[215] Heuzey, Les Fouilles de Chaldée, pp. 13, 14.
[216] De Longpérier, Musée Napoléon III., plate 2.
[217] Art in Ancient Egypt, vol. ii. fig. 271.
[218] Heuzey, Catalogue, p. 32.
[219] Heuzey, Les Fouilles de la Chaldée, p. 15.
[220] We may give as an instance the very small fragment of a relief in white stone, representing the Indian humped bull, the zebu, which has also been met with in the Assyrian bas-reliefs. The treatment is very fine.
[221] See De Longperier, Monuments antiques de la Chaldée decouverts et rapportés par M. de Sarzec (Œuvres, vol. i. p. 335). The learned archæologist, of whom the writing of this paper was one of the last occupations, saw in this fragment evidence of worship rendered to the great rivers that watered and fertilized Mesopotamia; the double stream of water is the symbol of Naharaim, or “the two rivers,” a symbol whose presence in other objects from the same region he points out.
[222] Loftus (Travels, p. 116), describes a statue of black granite that he found at Hammam in lower Chaldæa. So far as we can tell from his short description, it must bear no slight resemblance to the Tello statues. The right shoulder was bare and had an inscription engraved upon it. The rest of the figure was clothed, and the hands were crossed upon the knees. The head was missing. At Warka the same traveller saw a bas-relief representing a man striking an animal; it was of basalt and was broken into several pieces. Among the objects acquired in 1877 by the British Museum, I find mentioned “a fragment of black granite or basalt, which seems to belong to a statue of Hammourabi, king of Babylon about 1,500 years before our era.” (Account of the Income and Expenditure of the British Museum for 1878.) Is not this the broken statue which now figures in the gallery under the name of Gudea? At the first moment the inscription may not have been readily deciphered; the summary report presented to Parliament seems, indeed, to name Hammourabi with some hesitation.
[223] This type comes from Tello. Among the statuettes found there by M. de Sarzec, there were some in which it was reproduced, but they were all inferior to the example figured above. Layard found statuettes inspired by the same motive in a mound near Bagdad (Discoveries, p. 477).
[224] Heuzey, Catalogue, p. 30.