Neither boatmen nor fishermen have anything to do with the building of the great edifice that occupies so many minds and arms within a stone’s throw of where they labour. They are introduced merely to amuse the eye of the spectator by the faithful representation of life; a passage of what we call genre has crept into an historical picture. Elsewhere it is landscape proper that is thus introduced. One of the slabs of this same series ends in a row of precipitous heights covered with cypresses, vines, fig and pomegranate trees, and a sort of dwarf palm or chamærops.[251]
They thought no doubt that the spectators of such pictures would be delighted to have the shadowy freshness of the orchards that bordered the Tigris, the variety of their foliage and the abundant fruit under which their branches bent to the ground, thus recalled to their minds. The group of houses that we have figured for the sake of their domed roofs, forms a part of one of these landscape backgrounds (Vol. I. Fig. 43).[252]
We might multiply examples if we chose. There is hardly a relief from Sennacherib’s palace in which some of those details which excite curiosity by their anecdotic and picturesque character are not introduced.[253] We find evidence of the same propensity in the decoration of the long, inclined passage that led from the summit of the mound down to the banks of the Tigris. There the sculptor has represented what must have actually taken place in the passage every day; on the one hand grooms leading their horses to water, on the other servants carrying up meat, fruit, and drink for the service of the royal table and for the army of officers and dependants of every kind that found lodging in the palace.[254]
This active desire to imitate reality as faithfully as possible had another consequence. It led to the multiplication of figures, and therefore to the diminution of their scale. No figures like those that occupy the whole heights of the slabs at Nimroud and Khorsabad have been found in the palace of Sennacherib. In the latter a slab is sometimes cut up into seven or eight horizontal divisions.[255] The same landscape, the same people, the same action is continued from one division to another over the whole side of a room. The subjects were not apportioned by slabs, but by horizontal bands; whence we may conclude that the limestone or alabaster was chiselled in place and not in the sculptor’s studio.
We have not engraved one of these reliefs in its entirety; with its half-dozen compartments one above another and its hundred or hundred and fifty figures, it would have been necessary to reduce the latter to such a degree that they could only be seen properly with a magnifying glass. The originals themselves, or the large plates given by Layard in his Monuments, must be consulted before the dangers of this mode of proceeding can be appreciated. The confusion to which we have pointed as one of the cardinal defects of Assyrian sculpture, is nowhere more conspicuous than in the battle pictures from Sennacherib’s palace. It is, however, only to be found in the historical subjects. When the sculptor has to deal with religious scenes he returns to the simplicity of composition and the dignity of pose that we noticed in the reliefs of Assurnazirpal.
This may be seen in the figures carved on the rock of Bavian by the orders of Sennacherib. The village which has given its name to this monument lies about five and thirty miles north-north-east of Mossoul, at the foot of the first Kurdistan hills and at the mouth of a narrow and picturesque valley, through which flows the rapid and noisy Gomel on its way to the ancient Bumados, the modern Ghazir, which in its turn flows southwards into the Zab.
The sculptures consist of several separate groups cut on one of the lofty walls of the ravine. Some are accompanied by inscriptions, but the latter speak of canals cut by the king for the irrigation of his country and of military expeditions, and do not explain why such elaborate sculptures should have been carried out in a solitary gorge, through which no important road can ever have passed.[256]
The valley, which is very narrow, is a cul-de-sac. May we suppose that during the summer heats the king set up his tent in it and passed his time in hunting? According to Layard’s description the scene is charming and picturesque. “The place, from its picturesque beauty and its cool refreshing shade even in the hottest day of summer, is a grateful retreat, well suited to devotion and to holy rites. The brawling stream almost fills the bed of the narrow ravine with its clear and limpid waters. The beetling cliffs rise abruptly on each side and above them tower the wooded declivities of the Kurdish hills. As the valley opens into the plain the sides of the limestone mountains are broken into a series of distinct strata, and resemble a vast flight of steps leading up to the high lands of central Asia. The banks of the torrent are clothed with shrubs and dwarf trees, among which are the green myrtle and the gay oleander bending under the weight of its rosy blossoms.”[257] Such a gorge left no room for a palace and its mound,[258] but a subterranean temple may have been cut in the limestone rock for one of the great Assyrian deities, and its entrance may now be hidden, or even its chambers filled up and obliterated, by landslips and falling rocks, and two huge masses of stone that now obstruct the flow of the torrent may be fragments from its decoration. They bear the figures of two winged bulls, standing back to back and separated by the genius who is called the lion-strangler.[259]
Fig. 120.—The great bas-relief at Bavian; from Layard.