Fig. 74.—Wild ass. From the hunt of Assurbanipal, in the British Museum. Drawn by Saint-Elme Gautier.
The ibex and the wild goat figure in the same sculptured pictures. One marching in front of the herd turns and anxiously sniffs the wind, while her companion quietly browses by her side; farther off, two kids trot by the side of their mother. The alarm has not yet been given, but upon the next slab the artist shows the headlong flight that follows the discovery of the enemy. Naturally it is the wild and domestic animals of Mesopotamia and the districts about that are most commonly figured in these reliefs, but the sculptor also took advantage of every opportunity and pretext for introducing into his repertory those rare and curious animals which were only seen in Nineveh on rare occasions. Thus the camel that we find in so many pictures is the same as that which now occupies the same region and marches in its slow caravans;[180] but on the obelisk of Shalmaneser we find the double-humped Bactrian camel (Fig. 49).[181] The clumsy tribe of the pachyderms is not only represented by the wild boars that still have their lairs in the marshes of the lower Euphrates;[182] the rhinoceros and the Indian elephant also occur on the obelisk (Vol. I. Fig. 111).[183] The apes shown in our Fig. 64 also seem to belong to an Indian species.[184]
The sculptor was not always as happily inspired by these exotic animals as by those of his own country, and in that there is nothing surprising. He only caught a passing glimpse of them as they defiled, perhaps, before the people in some triumphal procession. On the other hand, the fauna of his native land were known to him through long habit, and yet his reproductions of the elephant and the dromedary are very good, much better than those of the semi-human ape. His idea of the rhinoceros is very faulty; the single horn planted on the nose leaves no doubt as to his meaning, but the lion’s mane with which the animal’s back is clothed has never belonged to the rhinoceros. The artist may have worked from a description.
In these pictures birds hold a very secondary place; Assyrian sculpture was hardly light enough of hand to render their forms and feathers. For such a task, indeed, painting with its varied handling, its delicate lines and brilliant colours is required. It was with the brush that the Egyptians succeeded, in the frescoes of their tombs, in figuring the principal birds of the Nile Valley with all their elegance of form and brilliant variety of plumage. In Assyria, among a nation of soldiers and in an art whose chief inspiration had to do with war, the only bird we find often reproduced is the eagle, the symbol of victory, who floats over the chariot of the king, and the vulture who devoured where they fell the bodies of the enemies of Assyria; and even these images are rather careless and conventional, which may perhaps be accounted for by their partially symbolic character and their frequent repetition.[185] A group of partridges rising and, in those sculptures of the later Sargonids in which the artists show a love for picturesque detail, birds hopping in the trees or watching over their nestlings, have been mentioned as showing technical excellence of the same kind as the hunting scenes.[186] The ostrich appears on the elaborate decorations of the royal robes (Fig. 75) and upon the cylinders (Fig. 76). Perhaps it was considered sacred.
Fig. 75.—Embroidery on the king’s robe; from Layard.
Fig. 76.—Fight between a man and an ostrich. Chalcedony. National Library, Paris.
As for fishes, crabs, and shells, these were scattered broadcast over the watercourses in the reliefs, but they are never studied with any great care (see Vol. I., Figs. 34 and 157), nor is any attempt made to distinguish their species. They seem to have been introduced merely as hints to the spectator, to dispel any doubt he may entertain as to the meaning of those sinuous lines by which the sculptor suggested rivers and the sea. Where these indications are not given we might indeed very easily mistake the artist’s intention (see Vol. I., Figs. 38 and 71).