AN ARTISTIC TRIUMPH OF ASSYRIAN SCULPTURE
Under Ashur-bani-pal (668–636 B.C.) Assyrian art reached both grace and vigour, as is manifest in the splendid natural scene of the wild-ass hunt, which is here reproduced from the original in the British Museum.
Modern Tools of Ancient Workers
The forms of the iron tools are also excellent; and iron seems to have been common in Assyria at an earlier date than in any other country, probably from the tenth or twelfth century B.C. Certainly the set of Assyrian tools left at Thebes by an armourer of Esarhaddon in 670 B.C., show that the principles, and even the exact forms, of modern tools had already been reached. The chisels and rasp have not been improved since; the saw is the same as the modern Oriental pull-saw, but the teeth have not an alternate set; the centre-bits and files anticipate our forms, but have not reached the complete stage. The material of most of the edge tools is steel, showing that the hardening was then understood. The cutting of seals in hard stones was an early art, but it was well maintained, and some of the most beautiful specimens are the chalcedony cylinders such as that of Sennacherib in London. The engraving of the inscriptions also shows that cutting in hard stones was freely done on a great scale; but the writing, being entirely in straight lines, was much easier to engrave than the figures of natural objects of the Egyptian signs. Probably emery powder or copper was the means used, as in Egypt.
The Books of Babylonia
The use of an official stamp of guarantee on uniform pieces of silver was adopted by the time of Nebuchadnezzar, but as this is two centuries later than Greek coinage it was probably copied from that. In one respect the Mesopotamian never equalled the Egyptian. The Memphite school of work had attained to a mechanical accuracy which we can scarcely gauge; their errors on large pieces of work were only a matter of thousandths of an inch. But the Mesopotamian never did a piece of passably square or regular stonework; the inequalities and skew angles are glaring, even in highly elaborated works of art. The sense of accuracy was quite untrained, and neither Semite nor Sumerian show any ability in this line. Egypt, on the contrary, started with a prehistoric race which excelled in exquisitely true handwork and dexterous flint flaking, and with the artistic sense of the dynastic people added, the combination was one of the highest that the world has seen.
LITERATURE. To give any adequate idea of the literature of Babylonia is far beyond our scope, and only the main classes of it can be named in this outline. These were:
1. Theology and Omens. 2. History. 3. Despatches and Correspondence. 4. Language and Translation. 5. Mathematics. 6. Astronomy. 7. Geography and Natural History. 8. Medicine.
