Fig. 31.—Sennacherib at Lachish. (After Layard.)
But the best known, because from certain points of view the most interesting, bas-relief from Sennacherib’s palace at Kouyunjik is that in which Sennacherib is seen receiving the submission of the conquered inhabitants of Lachish (Tell el-Ḥesy) (cf. Fig. [31]). The king is seated on a throne of great magnificence, and his feet repose on a high footstool. The side of the throne is divided into three registers, each of which is occupied by a row of men with arms upstretched to support the bar above: the bars themselves are decorated with various geometrical devices, while the throne stands upon four large cone-shaped feet. The king’s robes are as elaborate as his throne, both mantle and tunic being richly embroidered and fringed with tassels, while his head-gear consists in a kind of mitre, apparently the usual state head-gear of Assyrian monarchs. Behind him are two attendants, probably eunuchs, each holding a fly-flap in his right hand and a bandlet in his left; their dress consists in a long robe reaching down to the ankle and tied round the waist with a girdle, while a variegated sash passing from the left shoulder across the chest relieves the monotony of the comparatively inornate costume. Their hair is long, and the ends are curled as in the other figures here represented, but they are beardless and hatless. Behind these two attendants is the royal pavilion, the roof-canvas of which is apparently raised either for ventilation or to keep off the sun. The king with a bow in his left hand and an arrow in his right, is listening to his chief officers who are reporting the incidents of the siege of Lachish. The personage who leads the procession carries no arms, but has his head bared and is clad more sumptuously than the attendant officers, as befitteth the king’s vizier; the warriors are armed with maces, short swords, bows and arrows, or spears as the case may be. At a respectful distance from the royal throne three representatives of the conquered inhabitants of the city are making their obeisance before the king, one of them literally grovelling on all fours. The prisoners have a thick, though not a long, crop of hair, while their beards are also thick and short, in contradistinction to those of the Assyrians. Their dress consists of a perfectly plain, short-sleeved tunic reaching from neck to ankle, while their feet are unshod. The dress of the Assyrian warriors will be considered in a subsequent chapter (Chap. XIII). The scene of this somewhat dramatic spectacle is outside the captured city, under the grateful shade of vines and fig-trees, while mountains covered with trees form a fitting background to the picture. The purport of the four-lined cuneiform inscription in front of the king is that Sennacherib, king of hosts, king of Assyria, sat upon his throne of state, and the spoil of the city of Lachish passed before him. But magnificent as is the throne upon which Sennacherib is here seated, it must have been far surpassed in splendour by his royal throne at Nineveh; the latter was apparently made of rock crystal, some of the fragments of which are still preserved.
Sennacherib was succeeded after some intestine feuds by his son Esarhaddon; Esarhaddon carried on the traditions of his predecessors in warring against Phœnicia, and reducing Babylonia, but the distinguishing feature of his reign was the occupation of Lower Egypt by the Assyrians in 672 B.C. Unfortunately we have very few sculptural monuments of this king, though it must not be assumed from this that he was a whit less proud of his feats than his father, but his reign has practically no interest for the student of art and affords us little material for the pursuit of our present subject. This remark, however, is very far from applying to Ashur-bani-pal, his all-glorious son, whose triumphs in the field of art were as great in their way as those achieved in the battle-field. Ashur-bani-pal came to the throne in 668 B.C. and ruled some forty-two years, during which he raised the power of Assyria to a point never reached before and never reached again. The more noteworthy events of Ashur-bani-pal’s reign as well as the consequential effects of his taste for literature have been treated of elsewhere; suffice it to say here that this outburst of military, intellectual and artistic activity was but the supreme effort of an empire whose strength was exhausted and whose vitality was impaired, and even before the death of Ashur-bani-pal the meteoric splendour of her glory had begun to pale. It was as it were the final sickness of an aged man who had weathered many storms and whose recuperative power had hitherto risen to every occasion, at last however the final crisis comes and all is over. But that golden era of Assyrian art, so brief and short-lived, has nevertheless been immortalized by the artists of that day in those stone slabs which now form one of the most precious possessions of the British Museum.
Ashur-bani-pal’s exploits in the hunting field have been already referred to, and it is these that he chose to record pictorially upon his palace-walls rather than his victories on the field of battle, and it is to this choice that we owe those masterpieces of animal representation, which otherwise might never have been crystallized into concrete and permanent results.
A large number of these bas-reliefs are concerned with lion-hunting; from Pl. [XVIII] it would appear that lions sometimes suffered themselves to become domesticated; we here see a lion and lioness, the one standing, the other lying carelessly stretched at its ease upon the ground, in a kind of garden, the cultivated character of which is manifest from the presence of a vine. The lion stands before the crouching lioness with head and fore-paws outstretched, in a manner well-illustrative of that dignity and majesty which is always and has always been associated with the king of animals. Unfortunately most of the head and the entire hind-quarters of the lion are missing, but sufficient remains of the animal for us to imagine the rest without much risk of our imagination leading us astray.
PLATE XVIII
| Photo. Mansell | British Museum |
| Ashur-bani-pal’s Hunting Scenes: Lion and Lioness in a park or garden | |
PLATE XIX
