| PLATE XIV | |||
| Photo. Mansell | Musée du Louvre | Photo, Mansell | British Museum |
| Stele engraved with Khammurabi’s Code of Laws | The Sun-God Tablet | ||
In Pl. [XIV] we have a reproduction of the sculptured stele of black basalt upon which is inscribed the world-renowned legal code of Khammurabi, the most illustrious king of this first dynasty of Babylon. The king is seen standing in reverential attitude before the Sun-god Shamash, from whom he is receiving the laws inscribed below. The king wears a long robe reaching down to his ankles, but leaving his right arm, which is raised in adoration, untrammelled by the folds of his mantle. The seated deity likewise has a long beard, but his high horned cap differentiates him at once from his adoring servant, while from his shoulders tongues of fire are seen shooting forth, doubtless representing the rays of the sun. In his right hand he holds the ring and staff emblematic of dominion and power. He is similarly represented in Nabû-aplu-iddina’s tablet (cf. Pl. [XIV]) and also on two contemporaneous stelæ in the Louvre, in one of which he is in a standing position. Beneath his feet are the mountains portrayed in miniature. The laws enacted on this stele, which is now one of the treasures of the Louvre, number about two hundred and eighty, and deal with all kinds of subjects. It was set up in E-sagila, the temple of the chief god Marduk in Babylon, so that every aggrieved party at law could go and consult it. Like so many of the monuments of Babylonian antiquity, this stele was captured by the Elamites and removed to Susa, where it remained until the French excavations on that site brought it once more to light.
As we have already seen[93] the dynasty to which Khammurabi belonged was brought to an end some time later by an invasion of the Hittites, a powerful mountainous people whose home lay in Cappadocia. A century or so afterwards, i.e. about 1800 B.C., another mountainous nation known as the Kassites swept down from their strongholds in the Elamite territory on the east of the Tigris into the defenceless Babylonian plain, where they established and maintained their supremacy for a long time to come. Unfortunately the artistic relics of the Kassite period are few, and for the most part unimportant. Meanwhile, however, the Assyrians in the north had asserted their independence, and ultimately (i.e. about 1275 B.C.) succeeded in reducing Babylonia and establishing their sway over the whole of Mesopotamia. In spite of this fact, we have practically no specimen of the sculptor’s art during the long interval separating the fall of the First Dynasty of Babylon and the ninth century B.C., and it is not till the time of Ashur-nasir-pal, king of Assyria, and Nabû-aplu-iddina, king of Babylon, that we are able again to study in detail the work of the sculptor in the Tigro-Euphratian valley. To the former king we are indebted for a large series of bas-reliefs taken from the walls of his palace at Nimrûd (Calah), while to the latter we owe one of the most interesting and instructive Babylonian bas-reliefs in existence (cf. Pl. [XIV]).
One of the earliest specimens of Assyrian bas-relief as yet discovered is that which was found by Taylor at a village called Korkhar, situated some fifty miles north of Diarbekr. The relief in question was sculptured on the natural rock, which had been smoothed for the purpose by order of Tiglath-Pileser I (circ. 1100 B.C.).[94] The king is represented in a standing posture, his right arm is extended and he is pointing with his forefinger, while in his left hand he holds a mace; the king’s figure and general appearance are already quite stereotyped, and show no more originality or vigour than the representations of the later Assyrian kings. This same monarch has further left us the upper part of an obelisk erected to commemorate his feats in the chase, on one side of which there is a small relief in which Tiglath-Pileser is seen receiving the submission of various vassal-chiefs, while above their heads are the emblems of certain deities, the most interesting of which is the winged human-headed disc of Ashur, the patron god of Assyria. But these reliefs, interesting as they are, afford us little material upon which to form an estimate of the sculptural ability of the Assyrians at this period; the chief inference which they permit us to draw is that Assyrian art seems to have neither advanced nor declined appreciably, during the interval of two hundred or more years which lapsed between the time of Tiglath-Pileser and Ashur-naṣir-pal. The latter king succeeded his father Tukulti-Ninib II as king of Assyria (885 B.C.). Tukulti-Ninib had largely restored the fallen fortunes of the northern country, thus paving the way for the successes of future reigns, but Ashur-naṣir-pal extended the power of Assyria in every direction, as well as consolidating her rule over the districts reduced by his father. It is accordingly by no means unnatural that he should have desired to commemorate and perpetuate the record of his triumphs in pictorial fashion upon the walls of his palace at Nimrûd, and it is with his reign that the history of Assyrian bas-reliefs really commences, so far as our present material goes.
Assyria was in some ways the natural home of the bas-relief, for she contained a plentiful supply of alabaster and limestone, the softness of which facilitated the work of the artist and reduced his difficulties to a minimum: Babylonia on the other hand yielded practically no stone, and all that was used had to be quarried at a distance and transported at great cost and labour, and that fact makes the early efforts of the Babylonians in this direction all the more praise-worthy, and the proficiency to which those efforts gave birth, as seen for example in Narâm-Sin’s stele of Victory, the more astonishing. But this notwithstanding, the bas-relief was more highly developed in the northern country, where it played an all-important part in the artistic life of the people. The general object of these bas-reliefs was to commemorate the king’s victories over his enemies and his conquests in the chase, rather than to produce a purely æsthetic effect. In other words they are pictorial records rather than artistic products, and that fact is further borne witness to by the cuneiform texts with which they are generally inscribed. At the same time however, they afford material for the study of Assyrian sculpture. The art of sculpture in Assyria suffered all the drawbacks which befall every art once it becomes professionalized; it lacks spontaneity which is the very connotation of art, it is made to order, and therefore it inevitably knows no freedom but is the dull slave of conventionalism. But in spite of all this, the bas-reliefs of Ashur-naṣir-pal and his successors, hampered as they are by those universal enemies of human art, professionalism and conventionalism, still enshrine, or imprison if you will, the artistic genius of the people, and on this account, if for no other, are deserving of careful attention.
The reliefs which covered the walls of the palace of Ashur-naṣir-pal at Nimrûd (Calah) consist either of single figures of gigantic size, or else in a series of small scenes divided into two friezes by cuneiform inscriptions. In Pl. [XV] we see Ashur-naṣir-pal followed by a winged mythological being; both are engaged in the performance of a religious ceremony, the king with the bow and the arrow which he holds in his hands, the attendant with the cone which he holds up in his right hand. The semi-divine character of the winged creature is evidenced by his head-gear which consists of the horned cap, but the faces of both figures are more or less identical, a lamentable characteristic of all Assyrian portrayals of human or semi-humanly conceived beings. The chief peculiarities of this type of face are the large eyes, the curved nose, and the profusion of hair on both head and face. Both figures are clad in a long robe and deeply fringed mantle which extend to the feet. The footwear consists of sandals fastened by thongs passing over the instep and round the big toe. The muscular arms of both are adorned with bracelets, the pattern of the decoration on which is a replica of the ubiquitous rosette so characteristic of Assyrian art. The king’s head-gear consists of a helmet from which two tails hang, and in its appearance generally, is not unlike a bishop’s mitre. Both king and divine attendant carry what appear to be two daggers tucked into their waistbands. The muscularity noticeable in the arms is yet more aggressive in the left leg of the mythological being, which, unlike that of the king, is left exposed. This grotesquely realized conception of strength is but the decadent descendant of the naturally expressed vigour so noticeable in the statues of Gudea. And here may be mentioned one characteristic peculiarity of Assyrian sculpture; it will be observed that a long cuneiform inscription is chiselled right across the relief, pursuing the even or uneven tenor of its way quite recklessly through wings, garments, bodies and hands, and there is no obstacle which it fails to overcome, not even excepting the deep fringe on the mantles.
The subjects of the smaller reliefs of Ashur-naṣir-pal are many and various, though they all revolve round one of two themes, the battle-field or the chase. In one, Ashur-naṣir-pal has alighted from his chariot and is receiving the submission of the enemy; in another we see a number of fugitives swimming to a fortress on inflated skins. Here we see tributary chiefs bringing offerings to lay them at the feet of their imperious lord, while further on we see the bowmen of Ashur-naṣir-pal mounted in their chariots and discharging arrows against the enemy. In one relief the king himself is seen erect in his chariot with his bow fully drawn; elsewhere Ashur-naṣir-pal is represented in the act of crossing a river; the king has not however dismounted from his chariot, but is being rowed over, chariot and all.
One of the most luminous of these small bas-reliefs is reproduced in Pl. [XVI(2)]. Ashur-naṣir-pal and his army are storming a beleaguered city; the walls of the city are crenelated after the regular Mesopotamian fashion. Immediately before the walls the movable tower resting on six small wheels and containing the battering ram is stationed, the efficacy of which may be judged from the bricks falling from the battered walls. Mounted on the top of the tower is an archer with bow bent, whose person is protected by another warrior bearing a shield. The king is portrayed behind the movable tower in the act of drawing his bow; his head-gear differs from that of the warriors, who wear a conical helmet. In Pl. [XVI(3)], we see the warriors of Ashur-naṣirpal returning victorious from the battle-field. On the right of the picture are two three-horse chariots, both of which carry standard-bearers; above them we see a vulture making off with his prey, which in this instance consists in a human head, and in front are the infantry who appear to be gloating over the gory heads of their smitten adversaries, while to add to the ghastliness of the scene two musicians are playing on stringed instruments.
Ashur-naṣir-pal was however quite as proud of his victories in the chase as he was of his conquests in the battle-field, as is attested by the numerous hunting scenes which he caused to be carved in relief on his palace walls. In Pl. [XVI(4)] we see Ashur-naṣir-pal, erect in his chariot, in the act of dispatching a lion by the aid of his bow and arrow. The lion is treated with considerable boldness, and the skill of the artist in the portrayal of animal life—or death, as here—when compared with the stereotyped lifelessness of the king, is sufficiently striking. But Assyrian art does not reach its climax here, as we shall see when we come to consider the lions on Ashur-bani-pal’s bas-reliefs; the latter show a certain delicacy in the handling, and an intuition into all those infinite subtleties and varying nuances which are the hall-mark of life, animal or human as the case may be, and which apparently are not felt or at all events not successfully realized in the earlier works. The portrayal of the lion here is strong and life-like, but the spectator can never get away from the consciousness of the fact that it is a pictorial representation; he can never abandon the thought of the sculptor and the excellence of his art, or lose himself, be it only for a moment, in the reality itself. But in the reliefs of Ashur-bani-pal, one can for a brief space forget the artist and his work, and see the lion itself; one can catch a faint note of his dying gasp as he lies there motionless, his body transfixed with arrows, and it is in the effacement of the artist and the material which he uses that art attains the zenith of her power.