A history of art in Chaldæa & Assyria, Vol. 2 (of 2)

by Georges Perrot; Charles Chipiez

So it was with the civilization born in the double valley of the Tigris and Euphrates. Between the days of Ourkam and those of the Sassanids it had many different masters, but long before the apparent triumph of the Greek system, we find certain religious types maintained and repeated, which bear witness to the tenacity with which habits and beliefs, formed long before the first dawn of historic times, clung to life. Finally, China offers us a still more curious example of the intimate cohesion and the resisting force that defies the centuries. Egypt, Chaldæa, and Assyria are only memories; but China, protected by its situation, and by the circle of mountains and deserts that nature has drawn about it, the China of Confucius, still lives upon its ancient sites. Its religion is still that of the two primitive peoples we have been studying, an elaborate form of fetishism, or animism as some would have us call it. The adoration of the sovereign and of his great officers is addressed chiefly to the celestial bodies, to the sky itself, to the earth and its mountains; the common people fear and worship the genii that people the air and the waters, and, still more, the spirits of their own dead. These they feel hovering about them; they talk to them; with touching solicitude they prepare their funeral feasts.

As for the chief by whom these five hundred millions of human beings are governed, his power still preserves the absolute, theocratic, and patriarchal character that distinguishes royalty in all primitive social systems. We cannot tell what the future may have in store for China, which is now in contact with the west on all its frontiers, but it is curious to think that we have as contemporaries in one of the vastest empires in the world, a nation of men who in all their intellectual conceptions are nearer to the ancient Egyptians or Chaldæans than to a modern Englishman or Frenchman. And what adds to our surprise is that a people of whom we are sometimes inclined to speak with contempt is not more easily affected by our ideas and our scientific knowledge, and even goes so far as to add one more to the anxieties that beset the civilization of which we are so proud. Even a power like that of the United States of America takes alarm at the invasion of Chinese workmen, who do more work for less pay than men of Anglo-Saxon, Irish, or German birth.

The isolation in which China has lived so long has prevented us from giving her a place in our history, but we could not ignore her altogether; we have felt ourselves compelled to point out the close and striking resemblances that make her a sister of Egypt and Chaldæa—a younger sister indeed, but one that has survived her elders; and the comparison is important because the example of China enables us to realize better than we otherwise could the conditions under which the industrial activities of Egypt and Chaldæa were exercised. Thanks to the data she furnishes we can understand how the workshops of Babylonia and the Nile delta were able to scatter their productions in such prodigious quantities over all the markets of Western Asia; how objects elegant and carefully made as they were could be delivered at a price low enough to find plenty of buyers, even when the heavy charges for freight, brokerage, &c., were added to their original cost. On the fertile plains of the Euphrates and the Nile, as in the “yellow” district of China, life was so easy and food so abundant that the workman’s wage was almost nil. This gave to the dwellers in those happy regions a first advantage over the tribes condemned to win a laborious existence from the dry soil of the islands and mountain-chains of Southern Europe.

In a great bee-hive like modern China, where men swarm in countless millions, work is not only done cheaper, it is done better than among the poor and scanty tribes that peopled the shores and narrow valleys of Greece and Italy in those remote days when Memphis and Babylon were still great capitals. These small clans of fishermen and woodmen, of shepherds and agriculturists, were cut off from one another by lofty ridges, which were often to be crossed only by difficult and dangerous paths. A happy chance or a well directed effort of thought might lead one of them to discover some technical secret, but a long time would elapse before the invention would cross the mountains and simplify the toil of the neighbouring tribes. In that western world which remained so restless until the eleventh or tenth century before our era, it constantly happened that a tribe was bitten by a kind of mania to seek for a new and more favourable home. These displacements put an end to labour for a time, and brought about shocks and conflicts by which development was arrested and settled questions reopened. A canton sacked or a few villages destroyed was enough to put an end to some promising invention or to destroy the memory of some successful process. No conquest over natural difficulties was final.

It was quite otherwise in those ancient states which had a population firmly rooted in the soil, and of industrious, sedentary habits. In such societies there was no danger of a rude interruption to a work begun. When some artizan more skilful or imaginative than his fellows improved the tools of his trade, the knowledge of those improvements spread rapidly from workshop to workshop. Even in the cities of the modern East those who follow a particular trade live together in their own quarter of the town. In Constantinople and Cairo, in Damascus and Bagdad, there is the armourers’ quarter, the jewellers’ quarter, that of the saddlers, the tailors, and of many others. These quarters have their own special entrances, their officers and watchmen; in the days of antiquity as now, they formed so many small industrial towns, where, thanks to the heredity of professions and the constancy of habits and fashions, the prosperity of the manual arts was not at the mercy of political accident. Wars and changes of dynasty might cause a moment of stagnation and dulness, but such troubles did not prevent the apprentice from receiving from his master the instruction in his trade that he would afterwards pass on to his successors, with all that he himself could add to the legacy of the past. There were no sudden interruptions, no solutions of continuity: all that was found was kept; nothing was forgotten or wasted.

Until the still distant day when Ionia, Greece, and Italy should also have their populous cities, Egypt and Chaldæa found themselves in a very favourable situation compared with the peoples, or rather tribes, who dwelt on the shores of the Mediterranean. Among the latter none but those simple industries that could be carried on under the family roof, and in which the women and children could take their part, were understood. In the basins of the Nile and the Euphrates there were real manufactures. Artizans were specially trained and grouped into corporations; they did not work only in the hours they could spare from agriculture; they laboured at their trade without interruption from one end of the year to the other, producing objects which commerce would afterwards “place” where the demand was brisk. In fact they had a real, we might almost say a great industry. Beside the machine-fed industry of modern Europe its output was no doubt small; neither Egypt nor Chaldæa had steam, nor electricity, nor the “spinning-jenny;” but their organization and division of labour gave them a superiority over their contemporaries no less crushing than that by which modern Europe is enabled to flood the whole surface of this planet with her manufactures, and to substitute them for the local industries. In every little village of Anatolia I found the cottons of Manchester and the blue plates of Creil; they could be bought cheaper than native pottery and textiles. It was the same in antiquity. In the islands and on the coasts of the Ægæan, there was no competition to be feared by the faïence, the vessels of terra-cotta or metal, the textiles, the arms, the ivories, the glass, the utensils of every shape and kind sent out in such inexhaustible quantities from the workshops of Egypt and Chaldæa.

We must endeavour to point out the channels by which the overflow from this rich and varied production reached the people by whom it was consumed. And we have a distinction to make between the various foreign countries to which it was conveyed. We have, on the one hand, those countries that were in direct contact with Egypt and Chaldæa, such as Syria, for instance, which dealt immediately with the manufacturers of the Delta and the Euphrates valley. On the other there were distant clients who scarcely knew the name of the country from which their merchandize was brought. They made their purchases at second or even third hand. The influence of the two great primitive civilizations was naturally felt with less force at a distance than when close at hand. In the case of next-door neighbours, it no doubt favoured the progress of industry and the creation of wealth, but at the same time it must have weighed like an incubus on the national genius and imagination; by furnishing it with a complete repertory of forms and types it must have discouraged it and prevented it from becoming truly creative. On the other hand, with those who only came under that influence when attenuated, and, as it were, refracted by interposed media, the effect was quite different. It gave useful hints and suggestions, stimulating the spirit at the same time as it dispensed with the necessity of long periods of experiment and uncertainty. In the latter case originality was not crushed in the bud; it was enabled to develop itself with complete freedom.

These differences will be pointed out hereafter as they occur, but it was necessary to insist before going any further on the common features presented and the similar parts played by Egypt and Chaldæa in all the earlier ages of antiquity. These two peoples, who were so long practically forgotten, were the real founders of western civilization. To be ignorant of this capital fact or to shut one’s eyes to it for a moment is to lose one’s grasp of the true rise and subsequent development of the system which is in course of completion under our eyes and with our help.

Five or six centuries seem to have been sufficient for Greece and Italy to raise themselves to the pitch of refinement and culture suggested to us by the names of Pericles, of Alexander and Augustus. At first one is not amazed by this singular phenomenon. One thinks a satisfactory reason has been given for it by a few general statements as to the genius of those gifted races. But criticism has now grown to be more exacting. It has more precise observations and more numerous points of comparison at its command. It knows how slowly, especially in the first steps, collective and successive works are accomplished. It seeks for an explanation of such rapid progress in the duration and importance of the preliminary work carried out with untiring patience by the older societies, the laborious forerunners of the brilliant favourites of history. Without this long preparing of the ground, lasting at least some two or three thousand years, without the countless efforts of invention and the prolific activity that filled up that period, how much longer the nations of Southern Europe would have been in shaking themselves free of the barbarism in which Scythians and Sclaves, Celts and Germans were steeped until they were conquered by Rome. What turn things might have taken we cannot even guess, but of this we may be sure, that the world would not have witnessed when it did the marvellous and almost sudden appearance of the flowers of classic art and poetry.

Now the industries of Egypt and Chaldæa won their great prestige, and the works with which they flooded all the countries within their reach awakened the plastic genius of the western races, because behind them there was an art, an art not without faults, but yet with no little originality and grandeur.