§ 3. Furniture.
Cursing Nineveh and exulting in the prospect of her fall, the prophet Nahum calls to all those who had been crushed by the Assyrian hosts; he summons all the nations of the east to take their part in the work of revenge and their share in the spoil to be won. “Take ye the spoil of silver,” he cries, “take ye the spoil of gold; for there is none end of the store and glory out of all the pleasant furniture.”[389] We shall find all this among our spoils of Nineveh. The princes and nobles of Assyria seem to have had a peculiar love for luxurious furniture. To see this we have only to look at the bas-reliefs, where the artist took the greatest care to imitate every detail of the thrones on which he placed his gods and kings; and many fragments of these richly decorated chairs have been recovered in the course of the excavations; with the help of the sculptures they could be put together and the missing parts supplied. The elements of many such restorations exist in the British Museum, and we may well ask why no attempt has been made to reconstitute an Assyrian throne with their help, so as to give an exact idea of the kind of state chair used by a Shalmaneser or a Sennacherib.
In order to carry out such a restoration successfully we should have to begin by renewing all the wooden parts of the piece, the legs, back and cross-bars. Wood alone could be used for such purposes. Metal would be too heavy if solid, and not stiff and firm enough if hollow. We have, besides, direct proof that the Assyrian joiner so understood his work. “I found among the ruins,” says one explorer, “small bulls’ heads of copper, repoussé and carefully chased, inside of which a few fragments of dried wood still remained. These pieces had certainly belonged to chairs exactly similar to those figured in the reliefs.”[390]
At Nimroud, in the room in Assurnazirpal’s palace in which so many precious objects were discovered, Layard found the royal throne, and close beside it, the stool upon which the royal feet were placed, an arrangement of which we may gain an exact idea from the reliefs (Figs. 47 and 127). The sides of this chair were ornamented with bronze plaques nailed on to wooden panels, and representing winged genii fighting with monsters. The arms were ornamented at the end with rams’ heads, and their points of junction with the uprights of the back were strengthened with metal tubes.[391] All the wood had disappeared, but it was impossible to look at the remains for a moment without seeing how they were originally put together and what office they had to fill in the complete piece. Most of the fragments are now in the British Museum.
Fig. 193.—Fragment of a throne. Height 18 inches. Drawn by Saint-Elme Gautier.
The same collection has been recently enriched by the fragments of another throne, from Van.[392] A claw foot, uprights ending in several rows of dentations, and two winged bulls that once in all probability formed part of the arms, are among the parts preserved. The bulls are without faces, which may have been carried out in some other materials, gold perhaps, or ivory. The wings also are covered with hollows in which inlays of ivory or lapis may have been fixed. From Van also came the remains of another throne which now belongs to M. de Vogué, who has been good enough to allow us to reproduce the more important fragments. The best of these is one of the front feet which ends at the top in a rectangular tablet on which a winged lion is crouched (Fig. 193). Another piece seems to have been one of the cross pieces of the back;[393] the round sockets with which one face of it is nearly covered must once have been filled with precious stones. This lion, like that on the London chair, also has its wings covered with incisions, and its eyeballs represented by gaping hollows. The effect of the whole was heightened by threads of gold inlaid on its leading lines, such as round the grinning jaws of the lion. The largest piece is a hollow casting, but very heavy. The various members were connected by tenons and mortices; some of the latter are shown in our illustrations. The large rectangular openings on the upper surface of the cross-bar received a metal stem to which some small figures were attached; their bases have left marks on the cross-bar which may still be distinguished. Their feet were surrounded by a line of gilding.
Fig. 194.—Fragment of a throne. Length 18 inches. Drawn by Saint-Elme Gautier.
