Fig. 91.—A, B, C (British Museum, Nos. 93088, 91596, 90952). D (after Clay).
But the practice of making vases of stone did not cease with the decline of Babylonian supremacy; the Assyrians imitated their cultural progenitors in this as in all other matters. The most interesting stone vase belonging to the Assyrian era is that bearing an inscription of Sennacherib (cf. Fig. [91], A). It is a kind of amphora though the two handles are nearly worn away. The shape and proportions of this vase are very artistic, and the curves well rounded off. In general contour it somewhat resembles the little glass vase of Sargon, a yet more remarkable relic of antiquity (cf. Fig. [91], C). Another interesting example of Assyrian stone-ware is seen in Fig. [91], B; the vase, which is decorated round the neck, bears the traces of a well-nigh effaced inscription, and like the small glass vase of this same king is engraved with a small lion. It is shaped differently from most of the stone vases of the period, and has a charm and beauty all its own. Various glass vessels and tubes were recovered from the ruins of Babil, Kouyunjik and elsewhere, but their date is in nearly all cases an uncertain quantity. Assyrian and Babylonian glass would appear to have been made in the ordinary way, i.e. by a mixture of silex or sand with alkalis, while it was fashioned into the required shape by means of a blow-pipe, and finished off with a turning machine, of which the marks are sometimes still visible. This is the case with the little vase of Sargon illustrated above.[152]
Stone-ware of the late Babylonian period is well illustrated by the jar-fragment of Nebuchadnezzar (604-561 B.C.) published by W. L. Nash in the Proceedings of the Society of Biblical Archæology (1910, p. 180). The inscription is very brief and apart from the king’s name only has the numeral “one,” which was probably followed by a measure, but the name of the latter is broken away. This stone jar like the Assyrian jars differs from most of the inscribed vessels of earlier times, which usually bear a dedicatory inscription, while in shape it is not unlike the Assyrian jars seen in Fig. [91].
Allusion has elsewhere been made (cf. p. [86]) to the marble vase bearing the name of Xerxes in cuneiform and Egyptian hieroglyphics, but a number of similar vases and fragments bearing an inscription of this same king have also been brought to light. One such vase was found by Newton at Halicarnassus in Asia Minor, the fragments of another being found by Loftus at Susa, while a third (cf. Fig. [91], D) recently acquired by the Babylonian Museum of the University of Pennsylvania, is published by Clay in the Museum Journal (1910, I, p. 6). It bears the royal inscription of Xerxes the Great written in four different languages, Persian, Elamite, Babylonian and Egyptian, the last-named being written in the old hieroglyphics, and the other three in cuneiform. The vase measures nine and seven-eighths inches in height, and eight and fifteen-sixteenths inches in diameter.
Although stone-ware appears to have been used more frequently in the earlier periods of Mesopotamian civilization, it must be not supposed that terra-cotta pottery was not also used by the ancient Sumerians and early Semites. A vast quantity of pottery comprising bowls, phials, flat vases, chalice goblets, oval pots and vessels of every description, size, shape and form has been recovered from Tellô, Nippur, Fâra and other recently excavated sites in Babylonia, and indeed so numerous and so manifold are the vessels in question that only a long and systematic study of the mass of material now available, as thorough and exhaustive as that made by Professor Flinders Petrie of Egyptian pottery, would justify any attempt to classify and date the different specimens. The earlier excavations in Mesopotamia similarly yielded a large number of terra-cotta pots and jars, but unfortunately there is so much uncertainty as to the locality from which many of them came, and even where that is known, there is generally no means of ascertaining in what strata they were found—(as is unhappily also the case with a good deal of the pottery discovered in recent years)—and as they further bear no inscriptions, any attempted systematization in our present state of knowledge is inevitably based largely on unproved and unprovable hypotheses. Two good examples of early pre-Sargonic pottery are seen in Figs. [92], [93]. Both the cup (Fig. [92]) and the vase (Fig. [93]) were discovered in the pre-Sargonic strata at Nippur.[153] Many other interesting specimens of early pottery were discovered on the same site, some being apparently black in colour, others being red. In a room beneath the pavement of Narâm-Sin two vases were brought to light which illustrate the remarkable differences in size and shape exhibited by early Babylonian pottery, one of these vases being bell-shaped and having a flat bottom twice as large in diameter as its mouth, while the other, a little over two feet high and one foot nine inches across the top, was decorated with a rope pattern.[154]
Among the minor results attending the excavations at Bismâya was the recovery of a vast number of terra-cotta vases, some entire, others only fragmentary.[155] They were found in graves, wells, and drains as well as in the various platforms contained in the mound, and in the plain itself. Between twenty-five and twenty-six feet below the surface two large burial urns were discovered, while at a depth of some thirty-four feet a smaller urn was brought to light. The earliest examples of pottery were found more than forty-four feet below the surface. In the larger vases and urns the clay appears to have been mixed with chopped straw,[156] the clay itself being as a rule of a yellowish brown colour, but according to Banks, the clay was burnt to a deep brown or black colour in the earliest times. The wheel seems to have been used at all periods, though not to the exclusion of hand-made pottery. One of the pre-Sargonic vases from this site was apparently formed by placing the clay on a flat surface, which the potter revolved with one hand while fashioning the clay into the required shape with the other hand; as Banks suggests, this may have been the origin of the potter’s wheel. The vessels from Bismâya vary in height from a little over an inch to just under thirty inches, and they exhibit every conceivable kind of shape. The surfaces of most of them are plain, but some are decorated with dots, squares, concentric circles and grooves. Two large vases are painted with the marks of their makers or owners in black, but these are regarded by Banks as post-Babylonian. Some of the vases are provided with covers, the cover of one of the funeral urns consisting in a kind of dish; sometimes, in the case of vases which were buried, a woven cloth was fastened over the mouth and sealed with clay. These cloths have of course long since perished, but the marks of the threads on the clay are still visible.[157] One vase is shaped like a boat, while another interesting terra-cotta object discovered on this site is a lamp terminating in the head of an ox.