From the earliest times of which any remains have come down to us the Chaldæans understood how to make use of all the different materials that offer facilities to the artist for the rendering of living form. Until bronzes dating from the times of the pyramid builders were found,[136] it was thought that they had anticipated the Egyptians in the art of making that precious alloy and casting it in earthen moulds.[137] This conjecture was suggested by the discovery, near Bagdad, of a metal statuette, which is now in the Louvre (Fig. 53). It is what the Greeks called a canephoros. A young woman carries a basket on her completely shaven head, keeping it in place with her hands. From her waist upwards she is nude, but the lower part of her figure is wrapped in a kind of narrow skirt, on which is engraved a votive inscription containing the name of a king Kourdourmapouk, who is believed to have flourished in the sixteenth century before our era. The casting is solid.
The bronzes inscribed with the name of Gudea (Vol. I. Figs. 146–148) are perhaps still more ancient. The motive of one is identical with that of this canephoros. Metal working cannot have begun with such objects as these; it is pretty certain that forging metals was everywhere an earlier process than casting them. Before learning to prepare the mould and to force the liquid copper into its farthest recesses, men must have commenced by beating it into plates upon the anvil. When they had gathered sufficient skill to make these plates very thin and pliant, the next thing they attempted was to ornament them, which they first did by hammering one of their sides, and so producing reliefs on the other which could be brought to sufficient perfection by repeating the process with varying degrees of strength and delicacy, and by chasing. This is what is called repoussé work.
Fig. 53.—Canephoros. Louvre. Height 10½ inches.
There is no doubt that these processes were invented in the southern cities. The oldest of the Warka tombs show that metals were abundant from a very ancient period, and that their use was well understood; but we do not possess any important examples of repoussé work dating from the early days of Chaldæa. It is otherwise with Assyria. The exploration of her palaces has brought to light numerous fragments of ornamental sheathing in bronze; plaques and bands, sometimes curved, sometimes straight, according to the surface to which they were applied, were covered in some cases with mere ornamental designs, in others with numerous figures. Only within the last few years have we learnt to how high a pitch the sculptors of Mesopotamia had carried this art, and how well they understood that the rough form left by the hammer should be completed and defined with the burin and chisel. The most important discovery of the kind was made as recently as 1878, by Mr. Hormuzd Rassam, who found the bronze gates to which we have already more than once alluded, in the mound of Balawat.[138] Shalmaneser II., who built the palace to which these gates belonged, caused his victorious campaigns and his sacrifices to the gods to be represented upon them. We have already reproduced many of these curious reliefs (Vol. I., Figs. 51, 68, 73, 158; and above, Fig. 28); a last example will help to show the facility of the Assyrian artist and the boldness of his rendering of animals and men (Fig. 54). He played with bronze as he did with alabaster; in both his handling was firm and rapid and his modelling at once broad and strongly felt.[139]
Fig. 54.—Man driving goats and sheep. From the Balawat gates. British Museum.
Drawn by Saint-Elme Gautier.
Fig. 55.—Lion carved in wood. Louvre. Length 4 inches. Drawn by Saint-Elme Gautier.