[115] Ibid. (1st series), plate 63; Discoveries, p. 457.
[116] We have refrained from giving a reproduction of this fragment on account of its bad condition. Its surface is rough; it lacks the head, the forearms and the foreparts of the feet. The material is a coarse limestone. The height of the fragment is thirty-eight inches.
[117] No people that have ever lived have been more solicitous than the Assyrians to transmit the remembrance of their exploits to posterity. We thus find that many of their sculptured slabs had their posterior faces, those that were turned to the wall, also covered with inscriptions.
[118] Layard, Nineveh, vol. ii. p. 437.
[119] Layard, Nineveh, vol. ii. p. 448.
[120] British Museum. The whole series is illustrated in Layard, Monuments, 2nd series, plates 20–24.
[121] Sir H. Layard’s translation is different (Discoveries, p. 152). That quoted in the text has been kindly furnished to us by M. Oppert.
[122] Sir H. Layard, who has seen more Assyrian sculptures in place than any one else, seems to have been much struck by these incongruities. “It is rare,” he says, “to find an entire (Assyrian) bas-relief equally well executed in all its parts” (Nineveh, vol. ii. p. 78).
[123] This impression is still more strongly felt on glancing through the plates in which Sir H. Layard has reproduced in their entirety the series of sculptures which we can only show in fragmentary fashion. Compare, for example, the Panathenaic cortége with two processions taken from the palace of Sennacherib, the grooms leading horses, and servants carrying fruits and other comestibles (Monuments, 2nd series, plates 7–9), and the triumphal march of the Assyrian army with its chariots (ib. plates 47–49).
[124] Layard, Monuments, 2nd series, plates 45 and 46.