MANUAL
OF
ORIENTAL ANTIQUITIES

INCLUDING THE
Architecture, Sculpture, and Industrial Arts
OF
CHALDÆA, ASSYRIA, PERSIA, SYRIA, JUDÆA,
PHŒNICIA, AND CARTHAGE.
BY
ERNEST BABELON,
Librarian of the Department of Medals and Antiques in the Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris.
NEW EDITION,
WITH A CHAPTER ON THE RECENT DISCOVERIES AT SUSA.
With Two Hundred and Fifty-five Illustrations.
NEW YORK: G.P. PUTNAM’S SONS
LONDON: H. GREVEL AND CO.,
1906.

Printed and bound by Hazell, Watson & Viney, Ld., London and Aylesbury, England.

PREFACE.

THE domain which we are about to traverse in this little work embraces all the civilisations of the ancient East except that of Egypt. It includes the Chaldæans, the Assyrians, the Persians before Alexander, the Hittites of Syria, Cappadocia, and Asia Minor, the Jews, the Phœnicians, and even Cyprus, ending with the Carthaginians and their colonies. So vast a field, which, in the monumental work of MM. G. Perrot and C. Chipiez, occupies four volumes, can only be explored here in a summary manner, and the author claims no more than to have written a modest abridgment. It must not be supposed, however, in spite of the diversity and remoteness from one another of the peoples that we have just enumerated, that the subject lacks cohesion and unity. If the reader will have the goodness to follow us to the conclusion, he will be, on the contrary, struck by the perfect homogeneity of the book and the connection of all its parts. The picture, so to speak, contains many figures, but all concur in a common action, and the spectator grasps, at the first glance, the harmony of the composition.

For, in these old Eastern civilisations which held sway over the world before Greece and Rome, only two streams of artistic influence are really to be traced—that which rises in Egypt and that which issues from Assyria. Often they took a parallel course, side by side, sharing like brothers the empire of the arts; sometimes they opposed or obstinately excluded one another; or else they joined forces, mingled closely with one another, and united their original capacities in a common fund. But if these varying conditions produced in certain countries a local and indigenous art which is neither purely Egyptian nor purely Assyrian, we can always decompose its elements and make a chemical analysis of it, so to speak; and, when we have restored to Egypt that which properly belongs to her, and to Assyria all that has been borrowed from her, we perceive that nothing remains at the bottom of the crucible. Thus it may be said that, properly speaking, there is no Persian art, or Hittite art, or Jewish art, or Phœnician or Carthaginian art; everywhere we find the forms of Egypt or those of Assyria grouped, mixed, perhaps altered, in proportions which vary according to time, environment, and political conditions.

Leaving Egypt on one side, it is the Asiatic, or, more strictly, the Chaldæo-Assyrian stream that we have undertaken to study exclusively. We see it at its source, almost on the site of that Garden of Eden where Genesis and the Chaldæan legends place the ancestors of mankind; we follow it into Assyria, and observe its progress and transformations. Before long it overflows and passes on all sides beyond the limits of the basin of the Tigris and Euphrates; on one side, in Persia, it invades the palaces of Susa and Persepolis; on the other side, among the Hittites, the Aramæan populations of Syria, and the Jews, it spreads and divides into many rivulets, until it arrives at the frontier of Egypt and the heart of Asia Minor. Far from losing itself in the waves of the Mediterranean, it reaches all the shores of that great lake, Cyprus, Sicily, Africa, Spain; even passing beyond the Pillars of Hercules.

It seemed to us, then, that it would be a work of interest to draw a picture of Chaldæo-Assyrian art not only in its native country where it develops at its ease, but in its many ramifications among the neighbouring nations where it comes into collision with its rival and is interpreted by foreigners, until the day when Greece snatches the torch of the arts from the failing hand of the East. This Asiatic art, as we shall see, has no cause to be ashamed by the side of the Egyptian art. Chaldæa possesses a genius as spontaneous as that of Egypt, and the valley of the Euphrates is not less fertile than that of the Nile. The ambitions of her architects and sculptors were as high and noble as those of the artists who flourished at the court of the Pharaohs, and the staged towers were the equals of the Pyramids. Both nations pursued an ideal which contains a part of the truth, for in making a building colossal and imposing by its size, they thought that they attained to supreme greatness and perfection. The Greeks, through their greater refinement, did not fall into these excesses. But who will ever be able to say how much the powerful originality of the Hellenic genius borrowed from the imperfect models furnished by Egypt and Assyria? Who will ever be able to define with clearness and precision the kind of influence which Chaldæo-Assyrian art, in particular, imported by the ships of Phœnicia into all maritime countries, had on the origin of art in that younger civilisation of which Athens was the centre?

The ancient peoples of Asia, which form a compact group from the point of view of the history and development of the arts, are also akin in the complete destruction which has overtaken their architectural monuments. As if by a providential chastisement, from the table-land of Iran to the Pillars of Hercules, at Susa, at Babylon, at Nineveh, as at Jerusalem, Tyre, Carthage, and Gades, nothing is left of those temples, palaces, and towers which threw a challenge in the face of Heaven, and which wore out so many generations of slaves in the building of them. While the Pyramids still rise opposite to the Parthenon, and our astonishment is still excited by the imposing ruins of Egypt, Greece and Rome, nothing remains of the grand monuments which were the pride of the capitals of Asia. Everywhere we have to dig into the bowels of the earth and uncover the base of crumbled walls. Everything is reduced to dust like the image with the feet of clay, and a shroud of ashes covers that world the material culture of which is to be brought to life again, as far as possible, in the following pages.

In the first English edition, M. Babelon’s work was somewhat enlarged, and occasionally revised by the translator—Mr. B.T.A. Evetts, then of the Department of Egyptian and Assyrian Antiquities, British Museum. In the present edition will be found a new chapter by the author on the recent finds at Susa.

A.S.G.

TABLE OF CONTENTS.

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS.

ORIENTAL ANTIQUITIES.

CHAPTER I.
CHALDÆAN ART.

The extensive region of Western Asia to which the Greeks gave the name of Mesopotamia was already, at the period which lies farthest back among the memories of mankind, the centre of a mighty civilisation rivalling that of Egypt, and disputing with the latter the glory of having formed the cradle of the arts in the ancient East. Babylon and Nineveh were by turns, according to the course of political events, the intellectual hearth at which the bold and original genius was kindled, which marks the artistic productions of Chaldæa and Assyria, and the reflection of which is shown in the monuments of Persia, Judæa, Phœnicia, and Carthage, the island of Cyprus, and the Hittite races. Yet it is neither in the capital of Chaldæa nor in that of Assyria that the oldest traces have hitherto been found of this great civilisation, extinct now for twenty-four centuries; it is not among the ruins of these famous cities that we can hear, as it were, an echo of the first wailings of the genius of plastic art, observe its groping efforts, touch with our finger its rudest attempts. In the country, formerly so fertile, called Lower Chaldæa, where, according to the popular tradition preserved by Berosus, the fish-god Oannes taught men in the beginning “all that serves to soften life,” the traveller comes, almost at every step, upon artificial mounds known as tells, concealing under a veil of dust the remains of cities which yield in point of antiquity neither to Babylon nor Nineveh; and it is there that modern archæologists have had the good fortune to disinter ruins far more ancient than those of the palaces of Sargon, Assurbânipal, or Nebuchadnezzar. Though a number of tumuli remain unexplored, and, as we may conjecture, future excavations will afford much new matter for science, nevertheless a brilliant light has already been thrown by numerous and important discoveries on the oriental origin of art and on the degree of material culture reached by the nation which founded Babel and the other Chaldæan towns of Genesis. The ruins of Abu Habbah, identified with the two Sipparas (Sepharvaim, that of the god Samas and that of the goddess Anunit), have yielded to our curiosity several monuments of the highest interest; those of Abu Shahrein (Eridu), Senkereh (Larsa), Mugheir (Ur, the native city of Abraham), the great necropolis of Warka (Uruk, the Erech of the Bible), are sites which have all furnished already an important harvest of remains belonging to the most distant ages, incomplete as their exploration has been. But the extensive and methodical excavations undertaken from 1877 to 1881 by M. E. de Sarzec at Tello (Tell Loh) have enriched the Louvre with a collection of monuments unique in the museums of Europe, and enable us to give, at the present time, an exact and precise account of the character of Chaldæan architecture and sculpture long before Nineveh and Babylon had succeeded in imposing their supremacy upon these regions. Tello, fifteen hours north of Mugheir, twelve hours east of Warka, seems to represent the ancient Sirpurla.[1] Its ruins, which cover a space of four miles and a quarter, consist of a series of mounds at a short distance from the course of an ancient canal dug by the hand of man, the Shatt el Hai, which starts from the Euphrates and flows into the Tigris twelve hours below Bagdad. The principal tell contained the substructures of a palace which was, two or three thousand years before our era, the dwelling of a prince named, according to Assyriologists, Gudea. Hither we must especially transport ourselves, as well as to the mounds of Mugheir, Warka, and Abu Shahrein, where the English explorers Loftus and Taylor made some excavations with good results. The narrative of these excavations and the monuments which they have yielded to our museums, will help us to determine the peculiar features of an essentially self-made art, born spontaneously on the soil where it flourished, and apparently in no degree borrowed from its neighbours.

I. Architecture.

One of the fundamental characters of Chaldæo-Assyrian architecture is the exclusive use of bricks as the constructive material. This is required by the very nature of the soil of Mesopotamia, in which building-stone and wood suitable for carpenters’ work are entirely wanting, while the clay is thick, adhesive, and peculiarly adapted for fashioning in the mould and baking in the kiln. Accordingly, while the modern inhabitants of the country continue to make bricks, their manufacture is already recorded in the biblical reminiscences of the Tower of Babel: “Go to,” say the men who would build a tower that should reach to Heaven, “let us make brick and burn them thoroughly: and they had brick for stone and slime had they for mortar.”[2] The prophet Nahum informs us of the method of brick-making: “Draw thee waters,” he says,” ... go into clay, and tread the mortar, make strong the brick-kiln.”[3] There were two kinds of bricks. The unbaked brick is a square of whitish clay, mixed with fine straw and simply dried in the sun when it comes out of the mould; it was generally from 8 in. to 1 ft. square by 4 in. thick. The month in which the heat of summer first becomes intolerable in these regions, namely the month of Sivan (May-June) was called “the brick month,” or that in which the clay cakes were submitted to the action of the sun. To judge by what is done in Egypt at the present day, one workman could by himself make from one thousand to fifteen hundred bricks a day. The baked brick was subjected to the action of fire in proper kilns, like those of our modern brickyards; it acquired, through the baking, a reddish colour, and was less sensible than the crude brick to the decomposing action of damp; it was also more limited in its dimensions, in order that the heat might penetrate the internal substance of the mass, without danger of calcination on the surface. On one side of every brick, baked or unbaked, the name and official titles of the reigning prince were stamped by means of a matrix or a die used as a seal; thus, at Tello most of the bricks were marked with the name of Gudea, and at Babylon bricks of Nebuchadnezzar are found by hundreds of thousands.

Fig. 1.—Brick from Tello (Louvre).

While describing the construction of the fortifications at Babylon, Herodotus shows the process followed by the Chaldæans in building a wall: “As they dug the moat, they made bricks of the earth taken out of the trench, and when they had made a certain number of bricks they baked them in kilns. Then, using boiling bitumen as mortar, and inserting mats of woven reeds at every thirtieth course of bricks, they built first the borders of the moat, and next the wall itself in the same way.”[4] Mesopotamia possesses abundant wells of bitumen, notably at Hit and at Kalah Shergat; as for the tall reeds which still grow in abundance in the marshes of Lower Chaldæa, their employment in building had the effect of giving more solidity and cohesion to the courses of bricks. For walls less carefully constructed, or for partition-walls in the interior of the houses, a simple mortar of clay was used instead of bitumen. In great structures, such as Birs Nimroud at Babylon, the bricks are bound together by mortar made of lime, solid enough to stand all tests. The ruins of Mugheir have revealed the use of a mixture of ashes and lime, which is still employed by the natives, and called by them sharûr.

The necessarily limited size of bricks baked in kilns or dried in the sun must have helped to bring about a speedier disintegration of the structures, and have been a serious obstacle to the erection of walls of a height to be compared, for instance, with that of the Egyptian temples. At certain seasons of the year in Mesopotamia the rain falls in torrents, and, filtering through walls in bad repair, would soon open cracks and bring about the ruin of the structure. In these lowlands furrowed with watercourses, the crude brick of the foundations often on this account ran the risk of returning to its condition of clayey mud without consistency. Greek tradition relates that the Medes and Chaldæans saw a part of the walls of Nineveh fall of themselves, when they prolonged a blockade which forced the besieged to admit the waters of the Tigris during many weeks into the moats beneath the ramparts. The cuneiform inscriptions themselves, while the empire founded by Nebuchadnezzar was flourishing, often point out temples and palaces falling to ruin, which the kings strive without ceasing to repair or rebuild.

The old sanctuaries of primitive Chaldæa, E-saggil, E-zida, the Temple of the Great Light, E-parra, E-anna, E-ulbar, and others consecrated to Sin, to Samas, to Nana, to Bel Marduk, to Nebo, are restored at great expense by Nabonidus, the last King of Babylon, who sets himself the task of recalling in his inscriptions the material difficulties of this work worthy of a pious antiquarian. Let no one be surprised after this at the striking contrast between the ruins of Mesopotamia, and those of Egypt as we now see them. In the valley of the Nile building-stone abounds, and the architect has only to make his choice among the various qualities of material. Accordingly he hews out gigantic monoliths, erects imposingly majestic pylons, rears to an aerial height forests of pillars which seem to uphold the sky, plants in the middle of the desert those massive Pyramids which will defy to the end of time even the most determined of Vandals. On the banks of the Tigris and Euphrates, on the contrary, there is now nothing but the uniform plain of the desert, broken here and there by mounds of débris covered with sand; here it may be said with truth that the very ruins have perished. Only in thought can the archæologist reconstruct vast buildings in accordance with the vast material buried in disorder in the mud. The use of bricks in building has been, to a greater extent than political events, the auxiliary of Jehovah’s wrath against Nineveh and Babylon.

If the nature of the soil forced the Mesopotamian architect to build with bricks, the neighbourhood of rivers and canals for irrigation and the want of outlet for the water obliged him at the same time to have recourse to an expedient peculiar to Chaldæo-Assyrian architecture. He had to raise the actual dwelling on an artificial terrace removed from the level of a soil impregnated with unwholesome damp. This platform or basement of unbaked brick on which the building was placed is met with everywhere, not only at Nineveh and Babylon, but from the beginning in the substructures of Mugheir, Tello, Warka, and Abu Shahrein. In the palace of the patesi Gudea, the mass forms a sort of immense pedestal 39 ft. high, and nearly 655 ft. at the base; at the present day the sides form in relation to the plain a slope of 164 ft. Formerly the platform was mounted by a gentle slope intended for horses and chariots, and by one or more flights of steps which broke the outline of the terrace. The stone staircases by which the terrace of the palaces of Persepolis is ascended, are still in place; in Chaldæa and Assyria, where they were built of brick, they have almost everywhere disappeared. However, Taylor discovered two on the side of the platform of the palace of Abu Shahrein; one has only twelve steps 2 ft. broad; but the other was a monumental staircase of stone, 16 ft. broad, with a slope of more than 65 ft.

The edifice which surmounts the platform at Tello is of bricks cemented together with bitumen; its exterior walls are 5 ft. 10 in. thick, and form a parallelogram 173 ft. long and 101 ft. broad. Like the palaces of Warka and Mugheir, its orientation is according to the Assyrian custom—that is to say, the angles are turned towards the cardinal points, not the sides as in the Egyptian monuments. The two longer sides bulge slightly towards the middle, thus describing two opposite elliptical curves—a peculiarity which gives to the plan of the edifice something of the appearance of

Fig. 2.—Plan of the palace at Tello (after Heuzey).

a barrel, or of two trapeziums joined at the base. The outer surface of the walls is not everywhere uniform and flat; the adjacent sides of the northern angle are ornamented by projections alternately curved and rectilineal—a system of decoration which has also been observed at Warka, among the ruins of the temple called Wuswas, and is found later in the Assyrian monuments. The great north-eastern façade exhibits in the middle, besides the outward swell of which we have spoken, a projection 3 ft. 3 in. thick and 18 ft. long. The wings of this projection are formed of square pilasters and half-columns 1 ft. 7 in. in diameter, which recall the clustered pillars of our cathedrals, and form one of the most interesting peculiarities of the primitive architecture of Chaldæa. Taylor[5] and

Fig. 3.—Section of pillar (after Heuzey).

Loftus[6] had already remarked, at Abu Shahrein and Warka respectively, pillars and half-columns of brick-work; M. de Sarzec has found the same architectural features in one of the secondary mounds of Tello, which he calls the tell of pillars,[7] and which seems to represent the ruins of the temple of the god Nin Girsu. Two of these pillars, which measured 6 ft. in thickness, and were separated by a space of 6½ ft., still consisted of twenty-four courses of bricks. “Each pillar,” says M. de Sarzec, “is formed of a cluster of four round columns close together, and built entirely of brickwork.... If one of the four round columns is taken to pieces it is found that every alternate course is formed of a circular brick in the centre, round which radiate eight triangular bricks grooved at their interior angle, and rounded on the outer surface, so that they describe by their union a complete circle. In the next course the circle is composed, on the contrary, of eight triangular bricks ending in a point, which are united at the centre of the column, and of six other curved bricks which enclose the first eight. The space between the four circles thus formed is filled up with two large bricks hollowed out in the form of an arc of a circle, which fit exactly into it. These curious pillars, thus ingeniously constructed, recall the Egyptian order, modelled upon vegetable forms, which imitates four lotus-stalks in a bouquet; they show how skilfully the Chaldæans could dispense with the stone column. The base consisted of a square mass of bricks forming a pedestal projecting on all sides 2 ft. 11 in. beyond the shaft. The whole group was covered with a thick bed of plaster.”[8]

Yet, whatever skill was displayed in the manufacture of these specially moulded bricks, round, triangular, or forming a section of a circle, pillars of this construction could not, like the Egyptian column, show sufficient solidity to support a heavy mass; they would soon have bent under the burden. Accordingly they could only be employed exceptionally and almost entirely for decoration, whether to support the roof of a grand staircase or to shelter the cella in which a deity delivered his oracles.

The defective side of Chaldæan architecture, therefore, consists in the lack of stone supports rising proudly into space like the Egyptian column, and upholding on their bold heads, quite as well as the thickest walls, the foot of the arch, the architraves, the roof, the upper terraces or the upper stories of the building. But the proof that the architects would have hewn columns of stone, if nature had furnished them with the necessary material, is just this ingenious artifice by which they succeeded in replacing them; and moreover they did not hesitate to employ small columns of wood or metal in the construction of small buildings, such as the shrines of their gods. A stela of King Nabu-ablu-iddin (about B.C. 900), found at Abu Habbah, represents the shrine of the god Samas, supported by small wooden pillars, covered with plates of bronze overlapping each other so as to resemble the trunk of a palm tree (see [fig. 29]). The base and the capital are alike; they are composed of a double volute shaped like a lotus-flower, approaching somewhat the Ionic capital; in short, the Chaldæans knew how to make use of the column in minor architecture.

One doorway at least was opened in each façade of the palace of Tello, but these openings were not on the axis of the structure, nor even symmetrical. The principal side (the north-east) had two entrances; the largest, nearly in the middle of the swell, had an opening 3 ft. 11 in. broad. It was constructed at a later period—that is to say, at the time near the Christian era when the Græco-Parthian kings of Characene conceived the idea of restoring Tello and installing themselves there. Like the Arab houses of our day, the outer walls of the palace of Gudea show no other openings; there are neither windows nor lights of any sort, admitting the air and the day, and looking out over the country or the town.

Let us now penetrate into the interior of the Chaldæan edifice, of which the blind and dumb walls leave in our imagination an impression of gloom and cold uniformity. The walls seem never to have exhibited the smallest architectural decoration; they are entirely bare, and only characterised from time to time by depressions and projections; no traces of mouldings, of plinths, of cornices, and of those devices to which the architects of all countries have recourse in order to break the lines of the walls, and to call forth effects of light and shade. It must be supposed that the interior decoration of the palace consisted entirely of colouring and hanging draperies. The thickness of the wall varies from 8 ft. 6 in. to 2 ft. 7 in. All the partitions cut one another at right angles, forming thirty-six square or rectangular chambers; the largest measures 39 ft. 4 in. by 12 ft. 2 in., and the smallest 10 ft. 11 in. by 9 ft. 9 in. The disproportion which exists, especially in the state saloon, between the length and breadth, the extreme thickness of the walls, even of those which are the least important in the structure, form essential peculiarities to which we shall draw attention later in the Assyrian edifices. At Nineveh it has been proved that it is the thrust of the semicircular vaulting, which roofs the chambers, that has forced the architect to bring the parallel walls near to one another and to give them an enormous thickness. Are we, in the absence of palpable proof, to draw the same conclusion with regard to the palaces of old Chaldæa? Are we authorised to assert that the vault was known three thousand years before our era? In a word, how were the halls of Gudea’s building covered? Was it everywhere by means of transverse rafters supporting a floor and a terrace? or was it oftener by a bricked vault? As far as we have read M. de Sarzec’s narrative, or M. Heuzey’s studies on the excavations of Tello, we have found no direct answer to this question. Perhaps the present state of the ruins or the successive alterations to which the primitive structure has been subjected do not allow a categorical solution of the problem to be given. However, important indications authorise us to believe that the Chaldæans of the time of Gudea already understood the vault and used it for roofing their houses. In several parts even of the palace of Tello, M. de Sarzec found small vaulted passages, 3 ft. 3 in. high and 1 ft. 11 in.[9] thick, in a perfect state of preservation; in one of the secondary mounds he brought to light a small vaulted drain which carried the sewage of the town far away into the plain. Taylor found, in an underground chamber of the necropolis at Mugheir, the most primitive kind of vault that has ever been known—that called the corbelled vault. In this false vault the courses of bricks ascend in parallel rows on each side until they meet one another, every fresh course projecting perceptibly beyond that beneath it, until the opposite courses touch and form one.

Fig. 4.—Corbelled vaulting at Mugheir (after Taylor).

It was, then, as it seems, the Chaldæans who invented the vault;[10] the want of timber compelled them in early times to contrive to defend themselves at once against the heavy rains and the ardour of a torrid sun; the creation of the vault was in their case instinctive and spontaneous. They raised, two or three thousand years before our era, vaults and domes like those which are built to this day by the rudest masons at Mosoul or Bagdad. No doubt the present state of the Chaldæan ruins and the insufficient explorations which have been undertaken among them do not enable us to say whether these Proto-Chaldæans knew every kind of vault, as the Assyrians did in the age of the Sargonids, or the Babylonians at the epoch of Nebuchadnezzar; but the remarkable perfection observed in their monumental structures, and in the very manufacture of the bricks, are so many arguments in favour of the inference that the palaces and houses of the Chaldæans in the time of Gudea were surmounted, for the most part, by semicircular vaults or by cupolas, as were later, according to Strabo,[11] the houses of the Babylonians. The vaults supported a terrace formed of clay; this layer of earth would be less thick over rooms roofed only with a ceiling of palm-beams and reed-matting. The ascent was by staircases, an example of which seems to have been found in the palace at Tello.[12]

While clearing away the material accumulated between the courts A and B, the workmen employed by the French explorer came into contact (at the point H) with a structure of baked brickwork, which proves that the Chaldæans at the remotest epoch had already invented one of the most interesting and characteristic elements of their architecture—the zikkurat or staged tower. The lower layers in the palace of Gudea alone exist, and are composed of two solid masses in stages one above the other. In its present condition the upper terrace is a mass 26 ft. square, 13 ft. less on all sides than the lower stage; perhaps there still exists a third and lower step, which has not been reached by the soundings, which are imperfect at this point. The zikkurat of Tello was not in any case so lofty or so important a structure as those of the Ninevite palaces or those represented by the ruins of Babil or Birs Nimroud at Babylon. It was even much less considerable than that which Taylor observed at Abu Shahrein, and which was equally old. These towers always had, from the first, seven stages, each painted of a different colour, and connected with the worship of the sun (Samas), the moon (Sin), and the five planets of the astronomical system of the Chaldæans.

The disposition of the royal apartments showed a striking analogy with that which we shall meet with again later in the palaces of Nineveh; there were the convenience and comfort which we find in the palaces of modern oriental sovereigns. To the Chaldæans again we must give the credit of having invented that architectural arrangement which springs from the necessities of oriental life, and is so well fitted to its needs that for four thousand years it has never varied. There were in the palace of Gudea three interior courts (A, B, C, [fig. 2]), round each of which the rooms radiated, and from which they received air and light. Each of these three groups had its own entrance, and communicated with the next group only by a single passage easy to guard or to close. The group of chambers situated in the northern angle (C) was especially isolated and removed from the others; it was the hareem or women’s apartments. At the eastern angle (B) were the rooms composing the seraglio or selamlik—that is to say, the part of the palace inhabited by the king and his officers; there was the saloon for official receptions, of which we have given the dimensions. This part of the royal dwelling communicated on one side with a state courtyard, measuring 55 ft. 8 in. by 68 ft. 9 in., and on the other with the outside by means of a smaller room serving as an antechamber; beside the door opening on the façade, boxes or recesses had been arranged in which the guards were posted. The third group of chambers, on the south-east (A), formed the Khan—that is to say, the dependencies of the palace, the kitchens, the slaves’ lodgings, and the stables.

All the rooms were paved with bricks; they very rarely led into one another, and had an opening looking on to the court. The largest of the doorways, that which opened into the state saloon, was of the unusual breadth of 6 ft. 6 in.; it was probably a folding door. Under each of the principal doors there was a great threshold of marble or alabaster, sometimes covered with an inscription and placed on a bed of bitumen and crushed bricks; under this concrete, finally, cylinders of precious stone and talismanic amulets were generally found.

The leaves of the door turned on pivots, the point of which rested in a cavity hollowed out for this purpose in a great block of diorite. M. de Sarzec brought to the Louvre a large number of these natural blocks, which were found buried in the pavement so as only to rise an inch or two above the surface. On the smooth surface of each of them it is seen that the socket, hollowed out in the form of a conical cup, has undergone an incessant friction; round the hole an inscription, sometimes circular, was engraved ([fig. 5]). To prevent the wooden pivot of the doors from wearing out too rapidly, it was enveloped in a metal sheath, which took the form of a funnel, and which was fixed to the wood by means of nails. One of these bronze cups has been found at Tello, still in place on the socket.[13]

Fig. 5.—Socket for pivot of door, from Tello (Louvre).

Fig. 6.—Terra-cotta cone from Tello (Louvre).

The discoveries of Loftus and Taylor show us how the façades and the rooms of the Chaldæan palaces were decorated. The principal façade of the buildings at Abu Shahrein and Warka had a mural decoration of a kind as primitive as it was singular.[14] First it was plastered with a thick layer of clay stucco; then, before this plaster was completely dry, cones of baked clay were buried in it, like metal nails. Only the head of these cones is visible on the surface of the wall. While the stem is plunged into the thick clay and sticks there unseen. To the heads of these cones, disposed at regular distances, and acting perhaps also as talismans, various colours are applied; they are black, red, white, or yellow. Moreover, each head is separated from its neighbours by coloured geometrical lines, so that it became to the eye the centre of a lozenge or a square.

If the interior of the rooms was lined in monochrome with white stucco, or with fresco painting, nothing of this decoration is left. But we have in sufficiently large quantities, although always much mutilated, the remains of another more original system of wall decoration, of which the Chaldæans are the inventors—that is to say, enamelled bricks. By applying a coloured paste, which the fire would vitrify, to one of the surfaces of the bricks before baking, a glaze or enamel was produced, closely united to the clay and immovably solid. It was again necessity and their ungrateful climate which induced the Chaldæans to have recourse to this ingenious method. They were in great need of a remedy for the want of stone and a means of preventing the heavy rains from spoiling the colours applied to the walls. They succeeded so perfectly in this that even at the present day the brilliancy of these glazed tiles is not affected. The colours with which they are painted are of the simplest, and vary little; they are blue, white, black, yellow and red. Unfortunately, those fine fragments which have been brought to our museums are only so far interesting that they teach us the technical methods of a manufacture which involves that of opaque glass; even those which are least mutilated contain at the most a few floral designs or portions of the figures of animals, and moreover these last are not older than the epoch of Nebuchadnezzar.

The trenches dug among the massive terraces of Chaldæa have revealed other curious details of construction. We know, for instance, what steps were taken to prevent the sewage of the houses or the rain-water which fell upon them from filtering through the platforms of crude brick on which the buildings stood; a rapid disintegration would have followed. They, therefore, planned a complete system of water-channels and drainage. In one of the mounds at Tello, M. de Sarzec found a series of cylindrical pipes or tubes of baked clay, fitted into one another, and forming together a conduit for the water.[15]

Fig. 7.—Drainage pipe at Mugheir (after Loftus).

But the place where this method has been carried out with peculiarly ingenious skill is the necropolis at Mugheir. The top of the platform, in the body of which the tombs are sunk, is covered with a brick pavement laid with special care, in which every chink is filled up with bitumen. Under this upper crust the coffins are ranged in order, one above the other, each one being placed separately in a small chamber. At intervals brick tubes are met with, fitted into one another and forming a sort of immense flue hidden in the structure. The lower extremity of the pipes opened into a drain; the upper end, on a level with the surface of the pavement of the terrace, was furnished with a cap pierced with an infinite number of small holes like a skimmer. Through these the rain-water was carried off, and this system of drainage was so wonderfully well understood and carried out, that it has remained intact to our own day, and, according to Loftus, the tombs have been so well preserved that they are found perfectly dry, including the bodies and their furniture. We shall see the Assyrians take similar precautions to preserve the terraces of the Ninevite palaces from the percolation of water.

The construction of a temple or palace was the occasion of a religious ceremony analogous to that which we call the laying of the first stone. In a hollow formed in the foundation-wall a cylinder of baked clay was deposited ([fig. 8]), on which an inscription was written describing the erection of the building and setting forth the piety and great deeds of the prince; this cylinder was accompanied by various talismanic objects: cones and statuettes of bronze and baked clay, cylindrical seals, votive tablets, sometimes of silver or gold. Among the foundations of the palace of Gudea, M. de Sarzec found four of these cavities in the wall measuring 1 ft. 1 in. by 10 in. by 4 in.; they still contained the cylinders and amulets deposited there.

Hiding-places of the same kind have been observed at Senkereh, at Mugheir, and among the ruins of almost all the Chaldæan and Assyrian buildings. The Assyrians themselves, when they wished to restore an old ruined temple, took pains first to find out the hiding-place of the foundation-cylinder or timmennu.

The last king of Babylon, Nabonidus, relates in one of the official inscriptions of his reign how he happened to find the timmennu of the earliest builders of the temple of the Sun at Larsa. King Kurigalzu (about B.C. 1350), and later Esarhaddon (B.C. 680-667), and Nebuchadnezzar himself, had repaired this venerated sanctuary, and sought vainly for the hiding-place of the talismans. “Then I, Nabonidus, inspired by my piety towards the goddess Istar of Agade, my sovereign, caused an excavation to be made. The gods Samas and Rammanu granted me their constant favour, and I found the foundation-cylinder of the temple of E-Ulbar.” It bore the name of the king Sagasaltias (about b.c. 1500). After reading the inscription, Nabonidus restored it to its place and himself made another cylinder to record his researches and his own works; he deposited it in the foundation by the side of the ancient cylinder. Modern explorers, no doubt also favoured by Samas and Rammanu, found in a sufficiently good state of preservation the mysterious hiding-places and the precious objects which had been piously placed there 550 years before our era.[16]

Fig. 8.—Foundation-cylinder from Khorsabad (Louvre).

II. Statues and Bas-reliefs.

The discoveries of M. de Sarzec at Tello, and those of other explorers in Chaldæa, allow us to go back almost to the origin of sculpture in Western Asia. Our museums possess, in fact, bas-reliefs and statues belonging to a rudimentary stage of art, the remote age of which is still attested by the archaic inscriptions which accompany them, and these most ancient

Fig. 9.—Bas-relief from Tello (Louvre).

monuments are followed, as in the case of Egypt and Greece, by other statues and bas-reliefs which, descending a chronological scale across the ages, represent the graduated phases of artistic progress in Chaldæa before the Ninevite supremacy was imposed upon this country. Among the fragments of sculpture at Tello, that which M. Heuzey considers most primitive, and which should be placed at the head of the productions of oriental sculpture, is a bas-relief of greyish limestone, 10 in. broad and 5 in. high. Four figures alone remain of the complicated scene which decorated this stone panel. One of them is seated, with the profile turned to the left; it is a beardless man rather than a woman, and his face is half covered by an exaggerated eye seen from the front as in children’s drawings. His hair consists of two long tresses falling to his shoulders, and almost to be mistaken for the lappets of the high tiara with which he is crowned. This tiara seems to be adorned with two bulls’ horns. The bust is draped with a large shawl which leaves the right shoulder bare. The hand, raised to a level with the face, looks like a simple fork; it holds a cup, as if the scene represented a libation, and in fact we still see a part of the deity to whom the offering is directed. On the right a bearded man with square shoulders, crowned with a low cap, dressed in a large robe without folds, holds in his right hand a sort of club, with which he seems to deliver a blow upon the head of his companion, whom he seizes by the hand. It will be seen that the explanation of this picture is exceedingly doubtful; but looking from the point of view of the history of art, we must recognise in it without hesitation a fragment which comes down from remote antiquity. The relief is low, the outline of the figures is timid and uncertain, the details are disproportioned, as if the rude chisel which carved them had been held in the unskilful hands of a child; the design is full of elementary mistakes, though limestone is soft and easily worked.

Fig. 10. Bas-relief from Tello (Louvre).

A more advanced art marks the fragment of a bas-relief which M. Heuzey called “the Eagle and Lion Tablet,” and which is dated by an inscription mentioning the king Ur-Nina (B.C. 2500). An eagle is seen here with outspread wings standing upon a lion. The sculpture is equally flat and without modelling, but the graceful outline of the figures is clearly chiselled, and with a surer hand; the extremities of the wing feathers of the eagle are indented, the body of the lion is remarkably correct in outline, except the head, which still remains barbarous.

A third stage of Chaldæan sculpture may be represented by the “Vulture Stela,” on which the names of two kings have been read, one of whom is the son of Ur-Nina. The three fragments of this limestone stela are carved on both sides. On one of them a flock of vultures carry away human remains in their flight—heads, hands, and arms. The human heads denote an art which has left the gropings of childhood behind: they are entirely shaved, the nose is always aquiline, the eye of an exaggerated size and triangular. The vultures, more rudely drawn, are nevertheless well characterised by their long curved beak and their claws of exaggerated length; the markings of the feathers and wings are brought out. On another fragment of the same stela it seems that we witness the construction of a sepulchral tumulus.

Fig. 11.—The Vulture Stela (Louvre).

Fig. 12.—The Vulture Stela (Louvre).

Men dressed in a short tunic, fringed, and tightened at the waist, carry on their heads wicker baskets, probably containing earth to cover the pile of corpses heaped one upon the other in symmetrical and alternate rows. The third piece of the same monument seems to represent a scene of carnage. As for the back of the stela, it is less ornamented; however, on one of the fragments ([fig. 13]), a pole surmounted by an eagle with outspread wings is seen, and then a large human head, incomplete but highly interesting; it exhibits, from an anatomical point of view, the same character as the smaller heads which we have just considered; but its head-dress is a most curious feature,—a sort of tiara decorated with bulls’ horns. “By an archaic conventionality,” observes M. Heuzey, “these two horns are seen in profile, curved forwards and backwards; but in reality they were attached to the sides of the cap.... The cap is also surmounted by a crest of four large feathers, in the middle of which rises a cone decorated with a quaint head also crowned by a crescent; this little decorative head, drawn in full face, has an exceedingly long and broad nose without any sign of a mouth, so that it may be doubted whether it be the head of a man or of an animal.”[17] The same tiara is found with unimportant modifications on Assyrian cylinders and bas-reliefs, in which it forms the head-dress of deities or pontiffs. The artistic superiority of the bas-reliefs of the Vulture Stela over the monuments quoted previously is abundantly evident, and already allows us a foretaste of the sober and vigorous art revealed to us by the large statues found in the palace of Gudea.

Fig. 13.—The Vulture Stela (Louvre).

It was in the most spacious court of the palace that M. de Sarzec found assembled nearly all the Chaldæan statues which he had transported to the museum of the Louvre. To the number of ten, they are of blackish diorite with a bluish tinge; all are headless and bear inscriptions in the name of Gudea or of Ur-Bau. At the moment of discovery they were lying on the slabs of the court-yard,—on one side those which represent upright figures, on the other the seated statues. A separate head, appearing to belong to one of the statues, was also found in the same courtyard. The other heads were unearthed elsewhere, and it is impossible to say whether they had been removed from the headless statues that we know. All these heads, though exhibiting common characteristics, are distinguished from one another by peculiarities which disclose the surprising skill and the fecundity of the Chaldæan genius at this remote epoch. The man’s head ([fig. 14]) found in the great courtyard is of life-size, the hair and beard completely shaven, as in certain Egyptian statues. The eyebrows form an exaggerated projection above enormous eyes; the skull is remarkably elongated; the mutilated nose alone prevents us from having the complete type of the Chaldæan race, with its hard features and thick, sensual lips.

Fig. 14.—Chaldæan head (Louvre).

Fig. 15.—Chaldæan head (Louvre).

In a neighbouring tell M. de Sarzec found another head of the same size and of an equally interesting type. It is less severe in aspect than the preceding one, but carved with equal skill. The face is round and almost smiling, the chin broad and powerful, the nose flat. The very original head-dress is composed of a woollen cap fitting closely to the head, and furnished with a thick border, which, turning up, forms a sort of crown; the meshes of the woollen tissue are conventionally marked by a number of symmetrical rolls. Even at the present day in Lower Chaldæa the Christian priests of the Chaldæan rite envelop their heads in a turban of black stuff, which allows of a similar arrangement.[18]

Fig. 16.—Chaldæan statue (Louvre).

As for the headless statues whether seated or standing, they have all the same characteristics, exhibit an identical type, and are incontestably of the same school of sculpture. Here is a personage seated on a sort of stool not fully carved out; he recalls involuntarily the Greek statues of the sacred way of the Branchidæ at Miletus, and is in the same religious attitude. A cloak without sleeves is crossed over his breast and thrown back over his shoulder; a handsome fringe, delicately

Fig. 17.—Chaldæan statue (Louvre).

carved, falls over the whole depth in front; the hands are clasped on the breast in the oriental posture of meditation and devotion; the bare feet are chiselled with an attention to detail never to be surpassed in later times, even by the Ninevite artists. On the knees of the personage lies a tablet intended to receive an inscription or a design. In fact, another statue like this, though of smaller proportions, holds on its knees a similar tablet, on which the plan of a fortress with its bastions and posterns is engraved in outline, just as an architect of the present day would draw it. A graduated rule, that is to say, one subdivided into fractions of unequal but proportional length, 10¾ in. long, is carved in relief beside the plan, for which it serves as a scale; finally, at the side lies the style with which the architect engraved his design (see [fig. 53]). The standing statues answer almost to the same description; they also are bare-footed, with the hands crossed upon the breast but the arrangement of the long shawl, which seems to form the only garment of all these personages, becomes more intelligible. The Arab still drapes himself in the same fashion in his burnoos,—that garment, at once so simple and so dignified, of the shepherd of the desert. It is a piece of woollen stuff, the borders of which are adorned with a fringe; it is folded in two, and wrapped round the body obliquely, so that it covers one arm and leaves the other bare; the upper corner, held fast by wrapping the garment once round, is enough to keep the whole in place. We shall find this large shawl again on the Ninevite bas-reliefs, just as we shall observe the persistence and exaggeration of this sober and nervous style, which, as early as the Proto-Chaldæan epoch, lays too much stress on the muscles, and lingers with an excessive fondness over anatomical details.

The Chaldæan statues were intended to be seen all round, and not laid flat against a wall; they are completely finished behind as well as in front. Compared with the statues found in the temples of Cyprus, for instance, they show us that the artist has sought to spare neither his time nor his trouble. Amid this sobriety of treatment and this uniformity of attitudes we feel that Chaldæan art is already far from the hesitation and incorrectness of the first age; the chisel attacks the hardest stone with vigour and success; the artist’s hand is experienced and sure of itself. This archaic art is above all realistic, and aims at a precise and even affected following of nature. The bare shoulder is modelled and copied with surprising truth, the hands and feet are studied even to the knuckles, the nails, the wrinkles of the skin. At the same time the figures are thick-set and, it may be said, far too short—a fact which contributes to increase the impression of strength and muscular energy produced by an attentive observation of them.

The suppleness of the Chaldæan genius at the time of Gudea appears again in a singular monument of the De Sarzec collection, which may be taken to be the foot of a vase rather than the base of a small column (fig. 18). Small figures in high relief, nude, and seated on the ground, lean against a cylindrical stem. The best preserved figure has an oval face of rare refinement, and of a type entirely foreign to that of the large statues; with his beard cut in a point, and his head covered with a woollen turban, he looks straight in front of him with a smiling aspect; in all Assyrian sculpture no countenance of such originality could perhaps be found. We do not know what is the meaning of these little figures crouched round this sort of basin. They seem to hold the place of the winged bulls and lions or other fantastic genii, whom Assyrian art will soon multiply everywhere in the capacity of architectural supports or ornaments.

Fig. 18.—Foot of Chaldæan vase (Louvre).

In front of the palace at Tello stood a large stone basin decorated with sculpture, some fragments of which have come down to us. This monolithic trough, 8 ft. 2 in. long by 1 ft, 7½ in. broad, served, perhaps, to water the camels and the flocks which halted at the gate of Gudea’s dwelling; or rather, on account of its rich ornamentation, may we believe that it was a basin consecrated to the service of the temple, like the brazen sea in the Temple of Jerusalem, or the vase of Amathus? However it may be, there were,

Fig. 19.—Bas-relief from Tello (after Heuzey).

Fig. 20.—Bas-relief from Tello (Rev. arch., t. i., 1887, p. 265).

on its two longer surfaces, in low relief, women with arms outstretched, holding magic vases, from which two jets of liquid gushed, on each side of an ear of corn, a graceful symbol of the proverbial fertility of Mesopotamia, enclosed by the sacred streams of the Tigris and Euphrates, which were adored under the name of Naharaim, the two rivers par excellence. The fragment reproduced here ([fig. 19]) shows us that the Proto-Chaldæans already gave to flowing water the conventional form of undulating lines (see also [fig. 34]); the woman is drawn with surprising truth.[19] The same technical skill is remarked in a bas-relief from Tello, which represents a bearded personage, in full face, with a costume in which M. Heuzey has recognised the fleecy stuff called kaunakes by the Greeks. Observe the delicacy with which the Chaldæan artists treated the costume and the beard. It may almost be said that Mesopotamian art has no further progress to make, and that it already shows its full proportions at the fabulously remote epoch represented by the antiquities of Tello.

There is less modelling in the figures which adorn the upper part of the Caillou Michaux; the relief upon it is dry and flat, and the drawing affects a hieratic stiffness which would suggest an epoch of decadence, or at least a time when Chaldæan art was arrested in its upward march. This monument, dated in the reign of Marduk-nadin-akhi, King of Babylon about B.C. 1120, was perhaps a stone rolled down by the waters of the river, which was made into a sacred object; the cuneiform inscription contains the donation of a landed estate, settled as a dowry.[20] The curious figures, under the protection of which this contract is placed, show us, as they do in many cylinders, that at this epoch Chaldæan mythology was turned to profit by the artists, who knew how to unite human to animal forms without falling into monstrosity or deformity, and to give symbolical figures to the stars and to the invisible genii conceived by their wild imagination. The drawing of these strange figures is not unskilful; they inspire terror without degenerating into the caricature and grotesque forms which mark the images of the gods among barbarous peoples. Chaldæan art is as learned as the secrets of its mythology are complicated. Examine, for instance, this winged goat

Fig. 21.—The Caillou Michaux (Cabinet des Médailles).

Fig. 22.—Stela of Maduk-nadin-akhi (British Museum).

lying before an altar; the angular outlines of its horns are rendered with truth, the muscles of its legs, perhaps badly placed anatomically, are analysed in their smallest details, and the movement of this animal, which is making an effort to rise, is very natural, though lacking in life and suppleness. We shall recognise the same characters of dryness and rudeness in the black basalt stela of the same king, Marduk-nadin-akhi. Here, as in the Caillou Michaux, the relief is flat, nothing supple, graceful, or amiable; the Chaldæan genius cannot smile. Of those ample garments of the Oriental, those draperies with which the Greek artist will be able to produce so powerful an effect, the Chaldæan artist is satisfied with scratching in outline, so to speak, the folds and fringes; he makes heavy embroidered copes of them, like those of Catholic priests. But, in compensation, he looks at these embroideries through a magnifying glass, and excels in analysing and reproducing the richness of the tissue, the innumerable and complicated forms of the design. We can henceforth foresee that the sculptor, losing sight of synthesis so as to place his ideal exclusively in the infinitely little, will never rid himself of the narrow formula in which he so early imprisoned his talent. All his figures in statuary or in the bas-reliefs, so highly finished in detail, show as a whole a hieratic and conventional stiffness, which will unhappily descend as a heritage to the Assyrian artist.

Fig. 23.—Chaldæan statuette in bronze (Louvre).

III. Minor Sculpture and the Industrial Arts.

The Chaldæans could work in bronze as skilfully as in stone. M. de Sarzec has collected some bronze figures which, compared with other monuments already secured, allow us to fix some precise landmarks in the gradual development of the art of casting and chiselling metals in Chaldæa. A certain statuette of a man or woman ([fig. 23]) may be considered the most rudimentary attempt.[21] It has simply the shape of a cylindrical stem, the upper part of which is furnished with two arms and a human head like the xoana of the Greeks. This head, surmounted by small horns, is strangely barbarous; it recalls the art of the men of the bronze age and the most rustic of the Cypriote terra-cottas. Progress is manifest in other

Fig. 24.—Chaldæan statuette (Louvre).

bronzes—separated, perhaps, from the former by several hundred years. These are statuettes which, instead of being fixed on a base, end in a reversed and much elongated cone, which must have served to plunge them into a soft matter such as mortar. One represents a recumbent bull, the other ([fig. 24]) a kneeling man holding in his hands the base of the cone; he is bearded and covered with the tiara with several pairs of horns, reserved for gods and genii. A third, lastly, is a woman carrying a basket on her head, whose body has remarkably the appearance of an elongated ingot. This canephoros, whose female form is only indicated by the breasts and the width of the hips, leads us naturally to speak of another canephoros ([fig. 25]), found at Afaj on the Euphrates, bearing the name of the king Kudurmapuk (B.C. 2000). It may be seen by this statuette that the art of working in bronze followed closely the progress of sculpture in stone. Though the head and arms are still the work of half-trained artists, the head is very remarkable; the arch of the eyebrows and the eyes are treated as in the large diorite statues; the hair is completely shaved. The same characters are observed in a remarkable figure of a bearded priest, wearing a tiara of moderate height, dressed in a long tunic with flounced fringes.[22] Here is a mutilated statuette from Tello ([fig. 26]); it is a god standing on a crouching lion; the head of the roaring beast has a ferocious and natural expression, but the god’s robe is cylindrical, without amplitude and without modelling, and the artist has tried in vain to conceal this stiffness, which betrays his impotence, by engraving the fringes and rosettes of the drapery. Remark that the long hairs of the lion are treated like the woollen shag of the priest’s cap which we examined just now ([fig. 15]). The animal has very small wings; his forelegs are those of a bull, his hind-legs end in lion’s claws; the study of nature here is perfect, but in those conventional lines which are meant to express the swell of the muscles, we feel the tendency to exaggeration and trivial rudeness which we remarked in the statues.

Fig. 25.—Canephoros of Kudurmapuk (Louvre).

In one of the smaller mounds at Tello, M. de Sarzec discovered a fragment of a large bronze statue. “It was,” he says, “a life-sized bull’s horn, of bronze plating mounted on a wooden frame, but the wood was carbonised by the action of fire.”[23][24] He had also found a sword, which was stolen and destroyed by an Arab. But we can cite another weapon of the same kind in the possession of Colonel Hanbury; the blade, curved like a scythe, and triangular, bears a votive inscription in the name of the Assyrian king Rammannirari, the son of Pudil (B.C. 1300). The curious peculiarity of this weapon is that on one of its surfaces a small recumbent deer is to be seen engraved, and this is the maker’s mark: from this time onward the jealousy of craftsmen comes into play and declares itself by the same measures as in our day.

Fig. 26.—Chaldæan statuette in bronze (Louvre).

Surprising as the phenomenon is at first sight, Chaldæan pottery was far from following the progress of sculpture. The excavations of Tello have enriched the museum of the Louvre with five hundred terra-cotta cones, bearing the name of Gudea and Ur-Bau, but these are only industrial products, without artistic character, and belonging to the brick manufacture. The necropoles of Warka and Mugheir, where we might have expected to meet with works of art, as in the tombs of Greece or Etruria, have only furnished coarse vases which bear witness to the complete inferiority of pottery among the Chaldæo-Assyrians. They are all singularly barbarous and rustic, whether they come from the archaic tombs of Warka and Mugheir, or issue from the ruins of the palaces where, nevertheless, the art of sculpture soars and displays itself in its perfect development. Assyrian pottery, even that of the best epoch, resembles, sometimes so much as to be mistaken for it, the most archaic pottery of Greece proper and the Islands of the Ægean. But here it is only the beginning of art, the first effort of the potter who before long will fashion masterpieces; there, on the contrary, these vulgar kitchen receptacles form the whole art, and represent at once the start and the finish.

This neglect of ceramics by the Chaldæo-Assyrian artists results from geological and climatic causes analogous to those which, as we shall see, developed sculpture in bas-relief to the detriment of sculpture in the round. It is especially owing to the bad quality of the clay in Mesopotamia, which, though quite fit to be turned into square bricks, has not a fine enough grain for the purpose of fashioning from it the fragile frame of a broad crater, or of a slim amphora, and still less for the purpose of lending itself to all the details of face and drapery in graceful and slender figurines like those of Tanagra, Cyme, or Myrina.

The cohesion of the Mesopotamian clay is so imperfect that the Babylonian terra-cottas which have come down to us crumble almost at the first touch, in spite of the process of baking to which they have been subjected. It is observed that, to give some consistency to the body of the vases and to prevent cracks, the potter has been obliged to mix the clayey paste with chopped straw. It was impossible then to make the sides thin, or to fashion them with art; consequently it would not have been natural to decorate with rich and careful painting vases which could only be heavy and coarse. It was enough to trace out geometrical designs, bands of colour, ovals, symmetrical festoons round the neck of the amphoræ; nothing in this sort of decoration has been borrowed from the animal or vegetable world or from history, of which the artist could, however, make so wonderful a use in the decoration of metal vases, or of knicknacks in ivory, wood, or stone.

The Chaldæan terra-cotta figurines, however coarse they may be, are not entirely divested of interest for the history of art and mythology, and M. Heuzey has been able to appreciate them with delicacy from this point of view.[25]

Fig. 27.—Chaldæan statuette in terra-cotta.

The statuettes collected in great quantities by Loftus, at Warka, are of solid clay, and were manufactured in a mould in one piece; the back is flat and modelled with the hand. The clay is of a greenish grey, or sometimes brown; it is well baked and very hard. The attitude of these grotesque little figures offers singularly striking analogies to the terra-cotta figurines of the first Egyptian dynasty; they are men in long robes, with their beards cut in the Assyrian fashion, women dressed in tight tunics and wearing falling head-dresses like the Egyptian figurines; their hands are clasped on their breast in the religious attitude which we know already from the Tello statues. It is, however, very difficult to give the precise date of these figurines, which, perhaps, for the most part, are not anterior to the time of Nebuchadnezzar. Besides, we shall return to them later on. It is enough for the moment to observe how little varied and meagre was the theme worked out by the Chaldæan modellers in clay, at a time when sculpture and the other arts were nevertheless already most flourishing.

The monuments which we have just reviewed allow us to appreciate the degree of prosperity and perfection attained side by side with the higher branches of art by various industries in Chaldæa, such as tapestry, weaving, and the embroidery of stuffs. The stela of Marduk-nadin-akhi, for example ([fig. 22]), bears witness to the wonderful skill of the women of the royal hareem, or of the men employed in the workshop, whence issued that robe with golden fringe, covered with elegant designs and precious stones set in the web of the tissue, that tiara adorned with feathers and wide-open daisies, those sandals, the broad lozenge-shaped stitches of which can be counted.

M. Heuzey[26] has demonstrated that the stuff called kaunakes (καυνἁκης) by the Greeks, who gave this name to a Babylonian garment, goes back at least as far as the epoch of Gudea. The representation of this woollen tissue shows several series of tufts arranged in rows one above the other; the principle of the manufacture of the kaunakes is the same as that of plush or velvet, only the woollen pile is longer and arranged less closely. This sort of material, invented by the Chaldæans, continued to be made by the Assyrians and Persians; in this way the Greeks came to know it, and Aristophanes speaks of it in his comedy of the Wasps. Garments made of kaunakes are frequently met with on the Chaldæan monuments, especially on the cylinders, where they have been mistaken for robes of a gathered and gauffered material. They are worn both by women and by men, as is proved by the bearded personage whom we reproduced above ([fig. 20]), and a female statuette in alabaster which shows all the characteristics of Chaldæan art contemporary with the monuments of Tello ([fig. 28]).

Fig. 28.—Chaldæan statuette in alabaster.

Fig. 29.—Bas-relief of the tablet of the god Samas (British Museum).

The tablet of the god Samas ([fig. 29]), found at Abu-Habbah (Sepharvaim), and dated in the reign of the Babylonian king Nabupal-iddin (B.C. 850), shows together the two principal Chaldæan garments—that made of kaunakes, and that of a plain material, open in front, which we shall often meet with again in Assyria. Moreover, this bas-relief, if it is closely studied, throws a remarkable light on the different industries in wood, iron, stone and wearing material. The tabernacle in which the god Samas is seated on his throne seems to be an iron niche, the upper part being curved to imitate a shallow vault; in the front of the shrine there are small pillars of wood or iron; the stem is covered with scales in imitation of the trunk of the palm-tree, and made, no doubt, of plates of metal laid over it; for base and capital there are volutes something like the Ionic capital. The solar disk, the symbol of the god, is supported by cords held in the hands of two genii, who seem to play a purely ornamental and decorative part. The throne of the god, and the table on which the radiated disk is placed, are elegantly sculptured pieces of furniture, and reveal a civilisation which strives after the highest refinement in its luxuries.

Fig. 30.—Chaldæan head in steatite (Louvre).

As for ornaments of precious metal, none have yet been found in Chaldæa, though we know that from the most distant ages gold and silver flowed into Babylon and the towns of Chaldæa as well as into Egypt. The goldsmith’s art must have been on a par with that of the seal-engraver, the monuments of which are so numerous, as we shall now see. To these branches of art belongs a small head in steatite, carved in the round and forming the gem of the Tello collection; better than anything else, this head, treated in so realistic and, at the same time, so highly finished a manner, brings us into contact, so to speak, with the brilliant superiority of the Chaldæan artist when he devotes himself to these secondary forms of art, which at the present day require the use of the magnifying-glass, and in which we are at a loss whether to admire most the patience of the artist, the steadiness of his hand, or the delicacy of his talent.

IV. Chaldæan Seal-engraving.[27]

Though we do not yet possess more than a limited number of pieces of sculpture and statues, those imposing witnesses of Chaldæan art in the time of Gudea or Hammurabi, we can at least supply this want by the numerous and varied productions of the seal-engraver’s art. The Chaldæans invented the carving of precious stones, and no people ever made a more constant use of those cylinders, cones and seals of every form, on which are seen, engraved in lines fine and deep, the same images which monumental sculpture drew upon the walls of temples and palaces. These stones carved in intaglio, whether hæmatite, porphyry, chalcedony, marbles or onyx of every variety, were worn round the neck, on the finger, on the wrist, or fastened to the garment; they were at the same time prophylactic amulets against sickness or witchcraft, and seals with which impressions were made at the end of public or private documents.

The most ancient of the Chaldæan cylinders reveals to our eyes the very origin of seal-engraving, the first attempts to carve the round, ovoid, or cylindrical gems of the necklaces of the stone age. The burin and the puncheon, handled for the first time, do not yet trace out more than zigzags, lozenges, straight and semicircular lines crossing one another. Soon attempts are made to trace buildings, figures of animals, antelopes feeding ([fig. 31]), or fish. The joints and swells of the quadrupeds’ bodies are represented by round holes, the limbs by simple strokes.

Fig. 31.—Chaldæan cylinder (De Clercq collection).

Soon, with greater mastery over his instruments, the artist—for we may now give him this name—will seek to reproduce on the cylinders the human figure, and then that of the divine beings or the heroes begotten of popular fancy, whose image is to increase the talismanic virtue of the stone. There are monsters standing on their hind-legs, struggling with one another, and giants killing lions or human-faced quadrupeds. M. Menant has remarked that the figures of animals are always represented in profile, while the human figures, with long beards, are in full face even when the body is in profile. There are double-faced genii, quadrupeds with a single head and two bodies. One of the most remarkable cylinders of this primitive epoch is, without contradiction, that of the rich De Clercq collection, the design of which we give here ([fig. 32]). Men and various animals are here seen: a goat with wavy horns browsing on the leaf of a tree; a rhinoceros, antelopes, bulls, fish, an eagle, and some trees; two demons subduing fantastic animals, scorpions, and palm-trees. We think of the biblical scene of Adam and Eve in the earthly paradise surrounded by all the living beings in creation.

Fig. 32.—Chaldæan cylinder (De Clercq.)

Fresh progress is marked by the appearance of inscriptions at the sides of the figured scenes. Every possessor of a cylinder makes a point of having his name or that of a favourite deity engraved upon it. Accordingly the names of several patesis, who governed Chaldæan towns three or four thousand years before our era, have been found upon cylinders. The cylinder on which M. Oppert read the name of Asrinilu, patesi of Umalnaru ([fig. 33]), represents an episode in the Chaldæan epic. The hero Izdubar, with curly beard and hair, seizes with each hand by a hind-leg two lions hanging head downwards. The scene is completed by trees, an antelope, a small human figure, a lion-headed scorpion, a human-headed bull. What is here especially striking is the archaism of the cuneiform signs, formed of strokes, which cross one another, but have not yet the form of wedges, which they are to assume later, and also the modelling and suppleness of most of the figures; the instrument is no longer felt through the work.

Fig. 33.—Chaldæan cylinder (De Clercq).

Fig. 34.—Cylinder of Sargani (De Clercq).

Chaldæan seal-engraving reaches its apogee with another cylinder of the De Clercq collection, which has the advantage of being dated, at least relatively: it bears the name of Sargani or Sargon the First, king of Agade, about 3800 years before our era. M. Menant mentions it as marking an important stage in the history of art. The picture, which is very simple, is composed of two symmetrical scenes: Izdubar, with one knee on the ground, on the bank of a river, holds with both hands the sacred ampulla, from which a double jet of water escapes, and at which a bull with long striated horns comes to drink.[28] Here the artist possesses all the secrets of his art: never, at any epoch, will he be able to reproduce with greater delicacy and truth the powerful muscles of the bull and the giant. And as it must certainly be admitted that monumental sculpture advances as rapidly as seal-engraving, I do not know which should astonish us most—the degree of perfection to which the Chaldæans had carried the plastic arts, or the prodigiously distant epoch to which such monuments transport us.

A cylinder in the museum at New York ([fig. 35]), which from the characters of the writing seems almost contemporary with that of Sargon the First, is executed with a still greater perfection. The play and graceful suppleness of the muscles of the bull and the lion are rendered with the precision which the direct study of nature brings, and with the ease which betrays an artist who can overcome technical difficulties.

Fig. 35.—Chaldæan cylinder (New York Museum, after Menant).

If all Chaldæan cylinders could be classed chronologically and by schools, epochs of perfection or of decadence would no doubt be observed, and also greater activity in some artistic centres than in others, the choice of subjects being modified from town to town and from age to age. In the present state of our knowledge we can only hazard conjectures with regard to this. M. Menant looks upon the cylinders which represent the goddess Istar holding her child upon her knees and receiving the homage of the faithful, as issuing from the workshops of Uruk (Erech); it is the prototype of the divine mother whose worship is to spread even into Greece. At Ur cylinders of very different types, but of a dry execution, which is rather a mark of decadence than of archaism, were manufactured: there are scenes of worship or initiation into mysteries, and sacrifices, among which that of the kid is the most frequent. On certain monuments M. Menant recognises a representation of human sacrifices: the most marked scene of this kind shows us a sacrificer, who, raising his right hand, brandishes a dagger over a kneeling child, whom he seems to prepare to slay, in the presence of a pontiff and of the statue of the god. One of the commonest figures on Chaldæan cylinders is that of the goddess Istar, sometimes decked with rich ornaments, sometimes entirely naked, in full face, with her hands clasping her breasts: this last type, profusely reproduced by the modellers in clay, was perpetuated all over the East up to the time of the Greek and Roman supremacies.

CHAPTER II.
ASSYRIAN ARCHITECTURE.

Assyria, because she lies nearer to the mountains than Chaldæa, and because the use of stone, without ever being exclusive, was more frequent in northern than in southern Mesopotamia, has left us important ruins which have already been partly explored, and which allow us to reconstruct the forms of her architecture, without material gaps, from the ninth to the seventh century before our era. In temples, palaces, staged towers, and fortresses, the art of building is revealed to our eyes by means of the excavations of which Nineveh and its environs have been the object. But nothing is left of private architecture, and the same must be said of sepulchral architecture, or rather this latter did not exist in Assyria, which has only yielded to our explorers a few jars filled with bones. The corpses were generally carried away into Lower Chaldæa, which continued to be for long ages a sort of Campo Santo, or vast cemetery at the service of the inhabitants of all Mesopotamia. Down to the present day, the Persians, even of the most distant provinces, make a point of having their dead buried at Nejef and Kerbela, near the mosque of Ali, the great saint of the Shiite Mussulmans. This traditional superstition is turned to profit by a company of carriers, who annually transport more than ten thousand corpses. The necropolis of Mugheir and the surrounding tells belongs therefore both to Chaldæa and to Assyria; corpses are piled up there by hundreds of thousands, but beyond the system of drainage, organised in order to catch the rain-water, it offers nothing of great interest. There were no sepulchral monuments; and as for the tombs themselves, they are generally little brick structures with nothing remarkable about them; the furniture consisting of terra-cotta vases and figurines, amulets and cylinders, is of the most wretched description.

Fig. 36.—Tomb at Warka (after Taylor).

The principal buildings of Assyria, which have been methodically and almost completely explored, are those of Khorsabad, some leagues to the north of Nineveh, and those of Kouyunjik and Nimroud. Several hillocks in which a collection of important structures would with equal certainty be found, such as the hill of Nebi Yunus, where Arab tradition fixes the tomb of the prophet Jonah, and Arvil on the site of Arbela, have not yet been tested by the explorer’s pick; others, such as the artificial mounds of Kalah Shergat, Balawat, and Karamles, have only been incompletely explored, and though epigraphic material, extremely valuable for history, and bas-reliefs of the highest artistic interest, have been extracted from them, from the architectural point of view at least their imperfect excavation teaches us nothing new.

The Babylonian buildings of the epoch of Nebuchadnezzar and Nabonidus must have resembled the Ninevite palaces and temples in form and architectural arrangement; but up to the present time we can only speak of them by conjecture, or according to the inexact descriptions of Greek travellers, and we cannot regret too much that the enormous Babylonian tells, such as those called the Kasr or Palace, Tell Amran, Babil and Birs Nimroud have yielded hardly anything yet of their archæological treasures. We must, then, for the present, confine ourselves to the description of the ruins of Khorsabad, Nimroud, and Kouyunjik, in order to reconstruct the principal forms of Mesopotamian architecture at the most splendid period of the Ninevite empire.

§ I. Principles of Construction.

The limestone which is furnished in abundance by the lowest spurs of the mountains of Kurdistan enabled the architects of Nineveh not to employ brick exclusively, and sometimes to erect walls of trimmed ashlar. They used limestone especially for the basements of the buildings, which were more particularly exposed to the action of damp, so fatal to crude brick; they also had recourse to it for the construction of the ramparts of the royal palaces. But even here, on account of the dearness of the materials, which it was necessary to seek at a distance and to spend much time in hewing, stone is only employed for the outer facing of the wall; the builders use it sparingly, and are as niggardly of it as they are prodigal of brick. Accordingly, the walls which enclose the terrace of Sargon’s palace at Khorsabad are only of stone on the surface; the interior, or rather the nucleus of the structure, is of brick. The blocks on their external and visible surface are of variable length, but are placed upon one another in very regular courses of equal height and with crossed joints. Headers penetrate like wedges into the mass of the terrace to ease the layers of brick and bind them to the stone structure. In the lower courses of the rampart of the palace at Khorsabad there are regularly hewn blocks from 8 ft. 2 in. to 9 ft. 10 in. square; the blocks diminish in volume in proportion to the nearness of the layers to the summit of the rampart, which was 59 ft. high, including the battlements, which formed a parapet all round the terrace.

Fig. 37.—Masonry at Khorsabad (after Place).

Fig. 38.—Section of wall at Khorsabad (after Place).

The interior or exterior walls of the building which stood upon this gigantic base had no need to fear the infiltration of water or the attacks of enemies: their solidity might be lessened without inconvenience, by economising the stone. As a matter of fact, they are of brick, baked or crude, and stone is scarcely employed in them except for the lining and paving of a few rooms. In that case great slabs of limestone or gypsum are set upright as a plinth against the lower part of the wall, to preserve it from corrosion; they are adjusted end to end by the edge, and it was sufficient, in order to fix them, to pour between their posterior surface and the wall mortar which often only imperfectly adhered: the outer and only visible surface of these slabs was decorated with bas-reliefs which served for the adornment of the halls. As for the walls themselves, they were straight and perpendicular in contrast to those of the Egyptian buildings, which, seen from without, seem to lean inwards, and give to the whole building the appearance of a truncated pyramid. The Assyrian walls rise vertically, even when they enclose vaulted chambers, or when they form part of staged pyramids; each stage forms a perpendicular terrace, not a sloping one.

It has been observed that the partitions which separate the halls sometimes look like one block set up on end; the joints and the courses of the brickwork cannot be detected, to such an extent have the constructing materials been soldered together in a perfect amalgam of beaten clay. This peculiarity, noticed by Victor Place at Khorsabad, can only be explained by admitting that the bricks were employed in the building while they were still saturated with water, and before the process of drying was finished. Their natural dampness, added to that of the clayey mortar which bound them to one another, has formed a sort of muddy paste which must have taken years to harden, but which was particularly effective against the disintegration of the wall, since it became in this way entirely homogeneous. It was the extraordinary thickness of these walls which prevented them from giving way under their own weight, and even allowed them to uphold those heavy beds of clay which form the vaults and terraces of the houses. They thus protected the halls most effectively from the ardent heat of the sun. At the present day the inhabitants of Bagdad and Mosoul take refuge, during summer, in their sirdab, a half-underground room with extremely thick brick walls, the single opening of which looks to the north. The people of Nineveh and Babylon, subject to the same climatic conditions, certainly acted in the same manner. As for the princes, they had, to defend them against the sun, walls from 13 ft. to 26 ft. thick, and vaultings as enormous as the walls. Nevertheless, the mode of building with clay which we have just noticed was very defective; this is the weak side of Ninevite and Babylonian buildings, and we understand why the kings are unceasingly obliged, as they relate in their inscriptions, to repair or rebuild walls which crumble under the dissolving action of water from the sky.

The unusual thickness of the walls, the long, narrow form of all the chambers, are also justified by the employment of the vault as the essential element of the Assyrian buildings. V. Place unearthed at Khorsabad a great doorway surmounted by a semicircular arch. The sides of the doorway, as well as the arch itself, are of brick; there are three rows of voussoirs one above the other, forming as it were three concentric door-frames half-fitting into one another. All the voussoirs, which have issued from a single mould, have a slightly trapezoidal shape, like the stone voussoirs of our most carefully built edifices. The height of the doorway, under the keystone, is 19 ft. 8 in., and the breadth 11 ft. At other points, Place recognised that the enormous accumulation of materials which filled up the halls could only come from the falling in of the clay vaults. Some blocks still, at the time of the excavations, formed an arch, sometimes several yards in diameter, solid enough to serve as shelter for the shepherds of the neighbourhood; they were, on the concave side, covered with carefully laid stucco, or with paintings in fresco—a circumstance which proves positively that these blocks are sections of crumbled vaults.

Fig. 39.—Vaulted and domed houses (after Layard).

The square chambers were surmounted by a dome; there are in the palace of Sargon two of these rooms as much as 44½ ft. square. In a bas-relief discovered at Kouyunjik ([fig. 39]) a group of houses figures, among which some are surmounted by hemispherical cupolas, others by elongated domes in the form of sugar-loaves. The houses of Babylon were vaulted, as Strabo tells us. The Mesopotamian palaces of the Achæmenid, Parthian, or Sassanian epoch, the halls of which are surmounted by domes which scarcely yield in boldness to those of St. Sophia, evidently only handed on the Assyro-Chaldæan tradition which is also represented before our eyes by the modern houses of Mosoul, Bagdad and southern Persia. The technical methods of contemporary masons also do not fail to make known to us what steps their ancestors of the time of Sargon or Nebuchadnezzar took to supply the want of wood, and in consequence to do without a previous arched framework: travellers tell us that they have observed the commonest workmen of the country erecting their hemispherical or elliptical cupolas by layers in rings, laid one above the other, and narrowing in proportion to their nearness to the keystone; it is the same principle as that of the corbelled vaulting.

Fig. 40.—Vaulted drain (after Layard).

The place where it has been possible to observe the employment of the vault in the architecture of the Assyrian palaces, is in the very bowels of the basements of these edifices. A vast corridor, surmounted by a semicircular vaulting, was discovered by the English explorers, in the flanks of the mound of Nimroud; the lower courses are of enormous slabs of stone, all the rest is brick. In the scientific system of drains which carried off the sewage of the palace of Sargon, Place distinguished every kind of vaulting: the pointed or ogival vault, the semicircular vault, the flat-arched vault, the shallow vault, the elliptical vault.

Never, at any point in their history, did the Egyptians

Fig. 41.—Vaulted drain at Khorsabad (after Place).

or the Romans push the application of the vault to an equal degree of perfection. In most of the halls of Sargon’s palace a slab pierced with a hole was remarked in the middle of the bricks which form the pavement: this was the orifice of a vertical conduit opening into a vaulted drain concealed in the terrace. One of these drains had an ogival vaulting, the description of which we will borrow from MM. Perrot and Chipiez.[29] “The bricks composing it are trapezoidal in shape, two of their sides being slightly rounded—the one concave, the other convex. The radius of this curve varies with each brick, being governed by its destined place in the vault. These bricks go therefore in pairs, and as there are four courses of bricks on each side of the vault, four separate and different moulds would be required, besides a fifth, of which we shall presently have to speak. The four narrow sides of these bricks differ sensibly from one another. The two curved faces, being at different distances from the centre, are of unequal lengths; while, as the lower oblique edge is some inches below the upper in the curve, these two edges have different directions. In their disinclination to use stone voussoirs the Assyrian builders here found themselves compelled to mould bricks of very complicated form, and the way in which they accomplished their task speaks volumes for their skill.” The two upper voussoirs meeting and touching one another by one of their corners, the triangular space left empty between their edges was filled up either by wedge-shaped bricks or by mortar. The drain which we have just given as an example is 4 ft. 7 in. high under the keystone and 3 ft. 8 in. broad; the explorers were able to follow it to a length of 216 feet. To facilitate its construction the architect conceived the ingenious idea of building it upon an inclined plane—that is to say, that all the rows of voussoirs, instead of being perpendicular, lean considerably backwards, and are supported one upon the other; this system, which did not at all affect the solidity of the vaulting, allowed the builders to do without circular wooden frames.

Fig. 42.—Vaulted drain at Khorsabad. Slope of the bricks (after Place).

So much technical skill devoted to the construction of simple subterranean conduits makes us particularly regret that the deplorable quality of the material did not allow the vaults and domes of the palaces to exist till our day. However, there were not only vaulted halls in the Ninevite buildings; a certain number of them were covered by flat roofs formed of beams of palm-wood, poplar-wood or cedar-wood, which supported light terraces. The bas-relief at Kouyunjik which we cited above shows us flat roofs side by side with parabolic and spheroidal cupolas. Nevertheless, what we said about the use of stone in the Ninevite structures we can repeat here on the subject of timber. Nineveh, not being too remote from the wooded mountains of Armenia, Kurdistan and Masius, where forests of pines, beeches, and oaks grow, did not deprive herself of the use of these woods in her structures; she had panelled halls in her palaces, and, at the apogee of her power, when thousands and thousands of slaves placed their strength at the service of her monarchs, she had the timber of the Amanus and the Lebanon transported into her buildings. The king Assur-nasir-pal (B.C. 882-857) relates in one of his inscriptions that he had an enormous quantity of pines, cedars, and oaks cut down in the Amanus and the Lebanon in order to have them carried to Nineveh, and to employ them in the construction of his palace and the temples of his favourite gods. Other princes, such as Sargon, Sennacherib, Assurbanipal and Nebuchadnezzar, make the same boast of having utilised, in the buildings which they erected or repaired, beams brought from the Amanus and the Lebanon. “I caused the tallest cedars of Lebanon,” says Nebuchadnezzar, “to be brought to Babylon; the sanctuary of E-Kua, in which the god Marduk dwells, was freshly covered with beams of cedar-wood.”[30] This is the wood of resinous nature, “the odour of which is good,” add the inscriptions. At the British Museum fragments of a cedar beam, collected among the ruins of Assur-nasir-pal’s palace at Nimroud, are preserved. Who will ever be able to say what efforts and how many human lives were required to transport these gigantic rafters across a rough country without any roads for traffic, from the Lebanon as far as the banks of the Tigris and Euphrates? Accordingly it may be affirmed that the use of wood was always exceptional in the Chaldæo-Assyrian structures; it was never introduced except as an exotic element, of which the monarchs boast on account of its rarity. The climate and the nature of the Mesopotamian soil were better suited by thick vaultings, which, then as at the present day, never ceased to be the rule there.

Quite as little as the Chaldæans, and for the same motives, did the Assyrians make a frequent and regular use of the column as an element of their architecture. Victor Place notices, like the explorers of Lower Chaldæa, several façades in the palace of Sargon adorned with pilasters and half-columns of brick, projecting beyond the plane of the walls, and having no object except to relieve the monotony of the structure. Perhaps, too, these half-columns, which are found in groups of seven, had, like the two famous pillars in the Temple of Solomon, a mystical and symbolical meaning, the number seven playing an essential part among the mythological conceptions of the Chaldæo-Assyrians. Elsewhere a few bases of columns and a few monolithic capitals have been found, which prove that the Assyrians used stone supports for monumental porches, as we ascertained in the palace of Tello. A fragment of a bas-relief preserved at the British Museum, and coming from the palace of Assurbanipal, shows us ([fig. 43]) the façade of a great building adorned with a projecting roof, supported by four pilasters and four columns. The base of these columns rests on the back of gigantic lions, which seem to advance to meet one another, two and two. On the back of the lion the architect has placed a coussinet, surmounted by a torus and by the stem of the column. In the ruins of the palace of Kouyunjik, four bases of columns were found still in place, and seeming to belong to a covered gallery; there were also two small winged bulls with human heads, crowned with the tiara, and supporting on their back a spheroidal base decorated with geometrical designs in relief. At Nimroud Sir A. H. Layard noticed also two crouching sphinxes bearing bases of columns ([fig. 44]); according to the same architectural principle the foot of the arches rested upon the gigantic bulls which flanked the chief entrances of the palaces.

Fig. 43.—Façade with pilasters (from bas-relief in British Museum representing Babylon).

Fig. 44.—Base of column (after Layard).

The stem of the columns was probably of wood, painted or covered with a metallic envelope. Round the inner courtyards there were, as in the courts of oriental palaces in our own day, porticoes formed of cedar beams resting on bases analogous to those which we have just noticed. Strabo[31] reminds us that in Babylon beams of palm-wood were used in the construction of houses: “They are careful,” he says, “to wrap round each palm-wood pillar with rush-cords, which are then covered with several coats of paint.” Things were not done quite in this way in the houses of the rich and in princely residences. A fragment of a cedar beam of the size of a man was discovered at Khorsabad. It was still overlaid with a plating of bronze decorated with designs in repoussé, which imitate the bark of a palm-trunk.

Fig. 45.—Assyrian capital (after Place, Ninive et l’Assyrie, pl. 35).

Fig. 46.—Capital of Sassanian period from Warka (British Museum).

An enormous block of limestone, 39 ft. 3 in. high, brought to light at Khorsabad, comprises an entire capital and a part of the stem at the same time ([fig. 45]); it is almost the only Assyrian capital known. It affects the spheroidal form, and its convex part is decorated with a double line of curved festoons in relief; there was a similar ornament, no doubt, at the base. Several capitals from Warka are also preserved at the British Museum, but they were found among ruins of the Sassanian epoch. Nevertheless the resemblance which some of them bear to the architectural features of the bas-reliefs is so close that they are probably representatives of a style inherited from a former period. They are of that form, so well known in the sculptures, which has the character of the Ionic order, and was probably its original.

Fig. 47.—Shrine with columns (Botta, Les Monuments de Ninive, pl. 114).

In imitation of their southern neighbours the Assyrians used the column especially in chapels of little importance, in which the supports had no vault or terrace to uphold. Bas-reliefs from Khorsabad and Kouyunjik represent sanctuaries the roof of which is supported by small columns with a base and a capital, which partake at once of the Ionic and of the Doric order of the Greeks ([fig. 47]). These little structures recall the Chaldæan shrine of the god Samas ([fig. 29]). An object which appears to be the base of a small column exists in the Nimroud Gallery of the British Museum. It is of sandstone, and, to judge from its size, it must have formed part of a small chapel or shrine, such as we see in the sculptures. The ornamental design upon it is partly similar to that of the large capital figured above, but presents some variations from it. There is a small hole into which the pillar was doubtless fastened by a peg or metal dowel.

The Assyrian palace, like Arab houses, developed itself entirely in area, and not in height; there was rarely a second story on the platform. Nevertheless such a second story exists sometimes; it is then open at the sides, and the roof is supported by small columns. These columns, of wood rather than of stone or brick, form a gallery over the façade, and they are adorned at their upper extremity with a double volute as a capital. Bas-reliefs show us houses thus surmounted by a colonnade, which supports a light, flat roof of wooden beams. At the present day, houses in Kurdistan are still built on the same lines, and show an identical arrangement in two stories; the lower without windows, the upper open at the sides.

Fig. 48.—Base of small column (British Museum).

In a word, the Assyrians, like the Chaldæans, not having at their disposal building-stone in great abundance, were obliged to construct their edifices almost exclusively of brick, the capabilities of which they tried to the utmost. The result of this was that they never had those halls of columns which are the triumph of Egyptian architecture. However thick one may suppose pillars of brick, or columns formed of bricks moulded in the shape of segments of a circle, to be, these supports will never offer the same guarantee of solidity as the stone column. Wherever a heavy burden, such as a vault or a terrace, had to be supported, great walls were raised of an extraordinary thickness, which it would have been imprudent to pierce with windows capable of diminishing its resistance. Air and light only penetrated into the apartments by the doors; often, too, an opening was contrived at the summit of the vault or dome, formed of a cylindrical pipe of burnt clay carried through the entire thickness of the structure.

§ II. Palaces.

The town of Dur-Sarrukin (the Fortress of Sargon) stood three leagues north of Nineveh, on the Khaswer, one of the branches of the Tigris, where the Kurdish village of Khorsabad has been built. Discovered in 1843 by E. Botta, French Consul at Mosoul, it was almost completely excavated by this illustrious explorer and his successor, Victor Place, and it is from Khorsabad that most of the Assyrian monuments in the Louvre come. It was the custom that each of the Ninevite monarchs should have a special palace built at some distance from the great Assyrian capital, and this became the royal residence round which stood the dwellings of the court-officers, the guards, the servants, and all persons who depended upon the prince or lived at his expense. Dur-Sarrukin was built by Sargon, the father of Sennacherib, about the year 710 before our era. The palace and the town which was annexed to it formed a group of structures contained within a fortified enclosure ([fig. 49]) the plan of which was a square of 5905 feet.