In the lower division we see the Assyrian army on the march. On the right Mr. Pinches recognizes a fortified camp in which horses were left for flight in case of defeat. There is, indeed, one of these fortified walls shown in projection, of which we have already spoken, but the horse is placed upon a clearly indicated arch. What is this arch doing in the middle of the camp? We ask ourselves whether this circular structure may not be intended to represent a fortified tête-de-pont. It is abundantly proved that the Assyrians and Chaldæans made great use of the vault. Why should they not have employed it for bridges elsewhere than at Babylon? and wherever there were bridges on the great roads and near their own frontiers what could be more natural than to defend them by works flanked, like this, with towers? The horse would then be about to cross the bridge, and his introduction would be explained simply by the sculptor’s desire to give all possible clearness to a representation which could never be complete. He seems to advance with some precaution as if the floor of the bridge, which is indicated merely by a straight line, was made of tree trunks or roughly squared planks badly joined. We offer this hypothesis for what it may be worth. Next come two archers, and then chariots. The ground must be difficult, for not only does the driver support his horses with a tightened rein, but a man on foot walks in front and holds them by the head.
We find a scene entirely similar but still better treated in the upper division of another plaque (see Fig. 117).[241] Here we may see that the chariots are progressing not without difficulty and even danger, in the very bed of a torrent. The movement of the men who lead the horses is well understood and skilfully rendered; we feel how carefully they have to conduct their advance among the blocks of stone that encumber the bed of the stream and the tumbling water that conceals the nature of the ground. In the lower division we are presented with one of those scenes that are so common in Assyrian reliefs. The king in his royal robes appears on the left; a line of prisoners guarded by archers approach him and beg for mercy, while the foremost among them “kiss the dust beneath his feet,” to use an oriental expression in its most literal sense.
Fig. 117.—Two fragments from the Balawat gates. British Museum. Drawn by Saint-Elme Gautier.
We should have been willing, had it been possible, to make further extracts from this curious series of reliefs; to have shown, here naked prisoners defiling under the eyes of the conqueror, there Assyrian archers shooting at the heaped-up heads of their slain enemies. But we have perforce been content with giving, by a few carefully chosen examples, a fair idea of the work that intervened between the sculptors of Assurnazirpal and those of the Sargonids.
It is probable that the scheme of this vast composition was due to a single mind; from one end to the other there is an obvious similarity of thought and style. But several different hands must have been employed upon its execution, which is far from being of equal merit throughout. It is on examining the original that we are struck by these inequalities. Thus, in some of the long rows of captives the handling is timid and without meaning, while in others it has all the firmness and decision of the best among the alabaster or limestone reliefs; the muscular forms, the action of the calf and knee, are well understood and frankly reproduced. The passages we have chosen for illustration are among the best in this respect. Taking them all in all these bronze reliefs are among the works that do most honour to Assyrian art.
The only monument that has come down to us from the reign of Vulush III., the successor of Samas-vul, is a statue, or rather a pair of statues, of Nebo; the better of the two is reproduced in Fig. 15 of our first volume. These sacred images are of very slight merit from an art point of view; we should hardly have referred to them but for their votive inscriptions. From these we learn that they were consecrated in the Temple of Nebo by the prefect of Calah in order to bespeak the protection of that god for the king. But the latter is not named alone; the faithful subject says that he offers these idols “for his master Vulush and his mistress Sammouramit.”
In this latter name it is difficult not to recognize the Semiramis of the Greeks, and we are led to ask ourselves whether the queen of Vulush may not have afforded a prototype for that legendary princess. This association of a female name with that of the king is almost without parallel either in Chaldæa or Assyria. In royal documents, as well as in those of a more private character, there is no more mention of the royal wives than if they did not exist. Only one explanation can be given of the apparent anomaly, and that is that Sammouramit, for reasons that may be easily guessed, enjoyed a quite exceptional position. It was in those days that, from one reign to another, the princes of Calah attempted to complete the subjugation of Chaldæa. It may have happened that in order to put an end to a state of never-ending rebellion, Vulush married the heiress of some powerful and popular family of the lower country, and, that he might be looked upon as the legitimate ruler of Babylon, joined her name with his in the royal style and title. This hypothesis finds some confirmation in what Herodotus tells us about Semiramis. She was, he says, queen of Babylon five generations before Nitocris, which would be about a century and a half. He adds that she caused the quays of the Euphrates to be built.[242] This takes us back to rather beyond the middle of the eighth century B.C., that is very near to the date which Assyrian chronology would fix for the reign of Vulush (810–781). As the last representative of the old national dynasty, this Semiramis, associated as she was in the exercise, or at least in the show, of sovereign power both in Assyria and Chaldæa, would not be forgotten by her countrymen, and the population of Babylon would be especially likely to magnify the part she had played. There is nothing fabulous in the tradition as Herodotus gives it, although it may, perhaps, go beyond the truth here and there. Ctesias, however, goes much farther. He brings together and amplifies tales which had already received many additions in the half century that separated him from Herodotus, and he thus creates the type of that Semiramis, the wife of Ninus and the conqueror of all Asia, who so long held an undeserved place in ancient history.[243]
The last Calah prince who has left us anything is Tiglath-Pileser II. (745–727). We have already described how his palace was destroyed by Esarhaddon, who employed its materials for his own purposes.[244] At the British Museum there are a few fragments which have been recognized by their inscriptions as belonging to his work (Vol. I. Fig. 26)[245]; they are quite similar to those of his immediate predecessors.
With the new dynasty founded by Sargon at the end of the eighth century taste changed fast enough. In those bas-reliefs in the Khorsabad palace which represent that king’s campaigns, many details are treated in a spirit very different from that of former days. Trees, for instance, are no longer abstract signs standing for no one kind of vegetation more than another; the sculptor begins to notice their distinguishing features and to give their proper physiognomy to the different countries overrun by the Assyrians. But these landscape backgrounds are not to be found in all the bas-reliefs of Khorsabad.[246]