One of the earliest types invented by the imaginations of these people was that of the strange and chaotic beings who, according to the traditions collected by Berosus, lived upon the earth before the creation of man, creatures in which the forms and limbs afterwards separated and distinguished by nature, were mixed up as if by accident. The text in question is of the very greatest interest and value. It proves that the composite figures of which Chaldæan art was so fond were not a simple caprice of the artists who made them, but were suggested by a cosmic theory of which they formed, as it were, a plastic embodiment and illustration.
“There was a time,” says Berosus, “when all was water and darkness, in which monstrous animals were spontaneously engendered: men with two wings, and some with four; with two faces, and two heads, the one male and the other female, and with the other features of both sexes united in their single bodies; men with the legs and horns of a goat and the feet of a horse; others with the hind quarters of a horse and the upper part of a man, like the hippocentaurs. There were also bulls with human heads, dogs with four bodies and fishes’ tails, and other quadrupeds in which various animal forms were blended, fishes, reptiles, serpents, and all kinds of monsters with the greatest variety in their forms, monsters whose images we see in the paintings of the temple of Bel at Babylon.”[321] Of all these fantastic creatures there are hardly any but may be found on some cylinder, and if there be one or two still missing, it is very probable that future discoveries will fill up the gap.
Fig. 149.—Chaldæan cylinder of veined agate. Louvre.
Before quitting these remains from the earliest school of gem engraving, we must draw attention for a moment to the way in which it treats costume. In most cases the folds of the stuff are imitated by very fine parallel strokes. Sometimes, as, for instance, in the figure on the right of Ourkam’s seal (Vol. I., Fig. 3), these close and slightly sinuous lines extend without interruption from the top to the bottom of the dress, but in most cases they are crossed by several transverse bands, probably coloured, either woven into the material or sewn upon it (see Vol. I., Figs. 3, 17, and 20, and above, Figs. 39 and 41). We have already encountered this method of treating drapery in certain statuettes from the same place and time (Figs. 99 and 100), but we never find it in Assyria or in Chaldæa after the fall of Nineveh, either in statues or on engraved stones.
There is another characteristic detail that should not be forgotten, namely, the caps turned up at the side in the shape of horns (Vol. I., Fig. 17 and above, Fig. 143). By this head-dress and the plaited robes a Chaldæan cylinder may be at once recognised as dating from these remote ages. Fashions and methods of execution changed as soon as the preponderance of Assyrian royalty was assured. Artists of merit must then have migrated northwards and opened workshops in the cities of the Tigris; but production was never so great as in the south. Every traveller in those regions notices that there are far more cylinders to be purchased in the bazaars of Bagdad and Bassorah than in those of Mossoul.[322] The glyptic art of Assyria was an exotic, like her sculpture and her architecture.
Fig. 150.—Archaic Assyrian cylinder. In the Uffizi, Florence.
In attempting to define the characteristics of the Assyrian cylinders, and to distinguish them from those of Chaldæa, we may take as points of departure and as types of the new class, a few seals bearing legends that enable us to give them a positive date. Thus we may learn from a signet that once belonged to the governor of Calah what the execution of the artists employed by the princes of Elassar and Nimroud was like (Fig. 150). We need not hesitate to assign this cylinder to the first Assyrian monarchy. The workmanship, at once careful and awkward, belongs to a time when all the difficulties of gem engraving had not yet been overcome. In the wings of the genius and the legs of the personage who follows him the management of the instrument used is that of an art still in its infancy. In this seal then we have a valuable example of what we may call The Archaic Assyrian Cylinder. We have already figured several in which the same characteristics appear (Figs. 124, 139, and 140). In the same class we may put a number of cylinders on which scenes of worship are represented with slight variations (Figs. 151 and 152).[323] The figure of the king standing before the altar with his right hand upon his bow resembles the Assurnazirpal in several of the Nimroud reliefs (see above, Fig. 140). The Balawat gates and other remains from the same time have already made us acquainted with the accessories of the act of worship figured in the last of these two cylinders, especially with the short column surmounted by a cone (Plate XII).
