In many instances oxydization had gone so far that the cups could not be lifted without falling to pieces; others, however, though covered with a thick coat of oxide, were brought away and successfully cleaned.[410] At the British Museum I compiled a catalogue of forty-four plates or cups of this kind, nearly all from the same treasure, while in the store rooms of the same institution there are many more waiting to be cleaned and rendered fit for exhibition. All these, with a few exceptions, are ornamented, the simplest among them having a star or rosette in the centre. Wherever the bronze has not been completely eaten away the decoration may be recovered, and often it is still singularly clear and sharp. A few cups that had been protected by those placed above them showed, when discovered, such brilliant copper tones that the workmen at first thought they were of gold. The mistake was soon recognized, but we may well believe that the conquerors of half Asia numbered gold and silver vessels among the treasures stored in their palaces; as yet, however, none have been found. All these cups, like the deeper vessels recovered at the same time, were of bronze; the precious metals only appear in the form of small inlays and incrustations in the alloy. In the centre of the rosettes with which some of the bands are decorated a small silver stud, slightly raised above the rest of the surface, is sometimes placed, and in a few cases the points of the great rosette that occupies the centre of the plate radiate from a centre of gold, silver being banished to the small rosettes at the edge. Again, the middle is sometimes a kind of boss, over the whole of which traces of gold may still be distinguished.
The decoration of these pateræ is always inside: on the outside nothing is to be seen but the confused reverse of the pattern, such as may be seen on the left of our Fig. 208. I have found but one exception to this rule in a much deeper cup on the outside of which a lion hunt is represented.[411] In that case figures engraved within the vase would have been invisible, for it is very deep.
In most cases the ruling principle of the decoration is the division of the disk into three, four, or five concentric circles, but in some instances the whole field, with the exception of a simple border, is occupied by one subject. In those cups upon which the greatest care and thought seem to have been lavished, the figures are beaten up into relief with the hammer and then finished with the burin. In the others the whole design is carried out with the latter tool, which is sometimes used with a degree of refinement that is amazing. As an example of this we may quote a patera that has been cleaned and put on view quite recently. Stags march in file around its five concentric zones, which are all of the same width. It is difficult to explain either the fineness of the lines or the regularity of the design, each animal being an accurate reproduction of his neighbour and the intervening spaces being exactly equal. One is almost tempted to believe that the work must have been done by machinery.
We know, however, that such mechanical helps were unknown to the ancients, and, although there are many cups and vases at the museum bearing a strong mutual resemblance, we cannot point to any two that are exactly similar. To give a fair idea of the variety of their designs we should have to reproduce not only all the cups figured by Sir H. Layard, but several more that have only been prepared for exhibition quite lately. Among the latter are some very curious ones. We cannot afford the space for all this, and must be content to give a few examples chosen from those on which the ornament is most definite and clearly marked.
Fig. 209.—Bronze platter. Diameter about 9 inches. British Museum. Drawn by Wallet.
It was noticed by those who saw the veil of oxide drawn away from the ornamentation of these bronze vessels that a large proportion of them were Egyptian rather than Assyrian in their general physiognomy. Some of them displayed motives familiar to all those who have travelled in the Nile valley. Take, for instance, the fragment we have borrowed from one of the best preserved of them all (Fig. 209).[412] Neither the minute lines of palmettes in the centre, nor the birds that occur in the outer border, have, perhaps, any great significance, but nothing could be more thoroughly Egyptian than the zone of figures between the two. The same group is there four times repeated. Two griffins crowned with the pschent, or double tiara of upper and lower Egypt, have each a foot resting upon the head of a kneeling child, but their movement is protective rather than menacing. Instead of struggling, the child raises its hands in a gesture of adoration. Between the griffins and behind them occur slender columns, quite similar to those we have so often encountered in the open architecture of Egypt.[413] Between the groups thus constituted are thicker shafts bearing winged scarabs on their campaniform capitals. These same columns and capitals occur on another cup from which we detach them in order to show their details more clearly.[414] In one instance the terminal of the shaft is unlike anything hitherto found elsewhere; it is a sphere (Fig. 210); but the contour of the next is thoroughly Egyptian (Fig. 211), and the symbols on the last three, a scarab and two uræi, proclaim their origin no less clearly (Figs. 212 to 214).
Figs. 210–214.—Columns or standards figured upon a bronze cup; from Layard.
