Figs. 220, 221.—Chariot poles; from a bas-relief.
It was from the animal kingdom that the Assyrian armourer borrowed most of the forms with which he embellished the weapons and other military implements he made. Thus we find the chariot poles ending in the head of a bull, a horse, or a swan (Figs. 220 and 221).[432] Elsewhere we find a bow no less gracefully contrived; its two extremities are shaped into the form of a swan’s head bent into the neck.[433]
Figs. 222, 223.—Sword scabbards, from the reliefs; from Layard.
The sword is the king of weapons. By a kind of instinctive metaphor every language makes it the symbol of the valour and prowess of him who wears it. It was, therefore, only natural that the Assyrian scabbard, especially when worn by the king, should be adorned with lions (Figs. 82, 222, 223). These were of bronze, no doubt, and applied. In the last of our three examples a small lion is introduced below the larger couple. The sword-blade itself may have been decorated in the same fashion. The Assyrians understood damascening, an art that in after ages was to render famous the blades forged in the same part of the world, at Damascus and Bagdad. The Arab armourers did no more, perhaps, than practise an art handed down to them from immemorial times, and brought to perfection many centuries before in the workshops of Mesopotamia. At any rate we know that two small bronze cubes found at Nimroud were each ornamented on one face with the figure in outline of a scarab with extended wings, and that the scarab in question was carried out by inlaying a thread of gold into the bronze (Fig. 224). Meanwhile we may point to an Assyrian scimitar, the blade of which is inscribed with cuneiform characters.[434]
In the reliefs we find a large number of shields with their round or elliptical surfaces divided into concentric zones.[435] A recent discovery enables us to say how these zones were filled, at least in the case of shields belonging to kings or chiefs. In 1880 Captain Clayton found, on the site of an ancient building at Toprak-Kilissa, in the neighbourhood of Van, four shields, or rather their remains, among a number of other objects. These shields are now in the British Museum. Upon one fragment we may read an inscription of Rushas, king of Urardha, or Armenia, in the time of Assurbanipal.[436]
Fig. 224.—Bronze cube damascened with gold; from Layard.
This inscription, which is votive in its tenor, combines with the examination of the objects themselves, to prove that these shields are not real arms, made for the uses of war. The bronze is so thin—not more than a millimetre and a half in thickness—that even if nailed upon wood or backed with leather it could have afforded no serious protection, and its reliefs must have been disfigured and flattened with the least shock. The edge alone is strengthened by a hoop of iron. The shields are votive, and must have been hung on the walls of a temple, like those we see thus suspended in a bas-relief of Sargon (Vol. I. Fig. 190), a relief in which a temple of this same Armenia is represented.[437] But although they were made for purposes of decoration, these arms were none the less copies of those used in actual war, except in the matter of weight and solidity; thus they were furnished with loops for the arms, but these were too narrow to allow the limb of a man of average size to pass through them with any freedom.