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

by Georges Perrot; Charles Chipiez

And if we compare the sculptors of Thebes and Nineveh, we shall arrive at the same conclusion. On the one hand we find artists who, whether they worked for the tomb or the temple, in the most stubborn or the most kindly materials, chiselled images that either delight us with their simple truth, or impress us with their noble gravity and colossal size. A whole nation of statues issued from those Egyptian studios through which we have conducted our readers, many of them real masterpieces in their way. In Mesopotamia, after early attempts that seemed full of promise, the art of modelling statues was soon abandoned. In the glorious days of Nineveh, all that was required of the sculptor was a talent, we might say a knack, for cutting in the soft gypsum or limestone realistic illustrations of the conquests and hunts of the reigning prince. He had to turn out purely historical and anecdotic sculpture by the yard, or rather by the mile; while in Egypt we see the whole nation, with its kings and gods, revive to a second life in those forceful and sincere portraits of which so many thousands have come down to our day.

In placing the distinctive features of the individual upon wood or stone, the sculptor did something more than flatter the vanity of the great; he prolonged their existence, he helped them to keep off the assaults of death and to defy annihilation. From Pharaoh to the humblest fellah, every one had to conciliate the man who possessed such a quasi-magic power, and from whom such an all-important service might have to be demanded. The common people bought ready-made figures in a shop, on which they were content to cut their names, but the kings and nobles commissioned their statues from the best artists of the time, and some reflex from the respect and admiration surrounding the sovereign must have fallen upon the man to whom he confided the task of giving perpetuity to his royal features, in those statues that during the whole of his reign would stand on the thresholds and about the courts of the temple, and on the painted walls of that happy abode to whose shadows he would turn when full of years and eager for rest.

If, before the advent of the Greeks, there were any people in the ancient world in whom a passion for beauty was innate, they were the people of Egypt. The taste of Chaldæa was narrower, less frank and less unerring; she was unable, at least in the same degree, to ally force with grace; her ideal had less nobility, and her hand less freedom and variety. It is by merits of a different kind that she regains the advantage lost in the arts. If her artists fell short of their rivals, her savants seem to have been superior to those of Egypt. In their easy-going and well-organized life, the Egyptians appear to have allowed the inquiring side of their intellects to go to sleep. Morality seems to have occupied them more than science; they made no great efforts to think.

The Chaldæans were the reverse of all this. We have reason to believe that they were the first to ask themselves the question upon which all philosophy is founded, the question as to the true origin of things. Their solution of the problem was embodied in the cosmogonies handed down to us in fragments by the Greek writers, and although their conceptions have only been received through intermediaries by whom their meaning has often been altered and falsified, we are still enabled to grasp their fundamental idea through all the obscurities due to a double and sometimes triple translation, and that idea was that the world was created by natural forces, by the action of causes even now at work. The first dogma of the Babylonian religion was the spontaneous generation of things from the liquid element.[463]

The first vague presentiment and rough sketch, as it were, of certain theories that have made a great noise in the world in our own day, may be traced, it is asserted, in the cosmogonic writings of ancient Chaldæa. Even the famous hypothesis of Darwin has been searched for and found, if we may believe the searchers. In any case it seems well established that the echo of these speculations reached the Ionian sages who were the fathers of Greek philosophy. Their traces are perceptible, some scholars declare, in the Theogony of Hesiod. Possibly it is so; there are certainly some striking points of resemblance; but where the influence of such ideas is really and clearly evident is in those philosophic poems that succeeded each other about the sixth century B.C., all under the same title: concerning nature (περὶφύσεως).[464] These poems are now lost, but judging from what we are told by men who read them in the original, the explanation they gave of the creation of the world and of the first appearance upon it of organized beings, differed only in its more abstract character from that proposed many centuries before, and under the form of a myth, by the priests of Chaldæa. If we may trust certain indications, these bold and ingenious doctrines crossed over from Ionia to the mainland of Greece, and reached the ears of such writers as Aristophanes and Plato.

It does the greatest honour to Chaldæa that its bold speculations should have thus contributed to awaken the lofty intellectual ambitions and the scientific curiosity of Greece, and perhaps she may have rendered the latter country a still more signal service in teaching her those methods by whose use man draws himself clear of barbarism and starts on the road to civilization; a single example of this will be sufficient. It is more than forty years since Bœckh, and Brandis after him, proved that all the measures of length, weight and capacity used by the ancients, were correlated in the same fashion and belonged to one scale. Whether we turn to Persia, to Phœnicia or Palestine, to Athens or Rome, we are constantly met by the sexagesimal system of the Babylonians. The measurements of time and of the diurnal passage of the sun employed by all those peoples, were founded on the same divisions and borrowed from the same inventors. It is to the same people that we owe our week of seven days, which, though not at first adopted by the western nations, ended by imposing itself upon them.[465] As for astronomy, from a period far away in the darkness of the past it seems to have been a regular branch of learning in Chaldæa; the Greeks knew very little about it before the conquests of Alexander; it was more than a century after the capture of Babylon by the Macedonians that the famous astrological tables were first utilized by Hipparchus.[466]

In the sequel we shall come upon further borrowings and connections of this kind, whose interest and importance has never been suspected by the historian until within the last few years. Take the chief gods and demi-gods to whom the homage of the peoples of Syria and Asia Minor was paid, and you will have no difficulty in acknowledging that, although their names were often changed on the way, Mesopotamia was the starting place of them all. By highways of the sea as well as those on land, the peoples established on the eastern shores of the Mediterranean entered into relations with the tribes of another race who dwelt on the European coasts of the same sea; they introduced them to their divinities and taught them the rites by which those divinities were honoured and the forms under which they were figured. Without abandoning the gods they worshipped in common with their brother Aryans, the Greeks adopted more than one of these Oriental deities. This is not the place to consider the question in detail. We must put aside for the present both the Cybele of Cappadocia and Phrygia and that Ephesian Artemis, who, after being domiciled and naturalized in one of the Hellenic capitals, so obstinately and so long preserved her foreign characteristics; we must for the moment forget Aphrodite, that goddess of a different fortune whose name is enough to call up visions of not a few masterpieces of classic art and poetry. Does not all that we know of this daughter of the sea, of her journeys, of the first temples erected to her on the Grecian coasts and of the peculiar character of her rites and attributes—does not all this justify us in making her a lineal descendant of Zarpanitu, of Mylitta and Istar, of all those goddesses of love and motherhood created by the imagination and worshipped by the piety of the Semites of Chaldæa? On the other hand the more we know of Egypt the less inclined are we to think that any of the gods of her Pantheon were transported to Greece and Italy, at least in the early days of antiquity.

Incomplete as they cannot help being, these remarks had to be made. They will explain why in the scheme of our work we have given similar places to Chaldæa and Egypt. The artist will always have a predilection for the latter country, a preference he will find no difficulty in justifying; but the historian cannot take quite the same view. It is his special business to weigh the contributions of each nation to the common patrimony of civilization, and he will understand how it is that Chaldæa, in spite of the deficiencies of its plastic art, worked more for others than Egypt and gave more of its substance and life. Hidden among surrounding deserts the valley of the Nile only opened upon the rest of the world by the ports on a single short line of frontier. The basin of the Euphrates was much more easily accessible. It had no frontier washed by the Mediterranean, but it communicated with that sea by more numerous routes than Egypt, and by routes whose diversity enhanced the effect of the examples they were the means of conveying to the outer world.

It is, to all appearance, to the ancient inhabitants of Mesopotamia that humanity owes the cultivation of wheat, its chief alimentary plant.[467] This precious cereal seems to have been a native of the valleys of the Indus and Euphrates; nowhere else is it found in a wild state. From those two regions it must have spread eastwards across India to China, and westwards across Syria into Egypt and afterwards on to the European continent. From the rich plains where the Hebrew tradition set the cradle of the human race, the winds carried many seeds besides those by which men’s bodies have so long been nourished; the germs of all useful arts and of all mental activities were borne on their breath like a fertilizing dust. Among those distant ancestors of whom we are the direct heirs, those ancestors who have left us that heritage of civilization which grows with every year that passes, there are none, perhaps, to whom our respect and our filial gratitude are more justly due than to the ancient inhabitants of Chaldæa.