The remains of another stone lion bearing an inscription of Gudea, from which we gather that the lion in question formed part of the decoration of the door through which access was gained to the sanctuary of the goddess Gatumdug were recovered from the same site. This lion[100] shows still further the subtle influence of conventionalism in the manner in which the hair on the lower part of the belly is portrayed, a series of triangles, such as is often seen in the figures of lions on the cylinder-seals, representing a fringe of long hair. Many of the lion-heads discovered at Tellô were provided with holes for the insertion of a peg, and probably served for lower supports of the back of thrones. One of these lion-heads is of especial interest as it bears the name of Ur-Ninâ, the founder of the first dynasty of Lagash,[101] while a second mentions Magan, the uncertain district whence the Babylonians procured their stone. Another early animal sculpture of some considerable interest was discovered by Captain Cros at Tellô in 1904 (cf. Fig. [36], B). It represents a recumbent dog—apparently of the mastiff breed, and identical in species with those figured on Ashur-bani-pal’s bas-reliefs: the length of the dog is only about four inches, its height just under three and a half inches, and it is two inches thick, but the interest attaching to it lies in the fact that it bears an inscription of one Sumu-ilu, a king of Ur who probably reigned towards the close of the third millennium B.C., but of whom little else is known, and whose name had not even been heard of before the discovery of this little black stone dog. The material used for this sculpture is steatite, and the dog’s back is pierced with a hole which served as a stand for a cylindrical steatite vase. The hole and the vase are apparently of later date than the dog itself.[102]
Another very interesting example of early Babylonian sculpture in the round is that of a small human-headed bull[103] (cf. Fig. [36], C) now preserved in the Louvre. It is, as it were, the archetype or prototype of those winged human-headed bulls and lions placed at the entrances of palaces to guard against maleficent demons. The pose of the bull is one that is entirely natural, and recalls the semi-recumbent calves on Entemena’s silver vase (cf. Figure [45]), but the body of the animal lacks the intense realism of the earlier animal representations. He wears a long vertically streaked beard, which is flanked on either side by plaits of hair, and his head is surmounted by a cap with four pairs of horns.
In the centre of his back there is a hole which doubtless once served as a socket for some votive object or figure as seems so frequently to have been the case; but the particular interest of this little sculpture lies in the shell inlay work on the back. The figure itself is made of black steatite, the inlay work consisting of yellow shell, and we have as a result a somewhat grotesquely marked bull. Sometimes animals were carved in wood, a good example of which is the little wooden lion in the Louvre, but the remains of Babylonian or Assyrian wood-carving are far too scanty to enable us to undertake a study of their work in this direction.
In later times sculpture in the round, which had never been popular with the artists of Mesopotamia owing to the obvious difficulty of procuring the necessary material in the first instance, and in the second to the nature of the work itself and the obstacles which had to be surmounted in the realization of that work, went almost entirely out of fashion. There remain, however, a few examples of sculptured animals to be considered, among the first and foremost of which are those colossal human-headed winged-bulls and lions which guarded the entrances of the palaces of Ashur-naṣir-pal and Sargon (cf. Pl. [XXV]). They are, it is true, neither bas-reliefs nor round sculptures, but a combination of the two, whereby the artist has endeavoured to create a perfectly natural and complete effect from every point of vision, and his efforts have met with the success which they deserved. The means he has employed to produce this satisfactory result is the provision of each of these extraordinary monsters with a fifth leg, though all these winged monsters were not so provided, the principal exceptions being the four-legged bulls in Sennacherib’s palace at Kouyunjik. The difficulty with which the artist found himself encountered, and which was obviated by the above-mentioned device, lay in the inability of four legs of natural proportions to support a stone body of the gigantic size demanded by the architectural requirements for which these creatures were destined to be used. In short, a pure round sculpture of a lion or bull of the portentous size desired was a literal impossibility, and relief accordingly had to come into play, it being merely a question of how far the relief should be low or high, and the higher it was the more it of course approximated to the round, and realized what was presumably the artist’s real intention. The creation of a satisfactory front view of these animals involved no difficulty, for the visibility of the two front legs was all that was necessary, and the drawback of the space between the legs being occupied with the solid mass of stone which supported the animal and out of which it was sculptured in high relief, was comparatively slight and negligible. But the satisfactory portrayal of the animal from the side aspect was fraught with much greater difficulty. Normally the two near legs of a quadruped viewed from the side, by no means exclude the two legs on the off-side from one’s vision. The artist was clearly conscious of the difficulty which here confronted him and he has devised an ingenious means, indeed the only means under the circumstances for surmounting this inherent difficulty. He has provided the lion or the bull, as the case may be, with a fifth leg with the satisfactory result that viewed from either standpoint the animal’s action or inaction is conceived in a perfectly natural fashion. From the front the winged monster is seen in a stationary attitude, his two fore legs firmly planted together on the ground, while from the side, on the other hand, the animal is walking along in an entirely normal and life-like manner. These winged monsters were placed on either side of the portals of the king’s palace and they helped to support the palace walls. But the object which they were supposed to serve, and the duties which they were expected to perform, were not of the purely architectural or even of the decorative order, their vocation, though embracing all these minor functions, involved the fulfilment of yet higher obligations, for they were destined to ward off the attacks of malicious spirits from the nether world. Esarhaddon, king of Assyria from 681-668 B.C. specifically states for what purpose these “shedi” or “lamassi”—the Assyrian names for these semi-mythical monsters—were created and made, for example, in one passage—to quote the translation given by Perrot and Chipiez (p. 266)—Esarhaddon says that “the shedi and lamassi are propitious, are the guardians of my royal promenade and the rejoicers of my heart, may they ever watch over the palace and never quit its walls,” and again in another passage he says, “I caused doors to be made in cypress, which has a good smell, and I had them adorned with gold and silver and fixed in the doorways. Right and left of these doorways I caused shedi and lamassi of stone to be set up, they are placed thereto repulse the wicked.” The front parts of these monsters always projected beyond the general line of the wall, the human head and the chest at all events being outside the arch which these animals supported.
Sometimes the winged human-headed monster is flanked by a mythical creature with wings, holding a basket in his left hand, and a cone in his right (cf. Pl. [XXV]), at other times he stands in isolated glory alone. The head is of the familiar type to which one-half of the Assyrian representations of men so rigidly conform, the type characterized by a beard, the other type being beardless: all the royalty and nobility seem to have worn beards, and, according to the Assyrian sculptors, to have had precisely the same features, the numerous beardless figures portrayed on the bas-reliefs representing the humbler classes, and no doubt in some instances eunuchs. The head of this winged colossus is surmounted by a lofty head-dress richly decorated with rosettes, and furnished with two pairs of horns, the ever-present mark of sacro-sanctity. The hair and beard are profuse in their luxuriance, and elaborate in their dressing, while the tail is treated with the like punctilious care. Two enormous wings cover the back, extending their overshadowing protection some way beyond it. The relief in which the body and specifically the legs are raised is very high, and they stand out almost in the round. Many of these gigantic stone animals have been found at Nimrûd, Khorsabad, the capital of Sargon, and Nineveh.
But although the Assyrians show a marked predilection for mythical monsters in their large sculptural achievements in the round or semi-round, they showed themselves capable of conceiving and admirably realizing animals of the normal order; one of the best examples of an Assyrian carved animal is the colossal lion of Ashur-naṣir-pal (cf. Pl. [XXVI]), which is now in the British Museum and once formed part of an entrance to a building. This lion is about eight feet high and thirteen feet long, and bears an inscription like many of the winged human-headed bulls and lions. The lion also has five legs like so many of the latter. The head is carved with great boldness and vigour, although it is a little conventional. The jaws are extended, the upper lip and nostrils being drawn up, and even an unimaginative person may well fancy he can hear a deep roar proceeding from that fierce, wide-opened mouth. His neck is covered with a thick mane and ruffles of stiff hair. To obtain the best view of the sculpture, the view, that is to say, in which the spectator will accord the full measure, or even an over-measure, of justice to the skill of the artist, one must make one’s point of observation on the side. The front aspect is disappointing, as the lion is too thin for its length and height, and is consequently deficient not only in artistic merit, but also in the dignified majesty of which he has ever been the symbolic incarnation. But in spite of these obvious drawbacks, the work as a whole compels admiration and inevitably arrests the attention, for it possesses the “one thing needful”—life. A comparison between the lion’s head, and that of any of the winged human-headed monsters, at once demonstrates the point to which allusion has so frequently been made, the genius which the Assyrians at all times and all periods show in the delineation of animals, and the contrasting laboriousness with which all their representations of human faces are invariably marked. But there is at least one general remark which may fairly be made of Assyrian sculpture, a remark applicable both to human as well as animal sculptures, and that is that whether the subject be natural or mythical, human or bestial, the artist’s product is never without force and never lacks impressiveness, a quality which in our own day is generally made conspicuous by its absence. Other interesting animal-sculptures have been found in Lower Mesopotamia, the most famous of which is the immense black basalt lion on the Ḳasr mound at Babylon (cf. Pl. [XXVII]). It consists of a lion towering over a nude human being lying on the ground, the whole piece being made of basalt. The remains of another stone lion of large proportions were discovered in the course of the recent German excavations at Babylon; thirty fragments of the dolerite of which it was composed have been recovered including a portion of one of the claws, which measures over three inches in length, and proves that the lion must have been of abnormal size, while its general form and appearance would seem to indicate a great age.
PLATE XXVII
