The strength of the chief cities formed in the last resort the support of the kingdom. The walls of these the kings of Asshur cannot have neglected to renew and strengthen. In the inscriptions only the buildings of Sennacherib and Assurbanipal at the walls of Nineveh are mentioned. According to the statements of Ctesias, preserved in Diodorus, the city of Nineveh formed a long rectangle of 480 stades (60 miles) in the circuit. The walls which inclosed this space were 100 feet high, and were overtopped by 1500 towers of double the height.[404] A writing of the Hebrews, which, however, is not earlier than the fourth century B.C., maintains that the circuit of Nineveh was three days' journey; 120,000 inhabitants lived in the city, who could not distinguish the right hand and the left, i. e. children in the earliest years of life. More important is the evidence of Nahum, from the middle of the seventh century B.C., that "Nineveh is full of men as a pool is full of water; her merchants are more numerous than the stars in heaven."[405] The position of Nineveh is marked by the ruins of Kuyundshik and Nebbi Yunus, opposite Mosul; and the remains of the outer wall allow us to fix, with tolerable accuracy, the circuit which it really had. As a fact it formed a long rectangle, somewhat out of the square. On the west the course of the Tigris covered the city; the wall on this side of the city extended along the ancient bed of the river for 13,600 feet; the wall of the longer eastern side measures 16,000 feet; the wall of the north side is exactly 7000 feet; that on the short south side is only half this length;[406] so that the whole circuit of the city does not reach ten miles, i. e. does not reach a sixth part of the extent given to it by Ctesias. Even if we add to this the circuit of the strong outer ramparts which run in a double and sometimes in a quadruple line, on the east side, from the point where the Khosr flows into the city, as far as the stream which, emptying into the Tigris, covered the southern front of Nineveh—even if we reckon in the city of Sargon (Khorsabad), which lay ten good miles to the north-east of Nineveh, on the left bank of the Khosr (p. 95), the circuit of both cities taken together does not amount to more than 15 miles. Xenophon, who was on the spot, and saw the walls of Nineveh still standing, gives them a circuit of six parasangs, i. e. of 20 miles. According to this, either the fortresses of Khorsabad and Nineveh were connected, and this circuit is actually given,—or Xenophon assumes that they once were in connection. We are hardly justified in excluding the first hypothesis. The lower part of the walls, so Xenophon tells us, was built of smoothed shell-stone;[407] the thickness was about 50 feet, and the height also 50 feet. On this substructure is raised the wall of bricks, which also is 50 feet thick, but 100 feet high. Hence these walls were standing 200 years after the fall of Nineveh; with the walls of Khorsabad, though broken by wide breaches, they were still to be traced through a circuit of 20 miles, and reached the astounding height of 150 feet, i. e. higher than Ctesias puts them. The remains of the walls of Khorsabad possess to this day a thickness of 45 feet, which agrees with Xenophon's measure; in the walls of Nineveh the substructure of well-hewn limestone can be traced, but the remains of the walls do not rise more than 46 feet above the present surface of the ground. If we are to venture on a supposition about the number of the inhabitants from the extent of the walls of Nineveh and Khorsabad—the total of the two cities, in which the royal palaces and temples occupied a considerable space, can hardly be put down at more than 300,000.

Twenty good miles to the south of Nineveh lay the other residence of the kings of Asshur, Chalah, the city founded by Shalmanesar I. Chalah was naturally even stronger than Nineveh. On the west, as at Nineveh, the Tigris formed the protection; about seven and a half miles to the south the greater Zab emptied into the Tigris. The course of this from the north-east to the south-west formed on the east also an outer line of defence, which was made still more strong by the fact that a not inconsiderable tributary of the Zab, the Bumodus (Ghasr), which flows from north to south, empties into the Zab about ten miles to the east of Chalah, just before the latter unites with the Tigris. Above the mouth of the Zab, Assurnasirpal carried a canal from that river in a northern direction to Chalah (II. 312). The city itself formed, as has been already remarked, a regular square, the extent of which reached about half the circuit of Nineveh; the south-west corner of the city was occupied by the royal palace. Xenophon gives to the walls of this "large but desolated" city, which he calls Larissa, a circuit of two parasangs (seven miles, nearly). The walls also were of less dimensions here. Xenophon found the substructure of stones 20 feet high; the walls of burnt bricks on the substructure 100 feet high; the thickness of the walls was 25 feet.[408] Northward of Chalah, on the brook Shordere, which flows past on the south and east of Chalah, are heaps of ruins, extending as far as Keremles, and from this point again through the plain as far as the district of Khorsabad. It is possible that the line of these forts formed an outer system of defence for Nineveh and Chalah, and that it lies at the bottom of the story of the 60 miles of circuit of Nineveh. The same circuit is given by Herodotus for the city of Babylon (cf. Chap. xv.). Of the third chief city, Asshur, which stood in ancient times, as we have seen, not only before Chalah, but also before Nineveh, nothing is left but heaps of refuse, out of which rises a conical hill. The ruins are of brick, among which here and there are seen some stones. The line of the old walls can still be traced. This city also formed a square, not less, but rather longer, in circuit than Chalah.[409]

It seems that the kings of Assyria laid less weight on the fortification of the city of Asshur, than on the strengthening of Chalah and Nineveh. They saw danger in the west only, from the lower Euphrates. The city of Asshur, on the western bank of the Tigris, was exposed to attacks from the west; Chalah and Nineveh were covered in this direction by the Tigris, which the enemy had to cross. To make the two cities so covered impregnable from the eastern side also was the object of the kings of Assyria, especially of Sargon, Sennacherib, and Assurbanipal. The thickness given to the walls of Nineveh, Khorsabad, and Chalah (25 to 50 feet), was sufficient to defy the battering-ram—the turrets, raised to the elevation of 120 to 150 feet, were so high that the stones of the slingers and the arrows of the bowmen could not reach them with effect, and no scaling-ladder or besieging-tower could be set up which would carry men to these turrets.

What Babylon possessed or acquired in science and poetry, Assyria did not fail to appropriate, just as she used her divisions of the heavens and the year, her weights and measures, her standard of coinage, and her writing from all antiquity. In the ruins of Kuyundshik a great number of tablets have been dug up,[410] copies of old Babylonian originals, which have preserved for us the story of the Babylonians about Chasisathra (Xisuthrus) and the great flood, about the descent of Istar to the under world, and other narratives of a mythical character. In addition to this are prayers and poems, with fragments apparently on cosmogonical subjects, very difficult of interpretation, and hardly to be referred to any definite date. Of especial value for the deciphering of the Babylonian and Assyrian cuneiform writing are the clay tablets discovered here, on which the cuneiform symbols are explained by placing beside them the phonetic value of the words and inflections, first of the Accadian, that language unknown to us, and then of Babylonian-Assyrian.[411] The use of writing was not less extensive in Babylonia and Assyria than in Egypt. The copious application of it for the purposes of government and legal business has been already mentioned. We are indebted to this for the remains of the list of years and rulers, the synchronistic tablets of the kings of Asshur and Babel, and a long series of private documents from the time of Bin-nirar III. down to the overthrow of the empire. These documents, and the ambition of the kings to retain their names in the buildings which they erected, to set up their images wherever their armies or their dominion advanced, to transfer to the walls of the buildings which they erected their achievements written on cylinders or stone slabs, to adorn the walls of their palaces with pictures of their hunts, their sieges, their victories and triumphs, accompanied by written explanations, have enabled us to restore, at least in its main lines, the lost history of Assyria—a history of which the Greeks have left and could only leave to us the fact that a kingdom of this name existed, and was the foremost power in Hither Asia, along with echoes of Medo-Persian songs about Ninus, Semiramis, and Sardanapalus—from which the Hebrews have retained no more than the names and the acts of the rulers who made their influence most deeply felt in the fortunes of Israel. Yet even the inscriptions of the kings of Asshur do not give us the history of Assyria undefiled. But whatever care they took to represent their successes in the most brilliant light possible—here and there we are driven to the attempt to bring back these accounts to the fact—they are far removed from the extravagance and the voluble assertions of the inscriptions of the Pharaohs. The far more realistic and historical sense of the Assyrians is stamped in their monuments and inscriptions. As they allow us to see, year by year, the activity, the untiring perseverance, and warlike skill of the Assyrian nation and its princes, even though they magnify their successes—so too the reverse side of these qualities is brought into prominence; the fierce cruelty, the bloody savagery which the conquered had to undergo. The kings constantly boast of the punishments they have inflicted, and appear more than once to exaggerate them.

The rivalry of the long series of the rulers of Assyria in building temples and palaces, which begins with the oldest period of the realm, after the pattern of Babylonia, has preserved for us no inconsiderable remains of Assyrian arts, and ocular evidence of the industry and mode of life, of the character and manners of the Assyrians—not indeed in the breadth and unbroken succession of development in which the monuments and the inexhaustible sepulchres on the Nile have retained the picture of ancient Egypt. For monuments of plastic art, the ruins of Erech, and Ur, and of Babylon, have been investigated almost in vain. The ruins of Nineveh and Chalah have preserved a considerable series of works of sculpture. If in the ruins of Babylon, with the exception of outlines on seals or other cylinders, there is scarcely a single image of a god preserved, there have been discovered at Nineveh some statues of gods, and innumerable pictures in relief of gods and demons, on the slabs of the palaces. The most frequent object on these is the image of the god Asshur. On a bearded human head, of grave aspect, the god wears a round cap or a helmet, round which are horns; the figure extends only to the knees; it is surrounded by a winged disk to which, from the knees of the god downwards, are attached the tail-feathers of a bird. In battle-pictures the breast of the god is clothed with a cuirass of steel-plates; his bow is in his hand; he shoots his arrows against the enemies of his nation. On the pictures representing a victorious return, and the seal-cylinders of the kings, the bow rests in the hands of the god. Nebo, the god of the planet Mercury (I. 267), is exhibited in standing images, with long beard and bared breast; the robe descends from the breast. Of a statue of Istar, in her old temple at Nineveh, we have at the least the head.[412] The god Bin also is to be seen on cylinders; he holds the trident of his lightning in his hand, a pointed cap is on his head; his robe falls, not from the shoulders, but only from the hips down to his ancles. The moon god Sin is seen on Assyrian cylinders in a long robe, with a long beard, standing on a half-moon; a second half-moon rises above the tall covering of his head. In a figure swimming in water, with a round horned cap on the head, and ending in the body of a fish from the hips downwards, we may no doubt recognise Dagon. The cylinders most frequently exhibit a sun's disk by the side of the images of Asshur, the crescent and seven stars.[413] On the slabs of stone which exhibit to us the forms of the kings, symbolical indications of the chief deities are visible to the left of the kings; we see the sun, the moon, a horned cap, and a winged disk, perhaps the symbol of the god Asshur. In the reliefs winged demons are often to be seen. They wear the high round cap, out of which rise four united bull's horns: occasionally the head is uncovered, and then it is surrounded merely with the narrow fillet of the priests; the arms and thighs are always uncovered. These forms also are frequently found in pairs, guarding the entrance to rooms; at times standing or kneeling in an attitude of blessing or prayer, on both sides of a wonderfully-shaped and adorned tree. In the same way two eagle-headed genii often stand opposite each other. Human figures, clothed in royal attire, with the head and wings of an eagle, are often found. Walking figures of lions with eagle heads and wings, or the back of a man on the legs of a bird surmounted by a lion's head, are found. The gates of the temples and palaces are guarded by winged bulls and lions with human heads. These are always placed in pairs. The height of these images ranges from 10 to 18 feet. At the point where the long, richly-worked wings, which are thrown far back, are joined to the shoulders, rises a grave and solemn countenance, with a strong beard, sometimes wearing a cap, sometimes a tall tiara, round which wind four bull's horns. These figures stand at times entirely detached before the entrance; in others the fore part and fore legs alone are free from the pilasters of the doors, and the figure is continued in relief on the side of the pilaster.

Plastic art in Assyria is less forced and typical in the lines, forms, and figures, than plastic art on the Nile: it is not fettered by the unchangeable laws of Egyptian art; it is less solemn, and free from the tiresome parallelism of the Egyptian forms. The sculpture of Assyria is more significant and vigorous. Not tied down by the hieratic style, like the Egyptian, it also works for the most part in the softer material of limestone, while the Egyptians prefer granite, the hardest of all materials. The Assyrians do not strive after the gigantic and colossal forms of Egypt: the dimensions even of the colossal bulls and lions are on a more moderate scale. Far more naïve, they conceive of life more freshly, fully, and powerfully, and aim far more at a true representation of life than the Egyptian. Egypt prefers the sunk, Assyria the raised picture. On the Nile the outline is the chief object: in Assyria the forms are always modelled full, strong, and round, with energetic expression of the limbs, and muscular to an excess. The movement is more vigorous and full of expression than in Egypt, without, however, sacrificing repose and fixedness, and without destroying dignity in the representation of ceremonies. The feet of the figures exhibit the Egyptian position in profile, but the upper part of the body is full, rounded, and closely compressed. The tall and thin forms of Egypt are not to be found in the monuments of Assyria. The clothing is heavy; the position and expression of the face is far more varied than in Egypt. The animals are represented plump and full of life, often with startling truth even in the most rapid motion; though not unfrequently with great exaggeration in the muscles. The great guardians of the portals exhibit a beautiful effect in the contrast of their mighty animal energy, and the quiet dignity of their human faces. Great practice in the treatment of the forms can hardly be mistaken anywhere; in spite of the dimensions, often colossal, the proportions are correctly preserved; and the larger pictures of camps, battles, and marches, if not better than those of Egypt, are more various and free in composition. Within the sphere of Assyrian art we are in a position to establish a certain distinction, a progress of some importance. The figures in the palaces of Assurnasirpal and Shalmanesar II., the two great princes of the ninth century B.C., are stronger and thicker, more coarse, violent, and exaggerated than the reliefs in the buildings of Sargon. In the century which passed since that time the plastic art of Assyria obviously made technical advances, and attained a more delicate treatment and greater regularity in the exposition. Later still, at the height of its development, Assyrian art is seen in the figures of the great palace of Nineveh (Kuyundshik), which Sennacherib, Esarhaddon, and Assurbanipal built in succession (p. 181).

The architecture of Assyria was not essentially different from that of Babylonia. The Assyrians had brought with them from the lower Euphrates the habit of building in bricks, and continued to use this style, though harder material lay at a less distance from them than from the cities of the Babylonian plain. The temples and the palaces of Asshur, Nineveh, and Chalah consisted for the most part of unburnt brick-slabs, dried in the sun and mixed with straw. This material made it necessary here, as in Babylonia, to make the walls stout, which was also advisable owing to the summer heat. The thickness varies between five and fifteen feet. The stone for the substructure and casing, mostly limestone and shell-stone, was quarried in the adjacent mountains. The buildings were roofed by beams extending from wall to wall: by this necessity the breadth of the rooms was limited. As a rule these are narrow, and the want of breadth is compensated by length. These are the dimensions of the porticoes and galleries which we can trace in the remains of the royal palaces: the great portico of the palace of king Assurnasirpal at Chalah (II. 313) has only a breadth of 35 feet, with a length of 154 feet; the porticoes in the palace of Kuyundshik are from 150 to 180 feet long, and 40 feet in width; the great gallery is only 25 feet broad, but more than 200 feet in length. Yet in the palace of king Sargon at Khorsabad, remains of the bases of pillars have been found. The application of the brick-vaulted roof in the form of pointed and round arches is shown in the narrow passage in the building of Shalmanesar II. at Chalah (II. 323), and in some remains of door-arches at Khorsabad. The pictures of cities in relief also occasionally exhibit arched gateways. The sculptures in the stone slabs of white, grey, and yellow limestone or alabaster, which cover the walls and chambers to a height of 10 or 12 feet, were painted, as is shown by numerous traces of colour upon them.[414] The walls of the chambers above the sculptures, where they did not make way for window lights, were decked with burnt and glazed tiles, sometimes coloured and enamelled; the beams of the roofs were adorned with carved work of wood and ivory, with plates of gold and silver, and precious stones.[415] The outer walls of the palaces must also have been cased with slabs of stone.

The wealth of Nineveh is called endless by the prophet Nahum. He mentions the abundance of carved and molten images, of costly vessels in the "house of their god." The monuments exhibit not only the "carved" images; beside many actual remains, they prove that costly furniture was in extensive use in the temples, at the court, and among the great officers of Assyria. The tables, stools, seats, drinking-vessels, vases, harness and bridles of horses, shown in the reliefs of the palace, are wrought with great delicacy and with good taste. The yokes of the chariots, the bows and bow-covers, exhibit very delicate carved work. On the robes of the kings we see groups of wild animals inwoven, partly real in form, as lions, partly mythical, like scenes of hunting and war. The ear-drops, which the kings and other persons of distinction wear, the bands round the arms and wrists, are of artistic work, and generally closed by the heads of lions, rams, and bulls; the weapons also, the handles and sheaths of the swords and daggers, must have been finished with great care and neatness, and in an excellent style. The not inconsiderable number of vessels of copper and bronze, of pitchers, stained glass, ivory articles, necklaces, armrings, and eardrops, which have been preserved in the ruins, prove that the monuments represent the possession of the Assyrians, without exaggeration of their beauty, that Assyria, besides what was brought to her by trade, possessed a school of artisans long trained in the art, and excellently taught, without which such great and excellent works in architecture and sculpture would have been impossible. Of the tombs of the Assyrians few have been opened as yet. The coffins, like those in the Babylonian sepulchres, are narrow and small, and only contain skeletons, with bands on the arms and neck, and some simple clay vessels beside the coffins.[416]

FOOTNOTES:

[395] Ezek. xxi. 3-9.