[244] See above, page 40.
[245] See also Layard, Monuments, first series, plates 57–67.
[246] Among the reliefs in which the transport of the materials for Sargon’s palace is represented, there is one which shows timber being dragged down to the Phœnician coast. Here the sea is no longer indicated merely by sinuous lines and a few fishes as in most of the earlier reliefs; there are all kinds of animals, shells, turtles, crabs, frogs, and even sea-serpents (Botta, Monument de Ninive, plate 34). In one place we find a wooded hill, with trees still of indeterminate form (plate 78). In another we may recognize pines in the forest traversed by the Assyrian cavalry (plates 108–113); birds fly among the branches and several among them fall pierced with the arrows of the hunters. Other trees bear fruit (plate 114). Partridges run upon the slopes of the hill. See also in the basalt reliefs from the building we have called a temple, a coniferous tree of some kind, probably a cypress, the general form of which is very well rendered (Place, Ninive, plate 48).
[247] This stele now belongs to the Berlin Museum. It has recently been the subject of an important work by a learned German Assyriologist, Herr Schrader (Die Sargonstele des Berliner Museums, in the Abhandlungen of the Berlin Academy for 1881). He gives a translation of the inscription, with a commentary, showing the date of the stele to be 707, or the fifteenth year of Sargon’s reign.
[248] These lions are figured by Layard, Monuments, first series, vol. i. p. 128. Their inscriptions are brought together in a single plate in the Discoveries, p. 601. The Aramaic texts will be published in the Corpus inscriptionum Semiticorum, in the first instalment of the part devoted to Aramaic inscriptions.
These lions of Khorsabad and Nimroud may be compared, both for type and use, to the bronze lion found at Abydos, on the Hellespont, in 1860. M. de Vogué has made us acquainted with the latter in the pages of the Revue archéologique for January, 1862. His article, which contains a reproduction both of the monument as a whole and of its inscription, and an explanation of the latter, has been reprinted in the Mélanges d’archéologie orientale (8vo. 1868, pp. 179–196). Mr. Norris has published a special study of the weights in the British Museum (On the Assyrian and Babylonian Weights, in the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, vol. xvi. p. 215).
[249] Botanists are of opinion that the conventional representations of the marsh vegetation suggests the horse-grass, or shave-grass (prêle), rather than the arundo-donax, in which the leaves are longer and thinner.
[250] See Layard, Monuments, second series, plates 12 and 13.
[251] Layard, Monuments, second series, plates 14, 15.
[252] Layard, Monuments, second series, plate 17.