A HISTORY OF ART IN CHALDÆA & ASSYRIA FROM THE FRENCH OF GEORGES PERROT, PROFESSOR IN THE FACULTY OF LETTERS, PARIS; MEMBER OF THE INSTITUTE, AND CHARLES CHIPIEZ. ILLUSTRATED WITH FOUR HUNDRED AND FIFTY-TWO ENGRAVINGS IN THE TEXT AND FIFTEEN STEEL AND COLOURED PLATES. _IN TWO VOLUMES. --VOL. I. _ TRANSLATED AND EDITED BY WALTER ARMSTRONG, B. A. , Oxon. , AUTHOR OF "ALFRED STEVENS, " ETC. [Illustration] London: CHAPMAN AND HALL, Limited. New York: A. C. ARMSTRONG AND SON. 1884. London: R. CLAY, SONS, AND TAYLOR, BREAD STREET HILL. PREFACE. In face of the cordial reception given to the first two volumes of MM. Perrot and Chipiez's History of Ancient Art, any words of introduction fromme to this second instalment would be presumptuous. On my own part, however, I may be allowed to express my gratitude for the approvalvouchsafed to my humble share in the introduction of the History of Art inAncient Egypt to a new public, and to hope that nothing may be found in thefollowing pages to change that approval into blame. W. A. _October 10, 1883. _ CONTENTS. CHAPTER I. THE GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS OF CHALDÆO-ASSYRIAN CIVILIZATION. PAGE § 1. Situation and Boundaries of Chaldæa and Assyria 1-8 § 2. Nature in the Basin of the Euphrates and Tigris 8-13 § 3. The Primitive Elements of the Population 13-21 § 4. The Wedges 21-33 § 5. The History of Chaldæa and Assyria 33-55 § 6. The Chaldæan Religion 55-89 § 7. The People and Government 89-113 CHAPTER II. THE PRINCIPLES AND GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS OF CHALDÆO-ASSYRIAN ARCHITECTURE. § 1. Materials 114-126 § 2. The General Principles of Form 126-146 § 3. Construction 146-200 § 4. The Column 200-221 § 5. The Arch 221-236 § 6. Secondary Forms 236-260 § 7. Decoration 260-311 § 8. On the Orientation of Buildings and Foundation Ceremonies 311-322 § 9. Mechanical Resources 322-326 § 10. On the Graphic Processes Employed in the Representations of Buildings 327-334 CHAPTER III. FUNERARY ARCHITECTURE. § 1. Chaldæan and Assyrian Notions as to a Future Life 335-355 § 2. The Chaldæan Tomb 355-363 CHAPTER IV. RELIGIOUS ARCHITECTURE. § 1. Attempts to Restore the Principal Types 364-382 § 2. Ruins of Staged Towers 382-391 § 3. Subordinate Types of the Temple 391-398 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS. PLATES. I. Babil _To face page_ 154 II. Rectangular Chaldæan temple 370 III. Square double-ramped Chaldæan temple 378 IV. Square Assyrian temple 380 FIG. PAGE 1. Brick from Erech 24 2. Fragment of an inscription engraved upon the back of a statue from Tello 25 3. Seal of Ourkam 38 4. Genius in the attitude of adoration 42 5. Assurbanipal at the chase 45 6. Demons 61 7. Demons 62 8. Eagle-headed divinity 63 9. Anou or Dagon 64 10. Stone of Merodach-Baladan I 73 11. Assyrian cylinder 74 12. Assyrian cylinder 74 13. Gods carried in procession 75 14. Gods carried in procession 76 15. Statue of Nebo 81 16. Terra-cotta statuette 83 17. A Chaldæan cylinder 84 18. The winged globe 87 19. The winged globe with human figure 87 20. Chaldæan cylinder 95 21. Chaldæan cylinder 95 22. The King Sargon and his Grand Vizier 97 23. The suite of Sargon 99 24. The suite of Sargon 101 25. Fragment of a bas-relief in alabaster 105 26. Bas-relief of Tiglath Pileser II 106 27. Feast of Assurbanipal 107 28. Feast of Assurbanipal 108 29. Offerings to a god 109 30. Convoy of prisoners 111 31. Convoy of prisoners 112 32. Babylonian brick 118 33. Brick from Khorsabad 119 34. Temple 128 35. Tell-Ede, in Lower Chaldæa 129 36. Haman, in Lower Chaldæa 131 37. Babil, at Babylon 135 38. A fortress 138 39. View of a town and its palaces 140 40. House in Kurdistan 141 41. Temple on the bank of a river, Khorsabad 142 42. Temple in a royal park, Kouyundjik 143 43. View of a group of buildings, Kouyundjik 145 44. Plan of angle, Khorsabad 147 45. Section of wall through AB in Fig. 44 147 46. Elevation of wall, Khorsabad 148 47. Section in perspective through the south-western part of Sargon's palace at Khorsabad 149 48. Temple at Mugheir 154 49. Upper part of the drainage arrangements of a mound 159 50. Present state of one of the city gates, Khorsabad 161 51. Fortress; from the Balawat gates, in the British Museum 164 52. The palace at Firouz-Abad 170 53. The palace at Sarbistan 170 54. Section through the palace at Sarbistan 171 55. Restoration of a hall in the harem at Khorsabad 174 56. Royal tent, Kouyundjik 175 57. Tent, Kouyundjik 175 58. Interior of a Yezidi house 178 59. Fortress 180 60. Crude brick construction 181 61. Armenian "lantern" 183 62-65. Terra-cotta cylinders in elevation, section and plan 184 66. Outside staircases in the ruins of Abou-Sharein 191 67. Interior of the royal tent 193 68. Tabernacle; from the Balawat gates 194 69. The seal of Sennacherib 196 70. Type of open architecture in Assyria 197 71. Homage to _Samas_ or _Shamas_ 203 72. Sheath of a cedar-wood mast, bronze 205 73. Interior of a house supported by wooden pillars; from the gates of Balawat 206 74. Assyrian capital, in perspective 207 75. Capital; from a small temple 209 76. View of a palace 210 77. Capital; from a small temple 212 78. Capital 212 79. Chaldæan tabernacle 212 80. Ivory plaque found at Nimroud 212 81. The _Tree of Life_ 213 82. Ornamental base, in limestone 214 83. Model of a base, side view 215 84. The same, seen from in front 215 85. Winged Sphinx carrying the base of a column 216 86. Façade of an Assyrian building 216 87, 88. Bases of columns 217 89. Tomb-chamber at Mugheir 222 90. Interior of a chamber in the harem of Sargon's palace at Khorsabad 225 91. Return round the angle of an archivolt in one of the gates of Dour-Saryoukin 227 92. Drain at Khorsabad, with pointed arch 229 93. Sewer at Khorsabad, with semicircular vault 232 94. Sewer at Khorsabad, with elliptical vault 233 95. Decorated lintel 238 96. Sill of a door, from Khorsabad 240 97. Bronze foot, from the Balawat gates, and its socket 243 98, 99. Assyrian mouldings. Section and elevation 245 100. Façade of a ruined building at Warka 246 101. Decoration of one of the harem gates, at Khorsabad 247 102. View of an angle of the _Observatory_ at Khorsabad 249 103. Lateral façade of the palace at Firouz-Abad 251 104. Battlements from an Assyrian palace 251 105. Battlements from the Khorsabad _Observatory_ 252 106. Battlements of Sargon's palace at Khorsabad 255 107. Altar 255 108. Altar in the Louvre 256 109. Altar in the British Museum 257 110. Stele from Khorsabad 258 111. The obelisk of Shalmaneser II. In the British Museum 258 112. Rock-cut stele from Kouyundjik 259 113. Fragment from Babylon 263 114. Human-headed lion 267 115. Bas-relief with several registers 269 116. Ornament painted upon plaster 275 117. Ornament painted upon plaster 275 118. Ornament painted upon plaster 276 119. Plan and elevation of part of a façade at Warka 278 120. Cone with coloured base 279 121, 122. Rosettes in glazed pottery 290 123. Detail of enamelled archivolt 291 124. Detail of enamelled archivolt 292 125. Enamelled brick in the British Museum 293 126. Ornament upon enamelled brick 294 127. Fragment of a glazed brick 295 128. Fragment of a glazed brick 297 129. Ivory tablet in the British Museum 301 130. Fragment of an ivory tablet 301 131. Threshold from Kouyundjik 303 132. Rosette 304 133. Bouquet of flowers and buds 305 134. Painted border 306 135. Fragment of a threshold 306 136. Door ornament 307 137. Palmette 308 138. Goats and palmette 308 139. Winged bulls and palmette 309 140. Stag upon a palmette 310 141. Winged bull upon a rosette 311 142. Stag, palmette, and rosette 311 143. Plan of a temple at Mugheir 312 144. Plan of the town and palace of Sargon at Khorsabad 313 145. General plan of the remains at Nimroud 314 146. Bronze statuette 316 147. Bronze statuette 317 148. Bronze statuette 318 149. Terra-cotta cone 319 150. Terra-cotta cylinder 320 151. The transport of a bull 324 152. Putting a bull in place 326 153. Chaldæan plan 327 154. Assyrian plan; from the Balawat gates in the British Museum 329 155. Plan and section of a fortress 329 156. Plan, section, and elevation of a fortified city 330 157. Plan and elevation of a fortified city 331 158. Fortress with its defenders 333 159, 160. Vases 342 161. Plaque of chiselled bronze. Obverse 350 162. Plaque of chiselled bronze. Reverse 351 163. Tomb at Mugheir 357 164. Tomb at Mugheir 358 165. Tomb at Mugheir 358 166. Tomb, or coffin, at Mugheir 359 167. Map of the ruins of Mugheir 362 168. View of the Birs-Nimroud 367 169-171. Longitudinal section, plan, and horizontal section of the rectangular type of Chaldæan temple 370 172. Map of Warka, with its ruins 371 173. Type of square, single-ramped Chaldæan temple 375 174-176. Transverse section, plan, and horizontal section of a square, single-ramped, Chaldæan temple 377 177-179. Transverse section, plan, and horizontal section of a square, double-ramped Chaldæan temple 378 180-182. Square Assyrian temple. Longitudinal section, horizontal section, and plan 380 183. Map of the ruins of Babylon 383 184. Actual condition of the so-called _Observatory_, at Khorsabad 387 185. The _Observatory_, restored. Elevation 388 186. The _Observatory_, restored. Plan 389 187. The _Observatory_. Transverse section through A B 390 188. Plan of a small temple at Nimroud 393 189. Plan of a small temple at Nimroud 393 190. Temple with triangular pediment 394 TAIL-PIECES, &c. Lion's head, gold (French National Library) _Title-page_ Lion's head, glazed earthenware (Louvre) 113 Two rabbits' heads, ivory (Louvre) 334 Cow's head, ivory (British Museum) 363 Eagle, from a bas-relief (British Museum) 398 A HISTORY OF ART IN CHALDÆA AND ASSYRIA CHAPTER I. THE GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS OF CHALDÆO-ASSYRIAN CIVILIZATION. § 1. --_Situation and Boundaries of Chaldæa and Assyria. _ The primitive civilization of Chaldæa, like that of Egypt, was cradled inthe lower districts of a great alluvial basin, in which the soil was stolenfrom the sea by long continued deposits of river mud. In the valley of theTigris and Euphrates, as in that of the Nile, it was in the great plainsnear the ocean that the inhabitants first emerged from barbarism andorganized a civil life. As the ages passed away, this culture slowlymounted the streams, and, as Memphis was older by many centuries thanThebes, in dignity if not in actual existence, so Ur and Larsam were olderthan Babylon, and Babylon than Nineveh. The manners and beliefs, the artsand the written characters of Egypt were carried into the farthest recessesof Ethiopia, partly by commerce but still more by military invasion; so tooChaldaic civilization made itself felt at vast distances from itsbirthplace, even in the cold valleys and snowy plateaux of Armenia, indistricts which are separated by ten degrees of latitude from the burningshores where the fish god Oannes showed himself to the rude fathers of therace, and taught them "such things as contribute to the softening oflife. "[1] In Egypt progressive development took place from north to south, while in Chaldæa its direction was reversed. The apparent contrast is, however, but a resemblance the more. The orientation, if such a term may beused, of the two basins, is in opposite directions, but in each the spreadof religion with its rites and symbols, of written characters with theiradaptation to different languages, and of all those arts and processeswhich, when taken together, make up what we call civilization, advancedfrom the seaboard to the river springs. In these two countries the conscience of man seems to have been firstawakened to his innate power of bettering his own condition by welldirected observation, by the elaboration of laws, and by forethought forthe future. Between Egypt on the one hand, and Chaldæa with that Assyriawhich was no more than its offshoot and prolongation, on the other, thereare strong analogies, as will be clearly seen in the course of our study, but there are also differences that are not less appreciable. ProfessorRawlinson shows this very clearly in a page of descriptive geography whichhe will allow us to quote as it stands. It will not be the last of ourborrowings from his excellent work, _The Five Great Monarchies of theAncient Eastern World_, a book that has done so much to popularize thediscoveries of modern scholars. [2] "The broad belt of desert which traverses the eastern hemisphere, in ageneral direction from west to east (or, speaking more exactly, of W. S. W. To N. E. E. ) reaching from the Atlantic on the one hand nearly to the YellowSea on the other, is interrupted about its centre by a strip of richvegetation, which at once breaks the continuity of the arid region, andserves also to mark the point where the desert changes its character fromthat of a plain at a low level to that of an elevated plateau ortable-land. West of the favoured district, the Arabian and African wastesare seas of land seldom raised much above, often sinking below the level ofthe ocean; while east of the same, in Persia, Kerman, Seistan, ChineseTartary, and Mongolia, the desert consists of a series of plateaux, havingfrom 3, 000 to nearly 10, 000 feet of elevation. The green and fertile regionwhich is thus interposed between the 'highland' and 'lowland' deserts, [3]participates, curiously enough, in both characters. Where the belt of sandis intersected by the valley of the Nile, no marked change of elevationoccurs; and the continuous low desert is merely interrupted by a few milesof green and cultivable surface, the whole of which is just as smooth andas flat as the waste on either side of it. But it is otherwise at the moreeastern interruption. Then the verdant and productive country dividesitself into two tracts, running parallel to each other, of which thewestern presents features, not unlike those that characterize the Nilevalley, but on a far larger scale; while the eastern is a lofty mountainregion, consisting for the most part of five or six parallel ranges, andmounting in many places far above the level of perpetual snow. "It is with the western or plain tract that we are here concerned. Betweenthe outer limits of the Syro-Arabian desert and the foot of the greatmountain range of Kurdistan and Luristan intervenes a territory long famousin the world's history, and the chief site of three out of the five empiresof whose history, geography, and antiquities, it is proposed to treat inthe present volumes. Known to the Jews as Aram-Naharaim, or 'Syria of thetwo rivers'; to the Greeks and Romans as Mesopotamia, or 'the between-rivercountry'; to the Arabs as Al-Jezireh, or 'the island, ' this district hasalways taken its name from the streams which constitute its most strikingfeature, and to which, in fact, it owes its existence. If it were not forthe two great rivers--the Tigris and Euphrates--with their tributaries, themore northern part of the Mesopotamian lowland would in no respect differfrom the Syro-Arabian desert on which it adjoins, and which, in latitude, elevation, and general geological character, it exactly resembles. Towardsthe south the importance of the rivers is still greater; for of LowerMesopotamia it may be said, with more truth than of Egypt, [4] that it is'an acquired land, ' the actual 'gift' of the two streams which wash it oneither side; being as it is, entirely a recent formation--a deposit whichthe streams have made in the shallow waters of a gulf into which they haveflowed for many ages. [5] "The division, which has here forced itself upon our notice, between theUpper and the Lower Mesopotamian country, is one very necessary to engageour attention in connection with ancient Chaldæa. There is no reason tothink that the term Chaldæa had at any time the extensive signification ofMesopotamia, much less that it applied to the entire flat country betweenthe desert and the mountains. Chaldæa was not the whole, but a part, of thegreat Mesopotamian plain; which was ample enough to contain within it threeor four considerable monarchies. According to the combined testimony ofgeographers and historians, [6] Chaldæa lay towards the south, for itbordered upon the Persian Gulf, and towards the west, for it adjoinedArabia. If we are called upon to fix more accurately its boundaries, which, like those of most countries without strong natural frontiers, sufferedmany fluctuations, we are perhaps entitled to say that the Persian Gulf onthe south, the Tigris on the east, the Arabian desert on the west, and thelimit between Upper and Lower Mesopotamia on the north, formed the naturalbounds, which were never greatly exceeded, and never much infringed upon. These boundaries are for the most part tolerably clear, though the northernonly is invariable. Natural causes, hereafter to be mentioned moreparticularly, are perpetually varying the course of the Tigris, the shoreof the Persian Gulf and the line of demarcation between the sands of Arabiaand the verdure of the Euphrates valley. But nature has set a permanentmark, half way down the Mesopotamian lowland, by a difference of ageological structure, which is very conspicuous. Near Hit on the Euphrates, and a little below Samarah on the Tigris, [7] the traveller who descends thestreams, bids adieu to a somewhat waving and slightly elevated plain ofsecondary formation, and enters on the dead flat and low level of the newalluvium. The line thus formed is marked and invariable; it constitutes theonly natural division between the upper and lower portions of the valley;and both probability and history point to it as the actual boundary betweenChaldæa and her northern neighbour. "[8] Whether the two States had independent and separate life, or whether, as inafter years, one of the two had, by its political and military superiorityreduced the other to the condition of a vassal, the line of demarcation wasconstant, a line traced in the first instance by nature and rendered morerigid and ineffaceable by historical developments. Even when Chaldæa becamenominally a mere province of Assyria, the two nationalities remaineddistinct. Chaldæa was older than Assyria. The centres of her civil lifewere the cities built upon the alluvial lands between the thirty-first andthirty-third degree of latitude. The most famous of these cities wasBabylon. Those whom we call Assyrians, a people who rose to power and gloryat a much more recent date, drew the seeds of their civilization from theirmore precocious neighbour. These expressions, Assyria and Chaldæa, are now employed in a sense farmore precise than they ever had in antiquity. For Herodotus Babylonia was amere district of Assyria;[9] in his time both States were comprised in thePersian Empire, and had no distinct existence of their own. Pliny calls thewhole of Mesopotamia Assyria. [10] Strabo carries the western frontier ofAssyria as far as Syria. [11] To us these variations are of smallimportance. The geographical and historical nomenclature of the ancientswas never clearly defined. It was always more or less of a floatingquantity, especially for those countries which to Herodotus or Diodorus, toPliny or to Tacitus, were dimly perceptible on the extreme limits of theirhorizon. It would, however, be easy to show that in assigning a more definite valueto the terms in question--a proceeding in which we have the countenance ofnearly every modern historian--we do not detach them from their originalacceptation; at most we give them more constancy and precision than thecolloquial language of the Greeks and Romans demanded. [12] The expressions_Khasdim_ and _Chaldæi_ were used in the Bible and by classic authorsmainly to denote the inhabitants of Babylon and its neighbourhood; and wefind Strabo attaching with precision the name _Aturia_, which is nothingbut a variant upon Assyria, to that district watered and bounded by theTigris in which Nineveh was situated. [13] Our only aim is to adopt, oncefor all, such terms as may be easily understood by our readers, and mayrender all confusion impossible between the two kingdoms, between thepeople of the north and those of the south. In order to define Assyria exactly we should have to determine itsfrontiers, and that we can only do approximately. As the nation grew itsterritory extended in certain directions. To the east, however, where theformidable rampart of the Zagros forbade all progress, no such extensiontook place. Those lofty and precipitous chains which we now call themountains of Kurdistan, were only to be crossed in two or three places, andby passes which during their few months of freedom from snow and floodsgave access to the high-lying plains of Media. These narrow defiles mightwell be traversed by an army in a summer campaign, but neither dwellingsnor cultivated lands could invade such a district with success; at mostthey could take possession of the few spots of fertile soil which lay atthe mouth of the lateral valleys; such, for example, was the plain ofArbeles which was watered by the great Zab before its junction with theTigris. Towards the south there was no natural barrier, but in thatdirection all development was hindered by the density of the Chaldeepopulation which was thickly spread over the country above Babylon andabout the numerous towns and villages which looked towards that city astheir capital. To the north, on the other hand, the wide terraces whichmounted like steps from the plains of Mesopotamia to the mountains ofArmenia offered an ample field for expansion. To the west there was stillmore room. Little by little rural and urban life overflowed the valley ofthe Tigris into that of the Chaboras or Khabour, the principal affluent ofthe Euphrates, until at last it reached the banks of the great westernriver itself. In all Northern Mesopotamia, between the hills of the Sinjarand the last slopes of Mount Masius, the Assyrians encountered only nomadtribes whom they could drive when they chose into the Syrian desert. Overall that region the remains of artificial mounds have been found which mustat one time have been the sites of palaces and cities. In some cases thegullies cut in their flanks by the rain discover broken walls and fragmentsof sculpture whose style is that of the Ninevitish monuments. [14] In the course of their victorious career the Assyrians annexed severalother states, such as Syria and Chaldæa, Cappadocia and Armenia, but thosecountries were never more than external dependencies, than conqueredprovinces. Taking Assyria proper at its greatest development, we may saythat it comprised Northern Mesopotamia and the territories which faced itfrom the other bank of the Tigris and lay between the stream and the lowerslopes of the mountains. The heart of the country was the district lyingalong both sides of the river between the thirty-fifth and thirty-seventhdegree of latitude, and the forty-first and forty-second degree oflongitude, east. The three or four cities which rose successively to becapitals of Assyria were all in that region, and are now represented by theruins of Khorsabad, of Kouyundjik with Nebbi-Younas, of Nimroud, and ofKaleh-Shergat. One of these places corresponds to _Ninos_, as the Greekscall it, or Nineveh, the famous city which classic writers as well asJewish prophets looked upon as the centre of Assyrian history. To give some idea of the relative dimensions of these two states Rawlinsoncompares the surface of Assyria to that of Great Britain, while that ofChaldæa must, he says, have been equal in extent to the kingdom ofDenmark. [15] This latter comparison seems below the mark, when, compass inhand, we attempt to verify it upon a modern map. The discrepancy is causedby the continual encroachments upon the sea made by the alluvial depositsfrom the two great rivers. Careful observations and calculations have shownthat the coast line must have been from forty to forty-five leagues farthernorth than it is at present when the ancestors of the Chaldees firstappeared upon the scene. [16] Instead of flowing together as they do now toform what is called the _Shat-el-Arab_, the Tigris and Euphrates then fellinto the sea at points some twenty leagues apart in a gulf which extendedeastwards as far as the last spurs thrown out by the mountains of Iran, andwestwards to the foot of the sandy heights which terminate the plateau ofArabia. "The whole lower part of the valley has thus been made, since thecommencement of the present geological period, by deposits from the Tigris, the Euphrates, and such minor streams as the Adhem, the Gyndes, theChoaspes, streams which, after having long enjoyed an independent existenceand having contributed to drive back the waters into which they fell, haveended by becoming mere feeders of the Tigris. "[17] We see, therefore, thatwhen Chaldæa received its first inhabitants it was sensibly smaller than itis to-day, as the district of which Bassorah is now the capital and thewhole delta of the Shat-el-Arab were not yet in existence. NOTES: [1] BEROSUS, fragment No. 1, in the _Essai de Commentaire sur les Fragmentscosmogoniques de Bérose d'après les Textes cunéiformes et les Monuments del'Art Asiatique_ of FRANÇOIS LENORMANT (Maisonneuve, 1871, 8vo. ). [2] _The Five Great Monarchies of the Ancient Eastern World; or, TheHistory, Geography, and Antiquities of Chaldæa, Assyria, Babylon, Media, and Persia. Collected and Illustrated from Ancient and Modern Sources_, byGEORGE RAWLINSON. Fourth edition, 3 vols. , 8vo. , with Maps andIllustrations (Murray, 1879). [3] HUMBOLDT, _Aspects of Nature_, vol. I. Pp. 77, 78. --R. [4] HERODOTUS, ii. 5. [5] LOFTUS'S _Chaldæa and Susiana_, p. 282. --R. [6] See STRABO, xvi. 1, § 6; PLINY, H. N. Vi. 28; PTOLEMY, v. 20; BEROSUS, pp. 28, 29. --R. [7] Ross came to the end of the alluvium and the commencement of thesecondary formation in lat. 34°, long. 44° (_Journal of GeographicalSociety_, vol. Ix. P. 446). Similarly, Captain Lynch found the bed of theTigris change from pebbles to mere alluvium near Khan Iholigch, a littleabove its confluence with the Aahun (_Ib. _ p. 472). For the point where theEuphrates enters on the alluvium, see Fraser's _Assyria and Mesopotamia_, p. 27. --R. [8] RAWLINSON. _The Five Great Monarchies_, &c. , vol. I. , pp. 1-4. As tothe name and boundaries of Chaldæa, see also GUIGNAUT, _La Chaldée et lesChaldéens_, in the _Encyclopédie Moderne_, vol. Viii. [9] HERODOTUS, i. 106, 192; iii. 92. [10] PLINY, _Nat. Hist. _ vi. 26. [11] STRABO, xvi. I. § 1. [12] _Genesis_ xi. 28 and 31; _Isaiah_ xlvii. 1; xiii. 19, &c. ; DIODORUSii. 17; PLINY, _Nat. Hist. _ vi. 26; the Greek translators of the Biblerendered the Hebrew term Khasdim by Chaldaioi; both forms seem to bederived from the same primitive word. [13] STRABO, xvi. I. 1, 2, 3. [14] LAYARD, _Nineveh and its Remains_, vol. I. Pp. 312, 315;_Discoveries_, p. 245. [15] RAWLINSON, _Five Great Monarchies_, vol. I. Pp. 4, 5. [16] LOFTUS, in the _Journal of the Geographical Society_, vol. Xxvi. P. 142; _Ib. _, Sir HENRY RAWLINSON, vol. Xxvii. P. 186. [17] MASPERO, _Histoire Ancienne des Peuples de l'Orient_, p. 137. § 2. --_Nature in the Basin of the Euphrates and Tigris. _ The inundation of the Nile gives renewed life every year to those plains ofEgypt which it has slowly formed, and so it is with the Tigris andEuphrates. Lower Mesopotamia is entirely their creation, and if the timewere to come when their vivifying streams were no longer to irrigate itssurface, it would very soon be changed into a monotonous and melancholydesert. It hardly ever rains in Chaldæa. [18] There are a few showers at thechanges of the season, and, in winter, a few days of heavy rain. During thesummer, for long months together, the sky remains inexorably blue while thetemperature is hot and parching. In winter, clouds are almost as rare; butwinds often play violently over the great tracts of unbroken country. Whenthese blow from the south they soon lose their warmth and humidity at thecontact of a soil which, but a short while ago, was at the bottom of thesea, and is, therefore, in many places still strongly impregnated with saltwhich acts as a refrigerant. [19] Again, when the north wind comes down fromthe snowy summits of Armenia or Kurdistan, it is already cold enough, sothat, during the months of December and January, it often happens that themercury falls below freezing point, even in Babylonia. At daybreak thewaters of the marshes are sometimes covered with a thin layer of ice, andthe wind increases the effect of the low temperature. Loftus tells us thathe has seen the Arabs of his escort fall benumbed from their saddles in theearly morning. [20] It is, then, upon the streams, and upon them alone, that the soil has todepend for its fertility; all those lands to which they never reach aredoomed to barrenness and death. It is fortunate for the prosperity of thecountry through which they flow, that the Tigris and Euphrates swell andrise annually from their beds, not indeed like the Nile, almost on a statedday, but ever in the same season, about the commencement of spring. Withoutthese periodical floods many parts of the plain of Mesopotamia would bebeyond the reach of irrigation, but their regular occurrence allows waterto be stored in sufficient quantities for use during the months of drought. To obtain the full advantage of this precious capital, the inhabitantsmust, however, take more care and expend more labour than is necessary inEgypt. The rise of the Euphrates and of the Tigris is neither so slow norso regular as that of the Nile. The waters do not spread so gently over thesoil, neither do they stay upon it so long;[21] since they have beenabandoned to themselves as they are at present, a great part of them arelost, and, far from rendering a service to agriculture, they turn vastregions into dangerous hot-beds of infection. It was to the west of the double basin that the untoward effects of theterritorial conformation were chiefly felt. The valley of the Euphrates isnot like that of the Nile, a canal hollowed out between two clearly markedbanks. From the northern boundary of the alluvial plain to the southern, the slope is very slight, while from east to west, from the plains ofMesopotamia to the foot of the Arabian plateau, there is also aninclination. When the river is in flood the right bank no longer exists. Where it is not raised and defended by dykes, the waters flow over it atmore than one point. They spread through large breaches into a sort ofhollow where they form wide marshes, such as those which stretch in thesedays from the country west of the ruins of Babylon almost to the PersianGulf. In the parching heat of the summer months the mud blackens, cracks, and exhales miasmic vapours, so that a long acclimatization, like that ofthe Arabs, is necessary before one can live in the region. Some of theseArabs live in forests of reeds like those represented in the Assyrianbas-reliefs. [22] Their huts of mud and rushes rise upon a low island in the marshes; and allcommunication with neighbouring tribes and with the town in which they sellthe product of their rice-fields, is carried on by boats. The brakes aremore impenetrable than the thickest underwood, but the natives have cutalleys through them, along which they impel their large flat-bottomed_teradas_ with poles. [23] Sometimes a sudden rise of the river will raisethe level of these generally stagnant waters by a yard or two, and duringthe night the huts and their inhabitants, men and animals together, will besent adrift. Two or three villages have been destroyed in this fashion amidthe complete indifference of the authorities. The tithe-farmer may betrusted to see that the survivors pay the taxes due from their lessfortunate neighbours. The masters of the country could, if they chose, do much to render thecountry more healthy, more fertile, more capable of supporting a numerouspopulation. They might direct the course of the annual floods, and savetheir excess. When the land was managed by a proprietory possessingintelligence, energy, and foresight, it had, especially in minor details, agrace and picturesque beauty of its own. When every foot of land wascarefully cultivated, when the two great streams were thoroughly kept inhand, their banks and those of the numerous canals intersecting the plainswere overhung with palms. The eye fell with pleasure upon the tall trunkswith their waving plumes, upon the bouquets of broad leaves with theircentre of yellow dates; upon the cereals and other useful and ornamentalplants growing under their gentle shade, and forming a carpet for the richand sumptuous vegetation above. Around the villages perched upon theirmounds the orchards spread far and wide, carrying the scent of their orangetrees into the surrounding country, and presenting, with their masses ofsombre foliage studded with golden fruit, a picture of which the eye couldnever grow weary. No long series of military disasters was required to destroy all thischarm; fifty years, or, at most, a century, of bad administration wasenough. [24] Set a score of Turkish pachas to work, one after the other, mensuch as those whom contemporary travellers have encountered at Mossoul andBagdad; with the help of their underlings they will soon have done moreharm than the marches and conflicts of armies. There is no force moresurely and completely destructive than a government which is at once idle, ignorant, and corrupt. With the exception of the narrow districts around a few towns and villages, where small groups of population have retained something of their formerenergy and diligence, Mesopotamia is now, during the greater part of theyear, given over to sterility and desolation. As it is almost entirelycovered with a deep layer of vegetable earth, the spring clothes even itsmost abandoned solitudes with a luxuriant growth of herbs and flowers. Horses and cattle sink to their bellies in the perfumed leafage, [25] butafter the month of May the herbage withers and becomes discoloured; thedried stems split and crack under foot, and all verdure disappears exceptfrom the river-banks and marshes. Upon these wave the feathery fronds ofthe tamarisk, and in the stagnant or slowly moving water which fills allthe depressions of the soil, aquatic plants, water-lilies, rushes, papyrus, and gigantic reeds spring up in dense masses, and make the low-lyingcountry look like a vast prairie, whose native freshness even the sun atits zenith has no power to destroy. Everywhere else nature is as dreary inits monotony as the vast sandy deserts which border the country on thewest. In one place the yellow soil is covered with a dried, almostcalcined, stubble; in another, with a grey dust which rises in cloudsbefore the slightest breeze; in the neighbourhood of the ancient townshipsit has received a reddish hue from the quantity of broken and pulverizedbrick with which it is mixed. These colours vary in different places, butfrom Mount Masius to the shores of the Persian Gulf, from the Euphrates tothe Tigris, the traveller is met almost constantly by the one melancholysight--of a country spreading out before him to the horizon, in whichneglect has gone on until the region which the biblical traditionrepresents as the cradle of the human race has been rendered incapable ofsupporting human life. [26] The physiognomy of Mesopotamia has then been profoundly modified since thefall of the ancient civilization. By the indolence of man it has lost itsadornments, or rather its vesture, in the ample drapery of waving palms andstanding corn that excited the admiration of Herodotus. [27] But the generalcharacteristics and leading contours of the landscape remain what theywere. Restore in thought one of those Babylonian structures whose loftyruins now serve as observatories for the explorer or passing traveller. Suppose yourself, in the days of Nebuchadnezzar, seated upon the summit ofthe temple of Bel, some hundred or hundred and twenty yards above the levelof the plain. At such a height the smiling and picturesque details whichwere formerly so plentiful and are now so rare, would not be appreciated. The domed surfaces of the woods would seem flat, the varied cultivation, the changing colours of the fields and pastures would hardly bedistinguished. You would be struck then, as you are struck to-day, by theextent and uniformity of the vast plain which stretches away to all thepoints of the compass. In Assyria, except towards the south where the two rivers begin to draw intowards each other, the plains are varied by gentle undulations. As thetraveller approaches the northern and eastern frontiers, chains of hills, and even snowy peaks, loom before him. In Chaldæa there is nothing of thekind. The only accidents of the ground are those due to human industry; thedead level stretches away as far as the eye can follow it, and, like thesea, melts into the sky at the horizon. NOTES: [18] HERODOTUS, i. 193: Hê de gê tôn Assuriôn huetai men oligôi. [19] LOFTUS, _Susiana and Chaldæa_, i. Vol. 8vo. 1857, London, p. 73. [20] LOFTUS, _Susiana and Chaldæa_, p. 73; LAYARD, _Discoveries in theRuins of Nineveh and Babylon_, p. 146 (i. Vol. 8vo. 1853). [21] HERODOTUS, exaggerates this difference, but it is a real one. "Theplant, " he says, "is nourished and the ears formed by means of irrigationfrom the river. For this river does not, as in Egypt, overflow thecornlands of its own accord, but is spread over them by the hand or by thehelp of engines, " i. 193. [Our quotations are from Prof. Rawlinson's_Herodotus_ (4 vols. 8vo. 1875; Murray); Ed. ] The inundations of the Tigrisand Euphrates do not play so important a _rôle_ in the lives of theinhabitants of Mesopotamia, as that of the Nile in those of the Egyptians. [22] LAYARD, _A Second Series of the Monuments of Nineveh_, plate 27(London, oblong folio, 1853). [23] LAYARD, _Discoveries_, pp. 551-556; LOFTUS, _Chaldæa and Susiana_, chap. X. [24] LAYARD (_Discoveries_, pp. 467, 468 and 475) tells us what the Turks"have made of two of the finest rivers in the world, one of which isnavigable for 850 miles from its mouth, and the other for 600 miles. " [25] LAYARD, _Nineveh and its Remains_, vol. I. P. 78 (1849). "Flowers ofevery hue enamelled the meadows; not thinly scattered over the grass as innorthern climes, but in such thick and gathering clusters that the wholeplain seemed a patch-work of many colours. The dogs as they returned fromhunting, issued from the long grass dyed red, yellow, or blue, according tothe flowers through which they had last forced their way. " [26] LAYARD, _Nineveh and its Remains_, vol. Ii. Pp. 68-75. [27] HERODOTUS, i. 193. "Of all the countries that we know, there is nonewhich is so fruitful in grain. It makes no pretension indeed, of growingthe fig, the olive, the vine, or any other trees of the kind; but in grainit is so fruitful as to yield commonly two hundredfold, and when theproduction is greatest, even three hundredfold. The blade of the wheatplant and barley is often four fingers in breadth. As for millet and thesesame, I shall not say to what height they grow, though within my ownknowledge; for I am not ignorant that what I have already writtenconcerning the fruitfulness of Babylonia, must seem incredible to those whohave never visited the country. .. . Palm trees grow in great numbers overthe whole of the flat country, mostly of the kind that bears fruit, andthis fruit supplies them with bread, wine, and honey. " § 3. --_The Primitive Elements of the Population. _ The two great factors of all life and of all vegetable production are waterand warmth, so that of the two great divisions of the country we have justdescribed, the more southern must have been the first inhabited, or atleast, the first to invite and aid its inhabitants to make trial ofcivilization. In the north the two great rivers are far apart. The vast spaces whichseparate them include many districts which have always been, and must everbe, very difficult of irrigation, and consequently of cultivation. In thesouth, on the other hand, below the thirty-fourth degree of latitude, theTigris and Euphrates approach each other until a day's march will carry thetraveller from one to the other; and for a distance of some eighty leagues, ending but little short of the point of junction, their beds are almostparallel. In spite of the heat, which is, of course, greater than innorthern Mesopotamia, nothing is easier than to carry the blessings ofirrigation over the whole of such a region. When the water in the riversand canals is low, it can be raised by the aid of simple machines, similarin principle to those we described in speaking of Egypt. [28] It is here, therefore, that we must look for the scene of the firstattempts in Asia to pass from the anxious and uncertain life of thefisherman, the hunter, or the nomad shepherd, to that of the sedentaryhusbandman, rooted to the soil by the pains he has taken to improve itscapabilities, and by the homestead he has reared at the border of hisfields. In the tenth and eleventh chapters of Genesis we have an echo ofthe earliest traditions preserved by the Semitic race of their distantorigin. "And it came to pass, as they journeyed from the east, that theyfound a plain in the land of Shinar; and they dwelt there. "[29] The _land_of SHINAR is the Hebrew name of what we call Chaldæa. There is no room formistake. When the sacred writer wishes to tell us the origin of humansociety, he transports us into Lower Mesopotamia. It is there that hecauses the posterity of Noah to build the first great city, Babel, theprototype of the Babylon of history; it is there that he tells us theconfusion of tongues was accomplished, and that the common centre existedfrom which men spread themselves over the whole surface of the earth, tobecome different nations. The oldest cities known to the collector of thesetraditions were those of Chaldæa, of the region bordering on the PersianGulf. "And Cush begat Nimrod: he began to be a mighty one in the earth. "He was a mighty hunter before the Lord: wherefore it is said, '_Even asNimrod, the mighty hunter before the Lord_. ' "And the beginning of his kingdom was Babel, and Erech, and Accad, andCalneh, in the land of Shinar. "Out of that land went forth Asshur, and builded Nineveh, and the cityRehoboth, and Calah, "And Resen between Nineveh and Calah: the same is a great city. "[30] These statements have been confirmed by the architectural and other remainsfound in Mesopotamia. Inscriptions from which fresh secrets are wrested dayby day; ruins of buildings whose dates are to be approximately divined fromtheir plans, their structure, and their decorations; statues, statuettes, bas-reliefs, and all the various _débris_ of a great civilization, whenstudied with the industrious ardour which distinguishes modern science, enable the critic to realize the vast antiquity of those Chaldæan cities, in which legend and history are so curiously mingled. Even before they could decipher their meaning Assyriologists had compared, from the palæographic point of view, the different varieties of the writtencharacter known as _cuneiform_--a character which lent itself for some twothousand years, to the notation of the five or six successive languages, at least, in which the inhabitants of Western Asia expressed theirthoughts. These wedge-shaped characters are found in their most primitiveand undeveloped forms in the mounds dotted over the southern districts ofMesopotamia, in company with the earliest signs of those types which areespecially characteristic of the architecture, ornamentation, and plasticfiguration of Assyria. There is another particular in which the monumental records and thebiblical tradition are in accord. During those obscure centuries that sawthe work sketched out from which the civilization of the Tigris andEuphrates basin was, in time, to be developed, the Chaldæan population wasnot homogeneous; the country was inhabited by tribes who had neither acommon origin nor a common language. This we are told in Genesis. Theearliest chiefs to build cities in Shinar are there personified in theperson of Nimrod, who is the son of Cush, and the grandson of Ham. He andhis people must be placed, therefore, in the same family as the Ethiopians, the Egyptians, and the Libyans, the Canaanites and the Phoenicians. [31] A little lower down in the same genealogical table we find attached to theposterity of Shem that Asshur who, as we are told in the verses quotedabove, left the plains of Shinar in order to found Nineveh in the uppercountry. [32] So, too, it was from Ur of the Chaldees that Terah, anotherdescendant of Shem, and, through Abraham, the ancestor of the Jewishpeople, came up into Canaan. [33] The world has, unhappily, lost the work of Berosus, the Babylonish priest, who, under the Seleucidæ, did for Chaldæa what Manetho was doing almost atthe same moment for Egypt. [34] Berosus compiled the history of Chaldæafrom the national chronicles and traditions. The loss of his work is stillmore to be lamented than that of Manetho. The wedges may never, perhaps, beread with as much certainty as the hieroglyphs; the remains ofChaldæo-Assyrian antiquity are much less copious and well preserved thanthose of the Egyptian civilization, while the gap in the existing documentsare more frequent and of a different character. And yet much preciousinformation, especially in these latter days, has been drawn from thosefragments of his work which have come down to us. In one of these we findthe following evidence as to the mixture of races: "At first there were atBabylon a great number of men belonging to the different nationalities thatcolonized Chaldæa. "[35] How far did that diversity go? The terms used by Berosus are vague enough, while the Hebraic tradition seems to have preserved the memory of only tworaces who lived one after the other in Chaldæa, namely, the Kushites andthe Shemites. And may not these groups, though distinct, have been moreclosely connected than the Jews were willing to admit? We know how bitterlythe Jews hated those Canaanitish races against whom they waged their longand destructive wars; and it is possible that, in order to mark theseparation between themselves and their abhorred enemies, they may haveshut their eyes to the exaggeration of the distance between the twopeoples. More than one historian is inclined to believe that the Kushitesand Shemites were less distantly related than the Hebrew writers pretend. Almost every day criticism discovers new points of resemblance between theJews before the captivity and certain of their neighbours, such as thePhoenicians. Almost the same language was spoken by each; each had the samearts and the same symbols, while many rites and customs were common toboth. Baal and Moloch were adored in Judah and Israel as well as in Tyreand Sidon. This is not the proper place to discuss such a question, but, whatever view we may take of it, it seems that the researches ofAssyriologists have led to the following conclusion: That primitive Chaldæareceived and retained various ethnic elements upon its fertile soil; thatthose elements in time became fused together, and that, even in thebeginning, the diversities that distinguished them one from another wereless marked than a literal acceptance of the tenth chapter of Genesis mightlead us to believe. We cannot here undertake to explain all the conjectures to which this pointhas given rise. We are without some, at least, of the qualificationsnecessary for the due appreciation of the proofs, or rather of theprobabilities, which are relied on by the exponents of this or thathypothesis. We must refer curious readers to the works of contemporaryAssyriologists; or they may, if they will, find all the chief facts broughttogether in the writings of MM. Maspero and François Lenormant, whom weshall often have occasion to quote. [36] We shall be content with giving, inas few words as possible, the theory which appears at present to begenerally admitted. There is no doubt as to the presence in Chaldæa of the Kushite tribes. Itis the Kushites, as represented by Nimrod, who are mentioned in Genesisbefore any of the others; a piece of evidence which is indirectly confirmedby the nomenclature of the Greek writers. They often employed the termsKissaioi and Kissioi to denote the peoples who belonged to this very partof Asia, [37] terms under which it is easy to recognize imperfecttransliterations of a name that began its last syllable in the Semitictongues with the sound we render by _sh_. As the Greeks had no letterscorresponding to our _h_ and _j_, they had to do the best they could withbreathings. Their descendants had to make the same shifts when they becamesubject to the Turks, and had to express every word of their conqueror'slanguage without possessing any signs for those sounds of _sh_ and _j_ inwhich it abounded. The same vocable is preserved to our day in the name borne by one of theprovinces of Persia, Khouzistan. The objection that the Kissaioi or Kissioiof the classic writers and poets were placed in Susiana rather than inChaldæa will no longer be made. Susiana borders upon Chaldæa and belongs, like it, to the basin of the Tigris. There is no natural frontier betweenthe two countries, which were closely connected both in peace and war. Onthe other hand, the name of Ethiopians, often applied by the same authorsto the dwellers upon the Persian Gulf and the Sea of Oman, recalls therelationship which attached the Kushites of Asia to those of Africa in theHebrew genealogies. We have still stronger reasons of the same kind for affirming that theShemites or Semites occupied an important place in Chaldæa from the verybeginning. Linguistic knowledge here comes to the aid of the biblicalnarrative and confirms its ethnographical data. The language in which mostof our cuneiform inscriptions are written, the language, that is, that wecall Assyrian, is closely allied to the Hebrew. Towards the period of thesecond Chaldee Empire, another dialect of the same family, the Aramaic, seems to have been in common use from one end of Mesopotamia to the other. A comparative study of the rites and religious beliefs of the Semitic raceswould lead us to the same result. Finally, there is something verysignificant in the facility with which classic writers confuse such termsas Chaldæans, Assyrians, and Syrians; it would seem that they recognizedbut one people between the Isthmus of Suez on the south and the Taurus onthe north, between the seaboard of Phoenicia on the west and the tablelands of Iran in the east. In our day the dominant language over the wholeof the vast extent of territory which is inclosed by those boundaries isArabic, as it was Syriac during the early centuries of our era, and Aramaicunder the Persians and the successors of Alexander. From the commencementof historic times the Semitic element has never ceased to play the chief_rôle_ from one end of that region to the other. For Syria proper, itspre-eminence is attested by a number of facts which leave no room fordoubt. Travellers and historians classed the inhabitants of Mesopotamiawith those of Phoenicia and Palestine, because, to their unaccustomed ears, the differences between their languages were hardly perceptible, whiletheir personal characteristics were practically identical. Such affinitiesand resemblances are only to be explained by a common origin, though thepoint of junction may have been distant. It has also been asserted that an Aryan element helped to compose thepopulation of primitive Chaldæa, that sister tribes to those of India andPersia, Armenia and Asia Minor furnished their contingents to the mixedpopulation of Shinar. Some have even declared that a time came when thosetribes obtained the chief power. It may have been so, but the evidence uponwhich the hypothesis rests is very slight. Granting that the Aryans didsettle in Chaldæa, they were certainly far less numerous than the othercolonists, and were so rapidly absorbed into the ranks of the majority thatneither history nor language has preserved any sensible trace of theirexistence. We may therefore leave them out of the argument until freshevidence is forthcoming. But the students of the inscriptions had another, and, if we accept thetheories of MM. Oppert and François Lenormant, a better-founded, surprisein store for us. It seemed improbable that science would ever succeed inmounting beyond those remote tribes, the immediate descendants of Kush andShem, who occupied Chaldæa at the dawn of history; they formed, to allappearance, the most distant background, the deepest stratum, to which thehistorian could hope to penetrate; and yet, when the most ancientepigraphic texts began to yield up their secrets, the interpreters wereconfronted, as they assure us, with this startling fact: the earliestlanguage spoken, or, at least, written, in that country, belonged neitherto the Aryan nor to the Semitic family, nor even to those African languagesamong which the ancient idiom of Egypt has sometimes been placed; it was, in an extreme degree, what we now call an _agglutinative language_. By itsgrammatical system and by some elements of its vocabulary it suggests acomparison with Finnish, Turkish, and kindred tongues. Other indications, such as the social and religious conditions revealed bythe texts, have combined with these characteristics to convince ourAssyriologists that the first dwellers in Chaldæa--the first, that is, whomade any attempt at civilization--were Turanians, were part of that greatfamily of peoples who still inhabit the north of Europe and Asia, from themarshes of the Baltic to the banks of the Amoor and the shores of thePacific Ocean. [38] The languages of all those peoples, though variousenough, had certain features in common. No one of them reached the delicateand complex mechanism of internal and terminal inflexion; they wereguiltless of the subtle processes by which Aryans and Semites expressed thefinest shades of thought, and, by declining the substantive and conjugatingthe verb, subordinated the secondary to the principal idea; they did notunderstand how to unite, in an intimate and organic fashion, the root toits qualifications and determinatives, to the adjectives and phrases whichgive colour to a word, and indicate the precise _rôle_ it has to play inthe sentence in which it is used. These languages resemble each otherchiefly in their lacunæ. Compare them in the dictionaries and they seemvery different, especially if we take two, such as Finnish and Chinese, that are separated by the whole width of a continent. It is the same with their physical types. Certain tribes whom we place inthe Turanian group have all the distinctive characteristics of the whiteraces. Others are hardly to be distinguished from the yellow nations. Between these two extremes there are numerous varieties which carry us, without any abrupt transition, from the most perfect European to the mostcomplete Chinese type. [39] In the Aryan family the ties of blood areperceptible even between the most divergent branches. By a comparativestudy of their languages, traditions, and religious conceptions, it hasbeen proved that the Hindoos upon the Ganges, the Germans on the Rhine, andthe Celts upon the Loire, are all offshoots of a single stem. Among theTuranians the connections between one race and another are only perceptiblein the case of tribes living in close neighbourhood to one another, whohave had mutual relations over a long course of years. In such a case thenatural affinities are easily seen, and a family of peoples can beestablished with certainty. The classification is less definitely markedand clearly divided than that of the Aryan and Semitic families; but, nevertheless, it has a real value for the historian. [40] According to the doctrine which now seems most widely accepted, it was fromthe crowded ranks of the immense army which peopled the north that thetribes who first attempted a civilized life in the plains of Shinar and thefertile slopes between the mountains and the left bank of the Tigris, werethrown off. It is thought that these tribes already possessed a nationalconstitution, a religion, and a system of legislation, the art of writingand the most essential industries, when they first took possession of thelands in question. [41] A tradition still current among the eastern Turksputs the cradle of the race in the valleys of the Altaï, north of theplateau of Pamir. [42] Whether the emigrants into Chaldæa brought therudiments of their civilization with them, or whether their inventivefaculties were only stirred to action after their settlement in thatfertile land, is of slight importance. In any case we may say that theywere the first to put the soil into cultivation, and to found industriousand stationary communities along the banks of its two great rivers. Oncesettled in Chaldæa, they called themselves, according to M. Oppert, thepeople of SUMER, a title which is continually associated with that of "thepeople of ACCAD" in the inscriptions. [43] NOTES: [28] _History of Art in Ancient Egypt_, vol. I. P. 15 (London, 1883, Chapman and Hall). Upon the Chaldæan _chadoufs_ see LAYARD, _Discoveries_, pp. 109, 110. [29] _Genesis_ xi. 2. [30] _Genesis_ x. 8-12. [31] _Genesis_ x. 6-20. [32] _Genesis_ x. 22: "The children of Shem. " [33] _Genesis_ xi. 27-32. [34] In his paper upon the _Date des Écrits qui portent les Noms de Béroseet de Manéthou_ (Hachette, 8vo. 1873), M. ERNEST HAVET has attempted toshow that neither of those writers, at least as they are presented in thefragments which have come down to us, deserve the credence which isgenerally accorded to them. The paper is the production of a vigorous andindependent intellect, and there are many observations which should becarefully weighed, but we do not believe that, as a whole, itshypercritical conclusions have any chance of being adopted. All recentprogress in Egyptology and Assyriology goes to prove that the fragments inquestion contain much authentic and precious information, in spite of thecarelessness with which they were transcribed, often at second and thirdhand, by abbreviators of the _basse époque_. [35] See § 2 of Fragment 1. Of BEROSUS, in the _Fragmenta HistoricorumGræcorum_ of CH. MÜLLER (_Bibliothèque Grecque-Latine_ of Didot), vol. Ii. P. 496; En de tê Babulôni polu plêthos anthrôpôn genesthai alloethnônkatoikêsantôn tên Chaldaian. [36] Gaston MASPERO, _Histoire ancienne des Peuples de l'Orient_, liv. Ii. Ch. Iv. _La Chaldée_. François LENORMANT, _Manuel d'Histoire ancienne del'Orient_, liv. Iv. Ch. I. (3rd edition). [37] The principal texts in which these terms are to be met with arebrought together in the _Wörterbuch der griechischen Eigennamen_ of PAPE(3rd edition), under the words Kissia, Kissioi, Kossaioi. [38] A single voice, that of M. Halévy, is now raised to combat thisopinion. He denies that there is need to search for any language but aSemitic one in the oldest of the Chaldæan inscriptions. According to him, the writing under which a Turanian idiom is said to lurk, is no more than avariation upon the Assyrian fashion of noting words, than an early form ofwriting which owed its preservation to the quasi-sacred character impartedby its extreme antiquity. We have no intention of discussing his thesis inthese pages; we must refer those who are interested in the problem to M. HALÉVY'S dissertation in the _Journal Asiatique_ for June 1874:_Observations critiques sur les prétendus Touraniens de la Babylonie_. M. Stanislas Guyard shares the ideas of M. Halévy, to whom his accurateknowledge and fine critical powers afford no little support. [39] MASPERO, _Histoire ancienne_, p. 134. Upon the etymology of_Turanians_ see MAX MÜLLER'S _Science of Language_, 2nd edition, p. 300, _et seq. _ Upon the constituent characteristics of the Turanian group ofraces and languages other pages of the same work may be consulted. .. . Thedistinction between Turan and Iran is to be found in the literature ofancient Persia, but its importance became greater in the Middle Ages, asmay be seen by reference to the great epic of Firdusi, the _Shah-Nameh_. The kings of Iran and Turan are there represented as implacable enemies. Itwas from the Persian tradition that Professor Müller borrowed the termwhich is now generally used to denote those northern races of Asia that areneither Aryans nor Semites. [40] This family is sometimes called _Ural-Altaïc_, a term formed insimilar fashion to that of _Indo-Germanic_, which has now been deposed bythe term Aryan. It is made up of the names of two mountain chains whichseem to mark out the space over which its tribes were spread. Like the word_Indo-Germanic_, it made pretensions to exactitude which were onlypartially justified. [41] This is the opinion of M. OPPERT. He was led to the conclusion thattheir writing was invented in a more northern climate than that of Chaldæa, by a close study of its characters. There is one sign representing a bear, an animal which does not exist in Chaldæa, while the lions which were to befound there in such numbers had to be denoted by paraphrase, they werecalled _great dogs_. The palm tree had no sign of its own. See in the_Journal Asiatique_ for 1875, p. 466, a note to an answer to M. Halévyentitled _Summérien ou rien_. [42] MASPERO, _Histoire ancienne_, p. 135. [43] These much disputed terms, Sumer and Accad, are, according to MM. Halévy and Guyard, nothing but the geographical titles of two districts ofLower Chaldæa. § 4. --_The Wedges. _ The writing of Chaldæa, like that of Egypt, was, in the beginning, no morethan the abridged and conventionalized representation of familiar objects. The principle was identical with that of the Egyptian hieroglyphs and ofthe oldest Chinese characters. There are no texts extant in which imagesare exclusively used, [44] but we can point to a few where the ideogramshave preserved their primitive forms sufficiently to enable us to recognizetheir origin with certainty. Among those Assyrian syllabaries which havebeen so helpful in the decipherment of the wedges, there is one tabletwhere the primitive form of each symbol is placed opposite the group ofstrokes which had the same value in after ages. [45] This tablet is, however, quite exceptional, and, as a rule, the cuneiformcharacters cannot thus be traced to their primitive form. Butwell-ascertained and independent facts allow us to come to certainconclusions which even this scanty evidence is enough to confirm. In inventing the process of writing and bringing it to perfection, thehuman intellect worked on the same lines among the Turanians of Chaldæa asit did everywhere else. The point of departure and the early stages havebeen the same for all peoples, although some have stopped half-way andothers when three-fourths of the journey were complete. The supremediscovery which should crown the effort is the attribution of a specialsign to each of the elementary articulations of the human voice. This finalobject, an object towards which the most gifted nations of antiquity wereworking for so many centuries, was just missed by the Egyptians. They were, we may say, wrecked in port, and the glory of creating the alphabet thatmen will use as long as they think and write was reserved for thePhoenicians. Even when their civilization was at its height the Babylonians never cameso near to alphabetism as the Egyptians. This is not the place for aninquiry into the reasons of their failure, nor even for an explanation howsigns with a phonetic value forced themselves in among the ideograms, andbecame gradually more and more important. Our interest in the two kinds ofwriting is of a different nature; we have to learn and explain theirinfluence upon the plastic arts in the countries where they were used. In our attempt to define the style of Egyptian sculpture and to givereasons for its peculiar characteristics, we felt obliged to attributegreat importance to the habits of eye and hand suggested and confirmed bythe cutting and painting of the hieroglyphs. In their monumentalinscriptions, if nowhere else, the symbols of the Egyptian system retainedtheir concrete imagery to the end; and the images, though abridged andsimplified, never lost their resemblance;[46] and if it is necessary toknow something more than the particular animal or thing which theyrepresent before we can get at their meaning, that is only because in mostcases they had a metaphorical or even a purely phonetic signification aswell as their ideographic one. For the most part, however, it is easy torecognize their origin, and in this they differ greatly from the symbols ofthe first Chaldæan alphabet. In the very oldest documents there are certainideograms that, when we are warned, remind us of the natural objects fromwhich their forms have been taken, but the connection is slight anddifficult of apprehension. Even in the case of those characters whose formsmost clearly suggest their true figurative origin, it would have beenimpossible to assign its prototype to each without the help of later texts, where, with more or less modification, they formed parts of sentences whosegeneral significance was known. Finally, the Assyrian syllabaries havepreserved the meaning of signs, that, so far as we can judge, wouldotherwise have been stumbling-blocks even to the wise men of Nineveh whenthey were confronted with such ancient inscriptions as those whosefragments are still found among the ruins of Lower Chaldæa. Even in the remote days that saw the most venerable of these inscriptionscut, the images upon which their forms were based had been rendered almostunrecognizable by a curious habit, or caprice, which is unique in history. Writing had not yet become entirely _cuneiform_, it had not yet adoptedthose triangular strokes which are called sometimes nails, sometimesarrow-heads, and sometimes wedges, as the exclusive constituents of itscharacter. If we examine the tablets recovered by Mr. Loftus from the ruinsof Warka, the ancient Erech (Fig. 1), or the inscriptions upon the dioritestatues found at Tello by M. De Sarzec (Fig. 2), we shall find that in thedistant period from which those writings date, most of the characters hadwhat we may call an unbroken trace. [47] This trace, like that of thehieroglyphs, would have been well fitted for the succinct imitation ofnatural objects but for a rigid exclusion of those curves of which natureis so fond. This exclusion is complete, all the lines are straight, and cutone another at various angles. The horror of a curve is pushed so far thateven the sun, which is represented by a circle in Egyptian and otherideographic systems, is here a lozenge. [Illustration: FIG. 1. --Brick from Erech. ] It is very unlikely that even the oldest of these texts show us Chaldæanwriting in its earliest stage. Analogy would lead us to think that thesefigures must at one time have been more directly imitative. However thatmay have been, the image must have been very imperfect from the day thatthe rectilinear trace came into general use. Figures must then have rapidlydegenerated into conventional signs. Those who used them could no longerpretend to actually represent the objects they wished to denote. They musthave been content to suggest their ideas by means of a character whosevalue had been determined by usage. This transformation would beaccelerated by certain habits which forced themselves upon the people assoon as they were finally established in the land of Shinar. [Illustration: FIG. 2. --Fragment of an inscription engraved upon the backof a statue from Tello. Louvre. (Length 10-1/4 inches. )] We are told that there are certain expressions in the Assyrian languagewhich lead to the belief that the earliest writing was on the bark oftrees, that it offered the first surface to the scribe in those distantnorthern regions from which the early inhabitants of Chaldæa wereemigrants. It is certain that the dwellers in that vast alluvial plain werecompelled by the very nature of the soil to use clay for many purposes towhich no other civilization has put it. In Mesopotamia, as in the valley ofthe Nile, the inhabitants had but to stoop to pick up an excellentmodelling clay, fine in texture and close grained--a clay which had beendetached from the mountain sides by the two great rivers, and deposited ininexhaustible quantities over the whole width of the double valley. Weshall see hereafter what an important part bricks, crude, fired, andenamelled, played in the construction and decoration of Chaldæan buildings. It was the same material that received most of their writing. Clay offered a combination of facility with durability which no othermaterial could equal. While soft and wet it readily took the shape of anyfigure impressed upon it. The deftly-handled tool could engrave charactersupon its yielding surface almost as fast as the reed could trace them uponpapyrus, and much more rapidly than the chisel could cut them in wood. Again, in its final condition as solid terra-cotta, it offered a chance ofduration far beyond that of either wood or papyrus. Once safely through thekiln it had nothing to fear short of deliberate destruction. The messageintrusted to a terra-cotta slab or cylinder could only be finally lost bythe reduction of the latter to powder. At _Hillah_, the town which nowoccupies a corner of the vast space once covered by the streets of Babylon, bricks are found built into the walls to this day, upon which the Assyrianscholar may read as he runs the royal style and titles ofNebuchadnezzar. [48] As civilization progressed, the dwellers upon the Persian Gulf felt anever-increasing attraction towards the art of writing. It afforded amedium of communication with distant points, and a bond of connectionbetween one generation and another; by its means the son could profit bythe accumulated experience of the father. The slab of terra-cotta was themost obvious material for its reception. It cost almost nothing, while suchan elaborate substance as the papyrus of Egypt can never have been verycheap. It lent itself kindly to the service demanded of it, and the writerwho had confided his thoughts to its surface had only to fire it for anhour or two to secure them a kind of eternity. This latter precaution didnot require any very lengthy journey; brick kilns must have blazed day andnight from one end of Chaldæa to another. If we consider for a moment the properties of the material, and examine theremains which have come down to us, we shall understand at once whatwriting was certain to become under the triple impulse of a desire to writemuch, to write fast, and to use clay as we moderns use paper. Supposeoneself compelled to trace upon clay figures whose lines necessitatedcontinual changes of direction; at each angle or curve it would benecessary to turn the hand, and with it the tool, because the clay surface, however tender it might be, would still afford a certain amount ofresistance. Such resistance would hardly be an obstacle, but it would insome degree diminish the speed with which the tool could be driven. Now, assoon as writing comes into common use, most of those who employ it in theordinary matters of life have no time to waste. It is important that allhindrances to rapid work should be avoided. The designs of the old writingwith their strokes sometimes broken, sometimes continuous, sometimes thick, and sometimes thin, wearied the writer and took much time, and at last itcame about that the clay was attacked in a number of short, clear-cuttriangular strokes each similar in form to its fellow. As these littledepressions had all the same depth and the same shape, and as the hand hadneither to change its pressure nor to shift its position, it arrived withpractice at an extreme rapidity of execution. Some have asserted that the instrument with which these marks were made hasbeen found among the Mesopotamian ruins. It is, we are told, a small stylein bone or ivory with a bevelled triangular point. [49] And yet when we lookwith attention at these terra-cotta inscriptions, we fall to doubtingwhether the hollow marks of which they are composed could have been made bysuch a point. There is no sign of those scratches which we should expect tofind left by a sharp instrument in its process of cutting out and removingpart of the clay. The general appearance of the surface leads us rather tothink that the strokes were made by thrusting some instrument with a sharpridge like the corner of a flat rule, into the clay, and that nothing wastaken away as in the case of wood or marble, but an impression made bydriving back the earth into itself. [50] However this may be, the firstelement of the cuneiform writing was a hollow incision made by a singlemovement of the hand, and of a form which may be compared to a greatlyelongated triangle. These triangles were sometimes horizontal, sometimesvertical, sometimes oblique, and when arranged in more or less complexgroups, could easily furnish all the necessary symbols. In early ages, theelements of some of these ideographic or phonetic signs--signs whichafterwards became mere complex groups of wedges--were so arranged as tosuggest the primitive forms--that is, the more or less roughly blocked outimages--from which they had originally sprung. The _fish_ may easily berecognized in the following group [Illustration]: while the character thatstands for the _sun_, [Illustration], reminds us of the lozenge which wasthe primitive sign for that luminary. In the two symbols [Illustration] and[Illustration], we may, with a little good will, recognize a _shovel_ withits handle, and an _ear_. But even in the oldest texts the instances inwhich the primitive types are still recognizable are very few; the wedgehas in nearly every case completely transfigured, and, so to speak, decomposed, their original features. This is the case even in what is called the Sumerian system itself, andwhen its signs and processes were borrowed by other nations, the tendencyto abandon figuration was of course still more marked. It has now beenclearly proved that the wedges have served the turn of at least fourlanguages beside that of the people who devised them, and that in passingfrom one people to another their groups never lost the phonetic valueassigned to them by their first inventors. [51] In the absence of this extended employment all attempts to decipher thewedges would have been condemned to almost certain failure from the first, but as soon as its existence had been placed beyond doubt, there was everyreason to count upon success. It allowed the words of a text to betransliterated into phonetic characters, and that being done, to discovertheir meaning was but an affair of time, patience, and method. * * * * * We see then, that the system of signs invented by the first inhabitants ofChaldæa had a vogue similar to that which attended the alphabet of thePhoenicians in the Mediterranean basin. For all the peoples of Western Asiait was a powerful agent of progress and civilization. We can understand, therefore, how it was that the wedge, the essential element of all thosegroups which make up cuneiform writing, became for the Assyrian one of theholy symbols of the divine intelligence. Upon the stone called the _CaillouMichaud_, from the name of its discoverer, it is shown standing upon analtar and receiving the prayers and homage of a priest. [52] It deserved allthe respect it received; thanks to it the Babylonian genius was able torough out and hand down to posterity the science from which Greece was toprofit so largely. And yet, in spite of all the services it had rendered, this form of writingfell into disuse towards the commencement of our era; it was supplantedeven in the country of its origin by alphabets derived from that of thePhoenicians. [53] It had one grave defect: its phonetic signs alwaysrepresented syllables. No one of the wedge-using communities made thatdecisive step in advance of which the honour belongs to the Phoeniciansalone. No one of them carried the analysis of language so far as to reducethe syllable to its elements, and to distinguish the consonant, mute byitself, from the vowel upon which it depends, if we may say so, for anactive life. All those races who have not borrowed their alphabet _en bloc_ from theirneighbours or predecessors but have invented it for themselves, began withthe imitation of objects. At first we have a mere outline, made to gratifysome special want. [54] The more these figures were repeated, the more theytended towards a single stereotyped form, and that an epitomized andconventional one. They were only signs, so that it was not in the leastnecessary to painfully reproduce every feature of the original model, as ifthe latter were copied for its plastic beauty. As time passed on, writingand drawing won separate existences; but at first they were not to bedistinguished one from the other, the latter was but a use of the former, and, in a sense, we may even say that writing was the first and simplest ofthe plastic arts. In Egypt this art remained more faithful to its origin than elsewhere. Evenwhen it had attained the highest development it ever reached in thatcountry, and was on the point of crowning its achievements by the inventionof a true alphabet, it continued to reproduce the general shapes andcontours of objects. The hieroglyphs were truly a system of writing bywhich all the sounds of the language could be noted and almost reduced totheir final elements; but they were also, up to their last day, a system ofdesign in which the characteristic features of genera and species, if notof individuals, were carefully distinguished. Was it the same in Chaldæa? Had the methods, and what we may call the styleof the national writing, any appreciable influence upon the plastic arts, upon the fashion in which living nature was understood and reproduced? Wedo not think it had, and the reason of the difference is not far to seek. The very oldest of the ideographic signs of Chaldæa are much fartherremoved from the objects upon which they were based than the Egyptianhieroglyphs; and when the wedge became the primary element of all thecharacters, the scribe ceased to give even the most distant hint of thereal forms of the things signified. Throughout the period which saw thosepowerful empires flourishing in Mesopotamia whose creations were admiredand copied by all the peoples of Western Asia, the more or less complexgroups and arrangements of the cuneiform writing, to whatever languageapplied, had no aim but to represent sometimes whole words, sometimes thesyllables of which those words were composed. Under such conditions itseems unlikely that the forms of the written characters can havecontributed much to form the style of artists who dealt with the figures ofmen and animals. We may say that the sculptors and painters of Chaldæa werenot, like those of Egypt, the scholars of the scribes. And yet there is a certain analogy between the handling of the inscriptionsand that of the bas-reliefs. It is doubtless in the nature of the materialsemployed that we must look for the final explanation of this similarity, but it is none the less true that writing was a much earlier and a muchmore general art than sculpture. The Chaldæan artist must have carried outhis modelling with a play of hand and tool learnt in cutting texts uponclay, and still more, upon stone. The same chisel-stroke is found in both;very sure, very deep, and a little harsh. However this may be, we cannot embark upon the history of Art in Chaldæawithout saying a word upon her graphic system. If there be one proof moreimportant than another of the great part played by the Chaldæans in theancient world, it is the success of their writing, and its diffusion as faras the shores of the Euxine and the eastern islands of the Mediterranean. Some cuneiform texts have lately been discovered in Cappadocia, thelanguage of which is that of the country, [55] and the most recentdiscoveries point to the conclusion that the Cypriots borrowed fromBabylonia the symbols by which the words of the Greek dialect spoken intheir island were noted. [56] We have yet to visit more than one famous country. In our voyage acrossthe plains where antique civilization was sketched out and started on itslong journey to maturity, we shall, whenever we cross the frontiers of anew people, begin by turning our attention for a space to theirinscriptions; and wherever we are met by those characters which are foundin their oldest shapes in the texts from Lower Chaldæa, there we shallsurely find plastic forms and motives whose primitive types are to betraced in the remains of Chaldæan art. A man's writing will often tell uswhere his early days were passed and under what masters his youthfulintellect received the bent that only death can take away. NOTES: [44] We are told that there is an inscription at Susa of this character. Ithas been examined but not as yet reproduced. We can, therefore, make no useof it. See François LENORMANT, _Manuel d'Histoire ancienne_, vol. Ii. P. 156. [45] M. LENORMANT reproduces this tablet in his _Histoire ancienne del'Orient_ (9th edition, vol. I. P. 420). The whole of the last chapter inthis volume should be carefully studied. It is well illustrated, andwritten with admirable clearness. The same theories and discoveries areexplained at greater length in the introduction to M. LENORMANT'S greatwork entitled _Essai sur la Propagation de l'Alphabet phenicien_, of whichbut one volume has as yet appeared (Maisonneuve, 8vo. , 1872). At the verycommencement of his investigations M. OPPERT had called attention to thecurious forms presented by certain characters in the oldest inscriptions. See _Expédition scientifique de Mésopotamie_, vol. Ii. Pp. 62, 3, notablythe paragraph entitled _Origine Hiéroglyphique de l'Écriture anarienne_. The texts upon which the remarks of MM. Oppert and Lenormant were mainlyfounded were published under the title of _Early Inscriptions from Chaldæa_in the invaluable work of Sir Henry RAWLINSON (_A Selection from theHistorical Inscriptions of Chaldæa, Assyria, and Babylonia_, prepared forpublication by Major-General Sir Henry Rawlinson, assisted by Edwin Norris, British Museum, folio, 1861). [46] See the _History of Art in Ancient Egypt_, vol. Ii. Pp. 350-3 (?). [47] This peculiarity is still more conspicuous in the engraved limestonepavement which was discovered in the same place, but the fragments are somutilated as to be unfit for reproduction here. [48] LAYARD, _Discoveries in the Ruins of Nineveh and Babylon_, p. 506. [49] OPPERT, _Expédition scientifique de Mésopotamie_, vol. Ii. Pp. 62, 3. [50] LAYARD, _Nineveh and its Remains_, vol. Ii. P. 180. [51] A list of these languages, and a condensed but lucid explanation ofthe researches which have led to the more or less complete decipherment ofthe different groups of texts will be found in the _Manuel de l'Histoireancienne de l'Orient_ of LENORMANT, 3rd edition, vol. Ii. Pp. 153, &c. --"Several languages--we know of five up to the present moment--havegiven the same phonetic value to these symbols. It is clear, however, thata single nation must have invented the system, " OPPERT, _JournalAsiatique_, 1875, p. 474. M. Oppert has given an interesting account of themode of decipherment in the _Introduction_ and in _Chapter 1. _ of the firstvolume of his _Expédition scientifique de Mésopotamie_. [52] A reproduction of this stone will be found farther on. The detail inquestion is engraved in LAYARD'S _Nineveh and its Remains_, vol. Ii. P. 181. [53] The latest cuneiform inscription we possess dates from the time ofDomitian. It has been published by M. OPPERT, _Mélanges d'Archéologieégyptienne et assyrienne_, vol. I. P. 23 (Vieweg, 1873, 4to. ). Some verylong ones, from the time of the Seleucidæ and the early Arsacidæ, have beendiscovered. [54] Hence the name _pictography_ which some scholars apply to thisprimitive form of writing. The term is clear enough, but unluckily it isill composed: it is a hybrid of Greek and Latin, which is sufficient toprevent its acceptance by us. [55] See the _Proceedings of the Society of Biblical Archæology_, twelfthsession, 1881-2. [56] See MICHEL BRÉAL, _Le Déchiffrement des Inscriptions cypriotes_(_Journal des Savants_, August and September, 1877). In the last page ofhis article, M. Bréal, while fully admitting the objections, asserts thatit is "difficult to avoid recognizing the general resemblance (difficile deméconnaître la ressemblance générale). " He refers us to the paper of HerrDEECKE, entitled _Der Ursprung der Kyprischen Sylbenschrift, einepalæographische Untersuchung_, Strasbourg, 1877. Another hypothesis hasbeen lately started, and an attempt made to affiliate the Cypriot syllabaryto the as yet little understood hieroglyphic system of the Hittites. See apaper by Professor A. H. SAYCE, _A Forgotten Empire in Asia Minor_, in No. 608 of _Fraser's Magazine_. § 5. --_The History of Chaldæa and Assyria. _ We cannot here attempt even to epitomize the history of those great empiresthat succeeded one another in Mesopotamia down to the period of the Persianconquest. Until quite lately their history was hardly more than a tissue oftales and legends behind which it was difficult to catch a glimpse of thefew seriously attested facts, of the few people who were more than shadows, and of the dynasties whose sequence could be established. The foregroundwas taken up by fabulous creatures like Ninus and Semiramis, compounded bythe lively imagination of the Greeks of features taken from several of thebuilding and conquering sovereigns of Babylon and Nineveh. So, in the caseof Egypt, was forged the image of that great Sesostris who looms so largein the pages of the Greek historians and combines many Pharaohs of thechief Theban dynasties in his own person. The romantic tales of Ctesiaswere united by Rollin and his emulators with other statements of perhapsstill more doubtful value. The book of Daniel was freely drawn upon, andyet it is certain that it was not written until the year which saw thedeath of Antiochus Epiphanes. The book of Daniel is polemical, nothistorical; the Babylon in which its scene is laid is a Babylon of theimagination; the writer chose it as the best framework for his lessons tothe Israelites, and for the menaces he wished to pour out upon theirenemies. [57] Better materials are to be found in other parts of the Bible, in _Kings_, in the _Chronicles_, and in the older prophets. But it would bean ungrateful task for the critic to attempt to work out an harmoniousresult from evidence so various both in origin and value. The most skilfulwould fail in the endeavour. With such materials it would be impossible toarrive at any coherent result that would be, we do not say true, butprobable. The discovery of Nineveh, the exploration of the ruins in Chaldæa, and thedecipherment of the cuneiform inscriptions, have changed all this, althoughmuch of the detail has yet to be filled in, especially so far as theearlier periods are concerned. We are now able to trace the leading lines, to mark the principal divisions, in a word, to put together the skeleton ofa future history. We are no longer ignorant of the origin of Babylonishcivilization nor of the directions in which it spread; we can grasp boththe strong differences and the close bonds of connection between Assyriaand Chaldæa, and understand the swing of the pendulum that in the course oftwo thousand years shifted the political centre of the country backwardsand forwards from Babylon to Nineveh, while from the mountains of Armeniato the Persian Gulf, beliefs, manners, arts, spoken dialects, and writtencharacters, preserved so many striking resemblances as to put their commonorigin beyond a doubt. Not a year passes but the discovery of fresh documents and the process oftranslation allows us to retouch and complete the story. MM. Maspero andLenormant have placed it before us as shaped by their most recent studies, and we shall take them for our guide in a rapid indication of the rulingcharacter and approximate duration of each of those periods into which thetwenty centuries of development may be divided. We shall then have somefixed points by which to guide our steps in the vast region whose monumentswe are about to explore. So that if we say that a certain fragment belongsto the _first_ or _second Chaldæan Empire_, our readers will know, notperhaps its exact date, but at least its relative age, and all risk ofconfusing the time of Ourkam or Hammourabi with that of Nebuchadnezzarwill be avoided. * * * * * When we attempt to mount the stream of history and to pierce the mistswhich become ever thicker as we near its source, what is it that we see? Wesee the lower part of the basin through which the twin rivers make theirway, entirely occupied by tribes of various origin and blood whose ethniccharacteristics we have endeavoured to point out. These mixed populationsare divided by the Tigris into two distinct groups. These groups often cameinto violent collision, and in spite of mutual relations kept up through along series of years, the line of demarcation between them ever remaineddistinct. Towards the east, in the plain which borders the river, and upon theterraces which rise one above the other up to the plateau of Iran, we havethe country called by the Greeks Susiana, and by the Hebrews the kingdom ofElam. West of the Tigris, in Mesopotamia, the first Chaldæan Empire isslowly taking shape. The eastern state, that of which Susa was the capital, was, at intermittentperiods, a great military power, and more than once poured its hosts, notonly over Babylonia, but over the Syrian provinces to the west of theEuphrates. But in these momentary successes, nevertheless, the part playedby this state was, on the whole, a subordinate one. It spent itself inbloody conflicts with the Mesopotamian empires, to which it became subjectin the end, while at no time does it appear to have done anything toadvance civilization either by isolated inventions or by generalperseverance in the ways of progress. We know very little of its internalhistory, and nothing to speak of about its religion and government, itsmanners and laws; but the few monuments which have been discovered sufficeto prove that its art had no independent existence, that it was neveranything better than a secondary form of Chaldæan art, a branch broken offfrom the parent stem. We are better, or, rather, less ill, informed, in the case of the firstChaldee Empire. The fragments of Berosus give us some knowledge of itsbeginnings, so far, at least, as the story was preserved in the nationaltraditions, and the remains by which tradition can be tested and correctedare more numerous than in the case of Susiana. The chronicles on which Berosus based his work began with a divinedynasty, which was succeeded by a human dynasty of fabulous duration. Theselegendary sovereigns, like the patriarchs of the Bible, each lived for manycenturies, and to them, as well as to the gods who preceded them, certainmyths were attached of which we find traces in the surviving monuments. Such myths were the fish god, Oannes, and the Chaldaic deluge with itsNoah, Xisouthros. [58] This double period, with its immoderate duration, corresponds to those darkand confused ages during which the intellect of man was absorbed in theconstant and painful struggle against nature, during which he had noleisure either to take note of time or to count the generations as theypassed. After this long succession of gods and heroes, Berosus gives whathe calls a _Medic_ dynasty, in which, it has been thought, the memory ofsome period of Aryan supremacy has survived. In any case, we have seriousreasons for thinking that the third of the dynasties of Berosus, with itseleven kings, was of Susian origin. Without speaking of other indicationswhich have been ingeniously grouped by modern criticism, a directconfirmation of this hypothesis is to be found in the evidence of theBible. In the latter we find Chedorlaomer, king of Elam, master of thewhole basin of the Tigris and Euphrates in the time of Abraham. Among hisvassals were Amraphel, king of Shinar, and Arioch, king of Ellasar, the twoprincipal cities of Assyria. [59] All doubts upon this point have beenbanished since the texts in which Assurbanipal, the last of the Nineviteconquerors, vaunts his exploits, have been deciphered. In two of theseinscriptions he tells us how he took Susa 1, 635 years afterChedornakhounta, king of Elam, had conquered Babylon; he found, he says, inthat city sacred statues which had been carried off from Erech by the kingof Elam. He brought them back again to Chaldæa and re-established them inthe sanctuary from which they had been violently removed. [60] Assurbanipal took Susa in 660. All antiquity declares that the Babyloniansand the Syrians had a taste for chronology at a very early period. This isproved by the eponymous system of the Assyrians, a system much to bepreferred to the Egyptian habit of dating their monuments with the year ofthe current reign only. [61] Moreover, have not the ancients perpetuated thefame of the astronomical tables drawn up by the Chaldæans and founded uponobservations dating back to a very remote epoch? Such tables could not havebeen made without a strict count of time. We have, then, no reason to doubtthe figure named by Assurbanipal, and his chronicle may be taken to givethe oldest date in the history of Chaldæa, B. C. 2, 295, as the year of theSusian conquest. The Elamite dynasty was succeeded, according to Berosus, by a nativeChaldæan dynasty. Berosus--and his dates are held in great respect--placesthe appearance of this new royal family in 2, 047, giving it forty-ninesovereigns and 458 years of duration. We are thus brought down to theconquest of Mesopotamia by the Egyptian Pharaohs of the eighteenth dynasty. The names of the Chaldæan princes have been transcribed by those Byzantinechroniclers to whom we owe the few and short fragments of Berosus that arestill extant. On the other hand, inscriptions dug up upon the sites of the Chaldæancities have furnished us with fifty royal names which may, it is thought, be ascribed to the period whose chief divisions we have just laid down. Assyriologists have classed them as well as they could--from the more orless archaic characters of their language and writing, from the elements ofwhich the proper names are composed, and from the relationships which someof the texts show to have existed between one prince and another--but theyare still far from establishing a continuous series such as those that havebeen arranged for the Pharaohs even of the Ancient Empire. Interruptionsare frequent, and their extent is beyond our power even to guess. PrimitiveChaldæa has unluckily left behind it no document like the list of Manethoto help us in the arrangement of the royal names with which the monumentsare studded. We do not even know how the earliest royal name upon the inscriptionsshould be read; it is more to avoid speaking of him by a paraphrase thanfor any other reason that the name Ourkam has been assigned to the princewhose traces are to be found sprinkled over the ruins of most of thesouthern cities. The characters of the texts stamped upon bricks recoveredfrom buildings erected by him, have, as all Assyriologists know, a peculiarphysiognomy of their own. Ourkam is the Menes of Chaldæa, and his date isput long before that Susian conquest of which we have spoken above. Theseals of Ourkam (see Fig. 3) and of his son Ilgi[62] have been found. Thename of the latter occurs almost as often as that of his father among theruins of Southern Chaldæa. [Illustration: FIG. 3. --Seal of Ourkam. ] The oldest cities of Lower Chaldæa date from this remote epoch, namely, Ur, now _Mugheir_ or the _bituminous_, Urukh now _Warka_, Larsam (_Senkerch_), Nipour (_Niffer_), Sippara, Borsippa, Babylon, &c. Ur, on the right bank ofthe Euphrates and near its ancient mouth, seems to have been the firstcapital of the country and its chief commercial centre in those earlytimes. The premiership of Babylon as a holy city and seat of royalty cannothave been established until much later. The whole country between Hillahand Bassorah is now little removed from a desert. Here and there rise a fewtents or reed huts belonging to the Montefik Arabs, a tribe of savagenomads and the terror of travellers. Europeans have succeeded in exploringthat inhospitable country only under exceptional circumstances. [63] And yetit was there, between two or three thousand years before our era, that theintermingling of ideas and races took place which gave birth to thecivilization of Chaldæa. In order to find a king to whom we can give a probable date we have to comedown as far as Ismi-Dagan, who should figure in the fourth dynasty ofBerosus. Tiglath-Pileser the First, who reigned in Assyria at the end ofthe twelfth century, has left us an official document in which he recountshow he had restored in Ellasar (now _Kaleh-Shergat_), a temple of Oannesfounded by Ismi-Dagan seven hundred years before. We are led therefore toplace the latter king about 1800. [64] We learn at the same time thatAssyria was inhabited, in the days of Ismi-Dagan, by a people who borrowedtheir gods from Chaldæa, and were dependents of the sovereign of the lattercountry. It was in fact upon the shores of the Persian Gulf, far enoughfrom Assyria, that Oannes made his first revelation, and it is at Ur in thesame region that the names of Ismi-Dagan and of his sons Goun-goun andSamsibin are to be found stamped upon the bricks. We may, therefore, lookupon their epoch as that in which the first Chaldee Empire reached itsapogee. It then embraced all Mesopotamia, from the slopes of Mount Zagrosto the out-fall of the two great rivers. The sovereigns of Chaldæa, like the Pharaohs of Egypt, toiled withintelligence and unremitting perseverance to develop the resources of thevast domain of which they found themselves masters. They set on foot greatpublic works whose memory survives here and there, to this day. From themoment when the first colonists, of whatever race, appeared in thecountry, they must have set about regulating the water courses; they musthave taken measures to profit by the floods to form reserves, and toutilize the natural fall of the land, slight though it was, for thedistribution of the fertilizing liquid. The first groups of agriculturistswere established in the immediate neighbourhood of the Tigris andEuphrates, where nothing more was required for the irrigation of the fieldsthan a few channels cut through the banks of the stream, but when the timearrived for the settlement of the regions at some distance from bothrivers, more elaborate measures had to be taken; a systematic plan had tobe devised and carried out by concerted action. That the kings of Chaldæawere quite equal to the task thus laid upon them is proved by theinscriptions of HAMMOURABI, one of the successors of Ismi-Dagan, which havebeen translated and commented upon by M. Joachim Ménant. [65] The canal to which this king boasts of having given his name, the_Nahar-Hammourabi_, was called in later days the royal canal, _Nahar-Malcha_. Herodotus saw and admired it, its good condition was anobject of care to the king himself, and we know that it was considerablyrepaired by Nebuchadnezzar. It may be compared to a main artery; smallervessels flowed from it right and left, throwing off in their turn stillsmaller branches, and ending in those capillaries which carried refreshmentto the roots of each thirsty palm. Even in our day the traveller in theprovince of Bagdad may follow one of these ancient beds for an hour or twowithout turning to the right or the left, and their banks, though greatlybroken in many places, still rise above the surrounding soil and afford awelcome causeway for the voyager across the marshy plains. [66] All theseapparent accidents of the ground are vestiges left by the great hydraulicworks of that Chaldee Empire which began to loom through the shadows of thepast some twenty years ago, and has gradually been taking form ever since. When civilization makes up its mind to re-enter upon that country, nothingmore will be needed for the re-awakening in it of life and reproductiveenergy, than the restoration of the great works undertaken by thecontemporaries of Abraham and Jacob. * * * * * According to all appearance it was the Egyptian conquest about sixteencenturies B. C. , that led to the partition of Mesopotamia. Vassals ofThothmes and Rameses, called by Berosus the "Arab kings, " sat upon thethrone of Babylon. The tribes of Upper Mesopotamia were farther from Egypt, and their chiefs found it easier to preserve their independence. At firsteach city had its own prince, but in time one of these petty kingdomsabsorbed the rest, and Nineveh became the capital of an united Assyria. Asthe years passed away the frontiers of the nation thus constituted werepushed gradually southwards until all Mesopotamia was brought under onesceptre. This consummation appears to have been complete by the end of thefourteenth century, at which period Egypt, enfeebled and rolled back uponherself, ceased to make her influence felt upon the Euphrates. Even thenBabylon kept her own kings, but they had sunk to be little more thanhereditary satraps receiving investiture from Nineveh. Over and over againBabylon attempted to shake off the yoke of her neighbour; but down to theseventh century her revolts were always suppressed, and the Assyriansupremacy re-established after more or less desperate conflicts. During nearly half a century, from about 1060 to 1020 B. C. , Babylon seemsto have recovered the upper hand. The victories of her princes put an endto what is called the FIRST ASSYRIAN EMPIRE. But after one or twogenerations a new family mounted the northern throne, and, toilingenergetically for a century or so to establish the grandeur of themonarchy, founded the SECOND ASSYRIAN EMPIRE. The upper country regainedits ascendency by the help of military institutions whose details nowescape us, although their results may be traced throughout the laterhistory of Assyria. From the tenth century onwards the effects of theseinstitutions become visible in expeditions made by the armies of Assyria, now to the shores of the Persian Gulf or the Caspian, and now through themountains of Armenia into the plains of Cappadocia, or across the Syriandesert to the Lebanon and the coast cities of Phoenicia. The first princeswhose figured monuments--in contradistinction to mere inscriptions--havecome down to us, belonged to those days. The oldest of all wasASSURNAZIRPAL, whose residence was at CALACH (_Nimroud_). The bas-reliefswith which his palace was decorated are now in the Louvre and the BritishMuseum, most of them in the latter. [67] They may be recognized at once bythe band of inscription which passes across the figures and reproduces onetext again and again (Fig. 4). To Assurnazirpal's son SHALMANESER III. Belongs the obelisk of basalt which also stands in the British Museum. Itsfour faces are adorned with reliefs and with a running commentary engravedwith extreme care. [68] [Illustration: FIG. 4. --Genius in the attitude of adoration. From theNorth-west Palace at Nimroud. Louvre. Drawn by Saint-Elme Gautier. ] Shalmaneser was an intrepid man of war. The inscriptions on his obeliskrecall the events of thirty-one campaigns waged against the neighbouringpeoples under the leadership of the king himself. He was always victorious, but the nations whom he crushed never accepted defeat. As soon as his backwas well turned they flew to arms, and again drew him from his repose inthe great palace which he had built at Calach, close to that of hisfather. [69] Under the immediate successors of Shalmaneser the Assyrian _prestige_ wasmaintained at a high level by dint of the same lavish bloodshed andtruculent energy; but towards the eighth century it began to decline. Therewas then a period of languor and decadence, some echo of which, and of itsaccompanying disasters, seems to have been embodied by the Greeks in theromantic tale of Sardanapalus. No shadow of confirmation for the story of afirst destruction of Nineveh is to be found in the inscriptions, and, inthe middle of the same century, we again find the Assyrian arms triumphantunder the leadership of TIGLATH PILESER II. , a king modelled after thegreat warriors of the earlier days. This prince seems to have carried hisvictorious arms as far east as the Indus, and west as the frontiers ofEgypt. And yet it was only under his second successor, SARYOUKIN, or, to give himhis popular name, SARGON, the founder of a new dynasty, that Syria, withthe exception of Tyre, was brought into complete submission after a greatvictory over the Egyptians (721-704). [70] In the intervals of his campaignsSargon built the town and palace which have been discovered at Khorsabad, _Dour-Saryoukin_, or the "town of Sargon. " His son SENNACHERIB equalled him both as a soldier and as a builder. Hebegan by crushing the rebels of Elam and Chaldæa with unflinching severity;in his anger he almost exterminated the inhabitants of Babylon, theperennial seat of revolt; but, on the other hand, he repaired and restoredNineveh. Most of his predecessors had been absentees from the capital, andhad neglected its buildings. They had preferred to place their ownhabitations where they could escape from the crowd and the dangers itimplied. But Sennacherib was of another mind. He chose a site well withinthe city for the magnificent palace which Mr. Layard has been the means ofrestoring to the world. This building is now known as _Kouyundjik_, fromthe name of the village perched upon the mound within which the buildingsof Sennacherib were hidden. [71] Sennacherib rebuilt the walls, the towers, and the quays of Nineveh at thesame time, so that the capital, which had never ceased to be the strongestand most populous city of the empire, again became the residence of theking--a distinction which it was to preserve until the fast approachingdate of its final destruction. The son of Sennacherib, ESARHADDON, and his grandson, ASSURBANIPAL, pushedthe adventures and conquests of the Assyrian arms still farther. Theysubdued the whole north of Arabia, and invaded Egypt more than once. Theytook and retook Memphis and Thebes, and divided the whole valley of theNile, from the Ethiopian frontier to the sea, into a number of vassalprincipalities, whose submission was insured by the weakness and mutualjealousies of their lords. Ever prompt in revolt, Babylon again exposeditself to sack, and Susiana, which had helped the insurrection, waspillaged, ravaged, and so utterly crushed that it was on the point ofdisappearing for ever from the scene as an independent state. There was amoment when the great Semitic Empire founded by the Sargonides touched eventhe Ægæan, for Gyges, king of Lydia, finding himself menaced by theCimmerians, did homage to Assurbanipal, and sued for help against thosefoes to all civilization. [72] [Illustration: FIG. 5. --Assurbanipal at the chase. Kouyundjik. BritishMuseum. Drawn by Saint-Elme Gautier. ] Like their ancestors, these great soldiers were also great builders. In oneof his inscriptions Esarhaddon boasts of having built ten palaces andthirty-six temples in Assyria and Chaldæa. [73] Some traces of one of thesepalaces have been found within the _enceinte_ of Nineveh, at Nebbi-Younas;but it was chiefly upon Nimroud that Esarhaddon left marks of hismagnificence. The palace called the South-western Palace, in consequence ofits position in the mound, was commenced by him. It was never finished, butin plan it was more grandiose than any other of the royal dwellings. Had itbeen complete it would have included the largest hall ever provided by anAssyrian architect for the pomps of the Ninevitish court. Assurbanipal was cruel in victory and indefatigable in the chase. Judgingfrom his bas-reliefs he was as proud of the lions he killed by hundreds inhis hunts, as of the men massacred by thousands in his wars and militarypromenades, or of the captives driven before him, like herds of helplesscattle, from one end of Asia to the other. He appears also to have been apatron of literature and the arts. It was under his auspices that thecollection of inscribed terra-cotta tablettes was made in the palace atKouyundjik, [74] of which so many fragments have now been recovered. Heordered the transcription of several ancient texts which had been firstcut, many centuries before, at Ur of the Chaldees. In fact, he collectedthat royal library whose remains, damaged by time though they be, are yetamong the most valued treasures of the British Museum. Documents of manykinds are to be found among them: comparative vocabularies, lists ofdivinities with their distinguishing epithets, chronological lists of kingsand eponymous heroes, grammars, histories, tables of astronomicalobservations, scientific works of various descriptions, &c. , &c. Thesetablets were classified according to subject and arranged in several roomsof the upper story, so that they suffered much in the fall of the floorsand roofs. Very few are quite uninjured but in many cases the pieces havebeen successfully put together. When first discovered these broken remainscovered the floors of the buried palace to the depth of about two feet. [75] The building was no less remarkable for the richness and beauty of itsbas-reliefs. We shall have occasion to reproduce more than one of thehunting scenes which are there represented, and of which we give a firstillustration on the opposite page. Some remains of another palace built bythe same prince have been discovered in the mound of Nebbi-Younas. Never had the empire seemed more strong and flourishing than now, and yetit was close to its fall. The Sargonids understood fighting and pillage, but they made no continuous effort to unite the various peoples whom theysuccessfully conquered and trampled underfoot. The Assyrians have beencompared to the Romans, and in some respects the parallel is good. Theyshowed a Roman energy in the conduct of their incessant struggles, and thesoldiers who brought victory so often to the standards of the Sennacheribsand Shalmanesers must have been in their time, as the legions of theconsuls and dictators were in later years, the best troops in Asia: theywere better armed, better disciplined, and better led than those ofneighbouring states, more used to fatigue, to long marches and rapidevolutions. The brilliance of their success and its long duration are thusexplained, for the chiefs of the empire never seem to have had the faintestsuspicion of the adroit policy which was afterwards to bind so manyconquered peoples to the Roman sceptre. The first necessity for civilizedman is security: the hope, or rather the certainty, of enjoying the fruitsof his own industry in peace. When this certainty is assured to him hequickly pardons and forgets the injuries he has suffered. This fact hasbeen continually ignored by Oriental conquerors and by Assyrian conquerorsmore than any others. The Egyptians and Persians appear now and then tohave succeeded in reconciling their subject races, and in softening theirmutual hatreds by paying some attention to their political wants. But theAssyrians reckoned entirely upon terror. And yet one generation was oftenenough to obliterate the memory of the most cruel disasters. Sons did notlearn from the experience of their fathers, and, although dispersed anddecimated times without number, the enemies of Assyria never acquiesced indefeat. In the subjection imposed upon them they panted for revenge, andwhile paying their tributes they counted the hours and followed withwatchful eye every movement of their master. Let him be carried into anydistant province, or engaged in lengthened hostilities, and they at onceflew to their arms. If the prince were fighting in Armenia, or on theborders of the Caspian, Chaldæa and Susiana would rise against him: ifdisputing the Nile Valley with the Ethiopians, Syria would revolt in hisrear and the insurrection would spread across the plains of Asia with therapidity of a prairie fire. Thus no question received a final settlement. On the morrow of the hardestwon victory the fight had to begin anew. The strongest and bravestexhausted themselves at such a game. Each campaign left gaps in the ranksof the governing and fighting classes, and in time, their apparentprivilege became the most crushing of burdens. The same burden has for acentury past been slowly destroying the dominant race in modern Turkey. Itsmembers occupy nearly all the official posts, but they have to supply thearmy as well. Since the custom of recruiting the latter with the childrenof Christians, separated from their families in infancy and converted toIslamism has been abandoned, the military population has decreased year byyear. One or two more wars like the last and the Ottoman race will beextinct. Losses in battle were then a chief cause of decadence in a state whichfailed to discipline its subject peoples and to incorporate them in itsarmies. A further explanation is to be found in the lassitude andexhaustion which must in time overtake the most warlike princes, thebravest generals, and the most highly tempered of conquering races. A fewyears of relaxed watchfulness, an indolent and soft-hearted sovereign, areenough to let loose all the pent up forces of insubordination and to unitethem into one formidable effort. We thus see that, in many respects, nothing could be more precarious than the prosperity of that Assyria whoseinsolent triumphs had so often astonished the world since the accession ofSargon. The first shock came from the north. About the year 632 all western Asiawas suddenly overrun by the barbarians whom the Greeks called the CimmerianScythians. With an _élan_ that nothing could resist, they spreadthemselves over the country lying between the shores of the Caspian and thePersian Gulf; they even menaced the frontiers of Egypt. The open towns werepillaged and destroyed, the fields and agricultural villages ruthlesslylaid waste. Thanks to the height and thickness of their defending wallsNineveh, Babylon, and a few other cities escaped a sack, but Mesopotamia asa whole suffered cruelly. The dwellers in its vast plains had noinaccessible summits or hidden valleys to which they could retreat untilthe wave of destruction had passed on. At the end of a few years theloot-laden Scythians withdrew into those steppes of central Asia whencetheir descendants were again, some six centuries later, to menace theexistence of civilization; and they left Assyria and Chaldæa half strippedof their inhabitants behind them. The work begun by the Scythians was finished by the Medes. These were Aryantribes, long subject to the Assyrians, who had begun to constitutethemselves a nation in the first half of the seventh century, and, underthe leadership of CYAXARES, the real founder of their power, had alreadyattacked Nineveh after the death of Assurbanipal. This invasion brought ona kind of forced truce, but when the Medes had compelled the Scythians toretreat to their deserts by the bold stroke which Herodotus admires somuch, they quickly resumed the offensive[76]. We cannot follow all thefluctuations of the conflict; the information left by the early historiansis vague and contradictory, and we have no cuneiform inscriptions to helpus out. After the fall of Nineveh cylinders of clay and alabaster slabswere no longer covered with wedges by the Assyrian scribes. They hadrecounted their victories and conquests at length, but not one among them, so far as we know, cared to retrace the dismal history of final defeat. All that we can guess is that the last sovereign of Nineveh fell before acoalition in which Media and Chaldæa played the chief parts[77]. NABOPOLASSAR, the general to whom he confided the defence of Babylon, entered into an alliance with Cyaxares. ASSUREDILANI shut himself up in hiscapital, where he resisted as long as he could, and finally set fire to hispalace and allowed himself to be burned alive rather than fall living intothe hands of his enemies (625 B. C. ). Nineveh, "the dwelling of the lions, ""the bloody city, " saw its last day; "Nineveh is laid waste, " says theprophet Nahum, "who will bemoan her?"[78] The modern historian will feel more pity for Assyria than the Jewish poet, the sincere interpreter of a national hatred which was fostered by frequentand cruel wounds to the national pride. We can forgive Nineveh much, because she wrote so much and built so much, because she covered so muchclay with her arrow-heads, and so many walls with her carved reliefs. Weforgive her because to the ruins of her palaces and the broken fragments ofher sculpture we owe most of our present knowledge of the greatcivilization which once filled the basin of the Tigris and Euphrates. Thekings of Assyria went on building palaces up to the last moment. Each reignadded to the series of royal dwellings in which every chamber was filledwith inscriptions and living figures. Some of these structures were raisedin Nineveh itself, some in the neighbouring cities. At the south-east angleof the mound at Nimroud, the remains of a palace begun by Assuredilani havebeen excavated. Its construction had been interrupted by the Medes andScythians, for it was left unfinished. Its proposed area was very small. The rooms were narrow and ill arranged, and their walls were decorated atfoot with slabs of bare limestone instead of sculptured alabaster. Abovethe plinth thus formed they were covered with roughly executed paintingsupon plaster, instead of with enamelled bricks. Both plan and decorationshow evidence of haste and disquiet. The act of sovereignty had to be done, but all certainty of the morrow had vanished. From the moment in whichAssyrian sculpture touched its highest point in the reign of Assurbanipal, the material resources of the kingdom and the supply of skilled workmen hadslowly but constantly diminished. [79] Nineveh destroyed, the empire of which it was the capital vanished with it. The new Babylonian empire, the Empires of the Medes and of the Persiansfollowed each other with such rapidity that the Assyrian heroes and theirprowess might well have been forgotten. The feeble recollections they leftin men's minds became tinged with the colours of romance. The Greeks tookpleasure in the fable of Sardanapalus: they developed it into a moral talewith elaborate conceits and telling contrasts, but they did not invent itfrom the foundation. The first hint of it must have been given by legendsof the fall and destruction of Nineveh current in the cities of Ecbatana, Susa, and Babylon when Ctesias was within their walls. * * * * * After the obliteration of Nineveh the Medes and Chaldæans divided westernAsia between them. A family alliance was concluded between Nabopolassar andCyaxares at the moment of concerting the attack which was to have such abrilliant success, and either in consequence of that alliance or for someunknown motive, the two nations remained good friends after their commonvictory. The Medes kept Assyria, and extended themselves to the north, overthe whole country between the Caspian and the Black Sea. They would havecarried their frontiers to the Ægæan but for the existence of the Lydianmonarchy, which arrested them on the left bank of the Halys. To the southof these regions the SECOND CHALDÆAN EMPIRE took shape (625-536 B. C. ). Itmade no effort to expand eastwards over that plateau of Iran where theAryan element, as represented by the Medes and soon afterwards by thePersians, had acquired an ever-increasing preponderance, but it pretendedto the sovereignty of Egypt and Syria. In the former country, however, theSaite princes had rekindled the national spirit, and the frontiers wereheld successfully against the invaders. It was otherwise with the Jewishpeople. Sargon had taken Samaria and put an end to the Israelitish kingdom;that of Judah was destroyed by Nebuchadnezzar. Thanks to its insularposition, Tyre escaped the lot of Jerusalem, but the rest of Phoenicia andall northern Syria were subdued by Babylon. In all this region the Semitic element had long been encroaching upon thoseother elements which had preceded and been associated with it at thecommencement. In all Mesopotamia only one tongue was spoken and written, the tongue we now know as _Assyrian_, but should call _Assyro-Chaldæan_. The differences of dialect between north and south were of littleimportance, and the language in question is that of the inscriptions inboth countries. Another change requires to be mentioned. Our readers will remember thenames of Ur, Erech, and many other cities which played a great part in theearly history of the country, and were all capitals in turn. Babylon, however, in time acquired an unquestioned supremacy over them all. Theresidence of the Assyrian viceroys during the supremacy of the northernkingdom, it became the metropolis of the new empire after the fall ofNineveh. Without having lost either their population or their prosperity, the other cities sunk to the condition of provincial towns. For some hundred years Babylon had been cruelly ill-treated by theAssyrians, and never-ending revolts had been the consequence. Nabopolassarbegan the work of restoration, and his son NEBUCHADNEZZAR, the real hero ofthe Second Chaldee Empire, carried it on with ardour during the whole ofhis long reign. "He restored the canals which united the Tigris to theEuphrates above Babylon; he rebuilt the bridge which gave a means ofcommunication between the two halves of the city; he repaired the greatreservoirs in which the early kings had caught and stored the superfluouswaters of the Euphrates during the annual inundation. Upon these works hisprisoners of war, Syrians and Egyptians, Jews and Arabs, were employed invast numbers. The great wall of Babylon was set up anew; so was the templeof Nebo at Borsippa; the reservoir at Sippara, the royal canal, and a partat least of Lake Pallacopas, were excavated; Kouti, Sippara, Borsippa, Babel, rose upon their own ruins. Nebuchadnezzar was to Chaldæa whatRameses II. Was to Egypt, and there is not a place in Babylon or about itwhere his name and the signs of his marvellous activity cannot befound. "[80] Nebuchadnezzar reigned forty-three years (604-561), and left Babylon thelargest and finest city of Asia. After his death the decadence was rapid. Afew years saw several kings succeed one another upon the throne, while arevolution was being accomplished upon the plateau of Iran which wasdestined to be fatal to Chaldæa. The supremacy in that region passed fromthe feeble and exhausted Medes into the hands of the Persians, anotherpeople of the same stock. The latter were a tribe of mountaineers teemingwith native energy, and their strength had been systematically organized bya young and valiant chief, in whom they had full confidence because he hadgiven them confidence in themselves. CYRUS began by leading them to theconquest of Media, Assyria, and Asia Minor, and by forcing the nations whodwelt between the southern confines of Persia and the mountains of UpperIndia to acknowledge his supremacy. Finally, he collected his forces for anattack upon Chaldæa, and, in 536, Babylon fell before his arms. * * * * * And yet Babylon did not disappear from history in a day; she was notdestroyed, like Nineveh, by a single blow. Cyrus does not appear to haveinjured her. She remained, under the Persian kings, one of the chief citiesof the empire. But she did not give up her habit of revolting whenever shehad a chance, and DARIUS, the son of Hystaspes, tired of besieging her, ended by dismantling her fortifications, while XERXES went farther, andpillaged her temples. But the chief buildings remained standing. Towardsthe middle of the fifth century they excited the admiration of Herodotus, and, fifty years later, that of Ctesias. Strabo, on the other hand, foundthe place almost a desert. [81] Babylon had been ruined by the foundation ofSeleucia, on the Tigris, at a distance of rather more than thirty milesfrom the ancient capital. Struck by the beauty of its monuments and theadvantages of its site, ALEXANDER projected the restoration of Babylon, andproposed to make it his habitual residence; but he died before hisintention could be carried out, and SELEUCUS NICATOR preferred to build atown which should be called after himself, and should at least perpetuatehis name. The new city had as many as six hundred thousand inhabitants. Under the Parthians Ctesiphon succeeded to Seleucia, to be replaced in itsturn by Bagdad, the Arab metropolis of the caliphs. This latest comer uponthe scene would have equalled its predecessors in magnificence had theroutes of commerce not changed so greatly since the commencement of themodern era, and, above all, had the Turks not been masters of the country. There can be no doubt that the next generation will see the civilization ofthe West repossess itself of the fertile plains in which it was born andnursed, and a railway carried from the shores of the Mediterranean to thoseof the Persian Gulf. Such a road would be the most direct route from Europeto India, and its construction would awake Chaldæa to the feverish activityof our modern life. Peopled, irrigated, and tilled into her remotestcorners, she would again become as prolific as of old. Her station upon thewayside would soon change her towns into cities as populous as those ofNebuchadnezzar, and we may even guess that her importance in the futurewould reduce her past to insignificance, and would make her capital such aBabylon as the world has not yet seen. NOTES: [57] TH. NOELDEKE, _Histoire littéraire de l'ancien Testament_, Frenchversion. See chapter vii. [58] This account of the fabulous origin of civilization in Chaldæa andAssyria will be found in the second book of BEROSUS. See _FragmentaHistoricorum Græcorum_ of Ch. MÜLLER, vol. I. Fr. 4, 13. Book i. Isconsecrated to the cosmogony, Book iii. To the Second Chaldee Empire. [59] _Genesis_ xiv. [60] F. LENORMANT, _Manuel de l'Histoire ancienne_, vol. Ii. P. 24. SMITH(_Assyrian Discoveries_, p. 224) puts the capture of Susa in 645, and thusarrives at the date 2280 B. C. [61] LENORMANT, _Manuel de l'Histoire ancienne_, vol. Ii. P. 65, gives anaccount of the system under which special magistrates gave their name toeach year, and of the lists which have been preserved. [62] This was lately found at Bagdad after long being supposed to be lost. It is now in the British Museum. [63] It was visited under the best conditions, and has been best describedby W. KENNETH LOFTUS who was in it from 1849 to 1852. Attached as geologistto the English mission, commanded by Colonel, afterwards General SirFenwick Williams of Kars, which was charged with the delimitation of theTurco-Persian frontier, he was accompanied by sufficient escorts and couldstay wherever he pleased. He was an ardent traveller and excellentobserver, and science experienced a real loss in his death. The only workwhich he has left behind him may still be read with pleasure and profit, namely, _Travels and Researches in Chaldæa and Susiana, with an Account ofExcavations at Warka, the "Ereich" of Nimrod, and Shúsh, "Shushan thepalace" of Esther_, 8vo, London: 1857. The articles contributed by J. E. TAYLOR, English vice-consul at Bassorah, to vol. Xv. Of the _Journal of theAsiatic Society_ (1855), may also be read with advantage. He passed overthe same ground, and also made excavations at certain points in LowerChaldæa which were passed over by Mr. Loftus. Finally, M. De Sarzec, theFrench consul at Bassorah, to whom we owe the curious series of Chaldæanobjects which have lately increased the riches of the Louvre, was enabledto explore the same region through the friendship of a powerful Arab chief. It is much to be desired that he should give us a complete account of hissojourn and of the searches he carried on. [64] LENORMANT, _Manuel de l'Histoire ancienne_, vol. Ii. P. 30. [65] J. MÉNANT, _Inscriptions de Hammourabi, Roi de Babylone_; 1863, Paris. These inscriptions are the oldest documents in phonetic character that havecome down to us. See OPPERT, _Expédition scientifique_, vol. I. P. 267. [66] KER PORTER, _Travels in Georgia, Persia_, etc. , 4to. , vol. Ii. P. 390. LAYARD, _Discoveries in the Ruins of Nineveh and Babylon_, p. 535. "Alexander, after he had transferred the seat of his empire to the east, sofully understood the importance of these great works that he ordered themto be cleansed and repaired and superintended the work in person, steeringhis boat with his own hands through the channels. " [67] This palace was the one called the _North-western Palace_. [68] LAYARD, _The Monuments of Nineveh, from Drawings made on the spot, Illustrated in one Hundred Plates_ (large folio, London: 1849), plates53-56. [69] It is now called the _Central Palace at Nimroud_. [70] The chief work upon this period, the most brilliant and the best knownin Assyrian history, is the _Faites de Sargon_ of MM. OPPERT and MÉNANT(Paris: 1865). [71] The palace occupied the whole of the south-western angle of the mound. [72] MASPERO (_Histoire ancienne_, p. 431) refers us to the authors by whomthe inscription, in which these relations between the kings of Lydia andAssyria are recounted, was translated and explained. The chief of these isGeorge SMITH, who, in his _History of Assurbanipal_, has brought togetherand commented upon the different texts from which we learn the facts ofthis brilliant reign. The early death of this young scholar can never betoo much regretted. In spite of his comparative youth he added much to ourknowledge of Assyria, and, moreover, to him belongs the credit of havingrecognized the true character of the Cypriot alphabet. [73] RAWLINSON, _The Five Great Monarchies_, vol. Ii. P. 196. [74] The _Northern Palace_. [75] This library has always attracted the attention of Assyriologists, andthe best preserved of its texts have been published at various times underthe supervision of Sir Henry RAWLINSON and George SMITH. These texts havebeen translated into English, French, and German, and much discussed by thescholars of all three nations. The reader may also consult the small volumecontributed by M. J. MÉNANT to the _Bibliothèque oriental elzévirienne_under the title: _La Bibliothèque du Palais de Ninive_. 1 vol. 18mo. , 1880Ernest Leroux. [76] HERODOTUS, i. 106. [77] HERODOTUS (i. 106) alludes to this capital event only in a word ortwo, in which he promises to give a more complete account of the wholematter in another work--en heteroisi logoisi--doubtless in that _History ofAssyria_ ("Assurioi logoi" i. 184) which was either never written or soonlost. Diodorus, who gives circumstantial details both of the coalition andthe siege, dates it a century too early, changes all the names, and mixesup many fables with his recital (ii. 23-28). In forming a just idea of thecatastrophe and of its date we have to depend chiefly upon the losthistorians, such as Abydenus and Alexander Polyhistor, fragments of whoseworks have been preserved for us by Eusebius and Georgius Syncellus. SeeRAWLINSON, _The Five Great Monarchies_, etc. , vol. Ii. Pp. 221-232. [78] _Nahum_ ii. 11; iii. 1, 7. [79] LAYARD, _Nineveh and its Remains_, vol. Ii. Pp. 38-39. _Discoveries_, p. 655. [80] MASPERO, _Histoire ancienne_, p. 506. [81] STRABO, xvi. I. 5. § 6. --_The Chaldæan Religion. _ We know much less about the religion of Chaldæa than about that of Egypt. The religious monuments of Mesopotamia are much fewer than those of theNile valley, and their significance is less clear. Their series are neitherso varied nor so complete as those of the earlier civilization. Certainorders of subjects are repeated to satiety, while others, which would bemore interesting, are completely absent. It is in funerary inscriptions that the heart of man, touched by themystery of the tomb, lays bare its aspirations with the greatest franknessand simplicity. Moved by the desire to escape annihilation on the one handand posthumous sufferings on the other, it is there that he addresses hismost ardent appeals to the supreme power, and allows us to arrive at aclear understanding of his ideas as to the action, the character, and thepower of the divinity. At Memphis, Abydos, and Thebes, documents of thiskind have been found in thousands, the figures accompanying them serving ascommentaries upon their text, and helping us to clear up all doubts as totheir nature. We thus have voices speaking from the depths of everyEgyptian tomb; but the Chaldæan sepulchre is mute. It has neitherinscriptions, nor bas-reliefs, nor paintings. No Assyrian burial-place hasyet been found. Dedications, phrases of homage to this or that divinity, the names anddistinguishing epithets of the gods, all these have been met with inMesopotamia; sometimes _in situ_, as artistic decorations, sometimes inengraved fragments of unknown origin. We may say the same of the differentdivine types. Sometimes we find them in monumental sculpture, more often onthose seals which we call _cylinders_. But how obscure, incomplete, andpoor such documents are in comparison with the long pages of hieroglyphs inwhich the Pharaohs address their gods or make them speak for themselves!How infinitely inferior in expression and significance to the vast pictureswhich cover the walls of the Theban temples and bring all the persons ofthe Egyptian pantheon before us in their turn! What hope is there thatexcavations in Chaldæa and Assyria will ever provide us with such remainsas those groups of statues which fill our museums, in which the effigy of asingle god is repeated hundreds of times with every variation of type, pose, and attribute given to it by the Egyptian theosophy? On the one hand, what abundance, we may say what super-abundance; on the other, whatpoverty, what gaping breaches in the chain of material history! Among thegods and genii, whose names have come down to us, how few there are whoseimages we can surely point to; and, again, what a small number of figureswe have upon which we can put a name without fear of error! To write the history of these beliefs is a difficult task, not only becausethe _idols_, as they would once have been called, are few, and theChaldæo-Assyrian inscriptions historical and narrative rather thanreligious and dogmatic, but also because the interpretation of the texts, especially of the most ancient, is much less advanced than that of thehieroglyphs. When documents in the old language, or at least written in theprimitive ideographic characters, are attacked, the process is one ofdivination rather than of translation in the strict sense of the word. Another difficulty has to be noticed; classic literature does little ornothing to help us in filling up these voids and dissipating theobscurities they cause. The Greeks were guilty of many errors when theyattempted to understand and describe foreign religions, but their relationswith the Egyptians and Phoenicians were so prolonged, and, towards the end, so intimate, that at last they did succeed in grasping some of the doctrinetaught in the sanctuaries of Heliopolis and Thebes, of Byblos andHierapolis. With their lively intellects they could hardly frequent thetemples, examine the sacred images, and question the priests as to thenational rites and ceremonies without discovering at least a part of thetruth. It was not so with Chaldæa. Babylon was too far off. Until the timeof Alexander's conquests the boldest travellers did no more than glanceinto its streets and monumental buildings, and by that time Nineveh hadlong ceased to exist. It was only under the first of the Seleucidæ, when aMacedonian kingdom was established in the centre of Mesopotamia, that thecuriosity of the Greeks led them to make inquiries similar to those theyhad pursued for some three centuries in the valley of the Nile. We cannotdoubt that this desire for information arose among the followers of thoseprinces themselves; many of them were very intelligent men; and whenBerosus determined to write his history in Greek, he may have wished toanswer the questions asked in his hearing by the Greek writers andphilosophers; by those Alexandrians who were not all at Alexandria. Unfortunately, nearly the whole of his work has been lost. At the end of a century and a half Babylon shook off Hellenism, andMesopotamia fell into the hands of the Parthians. These people affected, insome degree, the poetry and arts of Greece, but at bottom they were nothingmore than Oriental barbarians. Their capital, Ctesiphon, seems never tohave attracted learned men, nor ever to have been a seat of those inquiriesinto the past of the older races in which the cultured cities of the Greekworld took so great a pleasure. When Rome became the heir of Greece and theperpetuator of her traditions, we may believe that, under Trajan, she setabout establishing herself in the country; but she soon found it necessaryto withdraw within the Euphrates, and it was her loss when the Parthiansfell from power to be succeeded in the lordship of Mesopotamia by theSassanids. [82] We see, then, that, with the exception of one short period, Chaldæa waswhat the Greeks called a barbarous country after the fall of its nativeroyalty, and that it will help us little in our endeavour to grasp thenature and extent of its religious beliefs. The last of the Athenianphilosophers, Damascius, has certainly left us some information as to theBabylonish deities which seems to have been taken from authenticsources. [83] This, together with a few fragments from the work of Berosus, is all that Hellenic tradition has handed down to us. There is nothing herewhich can be even remotely compared to the treatises upon Isis and Osirisand the Goddess of Syria preserved under the names of PLUTARCH and LUCIAN. But we cannot enter upon the discussion of Chaldæan art without making aneffort to describe the gist of the national religion and its principalpersonages. In every country the highest function of art is to translatethe religious conceptions of its people into visible forms. The architect, the sculptor, the painter, each in his own fashion, carries out this idea;the first by the dimensions he gives to his temples, by their plan, and bythe decoration of their walls; the second and third by their choice offeature, expression and attribute for the images in which the gods becomevisible to the people. The clearness and precision with which thisembodiment of an idea is carried out will depend upon the natural aptitudesof the race and the assistance it receives from the capabilities of thematerials at hand. Plastic creations, from their very nature, must alwaysbe inferior to the thought they are meant to express; by no means can theygo beyond it. This truth is nowhere more striking than in the art ofGreece. Fortunately we are there able to see how a single theme is treated, in the first place, in poetry, --the interpreter of the popularbeliefs, --and afterwards in art; we can discover how Phidias andPraxiteles, to speak only of sculptors, treated the types created by Homerand Hesiod. In the case of Chaldæa we have no such opportunity. She hasleft us neither monuments of sacerdotal theology like those we haveinherited in such countless numbers from Egypt, nor the brilliant imageryin which the odes and epics of the Greeks sketched the personalities ofthe gods. But even in Chaldæa art was closely united with religion, and, inspite of the difficulty of the task, the historian of art must endeavour topierce the shadows that obscure the question, and discover the bond ofunion between the two. Thanks to the more recently deciphered texts, we do know something of thereligious rites and beliefs of the oldest nation that inhabited Mesopotamiaand left its trace in history. Whether we call them Accads or Sumirs, or byboth names at once, we know that to them the whole universe was peopled bya vast crowd of spirits, some dwelling in the depths of the earth, some inthe sea, while others floated on the wind and lighted in the sky the firesof the day and night. [84] As, among men, some are good and some bad, so among these spirits some werebeneficent and others the reverse, while a third class was helpful ormischievous according as it was propitiated by offerings or irritated byneglect. The great thing was to know how to command the services of thespirits when they were required. The employment of certain gestures, sounds, and articulate words had a mysterious but irresistible effect uponthese invisible beings. How the effect was produced no one asked, but thatit was produced no one doubted. The highest of the sciences was magic, forit held the threads by which the denizens of the invisible world werecontrolled; the master of the earth was the sorcerer who could compel themto obey him by a nod, a form of words, or an incantation. We can form someidea of the practical results of such a system from what we know of themanners and social condition of those Turanian races in Asiatic Russia whoprofess what is called _chamanism_, and from the condition of most of thenegro tribes and Polynesian islanders. Among all these people, who stillremain in a mental condition from which the rest of the species has longescaped, we find the highest places occupied by priest-magicians. Now andthen popular fury makes them pay cruelly for the ill-success of theirconjurations, but as a rule their persons and the illimitable powerascribed to them inspire nothing but abject fear. Fear is, indeed, the ruling sentiment in all religions in which a belief inspirits finds a place. A man can never be sure that, in spite of all hisprecautions, he has not incurred the displeasure of such exacting andcapricious masters. Some condition of the bargain which is beingperpetually driven with protectors who give nothing for nothing, may havebeen unwittingly omitted. "The spirits and their worshippers are equallyselfish. As a general rule, the mischievous spirits receive more homagethan the good ones; those who are believed to live close at hand are moredreaded than those at a distance; those to whom some special _rôle_ isassigned are considered more important than spirits with a wider but lessdefinite authority. "[85] There were, of course, moments when men turned with gratitude towards thehidden benefactor to whom they believed themselves indebted for someunhoped-for cure or unexpected success, when joy and confidence moved theirhearts at the thought of the efficacious protection they had securedagainst future ills; but such moments were few and short. The habitualfeeling was one of disquietude, we might almost say of terror, so that whenthe imagination endeavoured to give concrete forms to the beings inquestion, it figured them rather as objects of fear than love. The dayarrived for art to attempt the material realization of the dreams whichuntil then had been dimly seen in sleep or in the still more confusedvisions of the waking hours, and for this hideous and threatening featureswere naturally chosen. It is thus that the numerous figures of demons foundin Chaldæa and Assyria, sometimes in the bas-reliefs, sometimes in theshape of small bronzes and terra-cottas, are accounted for. A human body iscrowned with the head of an angry lion, with dog's ears and a horse's mane;the hands brandish long poignards, the feet are replaced by those of a birdof prey, the extended claws seeming to grasp the soil (Fig. 6). Thegestures vary; the right arm is sometimes stretched downwards at fulllength, sometimes bent at the elbow, but the combination of forms, thecharacter of the figure and its intention is always the same. We shallencounter this type again when we come to speak of Cappadocia. [Illustration: FIG. 6. --Demons; from the palace of Assurbanipal atKouyundjik. British Museum. Drawn by Saint-Elme Gautier. ] This belief in spirits is the second phase that the primitive religion, which we studied in Egypt under the name of _fetishism_ or _animism_, hasto pass through. [86] In the beginning mere existence is confounded withlife. All things are credited with a soul like that felt by man withinhimself. Such lifeless objects as stones and mountains, trees and rivers, are worshipped; so too are both useful and noxious animals. [87] Childish asit seems to us the worship of spirits is at least an advance upon this. Itpresupposes a certain power of reflection and abstraction by which men wereled to conclude that intelligence and will are not necessarily bound upwith a body that can be seen and touched. Life has been mobilized, if wemay use such a phrase, and thus we arrive at _polydemonism_; by which wemean the theory that partitions the government of the world among a crowdof genii, who, though often at war among themselves, are always morepowerful than man, and may do him much harm unless he succeeds in winningtheir help and good will. [Illustration: FIG. 7. --Demons. Louvre. ] The worship of stars is but one form of this religious conception. Thegreat luminaries of night and day were of course invested with life andpower by men who felt themselves in such complete dependence upon them. [Illustration: FIG. 8. --Eagle-headed divinity, from Nimroud. Louvre. Alabaster. Height forty inches. Drawn by Saint-Elme Gautier. ] So far as we can judge, the primitive form of fetishism left but feebletraces in the religion of civilized Chaldæa and Assyria. The signs are fewof that worship of sacred stones which played such an important part amongthe Semites of the west, and even among the Greeks, [88] neither can we findthat either fear or gratitude ever led to the worship of animals, thedocile helpers or the redoubtable enemies of man, in the same degree as itdid in Egypt. And yet Chaldæa and Assyria followed the example of Egypt inmixing up the forms of men with those of animals in their sacred statues. This we know both from the texts and the figured monuments. But it was notonly in the budding art of a primitive population that such combinationswere employed, and it was not only the inferior genii that wererepresented in such singular fashion. When, by the development of religion, the capricious and unruly multitude of spirits had been placed under thesupremacy of a small number of superior beings, these, whom we may call thesovereign gods, were often figured with the heads of lions or eagles (seeFig. 8). Before any of these images had been found we already knew fromBerosus what the deity was like by whom the first germs of art and lettershad been sown upon the earth. "He had the whole body of a fish, but beneathhis fish's head he had another head [that of a man], while human feetappeared below his fish's tail. He had also the voice of a man, and hisimages are yet to be found. "[89] More than one sculptural type has beenfound answering to this description (see Fig. 9). [Illustration: FIG. 9. --Anou or Dagon. Nimroud. Layard, _Discoveries_, p. 350. ] Why did art, in creating divine types, give such prominence to featuresborrowed from the lower animals? Was it impelled by mere inability todistinguish, by varieties of feature, form and attitude, between thedifferent gods created by the imagination? Or must we look upon theattribution to this or that deity, of forms borrowed from the bull, thelion, or the eagle, as a deliberate act of symbolism, meant to suggest thatthe gods in question had the qualities of the animals of which theirpersons were partly made up? In order to arrive at a just conclusion wemust, of course, take account both of the resistance of the material and ofthe facilities which a transparent system of allegory would give to theartist in the working out of his thought; we must also admit perhaps thatthe national intelligence had been prepared to look for and admire suchcombinations. It may have been predisposed towards them by the habits ofadmiration for the patient strength of the draught-ox and the destructivevigour of the eagle and the lion contracted during a long series of years. Both historical analogy and the examination of sculptured types lead us tothink that the tribes of Mesopotamia passed through the same religiousphases as those of the Nile valley, but it would appear that the mostprimitive beliefs were less long-lived in Chaldæa than in Egypt, and thatthey were engraved less deeply upon the heart of the nation. The belief in sorcery never died out in Chaldæa; up to the very last daysof antiquity it never lost its empire at least over the lower orders of thepeople. As time passed on the priests joined the practice of astrology tothat of magic. How the transition took place may readily be understood. Themagician began by seeking for incantations sufficiently powerful to compelnot only the vulgar crowd of genii to obedience, but also those who, in theshape of stars great and small, inhabited the celestial spaces and revealedthemselves to man by the brilliance of their fires. Supposing him to bewell skilled in his art his success would be beyond doubt so far as hisclients were concerned. Many centuries after the birth of this singular delusion even the Greeksand Romans did not refuse to believe that magic formulæ had sometimes thepowers claimed for them. "Incantation, " cries an abandoned lover in Virgil, "may bring down the very moon from the sky:" "_Carmina vel cælo possunt deducere lunam. _"[90] Although simple minds allowed themselves to believe that such prodigieswere not quite impossible, skilled men could not have failed to see that inspite of the appeals addressed to them by priests and magicians, neithersun nor moon had ever quitted their place in the firmament or interruptedtheir daily course. As the hope of influencing the action of the stars diedaway, the wish to study their motions grew stronger. In the glorious nightsof Chaldæa the splendour of the sky stirred the curiosity as well as theadmiration of mankind, and the purity of the air made observation easy. Here and there, in the more thickly inhabited and best irrigated parts ofthe plain, gentle mists floated over the earth at certain periods, but theywere no real hindrance to observation. To escape them but a slightelevation above the plain was required. Let the observer raise himself afew feet above the tallest palm trees, and no cloud interposed to preventhis eyes from travelling from the fires that blazed in the zenith to thepaler stars that lay clustered upon the horizon. There were no accidents ofthe ground by which the astronomer could lift himself above the smoke ofcities or the mists hanging over the lakes and canals, and to make up fortheir absence the massive and many-storied towers which men began toconstruct as soon as they understood how to make bricks and set them, mustsoon have come into use. These towers were built upon artificial moundswhich were in themselves higher than the highest house or palm. Theplatforms on their summits gave therefore the most favourable conditionspossible for the interrogation of the heavens before the invention of thetelescope. [91] Thanks to the climate and to these great observatories which rose veryearly in Chaldæan history all over the plain, the skies could be read likean open book; and the Chaldæans were fond of such reading, because itafforded them, as they thought, a sure means of predicting the future. Theyhad no great belief in the power of their most formidable conjurations toaffect the majestic regularity of the heavenly movements--a regularitywhich must have impressed each generation more strongly than the last, asit compared its own experience with the registered observations of thosethat had gone before it. But they could not persuade themselves that thepowerful genii who guided those great bodies on their unending voyage couldbe indifferent to the destinies of man, and that there was no bond ofunion, no mysterious connection, between him and them. They pretended todiscover this hidden bond. When a child uttered its first cry, an intimaterelation, they declared, was established between the new life and some oneof the countless bodies that people space. The impassive star, they said, governed the life and fortune of the mortal who, perhaps, ignorantly lookedupon himself as his own master and the master of some of those about him. The future of each man was decided by the character of the star thatpresided at his birth, and according to the position occupied by it in thesky at the time of any important action of his life, that action would befortunate in its issue or the reverse. [92] These statements contain thegerm of all the future developments of astrology. Among all civilizedpeoples this imaginary science has at last fallen from its former repute. From the remotest antiquity down to the end of the sixteenth century, and, in some places, to a much later date, it enjoyed a rare power and prestige. Traces of these are yet to be found in more than one familiar expressionrecalling the beliefs and ideas that took shape in the plains ofMesopotamia long before the palaces of Babylon and Nineveh were raised uponthe banks of its two great rivers. Astrology could not fail to smooth the way for astronomy, its successor. Inorder to profit by the indications of the stars, it was necessary toforesee the positions they would occupy in the sky on a given day or hour. There are many undertakings which succeed only when they are carefullymatured. If some great risk is to be run, it is not of much use to receivethe advice and warnings of the stars at the last moment, when the decisivestep has, perhaps, been made, and no retreat is possible. It would then betoo late to think about the chances of success, and a sudden withdrawalfrom an action already begun or an equally sudden acceptance of a task forwhich no sufficient preparation had been made, would be the too frequentresult. There was only one mode of escaping such a danger or embarrassment as this, and that was, first, to arrive by repeated observation at an exactknowledge of the route followed by the stars across the sky, and of therapidity of their march; secondly, to distinguish them one from another, toknow each by its own name, to recognize its physiognomy, character, andhabits. The first duty of the astrologer was to prepare such an inventory, and to discover the principle of these movements; then, and then only, would he be in a position to give a satisfactory answer to one asking whereany particular star would be at the end of any specified number of days, weeks, or months. Thanks to such information, his client could fix uponsome happy conjunction of the heavenly bodies, or at least avoid a momentwhen their influence would be on the side of disaster. In every undertakingof any importance the most favourable hour could be selected long before bythe person chiefly concerned, the hour in which his star would be in thebest quarter of the sky and in the most propitious relations with itsneighbours. The phenomena produced in Chaldæa by these studies have been repeated morethan once in the history of civilization; they embody one of thosesurprises to which humanity owes much of its progress. The final object ofall this patient research was never reached, because the relations uponwhich a belief in its feasibility was based were absolutely chimerical, butas a compensation, the accessory and preliminary knowledge, the mere meansto a futile end, have been of incalculable value. Thus, in order to give animposing and apparently solid basis to their astrological doctrines, theChaldæans invented such a numeration as would permit really intricatecomputations to be made. By the aid of this system they sketched out allthe great theories of astronomy at a very early age. In the course of a fewcenturies, they carried that science to a point never reached by theEgyptians. [93] The chief difficulty in the way of a complete explanation of the Chaldæansystem of arithmetic lies in the interpretation of the symbols which servedit for ciphers, which is all the greater as it would seem that they hadseveral different ways of writing a single number. In some cases thenotation varied according to the purpose of the calculation. Amathematician used one system for his own studies, and another fordocuments which had to be read by the public. The doubts attending thequestion are gradually being resolved, however, by the combined efforts ofAssyriologists and mathematicians. At the beginning of their civilizationthe Chaldæans did as other peoples have done when they have becomedissatisfied with that mere rough opposition of unity to plurality which isenough for savage races, and have attempted to establish the series ofnumbers and to define their properties. "They also began by counting ontheir fingers, by _fives_ and _tens_, or in other words by units of _five_;later on they adopted a notation by _sixes_ and _twelves_ as an improvementupon the primitive system, in which the chief element, the _ten_, could bedivided neither into three nor four equal parts. "[94] Two regular serieswere thus formed, one in units of six, the other in units of five. Theircommonest terms were, of course, those that occur in both series. We knowfrom the Greek writers that the Chaldæans counted time by _sosses_ ofsixty, by _ners_ of 600, and by _sars_ of 3, 600, years, and these termswere not reserved for time, they were employed for all kinds of quantities. The _sosse_ could be looked at either as _five twelves_ or _six tens_. So, too, with the _ner_ (600) which represents _six hundreds_, or a _sosse_ of_tens_, or _ten sosses_ or _fifty twelves_. The _sar_ may be analysed in asimilar fashion. A system of numeration was thus established which may be looked at from adouble point of view; in the first place from its _sexagesimal_ base, whichcertainly adapts itself to various requirements with greater ease than anyother;[95] in the second from the extreme facility with which not onlyaddition, but all kinds of complex calculations may be made by its use. [96] With but two symbols, one for the units, the other for the tens, everynumber could be expressed by attending to a rule of position like thatgoverning our written numeration; at each step to the left, a single sign, the vertical _wedge_, increased sixty-fold in value; the tens were placedbeside it, and a blank in this or that column answered to our zero. Founded upon a sexagesimal numeration, the metrical system of Babylon andNineveh was "the most scientific of all those known and practised by theancients: until the elaboration of the French metrical system, it was theonly one whose every part was scientifically co-ordinated, and of which thefundamental conception was the natural development of all measures ofsuperficies, of capacity, or of weight, from one single unit of length, aconception which was adopted as a starting point by the French commissionof weights and measures. " The cubit of 525 millimetres was the base of the whole system. [97] We shallnot here attempt to explain how the other measures--itinerary, agrarian, ofcapacity, of weight--were derived from the cubit; to call attention to thetraces left in our nomenclature by the duodecimal or sexagesimal system ofthe Babylonians, even after the complete triumph of the decimal system, issufficient for our purposes. It is used for instance in the division of thecircle into degrees, minutes, and seconds, in the division of the year intomonths, and of the day into hours and their fractions. This convenient, exact, and highly developed system of arithmetic andmetrology enabled the Chaldæans to make good use of their observations, andto extract from them a connected astronomical doctrine. They began byregistering the phenomena. They laid out a map of the heavens andrecognized the difference between fixed stars and those movable bodies theGreeks called planets--among the latter they naturally included the sun andthe moon, the most conspicuous of them all both in size and motion, whosecourses were the first to be studied and described. The apparent march ofthe sun through the crowded ranks of the celestial army was defined, andits successive stages marked by those twelve constellations which are stillcalled the _Signs of the Zodiac_. In time even these observations wereexcelled, and it now appears certain that the Chaldæans recognized theannual displacement of the equinoctial point upon the ecliptic, a discoverythat is generally attributed to the Greek astronomers. But, likeHipparchus, they made faults of calculation in consequence of the defectsof their instruments. [98] It was the same with the moon. They succeeded in determining its mean dailymovements, and when they had established a period of two hundred andtwenty-three lunations, they contrived to foretell its eclipses. Eclipsesof the sun presented greater difficulties, and the Chaldæans were contentwith noting their occurrence. They were acquainted with the solar year ofthree hundred and sixty-five days and a quarter; they used it in theirastronomical calculations; but their religious and civil year was onecomposed of twelve lunar months, alternately full and short, that is, oftwenty-nine and thirty days respectively. The lunar and solar years werebrought into agreement by an intercalary cycle of eight years. [99] The assertion of the philosopher Simplicius has been called in question forvery plausible reasons. Simplicius declares, upon the faith of Porphyrius, that Callisthenes sent from Babylon to his uncle Aristotle, a copy ofChaldæan observations dating back as far as 1903 years before the entry ofAlexander into Mesopotamia, that is, to more than twenty-two centuriesbefore our era. [100] However this may be, all ancient writers are agreed in admitting that theChaldæans had begun to observe and record astronomical phenomena longbefore the Egyptians;[101] moreover the remains of those clay tablets havebeen found in various parts of Chaldæa and Assyria upon which, as Plinytells us upon the authority of the Greek astronomer Epigenes, the Chaldæanshad inscribed and preserved the astronomical observations of seven hundredand eighty thousand years. [102] We need not dwell upon the enormity of thisfigure; it matters little whether it is due to the mistakes of a copyist orto the vanity of the Chaldæans, and the too ready credulity of the Greeks;the important point is the existence of the astronomical tablets, andthose Epigenes himself saw. The library of Assurbanipal at Nineveh includedcatalogues of stellary and planetary observations, among others the timesof Venus, Jupiter and Mars, and the phases of the moon, for every day inthe month. [103] Tablets have also been recently discovered giving thearrangement of the stars in the sky for each season and explaining the ruleto be followed in the insertion of the intercalary months. Finally, afragment of an Assyrian planisphere has been found in the palace ofSennacherib. [104] Even if classic authors had been silent on the subject, and all theoriginal documents had disappeared, we might have divined from theappearance of the figured monuments alone, how greatly the Chaldæanshonoured the stars and how much study and research they devoted to them; wemight have guessed that they lived with their eyes fixed upon the firmamentand upon the sources of light. Look at the steles that bear royal effigies, at the representations upon contracts and other documents of that kind (seeFig. 10), at the cylindrical or conical seals which have gravitated inthousands into our museums (Figs. 11 and 12); you will see a personageadoring a star, still oftener you will find the sun's disk and the crescentmoon figured upon the field, with, perhaps, one or several stars. Theseimages are only omitted upon reliefs that are purely narrative andhistorical, like most of those in the Assyrian palaces. Everywhere else, upon every object and in every scene having a religious and sacredcharacter, a place is reserved for the symbols in question, if we may callthem so. Their presence is evidence of the homage rendered by the Chaldæansto the stars, and of the faith they placed in their supposed revelations. Further evidence to the same effect is given by the ancient writing, inwhich the ideogram for _king_ was a star. "The imaginations of the Egyptians were mainly impressed by the daily andannual circlings of the sun. In that body they saw the most imposingmanifestation of the Deity and the clearest exemplification of the lawsthat govern the world; to it, therefore they turned for theirpersonifications of the divine power. "[105] The attention of the Chaldæans, on the other hand, was not so absorbed, and, so to speak, lost, in thecontemplation of a single star, superior though it was to all others inits power for good or ill, and in its incomparable splendour. They watchedthe sky with a curiosity too lively and too intelligent to permit of awilling sacrifice of all the stars to one. _Samas_, the sun, and _Sin_, themoon-god, played an important _rôle_ in their religion and theology, but itdoes not appear that the gods of the other five planets were inferior tothem in rank. If we accept the parallels established by the Greeks andRomans, these were _Adar_ (Saturn), _Merodach_ (Jupiter), _Nergal_ (Mars), _Istar_ (Venus), and _Nebo_ (Mercury). [Illustration: FIG. 10. --Stone of Merodach-Baladan I. (Smith's _AssyrianDiscoveries_). ] The chief atmospheric phenomena were also personified; of this we may giveone example. All travellers in Chaldæa agree in their descriptions of thosesudden storms which burst on the country from a clear sky, especiallytowards the commencement of summer. Without a single premonitory symptom, ahuge, black water-spout advances from some point on the horizon, its flanksshooting lightnings and thunder. In a few minutes it reaches the travellerand wraps him in its black vapours; the sand-laden wind blinds him, therain pours upon him in solid sheets; but he has hardly realized hisposition before the storm is past and the sun is again shining in the bluedepths above. But for torn and overthrown tents and trees uprooted orstruck by the electric fluid, a stranger to the country might almostbelieve himself to have been the sport of a dream. [106] [Illustration: FIG. 11. --Assyrian Cylinder, in the National Library, Paris. Jasper. ] [Illustration: FIG. 12. --Assyrian Cylinder, in the National Library, Paris. Serpentine. ] The force and suddenness of these visitations could hardly fail to impressthe imagination of a people exposed to them, and it is not surprising thatMesopotamia had its god of storms and thunder. He, Raman, it is, perhaps, who is figured in the bas-relief from Nimroud reproduced below (Figs. 13and 14), [107] in which a god appears bearing an axe in his right hand, and, in his left, a kind of faggot, whose significance might have escaped us butfor the light thrown upon it by classic sculpture. The latter no doubtborrowed a well-known form from the east, and the object in question isnothing less than the thunderbolt given by Greek artists to their Zeus. [Illustration: FIG. 13. --Gods carried in procession; from Layard's_Monuments of Nineveh_, first series, pl. 65. ] It was this adoration of the stars and planets that led by degrees to whatwe call polytheism. Man partitioned those terrible powers of nature ofwhich he felt himself the sport, between a vast number of agents, betweencrowds of genii upon whose mercies he thought himself dependent, and whomhe did his best to propitiate by gifts and to compel by magic. Little bylittle, intelligence perfected that work of abstraction and simplificationby which all races but those who have stuck fast in the conceptions oftheir infancy have arrived at a single conclusion. Without ceasing tobelieve in the existence of genii, they invented the gods, a race of beingsfar more powerful, not only than short-lived man, but even than theconfused army of demons, of those beings who enjoyed the control of not afew of the mysterious agencies whose apparent conflict and final accord arethe causes of the life, movement, and equilibrium of the world. [Illustration: FIG. 14. --Gods carried in procession; from Layard's_Monuments of Nineveh_, first series, pl. 65. ] When the intellect had arrived at this doctrine, calmness and serenity fellupon it. Each deity became a person with certain well-defined powers andattributes, a person who could not escape the apprehension and the appealsof mankind with the facility of the changing and fantastic crowd of demons. His dwelling-place could be pointed out to the faithful, whether it were inhis own peculiar star, among the eternal snows upon the summits of thedistant mountains, or near at hand, in the temple built for him by hisworshippers. Such a deity could be approached like a sovereign whose honourand interest are bound up with his word. So long as by prayer, and stillmore by sacrifices, the conditions were observed on the suppliant's side, the god, invisible though he was, would do his duty and protect those withwhom he had entered into an unwritten contract. But in order to establish this mutual relationship between gods and men, itwas necessary that the former should be brought within reach of thelatter. With the development of the religious sentiment and of definite andclear ideas as to the gods, the plastic faculty was called upon for greaterefforts than it had before made. Something beside grimacing and monstrous images of genii was asked from it. Figures were demanded which should embody something of the nobility andmajesty attributed to the eternal masters of the world. The divine effigywas the incarnation of the deity, was one of the forms in which hemanifested himself, it was, as the Egyptians would say, one of his_doubles_. Such an effigy was required to afford a worthy frame for thesupreme dignity of the god, and the house built by man's hands in which hecondescended to dwell had to be such that its superior magnificence shoulddistinguish it at a glance from the comparatively humble dwellings in whichmortals passed their short and fugitive lives. It was thus that the temples and statues of the gods took form when thevarious deities began to be clearly distinguished from one another, and, bya process of mental condensation, to acquire a certain amount ofconsistence and solidity. The Chaldæan temples, unlike those of Egypt andGreece, have succumbed to time, and the ancient texts in which they aredescribed are short and obscure. Their ruins are little more than shapelessheaps of _débris_. In endeavouring to arrive at a clear understanding ofthe Chaldæan notions as to the gods, we are unable to study, as we didelsewhere, the forms of their religious edifices, with their plans, dimensions, and the instructive variety of decorative symbols and figureswith which the sanctuary and its dependencies were overspread. On the other hand a sufficient number of figures of the gods have come downto us. They abound upon small objects, such as cylinders, engraved stones, cones, scarabæi, the bezels of rings, terra-cotta tablets and statuettes. They are also found, though less frequently, among the _débris_ ofmonumental sculpture, in the bas-reliefs of the Ninevite palaces, and evenamong certain figures in the round which have been recovered from the ruinsof these latter buildings. We can therefore easily find out the particularattributes given by the artist as the interpreter of the national beliefsto those gods whose visible bodies it was his office to create; we can seewhat choice and combination of forms he thought best fitted to solve theproblem presented to him. But as yet we are not in a position to put aname to each even of the figures that recur most frequently. In the case ofEgypt there is no such difficulty: when we encounter the image of one ofher gods upon the walls of a temple or in the cases of a museum, we can saywithout hesitation, "This is Osiris or Ptah, " as the case may be, "Amen orHorus, Isis, Sekhet, or Hathor. " It is not so with Chaldæa. Figures arethere often found uninscribed, and even when an inscription is present itnot seldom offers difficulties of interpretation which have not yet beencleared up; for the divine names are usually ideograms. Only a few havebeen identified beyond all doubt, those namely of which we have Hebrew orGreek transcriptions, preserving for us the real Chaldæan original; Ilou, Bel, Nisroch, Beltis, Istar, are examples of this. Hence it results thatAssyriologists often feel no little embarrassment when they are asked topoint out upon the monuments the figures even of those gods of whose namesthey are the least doubtful. The Assyrians and Chaldæans, like othernations of antiquity, had what we should now call their _figuredmythology_, but we are still imperfectly acquainted with it. Even for thosewhom we may call the most exalted personages of the Chaldæan Olympus, scholars have hardly succeeded in illustrating the texts by the monumentsand explaining the monuments by the texts; and we are yet far from beingable to institute a perpetual and standard comparison as we have done inthe case of Egypt and still more in that of Greece, between the divinetypes as they appear in religious formulæ and in the national poetry, andthe same types when embodied by the imagination of the artist. A long time may elapse before a mythological gallery for Chaldæa, in whichall the important members of the Mesopotamian pantheon shall take theirplaces and be known by the names they bore in their own day, can be formed, but even now the principles upon which they were represented by art may bestated. The images of the various gods were built up in great part by theaid of combinations similar to those made use of in realizing the minordemons. A natural bent towards such a method of interpretation was perhapsinherited from the days in which the _naïve_ adoration of all those animalswhich help or hurt mankind formed a part of the national worship; again, certain animals were, by their shapes and constitution, better fitted thanothers to personify this or that quality which, in its fulness, wasconsidered divine. It was natural, therefore, that the artist should, inthose early days, have indicated the powers of a deity by forms borrowedfrom the strongest, the most beautiful, or the most formidable of animals. Nothing could suggest the instantaneous swiftness of a god better than thespreading wings of an eagle or vulture, or his destructive and irresistiblepower better than their beaks and talons, the horns and dewlap of the bull, or the mane and claws of the lion. The sculptor had, therefore, a good reason for employing these forms andmany others offered to him by the fauna of the regions he inhabited. Heintroduced them into his work with skill and decision, and obtainedcomposite types by their aid which we may compare to those of Egypt. Butthere were some differences which deserve to be remembered. The human facereceived more consideration from the Mesopotamian sculptors than from thoseof Egypt. Except in the sphinxes and in two or three less important typesthe Egyptians, as our readers will remember, crowned a human body with thehead of a snake, a lion, or a crocodile, an ibis or a hawk, and sometimesof a clumsy beast like the hippopotamus, [108] and their figures aredominated and characterized by the heads thus given to them. At Babylon andNineveh the case is reversed. Animals' heads are only found, as a rule, upon the shoulders of those figures which are looked upon by common consentas genii rather than gods. In the latter a contrary arrangement prevails. They may have, like Dagon, a fish's tail hanging down their backs, or, likethe colossal guardians of the king's palace, the body and limbs of a lionor bull with the wings of an eagle, but the head is that of a man and thesculptor has given it all the beauty he could compass. To this, we believe, there is but one exception--the eagle-headed god to whom Assyriologistshave assigned the name of Nisroch. He seems to have occupied a high placeamong the Mesopotamian divinities (Fig. 8). But the difference between the two systems does not end here. There are afew deities, such as Ptah, Osiris, and Amen, to whom the Egyptians gave ahuman form in its simple entirety; but even in such cases it was notreproduced in its native elegance and nobility. The extremities of Ptah andOsiris were enveloped in a kind of sheath, which made their figures lookmore like mummies than beings with the power of life and motion. It wasnot so in Chaldæa, as we shall see if we examine the procedure of theMesopotamian artist when he had to figure the greater gods, those in whomthe highest efforts of mental abstraction found concrete expression. Take, for instance, Nebo, the god of intelligence and prophecy, and Istar, thepersonification of the earth's fertility, of its power of creation anddestruction and its inexhaustible energy. Nebo stands upright, his headcovered with a horned tiara: his ample beard is gathered into three rows ofclose curls: he wears a long robe falling straight to the ground (Fig. 16). As for Istar, she is a young woman, nude, large-hipped, and pressing herbreasts with her hands (Fig. 15). The awkwardness and rudeness which tosome extent characterizes these figures is due to the inexperience of theartist; his intentions were good, but his skill was hardly equal to givingthem full effect. His Nebo was meant to be as majestic as a king or highpriest; his Istar is the spouse, the mother, the nurse; she is the goddess"who, " as the inscriptions say, [109] "rejoices mankind, " who, whenfertilized by love, assures the duration and perpetuity of the species. Itwas this method of interpretation that was in later years to lead to thosegreat creations of Greek art whose beauty is still the wonder of mankind. Between these Chaldæan figures and those of the Greek sculptors thedifference was one of degree. The anthropomorphism of the Chaldees wasfranker than that of the Egyptians, and so far the art of Chaldæa was anadvance upon that of Egypt, although it was excelled by the latter inexecutive qualities. The method to which it had committed itself, thediligent and passionate study of the human figure, was the royal road toall excellence in the plastic arts. [Illustration: FIG. 15. --Statue of Nebo; from Nimroud. British Museum. Calcareous stone. Height 6 feet 5 inches. ] But our present business is to discover this people's real conceptions ofits gods and to get a clear idea of their characteristic qualities. Weshall not attempt, therefore, to show how most of them belonged to one ofthose divine triads which are to be found, it is believed, in Chaldæa aswell as in Egypt: we shall not ask how these triads were subordinated, first, one to another, and secondly, to a single supreme being, who, inMesopotamia as elsewhere, was in time perceived more or less clearly andplaced at the head of the divine hierarchy. These triads are nearlyalways found in polytheistic religions, and that for sufficientlyobvious reasons. [Illustration: FIG. 16. --Terra-cotta Statuette; from Heuzey's _Figurinesantiques du Musée du Louvre_. ] The most simple relationship offered by the organic world to the mind ofman is the relationship of the sexes, their contrast, and the necessity fortheir union. Wherever religious conceptions spring up gods and goddessesare created together. All the forces divined by human intelligence aredoubled into two persons, closely united, the one the complement of theother. The one has the active, the other the passive _rôle_. Egypt, Chaldæa, Greece, all had these divine couples; Apsou, or, as Damasciuscalls him, Apason and Tauthé; Anou and Antou, the Anaïtis of the Greekwriters; Bel and Belit, or Beltu, perhaps the Greek Mylitta; Samas, thesun, and Allat, the queen of the dead; Merodach (or Marduk) and Zarpanit, agoddess mother who protected unborn infants and presided at births; Nabouand Nana; Assur and Istar; Dumouzi and Istar. Precise details as to thestatus of these divinities are still wanting. Several among them seem tohave been at one time endowed with a distinct individuality, and at otherperiods to have been almost indistinguishable from some other deity. Theywere without the distinct features and attributes of the inhabitants ofOlympus, but we are left in no doubt as to the binary divisions of which wehave been speaking. The attraction of desire and the union of the sexes leads to the birth ofthe child; with the appearance of the latter the family is complete, and, with it, the type upon which the triple classification of the gods wasfounded. But even when we attempt to trace the composition of a singlegroup and to assign his proper place to each of its members, theembarrassment is great. We find a single god sometimes filling, to allappearance, the _rôle_ of husband and father, and sometimes that of theson; or a single goddess acting at different times as the wife and daughterof one and the same god. Some of these apparent contradictions must bereferred to the want of certainty in our interpretation of theinscriptions, some to the floating quality of the conceptions to which theyrelate. It may never, perhaps, be possible to make out a complete list, orone which shall not be obnoxious to criticism on other grounds; moreover, the historian of art has no need to enter into any such discussion, or togive the details of a nomenclature as to which Assyriologists themselveshave many doubts. It suffices that he should point out the multiplicity ofcouples and triads, the extreme diversity of deities, and thus indicate areason for the very peculiar aspect of the cylinders and engraved stones ofChaldæa, for the complex forms of the gods, and for the multitude of variedsymbols which encumber the fields of her sculptured reliefs. Some of thefigures that crowd these narrow surfaces are so fantastic that theyastonish the eye as much as they pique the curiosity (see Fig. 17). [Illustration: FIG. 17. --A Chaldæan Cylinder: from Ménant's _La Bible etles Cylindres Chaldéens_. ] The number of divine types and the consequent difficulties ofclassification are increased, as in Egypt, by the fact that every importanttown had its local deities, deities who were its own peculiar gods. In thecourse of so many centuries and so many successive displacements of thepolitical centre of gravity, the order of precedence of the Mesopotamiangods was often changed. The dominant city promoted its own gods over theheads of their fellows and modified for a time which might be long orshort, the comparative importance of the Chaldæan divinities. Sin, the moongod, headed the list during the supremacy of Ur, Samas during that ofLarsam. With the rise of Assyria its national god, Assur, doubtless asupreme god of the heavens, acquired an uncontested pre-eminence. It was inhis name that the Assyrians subdued all Asia and shed such torrents ofblood. Their wars were the wars of Assur; they were undertaken to extendhis empire and to glorify his name. Hence the extreme rigour, the hideouscruelty, of the punishments inflicted by the king on his rebellioussubjects; he was punishing heretics and apostates. [110] In the religious effusions of Mesopotamia, we sometimes find an accent ofexalted piety recalling the tone of the Hebrew scriptures; but it does notappear that the monotheistic idea towards which they were ever tending, butwithout actually reaching it and becoming penetrated by its truth, had everacquired sufficient consistence to stimulate the Chaldæan artist to thecreation of a type superior in beauty and nobility to those of gods in thesecond rank. The fact that the idea did exist is to be inferred from theuse of certain terms rather than from any mention of it in theologicalforms or embodiment in the plastic arts. At Nineveh, Assur was certainly looked upon as the greatest of the gods, ifnot as the only god. Idols captured from conquered nations were sometimesrestored to their worshippers, but not before they had been engraved withthe words, "_To the glory of Assur_. " Assur was always placed at the headof the divine lists. He is thought to be descended from Anou or Sin: but hewas raised to such a height by his adoption as the national deity, that itbecame impossible to trace in him the distinguishing characteristics of hisprimary condition as a god of nature; he became, like the Jehovah of theIsraelites, a god superior to nature. His attributes were of a very generalkind, and were all more or less derived from his dignity as chief leaderand father, as master of legions and as president in the assemblies of thegods. He was regarded as the supreme arbiter, as the granter of victory andof the spoils of victory, as the god of justice, as the terror of evildoers and the protector of the just. The great god of the Assyrians was, ofcourse, the god of battles, the director of armies, and in that capacity, the spouse of Istar, who was no less warlike than himself. His name wasoften used, in the plural, to signify the gods in general, as that of Istarwas used for the goddesses. No myth has come down to us in which he playsthe principal part, a fact which is to be accounted for by hiscomparatively late arrival at a position of abstract supremacy. [111] In the Babylon of the second Chaldee empire there was, it would seem, adouble embodiment of the divine superiority, in Merodach, the warrior god, the god of royalty, and Nebo the god of science and inspiration. In Chaldæathe power of the priests and learned men did not yield before that of themonarch. And yet a certain latent and instinctive monotheism may be tracedin its complex religion. There were, indeed, many gods, but one was raisedabove all the others, and, whether they turned to Merodach or Nebo, thekings loved to style themselves the worshippers of the "Lord of Lords, "_Bel Beli_. [112] Like Assur at Nineveh, this supreme deity was sometimes called, byabbreviation, _Ilou_, or god, a term which was employed, with slightvariants, by every nation speaking a Semitic tongue. [113] But in spite of their aspirations and the august _rôle_ assigned to theirMerodach, their Nebo, and their Assur, Chaldæa and Assyria succeeded nobetter than Egypt in giving a fit embodiment to the sovereign moderator ofthe universe, to the king and common parent of gods and men. Their art waswithout the skill and power required for the creation of an image whichshould be worthy of the mental idea. Neither the temples of Nineveh northose of Babylon had an Olympian Jove. Assur came nearer to the acquisition of a supreme and unique godhead thanany of his rivals, but we do not know with any certainty what features werehis in plastic representations. Some have recognized him in a group whichoften occurs on the historic bas-reliefs and cylinders, here floating overa field of battle, there introduced into some scene of adoration. You areat once struck by the similarity of the group in question to one of thecommonest of Egyptian symbols--the winged globe on the cornice of almostevery temple in the Nile valley. Long before they had penetrated asconquerors to Thebes and Memphis, the Assyrians may have found this motiverepeated a thousand times upon the ivories, the jewels, the various objectsof luxury which Phoenician merchants carried from the ports of the Delta todistribute over every neighbouring country. [114] [Illustration: FIG. 18. --The winged globe; from Layard. ] The Assyrians appropriated the emblem in question, sometimes with hardly amodification upon its Egyptian form (Fig. 18), but more often with analteration of some significance. In the centre of the symbol and betweenthe outspread wings, appears a ring, and, within it, the figure of a mandraped in flowing robes and covered with a tiara. He is upright, in somecases his right hand is raised as if in prayer, while his left grasps astrong bow (Fig. 19); in others he is stretching his bow and about tolaunch a triple-headed arrow, which can be nothing but a thunderbolt. [Illustration: FIG. 19. --The winged globe with human figure; from Layard. ] The meaning attached to this plastic group by the Assyrians is made clearto us by the important place it held in the religious imagery of the Aryansof Media and Persia. These people, the last born of the ancient Asiaticworld, borrowed nearly the whole of their artistic motives from theirpredecessors; they only modified their significance when the differencebetween their religious notions and those of the inventors required it. Now, we find this symbol upon the rocks of Behistan and Persepolis, where, according to texts the meaning of which is beyond a doubt, it representsAhura-Mazda. The name has changed, but we may fairly conclude that the ideaand intention remained the same. Both in Mesopotamia and in Iran this groupwas meant to embody the notion of a supreme being, the master of theuniverse, the clement and faithful protector of the chosen race by whom hisimages were multiplied to infinity. * * * * * In this rapid analysis of the beliefs held by the dwellers on the Tigrisand Euphrates, we have made no attempt to discriminate between Chaldæa andAssyria. To one who looks rather to similarities than to differences, thetwo peoples, brothers in blood and language, had, in fact, but one religionbetween them. We possess several lists of the Assyrian gods and goddesses, and when we compare them we find that they differ one from the other bothin the names and numbers of the deities inscribed upon them; but, with theexception of Assur, they contain no name which does not also belong toChaldæa. Nothing could be more natural. Chaldæa was the mother-country ofthe Assyrians, and the intimate relations between the two never ceased fora day. Even when their enmity was most embittered they could not dispensethe one with the other. Babylon was always a kind of holy city for thekings of Assyria; those among them who chastised the rebellious Chaldæanswith the greatest severity, made it a point of honour to sacrifice to theirgods and to keep their temples in repair. It was in Babylon, at Borsippa, and in the old cities near the coast, that the priests chiefly dwelt bywhom the early myths had been preserved and the doctrines elaborated towhich the inhabitants of Mesopotamia owed the superiority of theircivilization. The Assyrians invented nothing. Assur himself seems only tohave been a secondary form of some Chaldæan divinity, a parvenu carried tothe highest place by the energy and good fortune of the warlike peoplewhose patron he was, and maintained there until the final destruction oftheir capital city. When Nineveh fell, Assur fell with her, while thosegods who were worshipped in common by the people of the north and those ofthe south long preserved their names, their fame, and the sanctity oftheir altars. The religion of Nineveh differed from that of Babylon, however, in minorparticulars, to which attention has already been called. [115] A singlesystem of theology is differently understood by men whose manner andintellectual bent are distinct. Rites seem to have been more voluptuous andsensual at Babylon than at Nineveh; it was at the former city thatHerodotus saw those religious prostitutions that astonished him by theirimmorality. [116] The Assyrian tendency to monotheism provoked a kind offanaticism of which no trace is to be found in Chaldæa. The Nineviteconquerors set themselves to extend the worship of their great nationalgod; they sacrificed by hecatombs the presumptuous enemies who blasphemedthe name of Assur. The sacrifice of chastity was in favour at Babylon, thatof life seemed to the Assyrians a more effectual offering. A soldierpeople, they were hardened by the strife of centuries, by the perpetualhardships of the battlefield, by the never-ending conflicts in which theytook delight. Their religious conceptions were, therefore, narrower andmore stern, their rites more cruel than those of their southern neighbours. The civilization of Babylon was more refined, men gave themselves moreleisure for thought and enjoyment; their manners were less rude, theirideas less rigid and conservative; they were more inclined towardsintellectual analysis and speculation. So that when we find traces of thebeliefs and useful arts of Mesopotamia on the coasts, and even among theisles, of the Ægæan, the honour of them must be given to Babylon ratherthan to Nineveh. NOTES: [82] The _History of the Assyrians and Medes_, which EUSEBIUS (_Préparationévangélique_, 1, 12, and 41) attributes to the writer whom he callsABYDENUS, dates perhaps from the period when the Roman Empire turned itsattention to the basin of the Euphrates and attempted to regain possessionof it. The few extant fragments of this author have been collected in Ch. MÜLLER'S _Fragmenta Historicorum Græcorum_, vol. Iv. P. 279. We knownothing as to when he lived, but he wrote in the Ionian dialect, as didARRIAN in his book on India, and it would seem difficult to put him laterthan the second century. It is probable that his undertaking belonged tothat movement towards research which began in the reign of Augustus and wasprolonged to the last years of the Antonines. [83] Damaskiou diadochou aporiai kai luseis peri tôn prôtôn archôn (editionpublished by Kopp, Frankfort-on-the-Main, 1826, 8vo), ch. 125. Ch. ÉmileRUELLE, _Le Philosophe Damascius; Étude sur sa Vie et ses Ouvrages, suiviede neuf Morceaux inédits, Extraits du Traité des premiers Principes ettraduits en Latin_ (in the _Revue archéologique_, 1861), fragments i. Andix. [84] On this subject the reader should consult M. Fr. LENORMANT'S _La Magiechez les Chaldéens et les Origines Accadiennes_, Paris: 1874, 8vo. TheEnglish translation, dated 1877, or, still better, the German versionpublished at Jena in 1878 (_Die Magie und Wahrsagekunst der Chaldæer_, 8vo), will be found more useful than the French original. Both are, infact, new editions, with fresh information. [85] TIELE, _Manuel de l'Histoire des Religions_ (Leroux, 1880, 8vo). Inour explanation of the Chaldæo-Assyrian religions we shall follow thisexcellent guide, supplementing it by information taken from another work bythe same author, _Histoire comparée des anciennes Religions de l'Égypte etdes Peuples Sémitiques_--both from the Dutch. [86] _A History of Art in Ancient Egypt_, vol. I. Pp. 47-57. [87] At Erzeroum Mr. LAYARD heard of some Kurdish tribes to the south-westof that place who, he was told, "are still idolatrous, worshippingvenerable oaks, great trees, huge solitary rocks, and other grand featuresof nature. " _Discoveries_, p. 9. [88] François LENORMANT, _Les Bétyles_ (extracted from the _Revue del'Histoire des Religions_, p. 12):--"The cuneiform inscriptions mention theseven black stones worshipped in the principal temple of Urukh in Chaldæa, which personify the seven planets. " In the same paper a vast number offacts are brought together which show how widely spread this worship was inSyria and Arabia, and with what persistence it maintained itself, at leastuntil the preaching of Islamism. It would be easy to show that it stillsubsists in the popular superstitions. As to this worship among the Greeks, see also the paper by M. HEUZEY, entitled, _La Pierre sacrée d'Antibes_(_Mémoires de la Société des Antiquaires de France_, 1874, p. 99). [89] BEROSUS, fragment 1. § 3. In the _Fragmenta Historicorum Græcorum_ ofCH. MÜLLER, vol. Ii. P. 496. [90] VIRGIL, _Bucolics_, viii. 69. See in the edition of Benoist(Hatchette, 8vo, 1876) passages cited from Horace and Ovid, which provethat the superstition in question was then sufficiently widespread toenable poets to make use of it without too great a violation ofprobability. [91] This was very clearly seen by the ancients. It could not be put betterthan by Cicero: "Principio Assyrii, propter planitiem magnitudinemqueregionum quas incolebant, cum cælum ex omni parte patens et apertumintuerentur, trajectiones motusque stellarum observaverunt. "--_DeDivinatione_, i. 1, 2. [92] "Chaldæi . .. Diuturnâ observatione siderum scientiam putantureffecisse, ut prædeci posset quid cuique eventurum et quo quisque fatonatus esset. "--CICERO, _De Divinatione_, i. 1, 2. [93] This has been clearly shown by LAPLACE in the _Précis de l'Histoire del'Astronomie_, which forms the fifth book of his _Exposition du Système duMonde_ (fifth edition). He gives a _résumé_ of what he believes to havebeen the chief results obtained by the Chaldæan astronomers (pp. 12-14 inthe separate issue of the _Précis_ 1821, 8vo). It would now, perhaps, bepossible, thanks to recent discoveries, to give more precise andcircumstantial details than those of Laplace. [94] AURÈS, _Essai sur le Système métrique assyrien_, p. 10 (in the_Recueil de Travaux relatifs à la Philologie et à l'Archéologie égyptienneset assyriennes_, vol. Iii. Vieweg, 4to, 1881). We refer those who areinterested in these questions to this excellent paper, of which but thefirst part has as yet been published (1882). All previous works upon thesubject are there quoted and discussed. [95] "Sixty may be divided by any divisor of ten or twelve. Of all numbersthat could be chosen as an invariable denominator for fractions, it hasmost divisors. "--FR. LENORMANT, _Manuel d'Histoire ancienne_, vol. Ii. P. 177, third edition. [96] AURÈS, _Sur le Système métrique assyrien_, p. 16. A terra-cottatablet, discovered in Lower Chaldæa among the ruins of Larsam, and believedwith good reason to be very ancient, bears a list of the squares of thefractionary numbers between 1/60 2 and 60/60 2, or 1/60, calculated withperfect accuracy (LENORMANT, _Manuel_, &c. Vol. Ii. P. 37). See also SAYCE, _Babylonian Augury by means of Geometrical Figures_, in the _Transactionsof the Society of Biblical Archæology_, vol. Iv. P. 302. [97] LENORMANT, _Manuel_, &c. Vol. Ii. P. 177, third edition. [98] _Ibid. _ p. 37. [99] LENORMANT, _Manuel_, vol. Ii. Pp. 175, 178, 180. G. SMITH, _AssyrianDiscoveries_ (London, 1876, 8vo), pp. 451, 452. RAWLINSON, _AncientMonarchies_, vol. I. Pp. 100, 101, fourth edition. We know that the_Astronomical Canon_ of Ptolemy begins with the accession of a king ofBabylon named Nabonassar, in 747 B. C. M. Fr. LENORMANT thinks that the datein question was chosen by the Alexandrian philosopher because it coincidedwith the substitution, by that prince, of the solar for the lunar year. Astronomical observations would thus have become much easier to use, whilethose registered under the ancient system could only be employed after longand difficult calculations. A reason is thus given for Ptolemy'scontentment with so comparatively modern a date. (_Essai sur les Fragmentscosmogoniques de Bérose_, pp. 192-197. ) [100] See the paper by M. T. H. MARTIN, of Rennes, _Sur les Observationsastronomiques envoyées, dit on, de Babylone en Grèce par Callisthène_, Paris, 1863. [101] The texts to this effect will be found collected in the essay of M. Martin. We shall be content here with quoting a phrase from Cicero whichexpresses the general opinion: "Chaldæi cognitione siderum sollertiaqueingeniorum antecellunt. " _De Divinatione_, i. 91. [102] PLINY, _Natural History_, vii. 57, 3. The manuscripts give 720, butthe whole context proves that figure to be far too low, neither does itaccord with the writer's thought, or with the other statements which hebrings together with the aim of showing that the invention of letters maybe traced to a very remote epoch. The copyists have certainly omitted an Mafter the DCCXX. Sillig, following Perizonius has introduced thiscorrection into his text. [103] LENORMANT, _Manuel_, &c. Vol. Ii. P. 175. [104] G. SMITH, _Assyrian Discoveries_, p. 407. [105] LENORMANT, _Manuel_, &c. Vol. Ii. P. 181. [106] LAYARD, _Nineveh and its Remains_, vol. I. P. 124. These stormshardly last an hour. [107] Some Assyriologists believe this to represent Merodach. [108] _History of Art in Ancient Egypt_, vol. I. Pp. 56, 57, and figs. 39-45. [109] RAWLINSON, _The Five Great Monarchies_, &c. Vol. I. P. 139. [110] TIELE, _Histoire comparée des anciennes Religions de l'Égypte et desPeuples Sémitiques_, translated by Collins, p. 222. The first volume of anEnglish translation, by James Ballingal, has been published in Trübner'sOriental Series. --ED. [111] _Ibid. _ p. 224. [112] TIELE, _Histoire_, &c. P. 237. [113] Hence the name Babylon, which has been handed down to us, slightlymodified, by classic tradition. The true Chaldæan form is _Bab-Ilou_, literally "The Gate of God. " [114] _History of Art in Ancient Egypt_, vol. Ii. Pp. 399-400 and figs. 311-313. [115] TIELE, _Manuel_, &c. Pp. 77, 78. [116] HERODOTUS, i. 99. § 7. --_The People and Government. _ We have already explained how it is that the religions of Chaldæa andAssyria are less well known to us than that of Egypt; the insufficiency ofour knowledge of the political and social organization of the two kingdomsis to be explained by the same reasons. The inscriptions, prolix enough onsome subjects, hardly touch on others that would be much more interesting, and, moreover, their interpretation is full of difficulty. The Greektravellers knew nothing of Nineveh, while their visits to Babylon werepaid in its years of decadence. They seem to have been chiefly struck withthe sort of sacerdotal caste to which they gave the name of Chaldaioi. The origin of this priestly corps has been much discussed. Some see in itthe descendants and heirs of the primitive population, of those whom theybelieve to have been Turanians; others believe them to have been Semiticimmigrants, coming from the north and bringing with them arts and doctrinesof which they constituted themselves the guardians and expounders in thenew country. We are hardly qualified to take part in the controversy. It iscertain, on the one hand, that the influence of these quasi-clergy began tomake itself felt at a remote period in the national history, and, on theother, that they had become, like the population that bowed before them, Semitic both in race and language at a very early date. The idiom employedby the Chaldæans belongs to the same family of languages as Arabic, Hebrew, and Aramæan; their gods are to be found, with slight modifications of nameand attributes, from Yemen in the south to the north of Syria and as farwest as the table-land of Cappadocia. It is, no doubt, upon the authority of Ctesias, his favourite guide inmatters of oriental history, that Diodorus talks of the _Chaldæans_. Ctesias may have seen them at Babylon, in the exercise of their functions, in the time of Artaxerxes Mnemon. "The Chaldæans, " writes the historian, "are the most ancient Babylonians . .. (and) hold the same station anddignity in the commonwealth as the Egyptian priests do in Egypt; for, beingdeputed to divine offices, they spend all their time in the study ofphilosophy, and are especially famous for the art of astrology. They aremightily given to divination, and foretell future events, and employthemselves either by purifications, sacrifices, or other enchantments toavert evils, or procure good fortune and success. They are skilful, likewise, in the art of divination by the flying of birds, and interpretingof dreams and prodigies; and are reputed as the oracles (in declaring whatwill come to pass) by their exact and diligent viewing of the entrails ofthe sacrifices. But they attain not to this knowledge in the same manner asthe Greeks; for the Chaldæans learn it by tradition from their ancestors, the son from the father, who are all in the meantime free from all otherpublic offices and attendances; and because their parents are their tutors, they both learn everything without envy, and rely with more confidenceupon the truth of what is taught them; and being trained up in thislearning from their very childhood, they become most famous philosophers, being at the age most capable of learning. "[117] Centuries were required for the growth of such a corporation and for thefirm establishment of its power upon a well-knit system of rites anddoctrines. The institutions described by Ctesias would hardly show anysensible change from those in force in the same country before the Persianconquests. In their double character of priests and astrologers theChaldæans would enjoy an almost boundless influence over both kings andprivate individuals; the general belief in their powers of divination madethem in a sense the masters and arbiters of every destiny. Under thenational kings "members of their caste led the national armies and occupiedall the chief posts in the kingdom. " The royal houses that succeeded oneanother at Babylon sprang from their ranks both in the days of vassalage toAssyria and in those of full independence. Their hierarchy was headed by anarchimagus; we do not know his title in the national language, but we doknow that, after the king, he was the chief person in the empire. Heaccompanied the sovereign wherever he went, even to the wars, in order toregulate his actions according to the rules of his art and the indicationsof the heavens. When the king died and his successor was not on the spot toassume the reins of government, the archimagus was regent during theinterregnum, as, for instance, between the death of Nabopolassar and theaccession of Nebuchadnezzar. [118] The almost theocratic character of this régime had both its advantages andits inconveniences. These priests were the savants of their time. Thehonours that were paid to them must have had their effect in stimulatingintellectual culture and material well being, but, on the other hand, theconstant intervention of a sacerdotal body in public affairs could not butdo something to enfeeble the military spirit and the energy andresponsibility of the commanders. Not that the priests were less penetratedby the national sentiment than their fellow countrymen. Proud of theirancient traditions and of the superiority of their science, they addedcontempt to the detestation they felt for a foreign master, whether he camefrom Babylon or Susa. The priests were the ringleaders in those risingsagainst Assyria, and, in later years, against Persia, which cost Babylon sodearly. Once only was the success they promised achieved, and that was inthe time of Nabopolassar, when Nineveh was exhausted by its long successionof wars and victories. On every other occasion the upper hand remained withraces less instructed, indeed, and less refined, but among whom the powerconcentrated in the hands of the sovereign had been utilized to drive allthe vital forces of the kingdom into the practice of war and preparationfor it. On the other hand, Babylon enjoyed certain elements of prosperity andguarantees of a long national existence which were wanting to those rivalsunder whose yoke she had more than once to pass. The ruling classes inChaldæa were quicker in intellect and far better educated than elsewhere. Their country lent itself to a wide and well-organised system ofcultivation better than the hilly districts of Assyria or the narrowvalleys and sterile plains of Iran. Communication was more prompt and easythan among the terraces which rise one above another from the left bank ofthe Euphrates up to the high lands of Persia and Media: in order to passfrom one of these terraces to another, the bare rock has to be climbed in afashion that brings no little danger to the traveller and his patientbeasts of burden. [119] In Chaldæa, on the other hand, the proximity of thetwo rivers to each other, and the perfect horizontality of the soil, makethe work of irrigation very easy. The agriculturists were not exposed tothe danger of a complete failure of crops, a misfortune which overtook theupper regions of Mesopotamia often enough. There the Euphrates and Tigrisare wide apart, and the land between them is far from being a dead level. Many districts had to depend almost entirely upon the rainfall forirrigation. Again, when it was a question of journeying from one city toanother or transporting the produce of the fields, the Chaldæan couldchoose between the land routes that lay along the banks of the canals, orthe waterways that intersected each other over the whole surface of thecountry. In these days the journey between Bagdad and Bassorah, a distanceof some three hundred miles, involves a long detour to the east along thefoot of the mountains, in order to avoid impassable marshes and bands ofwandering Arabs devoted to murder and pillage. The flat country is infestedwith mounted brigands who strip unprotected travellers, but in ancienttimes it swarmed with traffic, every road was encumbered with the movementsof merchandise and the march of caravans, the fields were crossed in everydirection by canals, and the tall sails of the boats that moved betweentheir banks rose over the waving crops as they do to-day in the deltas ofthe Meuse and the Rhine, for Chaldæa was a southern Holland. The incomparable situation of Babylon was sure to lead to great industrialand commercial activity in spite of any shortcomings in her rulers. Shestood in the centre of a marvellously fertile region, between upper andwestern Asia. Two great rivers were at her doors, bringing her, withoutcost or effort, the products of their upper basins, while, on the otherhand, they placed her in easy communication with the Persian Gulf and theIndian Ocean. The merchants of Babylon had communication with the people ofthe Levant by easy and well-worn roads crossing the fords of the middleEuphrates. Less direct roads farther to the north were used nearly as much. Some of these traversed the Cilician passes, crossed the Amanus and Taurusinto the plateau of Asia Minor, and ended at the coasts of the Ægæan andthe Euxine; others passed through Assyria into Media, and through theCaspian passes up to the central plateau of Asia and into distant Bactria, whence easy passes led down into the upper valley of the Indus. Babylon wasthus an _entrepôt_ for caravans both from the east and west, and fornavigators coming from the ports of Africa, Arabia, and India. There are, if we may use the expression, natural capitals and capitals thatare artificial. The sites of the first are determined by the configurationof the earth. When they perish it is but a temporary death, to be followedby a life often more full and brilliant than the first. The second owetheir prosperity to the caprice of a sovereign, or to politicalcombinations that pass away and leave no trace. Thebes and Nineveh wereartificial cities; both have disappeared and left behind them nothing buttheir ruins; they have been replaced only by villages and unimportanttowns. On the other hand, Memphis lives again in Cairo, and, when thedepopulation of Babylon was complete, Seleucia and Ctesiphon, Kouffa andBagdad sprang up to carry on her work. The centre of a refined civilization and of wide-stretching commercialrelations, Babylon could not have been without an original art, and onemarked with the peculiar characteristics of the national genius. Unhappily, the materials at her command were far inferior to those of which theEgyptians and Greeks could dispose. From this it has resulted that, on theone hand, her productions never passed a certain level of excellence, and, on the other, that they have been ill preserved. The Babylonians were notamong those happy peoples whose artists could exercise their tools upon theone material that gives birth to great sculptors and great architects--astone soft enough to yield kindly to the chisel, but hard enough topreserve to eternity the suggestive forms impressed upon it by the hand ofman. Our knowledge, therefore, of Chaldæan art will bear no comparison with whatwe have discovered as to the art of Egypt and Greece, of Etruria and Rome. So far as we can form a judgment from the remains that have come down tous, it was an art much less varied and comprehensive than that of Egypt. The tombs of Memphis and Thebes, with their pictured walls, reflect, as ina faithful mirror, the most interesting and most amusing of all spectacles, the daily life of the oldest of all civilized societies. In Chaldæa thereis nothing of the kind. The Chaldæan tomb gives us, by its arrangement andfurnishing, glimpses of a faith similar at bottom to that of Egypt, but wefind nothing parallel to the representations of daily work and pleasurewhich fill the mastabas and the Theban sepulchres; there is nothing thatcan be compared to those animated forms and images that play over again onthe tomb walls the long drama of a hundred acts whose first performanceoccupied so many centuries and filled a stage stretching from the swamps ofthe Delta to the cataracts of Syene. We are more especially grateful tothese funerary scenes for handing down to us, in a safe niche in the templeof the arts, those poor and humble folk who count for so little in thisworld where they bear the heaviest burdens, who depend for remembranceafter death upon the services they render to the great. We shall search invain among the scanty remnants of Babylonian sculpture for the attitude, gestures, and features of the laborious workmen upon whom the prosperity ofthe country was built. We shall find neither the tradesmen and artisans ofthe towns, nor the agriculturists who cultivated the fields and gave themthe water for which they never ceased to thirst. No hint is given of thosefishermen of the Persian Gulf who lived entirely, according to Herodotus, upon dried fish ground to powder and made into a kind of cake. [120] Thenaive, picturesque, and anecdotic illustrations of common life, which areso plentiful in Egypt, are almost completely wanting to the art of Chaldæa. On the other hand, we find, as we might have expected from what we know ofChaldæan society, continual traces of the sacerdotal spirit, and of thegreat part played by the king with the help and under the tutelage of thepriesthood. Upon the walls of palaces, temples, and towns, on thestatuettes of bronze and terra-cotta which were buried under the thresholdsof buildings and placed as votive offerings in the temples, upon cylindersand engraved stones, we find only complex and varied emblems, fantastic andsymbolic forms, attitudes suggestive of worship and sacrifice (Figs. 20 and21), images of gods, goddesses, and secondary genii, princes surroundedwith royal pomp and offering their homage to the deity. Hence a certainpoverty and monotony and the want of recuperative power inseparable from anabsorbed contemplation of sacred types and of a transcendental world. [Illustration: FIG. 20. --Chaldæan Cylinder. ] [Illustration: FIG. 21. --Chaldæan Cylinder; from the British Museum. [121]] Assyrian society was different in many respects from that of Chaldæa. Thesame gods, no doubt, were adored in both countries, and their worshipinvolved a highly-placed priesthood; but at Nineveh the royal power restedon the army, and the initiative and independence of the sovereign weremuch greater than in the case of Babylon. Assyria was a military monarchyin the fullest sense of the word. Almost as often as the spring came roundthe king led his invincible legions to the conquest of new subjects forAssur. He traversed deserts, crossed trackless mountain chains, and plungedinto forests full of hidden dangers. He destroyed the walls and towers ofhostile cities, in spite of the rain of arrows, stones, and boiling pitchthat poured upon himself and his hosts; he was at once the skilful captainand the valiant soldier, he planned the attack and never spared himself inthe _mêlée_. First in danger, he was the first in honour. In person heimplored the good will of the god for whom he braved so many dangers, inperson he thanked him for success and presented to him the spoils of theconquered enemy. If he was not deified, like the Pharaohs, either alive orafter his death, he was the vicar of Assur upon earth, the interpreter ofhis decrees and their executor, his lieutenant and pontif, and therecipient of his confidences. [122] There was no room by the side of this armed high priest for a sacerdotalcaste at all equal to him in prestige. The power and glory of the king grewwith every successive victory, and in the vast empire of the Sargonids, thehighest places were filled by men whom the monarch associated with himselfin the never-ending work of conquest and repression. First of all came akind of grand vizier, the _Tartan_, or commander-in-chief of the royalarmies. This is the personage we so often find in the bas-reliefs facingthe king and standing in an attitude at once dignified and respectful (seeFig. 22). Next came the great officers of the palace, the _ministers_ as weshould call them in modern parlance, and the governors of conqueredprovinces. Eunuchs were charged with the supervision of the harem and, asin the modern East, occupied high places at court. They may be recognizedin the bas-reliefs, where they are grouped about the king, by their round, beardless faces (see Figs. 23 and 24). The _Kislar-Aga_ is, in theConstantinople of to-day what more than one of these personages must havebeen in Nineveh. Read the account given by Plutarch, on the authority ofCtesias, of the murderous and perfidious intrigues that stained the palaceof Susa in the time of Artaxerxes-Mnemon. You will then have some idea ofthe part, at once obscure and preponderant, that the moreintelligent among these miserable creatures were able to play in thehouseholds of the great conquerors and unwearied hunters by whom thepalaces at Khorsabad, Kouyundjik, and Nimroud, were successively occupied. [Illustration: FIG. 22. --The King Sargon and his Grand Vizier. Bas-relieffrom Khorsabad; in the Louvre. Alabaster. Height 116 inches. Drawn bySaint-Elme Gautier. ] [Illustration: FIG. 23. --The suite of Sargon, _continued_. Bas-relief fromKhorsabad; in the Louvre. Alabaster. Height 90 inches. Drawn by Saint-ElmeGautier. ] [Illustration: FIG. 24. --The suite of Sargon, _continued_. Bas-relief fromKhorsabad. Alabaster. Height 97 inches. Drawn by Saint-Elme Gautier. ] All these military officers and administrators, these priests of thedifferent gods, and the domestics who were often the most powerful of all, looked to the hand of the king himself and depended upon no other master. Courage and military talent must have been the surest roads to advancement, but sometimes, as under the Arab caliphs and the Ottoman sultans, thecaprice of the sovereign would lead him to raise a man from the lowestranks to the highest dignities of the state. The _régime_ of Assyria may bedescribed in the words applied to that of Russia, it was despotism temperedwith assassination. "And it came to pass, as he (Sennacherib) wasworshipping in the house of Nisroch his god, that Adrammelech and Sharezerhis sons smote him with the sword: and they escaped into the land ofArmenia. And Esarhaddon his son reigned in his stead. "[123] Sennacherib'sfather, Sargon, perished in the same fashion. These murders were, perhaps, the revenge for some outrage or punishmentimprudently inflicted in a moment of anger; but however that may have been, neither in the one case nor the other did they hinder the legitimate heirfrom succeeding his father. Sennacherib replaced Sargon, and EsarhaddonSennacherib. The Assyrian supremacy was only supported by the constantpresence, at the head of the army, of a king ready for every eventuality; afew weeks of anarchy or interregnum would have thrown the whole empire intoconfusion; the royal power was the keystone of the arch, the element uponwhich depended the stability of a colossal edifice subjected to variousstrains. In such a society, art could hardly have had a mission other thanthe glorification of a power without limit and without control--a power towhich alone the Assyrians had to look for a continuance of their dearly-wonsupremacy. The architect, the sculptor, and the painter, exhausted theresources of their arts, the one in building a palace for the prince on ahigh mound raised to dominate the surrounding plain, the others indecorating it when built and multiplying the images of its almost divineinhabitant. The exploits of the sovereign, his great and never-endingachievements as a conqueror and destroyer of monsters, as pontif of Assurand the founder of palaces and cities--such are the themes to whichAssyrian sculpture devoted itself for many centuries, taking them up andvarying them in countless ways, and that, apparently, without any fear thathe for whom the whole work was intended would ever grow weary of therepetition. Such themes presuppose the actual occurrence of the events represented andthe artists' realization either from personal observation or fromdescriptions. This gives rise to a very sensible difference betweenChaldæan sculpture and that of Assyria, so far at least as the latter is tobe studied in the decorations of a palace. In those characteristics andqualities of execution which permit of a definition, the style is no doubtthe same as in Chaldæa. The artists of Babylon and those of Nineveh werepupils in one school--they saw nature with the same eyes; the same featuresinterested and attracted the attention of both; they had the sameprejudices and the same conventions. The symbols and combinations of formswe have noticed as proper to Chaldæan art are here also; scenes ofinvocation to gods and genii; ornamental groups and motives. An instance ofthe latter is to be found in the rich embroidery with which the robes ofthe Assyrian kings are covered. [124] Finally, we must remember that allAssyrian art was not included in the adornment of the palace. Before acomplete and definite judgment can be formed upon it the monuments ofreligious and industrial art should be passed under review, but, unhappily, no temple interior, and a very small number of objects of domestic luxuryand daily use, have come down to us. These gaps are to be regretted, but wemust not forget that the bas-reliefs were ordered by the king, that thethousands of figures they contain were introduced for the sake of giving_éclat_ to the power, the valour, and the genius of the sovereign, and thatthe best artists of which Assyria could boast were doubtless entrusted withtheir execution. Under the reserves thus laid down we may, then, devoteourselves to the study of the Ninevite sculptures that fill the museums ofLondon and Paris; we may consider them the strongest and most originalcreations of Assyrian art. [Illustration: FIG. 25. --Fragment of a bas-relief in alabaster. Louvre. Height 23 inches. Drawn by Saint-Elme Gautier. ] Now the sculpture upon the alabaster slabs with which the palace walls ofShalmaneser and Sargon, of Sennacherib and Assurbanipal, were covered, confines itself mainly to marches, combats, and sieves, it is more_realistic_ than the sculpture of Chaldæa, a country that had done less, especially upon fields of battle, but had invented more and done morethinking than its bellicose rival. We owe no small debt of gratitude to theswordsmen of Assyria, in spite of the blood they shed and the horriblecruelties they committed and delighted in seeing commemorated in thefigured histories of their reigns. The works entrusted to their artistshave left us precious documents and the elements for a restoration of avanished world. Philologists may take their time over the decipherment ofthe texts inscribed on the reliefs, but the great people of prey who, forat least four centuries, pillaged all Asia without themselves becomingsoftened by the possession of so much accumulated wealth, live, henceforward, in the long series of pictures recovered for the world byLayard and Botta. The stern conquerors reappear, armed, helmeted, andcuirassed, as they passed before the trembling nations thirty centuriesago. They are short of stature, but vigorous and sturdy, with anexceptional muscular development. They were, no doubt, prepared for theirmilitary duties from infancy by some system of gymnastic exercises, such ashave been practised by other nations of soldiers. Their noses are high andhooked, their eyes large, their features as a whole strongly Semitic (seeFig. 25). [Illustration: FIG. 26. --Bas-relief of Tiglath Pileser II. ; from Nimroud. British Museum. Height 44 inches. Drawn by Saint-Elme Gautier. ] [Illustration: FIG. 27. --Feast of Assurbanipal; from Kouyundjik. BritishMuseum. Height 20-3/4 inches. No. 1, The servants of the feast. ] [Illustration: FIG. 28. --Feast of Assurbanipal, _continued_. No. 2, Theking and queen at table. Drawn by Saint-Elme Gautier. ] The moral character of the people is shown with no less clearness. Theferocity they preserved amid all the luxurious appliances of theircivilization is commemorated. Atrocities of every kind find a place in thereliefs. Among the prisoners of war the most fortunate are those led by acord passed through their lips. Others are mutilated, crucified, flayedalive. Tiglath Pileser II. Is shown to us besieging a city, before whosewalls he has impaled three prisoners taken from the defenders (see Fig. 26). Elsewhere we find scribes counting over heaps of heads before payingthe price for them. [125] When these had come from the shoulders ofimportant enemies they were carried in procession and treasured ashonourable trophies. In one relief we find Assurbanipal, after his returnto Nineveh from the subjugation of the southern rebels, lying upon aluxurious couch in the garden of his harem and sharing a sumptuous mealwith a favoured wife. Birds are singing in the trees, an attendant touchesthe harp, flowers and palms fill the background, while a head, the head ofthe Elamite king, whom Assurbanipal conquered and captured in his lastcampaign, hangs from a tree near the right[126] of the scene (see Figs. 27and 28). The princes who took pleasure in these horrors were scrupulous intheir piety. We find numberless representations of them in attitudes ofprofound respect before their gods, and sometimes they bring victims andlibations in their hands (see Fig. 29). Thus, without any help from theinscriptions, we may divine from the sculptures alone what strangecontrasts were presented by the Assyrian character--a character at oncesanguinary and voluptuous, brutal and refined, mystical and truculent. [Illustration: FIG. 29. --Offerings to a god; Alabaster relief. Louvre. Height 10 feet. Drawn by Saint-Elme Gautier. ] It is not only by what it says, it is by what it leaves untold, by what itforgets to tell, that art has left us such a sincere account of thissingular nation. The king and his lieutenants, his ministers and householdofficers, the veterans who formed the strength of his legions and the youngmen from whom their numbers were recruited, did not constitute the whole ofthe Assyrian nation. There were also the tillers of the soil, the followersof those countless trades implied by a civilized society--the peasants, artisans, and merchants of every kind, who fed, clothed, and equipped thearmies; the men who carried on the useful but modest work without which thefighting machine must soon have come to a standstill. And yet they areentirely absent from the sculptures in which the artist seems to haveincluded everything that to him seemed worthy of interest. We meet themhere and there, but only by accident. They may be descried now and then inthe background of some scene of war, acting as labourers or in some otherhumble capacity. Otherwise the sculptor ignored their existence. They werenot soldiers, which was much as to say they were nothing. Can any otherinstance be cited of an art so well endowed entirely suppressing what weshould call the civil element of life? Neither do we find women in thebas-reliefs: that in which the queen of Assurbanipal occurs is quite uniquein its way. Except in scenes representing the capture of a town and thecarrying off of its inhabitants as prisoners of war, females are almostentirely wanting. On those occasions we sometimes find them carried onmules or in chariots (see Figs. 30 and 31). In certain bas-reliefs ofAssurbanipal, treating of his campaign against Susa, women are playing thetambourine and singing the king's praises. But all these are exceptions. Woman, whose grace and beauty were so keenly felt by the Egyptians, isalmost completely absent from the sculpture of Assyria. [Illustration: FIG. 30. --Convoy of prisoners. Kouyundjik. From Layard. ] By thus limiting its scope, sculpture condemned itself to much repetitionand to a uniformity not far removed from sameness; but its very silencesare eloquent upon the inhuman originality of a system to which Assyria owedboth the splendour of her military successes and the finality of her fall. The great entrenched camp, of which Nineveh was the centre, once forced;the veteran ranks, in which constant war, and war without quarter, had madesuch wide gaps, once broken, nothing remained of the true Assyria but theignorant masses of a second-class state to whom a change of masters hadlittle meaning, and a few vast buildings doomed soon to disappear undertheir own ruins. [Illustration: FIG. 31. --Convoy of prisoners. Kouyundjik. From Layard. ] When we have completed our examination of Assyrian sculpture, so rich insome respects, so poor in others, we shall understand the rapidity withwhich silence and oblivion overtook so much glory and power; we shallunderstand how some two centuries after the victory of Nabopolassar and thefinal triumph of Babylon and her allies, Xenophon and his Greeks couldmount the Tigris and gaze upon the still formidable walls of the desertedcities of Mespila and Larissa without even hearing the name of Ninevehpronounced. Eager for knowledge as they were, they passed over the groundwithout suspecting that the dust thrown up by their feet had once been acity famous and feared over all Asia, and that the capital of an empirehardly less great than that of the Artaxerxes whom they had faced atCunaxa, had once covered the ground where they stood. NOTES: [117] DIODORUS, ii. 29. [118] Fr. LENORMANT, _Manuel de l'Histoire ancienne de l'Orient_, vol. Ii. P. 252. [119] LOFTUS, _Travels and Researches in Chaldæa and Susiana_, p. 309. TheGreeks gave the appropriate name of klimakes to those stepped roads thatlead from the valley and the sea coast to the high plains of Persia. [120] HERODOTUS, i. 200. A similar article of food is in extensive use atthe present day in the western islands of Scotland, and upon other distantcoasts where the soil is poor. --ED. [121] Upon the subject of this cylinder, in which George Smith wished torecognize a representation of Adam and Eve tempted by the serpent, see M. JOACHIM MÉNANT'S paper entitled, _La Bible et les Cylindres Chaldéens_(Paris, 1880, Maisonneuve, 8vo). M. Ménant makes short work of this forcedinterpretation and of several similar delusions which were beginning to winsome acceptance. [122] Upon the sacred functions of the king, see LAYARD, _Nineveh_, vol. Ii. P. 474. [123] 2 Kings xix. 37. [124] LAYARD, _The Monuments of Nineveh_ (folio, 1849), plates 43-50. [125] LAYARD, _A Second Series of the Monuments of Nineveh_ (folio, 1853), plates 26 and 27. The scribes in question seem to be writing upon rolls ofleather. [126] Throughout this work the words "right" and "left" refer to the rightand left of the cuts, _not_ of the reader. By this system alone canconfusion be avoided in describing statues and compositions withfigures. --ED. [Illustration] CHAPTER II. THE PRINCIPLES AND GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS OF ASSYRO-CHALDÆAN ARCHITECTURE. § 1. --_Materials. _ Chaldæa was the cradle of the civilization, and consequently of the art, whose characteristics we have to define. Now the soil of Chaldæa to a greatdepth beneath the surface is a fine loose earth, similar to that of theNile Delta. At a few points only on the plain, and that near the PersianGulf, are there some rocky eminences, the remains of ancient islands whichthe gradual encroachment of the two great rivers has joined to the mainlandof Asia. Their importance is so slight that we may fairly ignore theirexistence and assert generally that Chaldæa has no stone. Like all greatrivers, the Tigris and Euphrates in the upper and middle parts of theircourses carry down pieces of rock from their native mountains, but afterthey enter upon the alluvial ground near the boundary between Assyria andChaldæa their streams become sluggish, and these heavy bodies sink to thebottom and become embedded in the soil; the water no longer carries on withit anything but the minute particles which with the passage of centuriesform immense banks of clay. In the whole distance between Bagdad and thesea you may take a spade, and, turn up the soil wherever you please, youwill not find a stone as big as a nut. In this absence of a natural stone something had to be found to take itsplace, and the artificial material we call brick was invented. The humanintellect refuses to give up the contest with nature before the firstobstacles that seem to bar its progress; if it cannot brush them aside itturns their flank. The least accident is often enough to suggest thedesired expedient. The origin of almost all the great discoveries that arestudded over the history of civilization may be traced to some luckychance. The first inhabitants of Chaldæa fashioned rude kitchens for thecooking of their simple food out of moist and plastic clay, the fires ofreed and broken wood lighted on these simple hearths reddened and hardenedthe clay till it became like rock. Some bystander more observant than therest noted the change and became the father of ceramics. We use the word inits widest, in its etymological sense. _Ceramics_ is the art of fashioningclay and burning it in the fire so as to obtain constructive materials, domestic utensils, or objects of luxury and ornament. [127] Even before the first brick or pottery kiln was erected it must have beenrecognized that in a climate like that of Chaldæa the soil when dried inthe sun was well fitted for certain uses. Among the _débris_ left by theearliest pioneers of civilization we find the remains of vases which seemto have been dried only in the sun. But porous and friable pottery likethis could only be used for a few purposes, and it was finally renounced assoon as the art of firing the earth, first in the hot ashes of the domestichearth, and afterwards in the searching flames of the close oven, wasdiscovered. It was otherwise with brick. The desiccation produced by thealmost vertical sun of Mesopotamia allowed it to be used with safety andadvantage in certain parts of a building. In that condition it is calledcrude brick, to distinguish it from the harder material due to the directheat of wood fires. In any case the clay destined for use as a building material was subject toa first preparation that never varied. It was freed from such foreignbodies as might have found their way into it, and, as in Egypt, it wasafterwards mixed with chopped or rather pulverized straw, a proceedingwhich was thought to give it greater body and resistance. It was then mixedwith water in the proportions that experience dictated, and kneaded by footin wide and shallow basins. [128] The brickmakers of Mossoul go through thesame process to this day. As soon as the clay was sufficiently kneaded, it was shaped in almostsquare moulds. In size these moulds surpassed even those of Egypt: theirsurfaces were from 15-1/4 to 15-1/2 inches square, and their thickness wasfrom 2 to 4 inches. [129] It would seem that these artificial blocks weregiven this extravagant size to make up for the absence of stone properlyspeaking; the only limit of size seems to have been that imposed bydifficulties of manufacture and handling. Crude brick never becomes hard enough to resist the action of water. InGreek history we read how Agesipolis, King of Sparta, when besiegingMantinea, directed the stream of the Ophis along the foot of its walls ofunburnt brick, and so caused them to crumble away. Cimon, son of Miltiades, attacked the defences of Eion, on the Strymon, in the same fashion. Whendesiccation was carried far enough, such materials could be used, ininteriors at least, so as to fulfil the same functions as stone or burntbrick. Vitruvius tells us that the magistrates who had charge of buildingoperations at Utica would not allow brick to be used until it was fiveyears old. [130] It would seem that neither in Chaldæa nor still less inAssyria was any such lengthy restriction imposed. It is only by exceptionthat crude bricks of which the desiccation has been carried to the farthestpossible point have been found in the palaces of Nineveh; almost the onlyinstance we can give is afforded by the bricks composing the arches of thepalace doorways at Khorsabad. They are rectangular, and into thewedge-shaped intervals between their faces a softer clay has been poured tofill up the joints. [131] As a rule things were done in a much less patientfashion. At the end of a few days, or perhaps weeks, as soon, in fact, asthe bricks were dry and firm enough to be easily handled, they were carriedon to the ground and laid while still soft. This we know from the evidence of M. Place, who cut many exploring shaftsthrough the massive Assyrian buildings, and could judge of the condition inwhich the bricks had been put in place by the appearance of hisexcavations. From top to bottom their sides showed a plain and uniformsurface; not the slightest sign of joints was to be found. Some might thinkthat the bricks, instead of being actually soft, were first dried in thesun and then, when they came to be used, that each was dipped in water soas to give it a momentary wetness before being laid in its place. M. Placerepels any such hypothesis. He points out that, had the Assyrianbricklayers proceeded in that fashion, each joint would be distinguishableby a rather darker tint than the rest of the wall. There is nothing of thekind in fact. The only things that prove his excavations to have been madethrough brick and not through a mass of earth beaten solid with the rammerare, in the first place, that the substance cut is very homogeneous andmuch more dense than it would have been had it not been kneaded and pressedin the moulds; and, secondly, that the horizontal courses are here andthere to be distinguished from each other by their differences oftint. [132] The art of burning brick dates, in the case of Chaldæa, from a very remoteepoch. No tradition subsisted of a period when it was not practised. Afterthe deluge, when men wished to build a city and a tower which should reachto heaven, "they said to one another, Go to, let us make brick, and burnthem throughly; and they had brick for stone, and slime had they formortar. "[133] The Babylonian bricks were, as a rule, one Chaldæan foot (rather more thanan English foot) square. Their colour varies in different buildings from adark red to a light yellow, [134] but they are always well burnt and ofexcellent quality. Nearly all of them bear an inscription to the followingeffect: "Nebuchadnezzar, King of Babylon, restorer of the pyramid and thetower, eldest son of Nabopolassar, King of Babylon, I. " In laying the brickthe face bearing this inscription was turned downwards. The characters wereimpressed on the soft clay with a stamp. More than forty varieties havealready been discovered, implying the existence of as many stamps (see Fig. 32). In Assyria these inscriptions were sometimes stamped, sometimesengraved with the hand (Fig. 33). Most of the bricks are regular in shape, with parallel and rectangularfaces, but a few wedge-shaped ones have been found, both in Chaldæa andAssyria. These must have been made for building arches or vaults. Theirobliquity varies according to their destined places in the curve. [135] The body of the enamelled bricks differs from that of the ordinary kind. Itis softer and more friable, appearing to be scarcely burnt. [136] Thisdifference, at which M. Place was so much surprised, had its reason. Themakers understood that their enamel colours when vitrified would penetratedeeper into and be more closely incorporated with the material upon whichthey were placed were the latter not so completely hardened. [Illustration: FIG. 32. --Babylonian brick; from the Louvre. 16 inchessquare on face, and 4 inches thick. ] Crude brick, burnt brick, and brick enamelled, those were the onlymaterials at the command of the architect, in the cities, at least, ofChaldæa. A few fragments of basalt and diorite have certainly been found intheir ruins, especially at Tello, recently excavated by M. De Sarzec; butwe can easily tell from the appearance of these blocks that they played avery subordinate part in the buildings into which they were introduced. Some of them seem to have been employed as a kind of decoration in reliefupon the brick walls; others, and those the most numerous, appear to havebeen used in the principal entrances to buildings. Upon one face asemicircular hollow or socket may be noticed, in which the foot of thebronze pivots, or rather the pivot shod and faced with bronze, upon whichthe heavy timber doors and their casings of metal were hung, had to turn. The marks of the consequent friction are still clearly visible. [137] Thedimensions of these stones are never great, and it is easy to see thattheir employment for building purposes was always of the most restrictednature. They had indeed to be brought from a great distance. The towns uponthe Persian Gulf might get them from Arabia. [138] Babylon and Nineveh musthave drawn them from the upper valleys of the Tigris and Euphrates. [139]But quarrying and transport involved an expenditure that prevented anythought of bringing these volcanic rocks into common use. [Illustration: FIG. 33. --Brick from Khorsabad; Louvre. 12-2/3 inchessquare, and 4-4/5 inches thick. ] Compared with the towns of the lower Euphrates, Babylon was not far frommountains whence, by means of canals and rivers, she might have easilyobtained a limestone of good quality. Even in these days, when commerce andindustry have fallen so low in those regions, the gypseous alabaster fromthe neighbourhood of Mossoul is transported in no unimportant quantities asfar as Bagdad. It is used for lining baths and those _serdabs_ to which thepeople retreat in summer. [140] The remains of the great capital show no trace of dressed stone. And yet itwas used during the second empire in some of the great public worksundertaken by Nabopolassar and more especially by Nebuchadnezzar. Herodotus, who saw Babylon, declares this in the most formal manner in hisdescription of the bridge which then united, for the first time, the twobanks of the Euphrates. While the river was bordered by quays of burntbrick, the bridge, says the historian, "was built of very large stones, bound together with iron clamps embedded in lead. "[141] That, however, was but one exception, and it was necessitated by the verynature of the work to be carried out. No cement was to be had which couldresist the action of water for an indefinite period and maintain thecoherence of brickwork subjected to its unsleeping attacks. In order toobtain piers capable of withstanding the current during the great floods, it was better too to use blocks of considerable weight, which could be heldtogether by metal tenons or clasps. It was but at rare intervals that buildings had to be erected in which thehabits of ages had to be thus abandoned. Why is it that such works haveperished and left no sign? The question may be easily answered. When theruins of Babylon began to be used as an open quarry, the stone buildingsmust have been the first to disappear. This material, precious by itsrarity and in greater request than any other, was used again and againuntil no trace of its original destination or of the buildings in which itwas found remained. In Assyria long chains of hills traversed the plain and stretched here andthere as far as the borders of the two rivers, besides which the lastbuttresses of the mountains of Kurdistan came very near the left bank ofthe Tigris. These hills all contained limestone. Two sorts were found: onefine, hard, close grained, and a little shelly, the other softer and morefriable. For the decoration of his monumental doorways and the lining of his richestapartments, the architect chose and committed to the sculptor those fineslabs of gypseous alabaster of which so many examples are to be seen in theLouvre and British Museum. In the plains gypsum serves as a base orfoundation for the wide banks of clay that spread over the country, and aremuch less thick than in the south of Chaldæa. Alabaster is there to be metwith in great quantities, often but little below the surface of thesoil. [142] It is a sulphate of chalk, gray in colour, soft and yetsusceptible of polish. But it has many defects; it breaks easily anddeteriorates rapidly on exposure to the air. The Assyrians, however, didnot fear to use it in great masses, as witness the bulls in the Louvre andBritish Museum. Before removal these carved man-headed animals weighed somethirty-five tons, and some of those remaining at Khorsabad and Kouyundjikare still larger. In Assyria as in Chaldæa the dark and hard volcanic rocks have only beenfound in a few isolated fragments. They were used by the statuary andornamentist rather than by the architect, and we cannot say for certainwhere they got them. We know, however, that basalt and other rocks of thatkind were found in the upper valleys of the streams that flowed into thetwo great rivers. [143] The Assyrian architect had therefore only to stretch out his hand to winstone of a sufficiently varied nature from the soil of his own country orthe flanks of its mountains. It was, of course, mediocre in quality but ithad powers of resistance that fitted it for use in certain positions. Atthe first glance it is difficult to understand why so little use was madeof it. But in truth stone was for the Assyrian no more than an accessoryand complementary material; the bodies of his structures were nevercomposed of it; it was mainly confined to plinths, pavements, and theinternal linings of walls. In spite of its apparent singularity this determined exclusion is to beeasily explained. The Assyrian invented nothing. His language and hiswriting, his religion and his science, came from Chaldæa, and so did hisart. When the kings of Resen, of Calech, and Nineveh, took it into theirheads to build palaces, they imported architects, painters, and sculptors, from the southern kingdom. Why, it may be asked, did those artists remainso faithful to the traditions in which they had grown up when they foundthemselves planted among such different surroundings? The answer is, thatnothing is more tenacious of life than those professional habits that aretransmitted from one generation to another by the practical teaching ofmore or less close corporations, besides which we must remember that theChaldæan methods were excellently well fitted for the satisfaction of thoseimpatient princes at whose orders the works were undertaken. For thequarrying, dressing, and fixing of stone, a special and rather tediouseducation was required. The manufacture and laying of bricks wascomparatively easy. A few weeks were sufficient to learn all that was to belearnt about the kneading and moulding of the earth, its desiccation in thesun or burning in the kiln. Provided that experienced men were forthcomingto superintend the latter operation, millions of good bricks could be madein the year. [144] All this required no lengthy apprenticeship. Theirarrangement in horizontal courses or grouping at stated intervals, intothose lines of battlements with which every wall was crowned, was done bythe men of the _corvée_. Certain parts of the building, such as arches andvaults, required more care and skill, and were left, no doubt, toexperienced masons and bricklayers, but, with these exceptions, the wholework could be confided to the first-comers, to those armies of captiveswhom we see in the bas-reliefs labouring in chained gangs like convicts. Working in this fashion, even the most formidable works could be completedwith singular rapidity. In Assyria, as in Chaldæa, a prince was no soonerseated firmly upon the throne than his architects set about erecting apalace which should be entirely his own. He had no wish that any name buthis should be read upon its walls, or that they should display any deeds ofvalour but those due to his own prowess. In the life of constant war andadventure led by these conquering sovereigns, speed was everything, forthey could never be sure of the morrow. That considerations like these counted for much in the determination of theAssyrian architects to follow a system that the abundance of durablematerials invited them to cast aside can hardly be doubted. They did notdare to rouse the displeasure of masters who disliked to wait; theypreferred rather to sacrifice the honour and glory to be won by theerection of solid and picturesque buildings than to use the slowly workedmaterials in which alone they could be carried out. Assyria was in all respects better provided than Chaldæa. Nature itselfseemed to invite her to throw off her too docile spirit of imitation and tocreate an art of her own. Her possession of stone was not her onlyadvantage over her southern neighbour, she had timber also; at least theNinevite architect had to go a much shorter distance than his Babylonianrival in order to find it. From the summits of the lofty mounds, at whosefeet he established his workshops, he could catch a distant view ofmountain chains, whose valleys were clothed with forests of oak and beech, pine and cypress. There was nothing of the kind within reach of LowerMesopotamia. The nearest mountains, those which ran parallel to the leftbank of the Tigris but at a considerable distance, were more naked, even inancient times, than those of Kurdistan and Armenia. From one side of theplain to the other there were no trees but the palm and the poplar fromwhich timbers of any length could be cut. The soft and fibrous date-palmfurnishes one of the worst kinds of wood in the world; the poplar, thoughmore useful, is not much less brittle and light. From materials like theseno system of carpentry could be developed that should allow great spaces tobe covered and great heights to be reached. When Nineveh and, after her, Babylon, had conquered all Western Asia, she drew, like Egypt before her, upon the forests of Lebanon. There she obtained the beams and planks forthe ceilings and doors of her sumptuous palaces. [145] The employment, however, of these excellent woods must always have been rare andexceptional. Moreover, other habits had become confirmed. When these newresources were put at the disposition of architecture, the art was too oldand too closely wedded to its traditional methods to accept their aid. Inthe use of wood, as in that of brick, Assyria neglected to make the best ofthe advantages assured to her by her situation and her natural products. If Chaldæa was ill-provided with stone and timber, she had every facilityfor procuring the useful and precious metals. They were not, of course, tobe found in her alluvial plains, but metals are easy of transport, especially to a country whose commerce has the command of navigablehighways. The industrial centres in which they are manufactured are oftenseparated by great distances from the regions where they are won from theearth. But to procure the more indispensable among them the dwellers uponthe Tigris and Euphrates had no great distance to cover. The southernslopes of Zagros, three or four days' journey from Nineveh, furnished iron, copper, lead, and silver in abundance. Mines are still worked in Kurdistan, or, at least, have been worked in very recent times, which supply thesemetals in abundance. The traces of abandoned workings may be recognizedeven by the hasty and unlearned traveller, and a skilful engineer would, no doubt, make further discoveries. [146] Mr. Layard was unable to learnthat any gold had been won in our days; but from objects found in theexcavations, from inscriptions in which the Assyrians boast of their wealthand prodigality, from Egyptian texts in which the details of tributes paidby the Roten-nou, that is by the people of Syria and Mesopotamia, aregiven, it is clear that in the great days of Nineveh and Babylon thosecapitals possessed a vast quantity of gold, and employed it in a host ofdifferent ways. In the course of several centuries of war, victory, andpillage, princes, officers, and soldiers had amassed enormous wealth by thesimple process of stripping the nations of Western Asia of every object ofvalue they possessed. These accumulations were continually added to, in thecase of Babylon, by the active commerce she carried on with themineral-producing countries, such as the Caucasus, Bactriana, India, andEgypt. There are some architectures--that of the Greeks for example--that preservea rare nobility even when deprived of their metal ornaments andpolychromatic decoration. The architects of Babylon and Nineveh weredifferently situated. Deprived of metals some of their finest effects wouldhave been impossible. The latter could be used at will in flexible threadsor long, narrow bands, which could be nailed or riveted on to wood orbrick. They may be beaten with the hammer, shaped by the chisel, orengraved by the burin; their surfaces may be either dead or polished; thevariety of shades of which they are capable, and the brilliance of theirreflections, are among the most valuable resources of the decorator, andthe colouring principles they contain provide the painter and enamellerwith some of his richest and most solid tones. In Chaldæa the architect wascondemned by the _force majeure_ of circumstances to employ little morethan crude or burnt brick and bad timber; in Assyria he voluntarilycondemned himself to the limitations they imposed. By the skilful andintelligent use of metals, he managed to overcome the resultingdisadvantages in some degree, and to mask under a sumptuous decoration ofgold, silver, and bronze, the deficiencies inherent in the material ofwhich his buildings were mainly composed. NOTES: [127] G. CURTIUS is of opinion that the word keramos, and consequently itsderivatives (kerameus, kerameia, kerameikê, &c. , ) springs rather from aroot CRA, expressive of the idea to _cook_, than from the word kerannumi, to mix, knead (_Grundzüge der Griechischen Etymologie_, p. 147, 5thedition). [128] See _Nahum_ iii. 14. [129] Even these dimensions were sometimes passed. The Louvre possesses anAssyrian brick rather more than 17-1/2 inches square. See DE LONGPERIER, _Notice des Antiquités Assyriennes_ (3rd edition, 1854, 12mo), No. 44. [130] VITRUVIUS, 1. Ii. Ch. 3. [131] PLACE, _Ninive et l'Assyrie_, vol. I. P. 225. The vault of thegallery discovered by LAYARD in the centre of the tower that occupied apart of the mound of Nimroud was constructed in the same fashion. _Discoveries in the Ruins of Nineveh and Babylon_, p. 126. [132] PLACE, _Ninive et l'Assyrie_, vol. I. Pp. 211-224. [133] _Genesis_ xi. 3. [134] LAYARD, _Discoveries_, pp. 506 and 531. [135] See, for Chaldæa, LOFTUS, _Travels and Researches_, p. 133; and forAssyria, PLACE, _Ninive et l'Assyrie_, vol. I. P. 250, and vol. Ii. Plates38 and 39. As an example of the varieties of section presented by thesebricks, we may cite those found by M. De Sarzec in the ruins of Tello, which belonged to a circular pillar. This pillar was composed of circularbricks, placed in horizontal courses round a centre of the same material. Elsewhere triangular bricks, which must have formed the angles of buildingshave been found. TAYLOR, _Notes on the Ruins of Mugheir_ (_Journal of theRoyal Asiatic Society_, vol. Xv. P. 266). At Abou-Sharein, this sametraveller found convex-sided bricks (_Journal_, &c. , vol. Xv. P. 409). [136] PLACE, _Ninive_, &c. , vol. I. P. 233. [137] Some of these fragments are in the Louvre. They are placed on theground in the Assyrian Gallery. Their forms are too irregular to be fittedfor reproduction here. But for the hollow in question, one might supposethem to be mere shapeless boulders. LAYARD noticed similar remains amongthe ruins of Babylon, _Discoveries_, &c. , p. 528. [138] M. OPPERT is even inclined to think that some of them came from thepeninsula of Sinai and the eastern shores of Egypt (_Revue Archéologique_, vol. Xlii. P. 272). The formation of the Arabian hills is not yet very wellknown, and we are not in a position to say for certain whence these rocksmay have come. It seems probable however, that they might have beenobtained from certain districts of Arabia, from which they could be carriedwithout too great an effort to within reach of the canals fed by theEuphrates, or of some port trading with the Persian Gulf. [139] LAYARD, _Discoveries_, &c. , p. 528. [140] LAYARD, _Discoveries_, p. 116. [141] HERODOTUS, i. 186. DIODORUS (ii. Viii. 2), quoting Ctesias, speaks inalmost the same terms of this stone bridge, which he attributes toSemiramis. [142] BOTTA, _Monuments de Ninive_, vol. V. P. 3. [143] In the valley of the Khabour, the chief affluent of the Euphrates, LAYARD found volcanoes whose activity seemed only to have been extinguishedat a very recent epoch. Long streams of lava projected from their sidesinto the plain. _Discoveries_, p. 307. [144] As for the simple and rapid nature of the process by which crudebricks are manufactured to the present day in Persia, see TEXIER, _L'Arménie et la Perse_, vol. Ii. P. 64. [145] As to the employment in Assyria of cedar from the Lebanon, seeFRANÇOIS LENORMANT, _Histoire Ancienne_, vol. Ii. P. 191, and aninscription of Sennacherib, translated by OPPERT, _Les Sargonides_, pp. 52, 53. Its use in Babylon is proved by several passages of the great textknown as the _Inscription of London_, in which Nebuchadnezzar recounts thegreat works he had caused to be carried out in his capital (LENORMANT, _Histoire_, vol. Ii. Pp. 228 and 233). We find this phrase among others, "Iused in the chamber of oracles the largest of the trees transported fromthe summits of Lebanon. " LAYARD (_Discoveries_, pp. 356-7) tells us thatone evening during the Nimroud excavations, his labourers lighted a fire todry themselves after a storm, which they fed with timbers taken from theruins. The smell of burning cedar, a perfume which so many Greek and Latinpoets have praised (_urit odoratam nocturna in lumina cedrum_, VIRGIL, _Æneid_, vii. 13), apprised him of what was going on. In the British Museum(Nimroud Gallery, Case A), fragments of recovered joists may be seen. Theyare in such good preservation that they might be shaped and polished anew, so as to again bring out the markings and the fine dark-yellow tone whichcontributed not a little to make the wood so precious. It was sought bothfor its agreeable appearance and its known solidity; and experience hasproved that the popular opinion which declared it incorruptible had somefoundation. [146] LAYARD, _Nineveh_, vol. I. P. 223, and vol. Ii. Pp. 415-418. § 2. --_The General Principles of Form. _ If in our fancy we strip the buildings of Chaldæa and Assyria of all theiraccessories, if we take from them their surface ornament and the salienceof their roofs, the bare edifice that remains is what geometricians call a_rectangular parallelopiped_. Of all the types created by this architecture, the only one of which westill possess a few fairly well preserved examples is that of the palace. It is therefore the best known of them all, and the first to exciteattention and study. Now, upon the artificial mound, the wide terrace, overwhich its imposing mass is spread, the palace may be likened to a huge boxwhose faces are all either horizontal or vertical (Plate V. ). Even in themany-storied temples, whose general aspect is modified of course to a greatextent by their height, the same element may be traced. We have endeavouredto restore some of these by collating the descriptions of the ancientwriters with the remains that still exist in many parts of Mesopotamia(Plates II. , III. , and IV. ). Their general form may be described as the boxto which we have compared the palace repeated several times in verticalsuccession, each box being rather smaller than the one below it. By thesemeans their builders proposed to give them an elevation approaching themarvellous. The system was in some respects similar to that of the pyramid, but the re-entering angles at each story gave them a very differentappearance, at least to one regarding them from a short distance. Only nowand then do we find any inclination like that of the sides of a pyramid, and in those cases it applies to bases alone (Plate IV. ). As a rule thewalls or external surfaces are perpendicular to their foundations. We may, perhaps, explain the complete absence from Chaldæa of a system ofconstruction that was so universal in Egypt by the differences of climateand of the materials used. Doubtless it rains less in Mesopotamia than evenin Italy or Greece. But rain is not, as in Upper Egypt, an almost unknownphenomenon. The changes of the seasons are ushered in by storms of rainthat amount to little less than deluges. [147] Upon sloping walls ofdressed stone these torrents could beat without causing any great damage, but where brick was used the inconveniences of such a slope would soon befelt. Water does not fall so fast upon a slope as upon a perpendicularwall, and a surface made up of comparatively thin bricks has many morejoints than one in which stones of any considerable size are employed. As arule the external faces of all important buildings were revetted with veryhard and well burnt bricks. But the rain, driven by the wind, might easilypenetrate through the joints and spread at will through the core of meresun-dried bricks within. The verticality of Assyrian and Chaldæan walls wasnecessary, therefore, for their preservation. Without it the thin coveringof burnt brick would have been unable to do its proper work of protectingthe softer material within, and the sudden storms by which the plains werenow and again half drowned, would have been far more hurtful than theywere. The Chaldæan palace, like the Egyptian temple, sought mainly for lateraldevelopment. Its extent far surpassed its elevation, and horizontal linespredominated in its general physiognomy. There was here a latent harmonybetween the architecture of nature and that of man, between the greatplains of Mesopotamia, with their distant horizons, and the long walls, broken only by their crenellated summits, of the temples and palaces. Theremust, however, have been a certain want of relief, of visibility, inedifices conceived on such lines and built in such a country. This latter defect was obvious to the Mesopotamians themselves, who raisedthe dwellings of their gods and kings upon an artificial mound with acarefully paved summit. [148] Upon this summit the structure properlyspeaking rested, so that, in Chaldæa, the foundations of a great buildinginstead of being, as elsewhere, sunk beneath the soil, stand so high aboveit that the ground line of the palace or temple to which they belong risesabove the plain to a height that leaves the roofs of ordinary houses andeven the summits of the tallest palms far below. This arrangement gave aclearer salience and a more imposing mass to structures which wouldotherwise, on account of their monotony of line and the vast excess oftheir horizontal over their vertical development, have had but littleeffect. [Illustration: FIG. 34. --Temple; from a Kouyundjik bas-relief. Rawlinson, vol. I. P. 314. ] Such an arrangement would appear superfluous in the case of those towers inthe shape of stepped pyramids, whose summits could be carried above theplain to any fanciful height by the simple process of adding story tostory. But the Mesopotamian constructor went upon the same system as in thecase of his palaces. It was well in any case to interpose a dense, firm, and dry mass between the wet and often shifting soil and the building, andto afford a base which by its size and solidity should protect the greataccumulation of material that was to be placed upon it from injury throughany settling in the foundations. Moreover, the paved esplanade had itsplace in the general economy. It formed a spacious court about the temple, a sacred _temenos_ as the Greeks would have called it, a _haram_ as amodern Oriental would say. It could be peopled with statues and decoratedwith mystic emblems; religious processions could be marshalled within itsbounds. [Illustration: FIG. 35. --Tell-Ede, in Lower Chaldæa. From Rawlinson's _FiveGreat Monarchies_. ] The general, we may almost say the invariable, rule in Mesopotamia was thatevery structure of a certain importance should be thus borne on anartificial hill. An examination of the ruins themselves and of themonuments figured upon the bas-reliefs shows us that these substructuresdid not always have the same form. Their faces were sometimes vertical, sometimes inclined; sometimes again they presented a gentle outward curve(see Fig. 34); but these purely external differences did not affect theprinciple. In all the river basins of Mesopotamia, whether of theEuphrates, the Tigris, or the smallest affluents of the Persian Gulf, whenever you see one of these _tells_, or isolated mounds, standing abovethe general surface of the plain, you may be sure that if you drive atrench into it you will come upon those courses of crude brick thatproclaim its artificial origin. Rounded by natural disintegration andscarred by the rain torrents, such a hillock is apt to deceive thethoughtless or ignorant traveller, but an instructed explorer knows at aglance that many centuries ago it bore on its summit a temple, a fortress, or some royal or lordly habitation (Fig. 35). The distinguishing feature of the staged towers is their striving after thegreatest possible elevation. It is true that neither from Herodotus norDiodorus do we get any definite statements as to the height of the mostfamous of these monuments, the temple of Belus at Babylon;[149] Straboalone talks of a stade (616 feet), and it may be asked on what authority hegives that measurement, which has been freely treated as an exaggeration. In any case we may test it to a certain extent by examining the largest andbest preserved of the artificial hills of which we have spoken, [150] and wemust remember that all the writers of antiquity are unanimous in assertingits prodigious height. [151] We run small risk of exaggeration, therefore, in saying that some of these Chaldæan temples were much taller than thehighest of the Gizeh Pyramids. Their general physiognomy was the reverse ofthat of the Mesopotamian palaces, but it was no less the result of thenatural configuration of the country. Their architect sought to find hiseffect in contrast; he endeavoured to impress the spectator by the strong, not to say violent, opposition between their soaring lines and the infinitehorizon of the plain. Such towers erected in a hilly country like Greecewould have looked much smaller. There, they would have had for closeneighbours sometimes high mountains and always boldly contoured hills androcks; however far up into the skies their summits might be carried, theywould still be dominated on one side or the other. Involuntarily the eyedemands from nature the same scale of proportions as are suggested by theworks of man. Where these are chiefly remarkable for their height, much oftheir effect will be destroyed by the proximity of such hills asAcrocorinthus or Lycabettus, to say nothing of Taygetus or Parnassus. It is quite otherwise when the surface of the country stretches away onevery side with the continuity and flatness of a lake. In these days noneof the great buildings to which we have been alluding have preserved morethan a half of their original height;[152] all that remains is a formlessmass encumbered with heaps of _débris_ at its foot, and yet, as everytraveller in the country has remarked, these ruined monuments have anextraordinary effect upon the general appearance of the country. They givean impression of far greater height than they really possess (Fig. 36). Atcertain hours of the day, we are told, this illusion is very strong: in theearly morning when the base of the mound is lost in circling vapours andits summit alone stands up into the clear sky above and receives the firstrays of the sun; and in the evening, when the whole mass rises in solidshadow against the red and gold of the western sky. At these times it iseasy to comprehend the ideas by which the Chaldæan architect was animatedwhen he created the type of these many-storied towers and scattered themwith such profusion over the whole face of the country. The chief want ofhis land was the picturesque variety given by accidents of the ground toits nearest neighbours, a want he endeavoured to conceal by substitutingthese pyramidal temples, these lofty pagodas, as we are tempted to callthem, for the gentle slopes and craggy peaks that are so plentiful beyondthe borders of Chaldæa. By their conspicuous elevation, and the enormousexpenditure of labour they implied, they were meant to break the uniformityof the great plains that lay about them; at the same time, they wouldastonish contemporary travellers and even that remote posterity for whom nomore than a shapeless heap of ruins would be left. They would do more thanall the writings of all the historians to celebrate the power and genius ofthe race that dared thus to correct and complete the work of nature. [Illustration: FIG. 36. --Haman, in Lower Chaldæa. From Loftus. ] When the king and his architect had finished one of these structures, theymight calculate upon an infinite duration for it without any greatpresumption, and that partly because Chaldæan art, even when most ambitiousand enterprising, never made use of any but the simplest means. The archwas in more frequent use than in Egypt, but it hardly seems to have beenemployed in buildings to which any great height was to be given. Scarcely atrace of it is to be discovered either in the parts preserved of thesestructures or in their sculptured representations. None of those light andgraceful methods of construction that charm and excite the eye, but must bepaid for by a certain loss of stability, are to be found here. Straightlines are the inflexible rule. The few arches that may be discovered in theinterior exercise no thrust, surrounded as they are on every side byweighty masses. In theory the equilibrium is perfect; and if, as the eventhas proved, the conditions of stability, or at least of duration, were lessfavourable than in the pyramids at Memphis or in the temples at Thebes, thefault lies with the inherent vices of the material used and with thecomparatively unfavourable climate. * * * * * In the absence of stone the Chaldæan builder was shut off from many of themost convenient methods of covering, and therefore of multiplying, voids. Speaking generally, we may say that he employed neither _piers_, nor_columns_, nor those beams of limestone, sandstone, or granite, which weknow as _architraves_; he was, therefore, ignorant of the _portico_, andnever found himself driven by artistic necessities to those ingenious, delicate, and learned efforts of invention by which the Egyptians andGreeks arrived at what we call _orders_. This term is well understood. Byit we mean supports of which the principal parts, base, shaft, and capital, have certain constant and closely defined mutual relations. Like azoological species, each order has a distinctive character and personalphysiognomy of its own. An art that is deprived of such a resource iscondemned to a real inferiority. It may cover every surface with the luxuryof a sumptuous decoration, but, in spite of all its efforts, a secretpoverty, a want of genius and invention, will be visible in its creations. The varied arrangements of the portico suggested the _hypostyle hall_, withall the picturesque developments it has undergone at the hands of theEgyptians, the Greeks, the Romans, and the people of modern Europe. Intheir ignorance of the pier and column, the Chaldæans were unable to givetheir buildings those spacious galleries and chambers which delight the eyewhile they diminish the actual mass of a building. Their towers wereartificial mountains, almost as solid and massive from base to summit asthe natural hills from which their lines were taken. [153] A few smallapartments were contrived within them, near their outer edges, that mightfairly be compared to caves hollowed in the face of a cliff. The weightupon the lower stories and the substructure was therefore enormous, even tothe point of threatening destruction by sheer pulverisation. The wholeinterior was composed of crude brick, and if, as is generally supposed, those bricks were put in place before the process of desiccation wascomplete, the shrinkage resulting from its continuance must have had a badeffect upon the structure as a whole, especially as the position of thecourses and the more or less favourable aspects of the different externalfaces must have caused a certain inequality in the rate at which thatoperation went on. The resistance would not be the same at all points, andsettlements would occur by which the equilibrium of the upper stages mightbe compromised and the destruction of the whole building prepared. Another danger lay in the violence of the sudden storms and the diluvialcharacter of the winter rains. Doubtless the outsides of the walls werefaced with well burnt bricks, carefully set, and often coated with animpenetrable enamel; but an inclined plane of a more or less gentlegradient wound from base to summit to give access to the latter. When astorm burst upon one of these towers, this plane became in a moment the bedof a torrent, for its outer edge would, of course, be protected by a lowwall. The water would pour like a river over the sloping pavement andstrike violently against each angle. Whether it were allowed to flow overthe edges of the inclined plane or, as seems more probable, directed in itscourse so as to sweep it from top to bottom, it must in either case havecaused damage requiring continual watchfulness and frequent repairs. Ifthis watchfulness were remitted for an instant, some of the external burntand enamelled bricks might become detached and leave a gap through whichthe water could penetrate to the soft core within, and set up a process ofdisintegration which would become more actively mischievous with every yearthat passed. The present appearance of these ruins is thus, to a greatextent, to be explained. Travellers in the country agree in describing themas irregular mounds, deeply seamed by the rains; and the sides againstwhich the storms and waterspouts that devastate Mesopotamia would chieflyspend their force are those on which the damage is most conspicuous (seeFig. 37). Even in antique times these buildings had suffered greatly. In Egypt, whenthe supreme power had passed, after one of those periods of decay that wereby no means infrequent in her long career, into the hands of an energeticrace of princes like those of the eighteenth or twenty-sixth dynasties, alltraces of damage done to the public monuments by neglect or violence wererapidly effaced. The pyramids could take care of themselves. They had seenthe plains at their feet covered again and again with hordes of barbarians, and yet had lost not an inch of their height or a stone of their polishedcuirass. Even in the temples the setting up of a few fallen columns, thereworking of a few bas-reliefs, the restoration of a painting here andthere, was all that was necessary to bring back their former splendour. [Illustration: FIG. 37. --Babil, at Babylon. From Oppert. ] In Chaldæa the work undertaken by Nabopolassar and his dynasty was far morearduous. He had to rebuild nearly all the civil and religious buildingsfrom their foundations, to undertake, as we know from more than one text, ageneral reconstruction. [154] A new Babylon was reared from the ground. Little of her former monuments remained but their foundations andmaterials. Temples richer than the first rose upon the lofty mounds, and, for the sake of speed, were often built of the old bricks, upon whichappeared the names of forgotten kings. Nothing was neglected, no expensewas spared by which the solidity of the new buildings could be increased, and yet, five or six centuries afterwards, nothing was left but ruins. Herodotus seems to have seen the great temple of Bel while it was stillpractically intact, but Diodorus speaks of it as an edifice "which time hadcaused to fall, "[155] and he adds that "writers are not in accord in whatthey say about this temple, so that it is impossible for us to make surewhat its real dimensions were. " It would seem, therefore, that the upperstories had fallen long before the age of Augustus. Even Ctesias, perhaps, who is Diodorus's constant guide in all that he writes on the subject ofChaldæa and Assyria, never saw the monument in its integrity. In any case, the building was a complete ruin in the time of Strabo. "The tomb ofBelus, " says that accurate and well-informed geographer, "is nowdestroyed. "[156] Strabo, like Diodorus, attributes the destruction of thesebuildings partly to time, partly to the avenging violence of the Persians, who, irritated by the never-ending revolts of Babylon, ruined the proudestand most famous of her temples as a punishment. That the sanctuary waspillaged by the Persians under Xerxes, as Strabo affirms, is probableenough, but we have some difficulty in believing that they troubledthemselves to destroy the building itself. [157] The effort would have beentoo great, and, in view of the slow but sure action of the elements uponits substance, it would have been labour thrown away. The destruction of anEgyptian monument required a desperate and long continued attack, it had tobe deliberately murdered, if we may use such a phrase, but the buildings ofMesopotamia, with their thin cuirasses of burnt brick and their softbodies, required the care of an architect to keep them standing, we mightsay of a doctor to keep them alive, to watch over them day by day, and tostop every wound through which the weather could reach their vulnerableparts. Abandoned to themselves they would soon have died, and died naturaldeaths. Materials and a system of construction such as those we have describedcould only result, in a close style of architecture, in a style in whichthe voids bore but a very small proportion to the solids. And such a stylewas well suited to the climate. In the long and burning summers ofMesopotamia the inhabitants freely exchanged light for coolness. With fewand narrow openings and thick walls the temperature of their dwellingscould be kept far lower than that of the torrid atmosphere without. [158]Thus we find in the Ninevite palaces outer walls of from fifteen tofive-and-twenty feet in thickness. It would have been very difficult tocontrive windows through such masses as that, and they would when made havegiven but a feeble light. The difficulty was frankly met by discarding theuse of any openings but the doors and skylights cut in the roofs. Thewindow proper was almost unknown. We can hardly point to an instance of itsuse, either among Assyrian or Chaldæan remains, or in the representationsof them in the bas-reliefs. Here and there we find openings in the upperstories of towers, but they are loop-holes rather than windows (Fig. 38). [159] [Illustration: FIG. 38. --A Fortress. From Layard. ] At first we are inclined to pity kings shut up within such blind walls asthese. But we must not be betrayed into believing that they took nomeasures to enjoy the evening breeze, or to cast their eyes over the broadplains at their feet, over the cities that lay under the shadows of thelofty mounds upon which their palaces were built. At certain times of theyear and day they would retire within the shelter of their thickest wallsand roofs; just as at the present moment the inhabitants of Mossoul, Bassorah, and Bagdad, take refuge within their _serdabs_ as soon as the sunis a little high in the heavens, and stay there until the approach ofevening. [160] When the heat was less suffocating the courtyards would be pleasant, withtheir encircling porticoes sustaining a light covering inclined towards thecentre, an arrangement required by the climate, and one which is to befound both at Pompeii and in the Arab houses of Damascus, and is sure tohave been adopted by the inhabitants of ancient Chaldæa. Additional spacewas given by the wide esplanades in front of the doors, and by the flatroofs, upon which sleep was often more successfully wooed than in the roomsbelow. And sometimes the pleasures given by refreshing breezes, coolshadows, and a distant prospect could be all enjoyed together, for in acertain bas-relief that seems to represent one of those great buildings ofwhich we possess the ruins, we see an open arcade--a _loggia_ as it wouldbe called in Italy--rise above the roof for the whole length of the façade(Fig. 39). [161] There are houses in the neighbourhood of Mossoul in which asimilar arrangement is to be met with, as we may see from Mr. Layard'ssketch of a house in a village of Kurdistan inhabited by Nestorians (Fig. 40). It includes a modified kind of portico, the pillars of which aresuggested or rather demanded by the necessity for supporting the ceiling. [Illustration: FIG. 39. --View of a Town and its Palaces. Kouyundjik. FromLayard. ] Supposing such an arrangement to have obtained in Mesopotamia, of whatmaterial were the piers or columns composed? Had they been of stone theirremains would surely have been found among the ruins; but no such thingshave ever come to light, so we may conclude that they were of timber orbrick; the roof, at least, must have been wood. The joints may have beencovered with protecting plates of metal by which their duration wasassured. We have a curious example of the use of these bronze sheaths inthe remains of gilded palm-trees found by M. Place in front of the _harem_at Khorsabad. He there encountered a cedar trunk lying upon the ground andincased in a brass coat on which all the roughnesses of cedar bark wereimitated. The leaves of doors were also protected by metallic bands, whichwere often decorated with bas-reliefs. [Illustration: FIG. 40. --House in Kurdistan; from Layard. ] Must we conclude that stone columns were unknown in Chaldæa and Assyria? Asfor Chaldæa, we have no positive information in the matter, but we knowthat she had no building stone of her own. The Chaldæan sculptor mightindeed import a few blocks of diorite or basalt, either from Arabia, Egypt, or the valleys of Mount Zagros, for use in statues which would justify suchexpense; but the architect must have been restricted to the use of materialclose at hand. In Assyria limestone was always within reach, and yet theAssyrians never succeeded in freeing themselves from traditional methodssufficiently to make the column play a part similar to that assigned to itby the peoples of Egypt and Greece. Their habits, and especially the habitof respect for the practices and traditions of Chaldæa, were too strong forthem. Their use of the column, though often tasteful and happy, is neverwithout a certain timidity. One is inclined to think they had an inkling ofthe possibilities latent in it, but that they lacked the courage necessaryto give it full play in the interiors and upon the façades of their largepalaces and towers. In the bas-reliefs we find columns used in the kiosquesbuilt upon the river banks (Fig. 41), and in the pavilions or chapelsstudded over the royal gardens (Fig. 42). The excavations, moreover, haveyielded pedestals and capitals which, rare as they are, have a double claimto our regard. The situations in which they have been discovered seem toshow that columns were sometimes used in front of doorways, to supportporches or covered ways extending to the full limits of the esplanade;secondly, their forms themselves are interesting. Close study will convinceus that, when copied by neighbouring peoples who made frequent and generaluse of stone supports, they might well have exercised an influence thatwas felt as far as the Ægæan, and had something to do with one of thefairest creations of Greek art. We thus catch side glimpses of the column, as it were, in small buildings, in the porches before the principal doors of palaces, and in the opengalleries with which some of the latter buildings were crowned (Fig. 39). In all these cases it is nothing but a more or less elegant accessory; wemight if we pleased give a sufficiently full description of Mesopotamianarchitecture without hinting at its existence. [Illustration: FIG. 41. --Temple on the bank of a river, Khorsabad; fromBotta. ] We cannot say the same of the arch, which played a much more important_rôle_ than it did in Egypt. There it was banished, as we have seen, to thesecondary parts of an edifice. It hardly entered into the composition ofthe nobler class of buildings; it was used mainly in store-rooms built nearthe temples, in the gateways through the outer walls of tombs, and inunderground cellars and passages. [162] In Mesopotamia, on the other hand, the arch is one of the real constituent elements of the nationalarchitecture. [Illustration: FIG. 42. --Temple in a Royal Park, Kouyundjik; from theBritish Museum. ] That the Chaldæan architects were early led to the invention of the arch iseasily understood. They were unable to support the upper parts of theirwalls, their ceilings or their roofs, upon beams of stone or timber, andthey had to devise some other means of arriving at the desired result. Thismeans was not matured all at once. With most peoples the first stageconsisted probably in those corbels or off-sets by which the width of thespace to be covered was reduced course by course, till a junction waseffected at the top; and sometimes this early stage may have been dispensedwith. In some cases, the workman who had to cover a narrow void with smallunits of construction may, in trying them in various positions andcombinations, have hit upon the real principle of the arch. This principlemust everywhere have been discovered more or less accidentally; in oneplace the accident may have come sooner than in another, and here it mayhave been turned to more profit than there. We shall have to describe andexplain these differences at each stage of our journey through the arthistory of antiquity, but we may at once state the general law that ourstudies and comparisons will bring to light. The arch was soonestdiscovered and most invariably employed by those builders who foundthemselves condemned, by the geological formation of their country, to theemployment of the smallest units. The Chaldæans were among those builders, and they made frequent use of thearch. They built no long arcades with piers or columns for supports, likethose of the Romans, and that simply because such structures would havebeen contrary to the general principles of their architecture. They made nouse, as we have already explained, of those isolated supports whoseemployment resulted in the hypostyle halls of Egypt and Persia, in thenaves of Greek temples and Latin basilicas. The want of stone put any sucharrangement out of the question. We have, then, no reason to believe thattheir arches ever rested upon piers or upon the solid parts of walls freelypierced for the admission of light. The type from which the modern east hasevolved so many fine mosques and churches was unknown in Chaldæa. In everybuilding of which we possess either the remains or the figuredrepresentation the archivolts rest upon thick and solid walls. Under these conditions the vault was supreme in certain parts of thebuilding. Its use was there so constant as to have almost the character ofan unvarying law. Every palace was pierced in its substructure by drainsthat carried the rain water and the general waste from the large populationby which it was inhabited down into the neighbouring river, and nearly allthese drains were vaulted. And it must not be supposed that the architectdeliberately hid his vaults and arches, or that he only used them in thoseparts of his buildings where they were concealed and lost in theirsurroundings; they occur, also, upon the most careful and elaboratefaçades. The gates of cities, of palaces and temples, of most buildings, infact, that have any monumental character, are crowned by an arch, the curveof which is accentuated by a brilliantly coloured soffit. This arch iscontinued as a barrel vault for the whole length of the passage leadinginto the interior, and these passages are sometimes very long. Vaults wouldalso, in all probability, have been found over those narrow chambers thatare so numerous in Assyrian palaces were it not for the universal ruin thathas overtaken their superstructures. Finally, certain square rooms havebeen discovered which must have been covered with vaults in the shape ofmore or less flattened domes. [Illustration: FIG. 43. --View of a group of buildings; Kouyundjik; fromLayard. ] We must here call attention to the importance of a bas-relief belonging tothe curious series of carved pictures in which Sennacherib caused theerection of his palace at Nineveh to be commemorated. Look well at thisgroup of buildings, which seems to rise upon a platform at the foot of ahill shaded with cypresses and fruit-laden vines (see Fig. 43). Thebuildings on the right have flat roofs, those on the left, and they seemthe most important, have, some hemispherical cupolas, and some tall domesapproaching cones in shape. These same forms are still in use over all thatcountry, not only for public buildings like baths and mosques, but evenhere and there for the humblest domestic structures. Travellers have beenoften surprised at encountering, in many of the villages of Upper Syriaand Mesopotamia, peasants' houses with sugar-loaf roofs like these. [163] We need not here go further into details upon this point. In these generaland introductory remarks we have endeavoured to point out as concisely aspossible how the salient characteristics of Assyrian architecture are to beexplained by the configuration of the country, by the nature of thematerials at hand, and by the climate with which the architect had toreckon. It was to these conditions that the originality of the system wasdue; that the solids were so greatly in excess over the voids, and thelateral over the vertical measurements of a building. In this latterrespect the buildings of Mesopotamia leave those of all other countries, even of Egypt, far behind. They were carried, too, to an extraordinaryheight without any effort to give the upper part greater lightness than thesubstructure; both were equally solid and massive. Finally, the nature ofthe elements of which Mesopotamian architects could dispose was such thatthe desire for elegance and beauty had to be satisfied by a superficialsystem of decoration, by paint and carved slabs laid on to the surface ofthe walls. Beauty unadorned was beyond their reach, and their works may becompared to women whose attractions lie in the richness of their dress andthe multitude of their jewels. NOTES: [147] OPPERT (_Expédition scientifique_, vol. I. P. 86) gives a descriptionof one of these storms that he encountered in the neighbourhood of Bagdadon the 26th of May. [148] LAYARD, _Nineveh and its Remains_, vol. Ii. P. 119. When one of thesemounds is attacked from the top, the excavators must work downwards untilthey come to this paved platform. As soon as it is reached no greater depthneed be attempted; all attention is then given to driving lateral trenchesin every direction. In Assyria the mass of crude bricks sometimes restsupon a core of rock which has been utilized to save time and labour(LAYARD, _Discoveries_, &c. , p. 219). [149] See HERODOTUS, i. 181-184; and DIODORUS, ii. 9. [150] By such means M. OPPERT arrives at a height of 250 Babylonian feet, or about 262 feet English for the monument now represented by the mound inthe neighbourhood of Babylon known as Birs-Nimroud. _Expéditionscientifique de Mésopotamie_, vol. I. Pp. 205-209, and plate 8. [151] Homologeitai d' hupsêlon gegenêsthai kath' huperbolên. --DIODORUS, ii. 9, 4. [152] The mound called Babil on the site of Babylon (Plate I. And Fig. 37)is now about 135 feet high, but the Birs-Nimroud, the highest of theseruins, has still an elevation of not less than 220 feet (LAYARD, _Discoveries_, p. 495). [153] See LAYARD'S account of his excavation in the interior of thepyramidal ruin occupying a part of the platform which now surmounts themound of Nimroud. From two sides trenches were cut to the centre; neitherof them encountered a void of any kind (_Nineveh and its Remains_, vol. Ii. P. 107). At a later period further trenches were cut and the rest of thebuilding explored (_Discoveries_, pp. 123-129). The only void of which anytrace could be found was a narrow, vaulted gallery, about 100 feet long, 6wide, and 12 high. It was closed at both ends, and appeared never to havehad any means of access from without. [154] See LENORMANT, _Histoire Ancienne_, vol. Ii. Pp. 228 and 233. Translations of several texts in which these restorations are spoken of arehere given. [155] tou kataskeuasmatos dia tou chronou diapeptôkotos (ii. 9, 4). [156] STRABO, xvi. 5. [157] DIODORUS, after describing the treasures of the temple, confineshimself to saying generally, "all this was afterwards spoiled by the kingof Persia" (ii. 9, 19). [158] According to the personal experience of M. Place, the ancientarrangements were more suited to the climate of this country than themodern ones that have taken their place. The overpowering heat from whichthe inhabitants of modern Mossoul suffer so greatly is largely owing to theunintelligent employment of stone and plaster in the construction ofdwellings. During his stay in that town the thermometer sometimes rose, inhis apartments, to 51° Centigrade (90° Fahrenheit). The mean temperature ofa summer's day was from 40° to 42° Centigrade (from 72° to about 76°Fahrenheit). [159] See LAYARD, _Monuments of Nineveh_, 2nd series, plates 21 and 40. [160] The _serdab_ is a kind of cellar, the walls and floor of which aredrenched periodically with water, which, by its evaporation, lowers thetemperature by several degrees. [161] The town represented on the sculptured slab here reproduced is notAssyrian but Phoenician; it affords data, however, which may belegitimately used in the restoration of the upper part of an Assyrianpalace. We can hardly believe that the Mesopotamian artists, inillustrating the wars of the Assyrian kings, copied servilely the realfeatures of the conquered towns. They had no sketches by "special artists"to guide their chisels. They were told that a successful campaign had beenfought in the marshes of the lower Euphrates, or in some country coveredwith forests of date trees, and these they had no difficulty inrepresenting because they had examples before their eyes; so too, whenbuildings were in question, we may fairly conclude that they borrowed theirmotives from the architecture with which they were familiar. [162] See the _History of Art in Ancient Egypt_, vol. Ii. Pp. 77-84. [163] LAYARD, _Discoveries_, p. 112; GEO. SMITH, _Assyrian Discoveries_, p. 341. § 3. --_Construction. _ As might have been expected nothing that can be called a structure ofdressed stone has been discovered in Chaldæa;[164] in Assyria alone havesome examples been found. Of these the most interesting, and the mostcarefully studied and described are the walls of Sargon's palace atKhorsabad. Even there stone was only employed to case the walls in which the mound wasinclosed--a cuirass of large blocks carefully dressed and fixed seemed togive solidity to the mass, and at the same time we know by the arrangementof the blocks that the outward appearance of the wall was by no means lostsight of. All those of a single course were of one height but of differentdepths and widths, and the arrangement followed a regular order like thatshown in Fig. 46. Their external face was carefully dressed. [165] [Illustration: FIG. 44. --Plan of angle, Khorsabad; from Place. ] [Illustration: FIG. 45. --Section of wall through AB in Fig. 44; fromPlace. ] The courses consist, on plan, of "stretchers" and "headers. " We borrow fromPlace the plan of an angle (Fig. 44), a section (Fig. 45), and an elevation(Fig. 46). Courses are always horizontal and joints properly bound. Thefreestone blocks at the foot of the wall are very large. The stretchers aresix feet eight inches thick, the same wide, and nine feet long. They weighabout twenty-three tons. It is astonishing to find the Assyrians, who werevery rapid builders, choosing such heavy and unmanageable materials. The supporting wall became gradually thinner towards the top, each coursebeing slightly set back from the one below it on the inner face (see Fig. 45). This arrangement is general with these retaining-walls. The averagediminution is from seven to ten feet at the base, to from three to six atthe top. The constructor showed no less skill in the use he made of his stretchersand headers. They not only gave him an opportunity of safely diminishingthe weight of his structure and economising his materials, they afforded aready means of adapting his wall exactly to the work it had to do. Theheaders penetrated farther into the crude mass within than the stretchers, and gave to the junction of the two surfaces a solidity similar to thatderived by a wall from its through stones or perpenders. [Illustration: FIG. 46. --Elevation of wall, Khorsabad; from Place. ] In describing this wall, M. Place also calls attention to the care withwhich the angles are built. "The first course, " he says, "is composed ofthree 'headers' with their shortest side outwards and their length engagedin the mass behind. Two of these stones lie parallel to each other, thethird crosses their inner extremities. "[166] Thanks to this ingeniousarrangement, the weakest and most exposed part of the wall is capable ofresisting any attack. The surface in contact with the core of crude brick was only roughlydressed, by which means additional cohesion was given to the junction ofthe two materials; but the other sides were carefully worked and squaredand fixed in place by simple juxtaposition. The architect calculated uponsufficient solidity being given by the mere weight of the stones and theperfection of their surfaces. [167] [Illustration: FIG. 47. --Section in perspective through the south-westernpart of Sargon's palace at Khorsabad; compiled from Place. ] The total height of this Khorsabad wall was sixty feet--nine feet for thefoundations, forty-six for the retaining-wall, and five for the parapet, for the wall did not stop at the level of the roofs. A row of battlementswas thought necessary both as a slight fortification and as anornament. [168] These were finished at the top with open crenellations inbrick, along the base of which ran apparently a frieze of painted rosettes. A reference to our Fig. 47 will explain all these arrangements better thanwords. It is a bird's-eye view in perspective of the south-western part ofthe palace. The vertical sections on the right of the engraving show howthe stones were bonded to the crude brick. The crenellations are omittedhere, but they may be seen in place on the left. The great size of the stones and the regularity of the masonry, the heightof the wall and the long line of battlements with which it was crowned, thecontrast between the brilliant whiteness of its main surface and the brightcolours of the painted frieze that, we have supposed, defined itssummit--all this made up a composition simple enough, but by no meansdevoid of beauty and grandeur. In the _enceinte_ surrounding the town, stone was also employed, but in arather different fashion. It was used to give strength to the foot of thewall, which consisted of a limestone plinth nearly four feet high, surmounted by a mass of crude brick, rising to a total height of aboutforty-four feet. Its thickness was eighty feet. The bed of stone upon whichthe brick rested was made up of two retaining walls with a core of rubble. In the former, large blocks, carefully dressed and fixed, were used; in thelatter, pieces of broken stone thrown together pell-mell, except towardsthe top, where they were so placed as to present a smooth surface, uponwhich the first courses of brick could safely rest. [169] When Xenophon crossed Assyria with the "ten thousand, " he noticed thismethod of constructing city walls, but in all the _enceintes_ thatattracted his attention, the height of the plinth was much greater thanthat of Khorsabad. At Larissa it was twenty, and at Mespila fifty feet, orrespectively a fifth and a third of the total height of the walls. [170]These figures can only be looked upon as approximate. The Greeks did notamuse themselves, we may be sure, with measuring the monuments theyencountered on their march, even if Tissaphernes gave them time. But we mayfairly conclude from this evidence that in some of the Assyrian town-wallsthe proportion between the plinth and the superstructure was very differentfrom what it is in the only example that has come down to us. At Khorsabad, then, stone played a much more important part in the palacewall than in that of the town, but even in the latter position it is usedwith skill and in no inconsiderable quantity; on the other hand, it is onlyemployed in the interior of the palace for paving, for lining walls, forthe bases, shafts and capitals of columns, and such minor purposes. In theonly palace that has been completely excavated, that of Sargon atKhorsabad, everything is built of brick. Layard alone speaks of astone-built chamber in the palace of Sennacherib at Kouyundjik, but hegives no details. It would seem as if the Assyrians were content with showing themselvespassed-masters in the art of dressing and fixing stone, and, that proofgiven, had never cared to make use of the material in the main structuresof their buildings. Like the Chaldæans, they preferred brick, into themanagement of which, however, they introduced certain modifications oftheir own. The crude brick of Nineveh and its neighbourhood was used whiledamp, and, when put in place, did not greatly differ from pisé. [171] Spreadout in wide horizontal courses, the slabs of soft clay adhered one toanother by their plasticity, through the effect of the water with whichthey were impregnated and that of the pressure exercised by the coursesabove. [172] The building was thus, in effect, nothing but a single hugeblock. Take it as a whole, put aside certain parts, such as the doorwaysand drains, that were constructed on rather different principles, shut youreyes to the merely decorative additions, and you will have a huge mass ofkneaded earth which might have been shaped by giants in a colossal mould. The masons of Babylon and of other southern cities made a much moreextensive use of burnt brick than those of the north. In Assyria the massesof pisé have as a rule no other covering than the slabs of alabaster andlimestone, and above, a thin layer of stucco. In Chaldæa the crude walls ofthe houses and towers were cuirassed with those excellent burnt brickswhich the inhabitants of Bagdad and Hillah carry off to this day for use intheir modern habitations. [173] The crude bricks used behind this protectingepidermis have not lost their individuality, as at Nineveh they seem tohave been used only after complete dessication. They are of course muchmore friable than those burnt in the kiln; when they are deprived of theircuirass and exposed to the weather they return slowly to the condition ofdust, and their remains are seen in the sloping mounds that hide the footof every ancient ruin (see Fig. 48), and yet if you penetrate into theinterior of a mass built of these bricks, you will easily distinguish thecourses, and in some instances the bricks have sufficient solidity to allowof their being moved and detached one from another. They are, in fact, bricks, and not pisé. But in Chaldæa, as in Assyria, the mounds upon whichthe great buildings were raised are not always of crude brick. They aresometimes made by inclosing a large space by four brick walls, and fillingit with earth and the various _débris_ left by previous buildings. [174] Ourremarks upon construction must be understood as applying to the buildingsthemselves, and not to the artificial hills upon which they stood. [Illustration: FIG. 48. --Temple at Mugheir; from Loftus. ] The Assyrians seem never to have used anything analogous to our mortar orcement in fixing their materials. On the comparatively rare occasions whenthey employed stone they were content with dressing their blocks with greatcare and putting them in absolute juxtaposition with one another. When theyused crude brick, sufficient adherence was insured by the moisture left inthe clay, and by its natural properties. Even when they used burnt or welldried bricks they took no great care to give them a cohesion that wouldlast, ordinary clay mixed with water and a little straw, was their onlycement. [175] Even in our own day the masons and bricklayers of Mossoul andBagdad are content with the same simple materials, and their structureshave no great solidity in consequence. In Chaldæa, at least in certain times and at certain places, constructionwas more careful. In the ruin known as _Babil_, a ruin that representsone of the principal monuments of ancient Babylon, there is nothing betweenthe bricks but earth that must have been placed there in the condition ofmud. [176] These bricks may be detached almost without effort. It is quiteotherwise with the two other ruins in the same neighbourhood, calledrespectively _Kasr_ and _Birs-Nimroud_. Their bricks are held together byan excellent mortar of lime, and cannot be separated without breaking. [177]Elsewhere, at Mugheir for instance, the mortar is composed of lime andashes. [178] [Illustration: PLATE I. BABYLON FROM AN UNPUBLISHED DRAWING BY FELIX THOMAS. ] Finally, the soil of Mesopotamia furnished, and still furnishes, a kind ofnatural mortar in the bituminous fountains that spring through the soil atmore than one point between Mossoul and Bagdad. [179] It is hardly ever usedin these days except in boatbuilding, for coating the planks and caulking. In ancient times its employment was very general in the more carefullyconstructed buildings, and, as it was found neither in Greece nor Syria, itmade a great impression upon travellers from those countries. They noted itas one of the characteristics of Chaldæan civilization. In the Biblicalaccount of the Tower of Babel we are told: "They had brick for stone, andslime had they for mortar. "[180] Herodotus lays stress upon the same detailin his description of the way in which the walls of Babylon were built: "Asthey dug the ditches they converted the excavated earth into bricks, andwhen they had enough, they burnt them in the kiln. Finally, for mortar theyused hot bitumen, and at every thirty courses of bricks they put a layer ofreeds interlaced. "[181] Those walls have long ago disappeared. For many centuries their ruinsafforded building materials for the inhabitants of the cities that havesucceeded each other upon and around the site of ancient Babylon, and nowtheir lines are only to be faintly traced in slight undulations of theground, which are here and there hardly distinguishable from the banksthat bordered the canals. But in those deserts of Lower Chaldæa, where thenomad tent is now almost the only dwelling, structures have been found butlittle damaged, in which layers of reeds placed at certain intervals amongthe bricks may be easily distinguished. As a rule three or four layers arestrewn one upon the other, the rushes in one being at right angles to thoseabove and below it. Here and there the stalks may still be seen standingout from the wall. [182] Fragments of bitumen are everywhere to be picked upamong the _débris_ about these buildings, upon which it must have been usedfor mortar. It never seems to have been employed, however, over the wholeof a building, but only in those parts where more than the ordinarycohesive power was required. Thus, at Warka, in the ruin called_Bouvariia_, the buttresses that stand out from the main building are oflarge burnt bricks set in thick beds of bitumen, the whole forming such asolid body that a pickaxe has great difficulty in making any impressionupon it. [183] Travellers have also found traces of the same use of bitumen in the ruinsof Babylon. It seems to have been in less frequent employment in Assyria. It has there been found only under the two layers of bricks that constitutethe ordinary pavement of roofs, courts, and chambers. The architect nodoubt introduced this coat of asphalte for two purposes--partly to givesolidity to the pavement, partly to keep down the wet and to force thewater in the soil to flow off through its appointed channels. A layer ofthe same kind was also spread under the drains. [184] In spite of all their precautions time and experience compelled theinhabitants of Mesopotamia to recognize the danger of crude brick as abuilding material; they endeavoured, therefore, to supplement its strengthwith huge buttresses. Wherever the ruins have still preserved some of theirshape, we can trace, almost without exception, the presence of thesesupports, and, as a rule, they are better and more carefully built than thestructures whose walls they sustain. Their existence has been affirmed byevery traveller who has explored the ruins of Chaldæa, [185] and in Assyriathey are also to be found, especially in front of the fine retaining wallthat helps to support the platform on which the palace of Sargon wasbuilt. [186] The architect counted upon the weight of his building, and uponthese ponderous buttresses, to give it a firm foundation and to maintainthe equilibrium of its materials. As a rule there were no foundations, aswe understand the word. At _Abou-Sharein_, in Chaldæa, the monumentdescribed by Taylor and the brick pavement that surrounds it are bothplaced upon the sand. [187] Botta noticed something of the same kind inconnection with the palace walls at Khorsabad: "They rest, " he says, "uponthe very bricks of the mound without the intervention of any plinth orother kind of solid foundation, so that here and there they have sunk belowthe original level of the platform upon which they are placed. "[188] This was not due to negligence, for in other respects these structuresbetray a painstaking desire to insure the stability of the work, and nolittle skill in the selection of means. Thus the Chaldæan architect piercedhis crude brick masses with numerous narrow tunnels, or ventilating pipes, through which the warm and desiccating air of a Mesopotamian summer couldbe brought into contact with every part, and the slight remains of moisturestill left in the bricks when fixed could be gradually carried off. Theseshafts have been found in the ruins of Babylon and of other Chaldæancities. [189] Nothing of the kind has been discovered in Assyria, and for avery simple reason. It would have been impossible to preserve them in thesoft paste, the kind of pisé, we have described. Another thing that had to be carefully provided for was the discharge ofthe rain water which, unless it had proper channels of escape, would filterthrough the cracks and crevices of the brick and set up a rapid process ofdisintegration. In the Assyrian palaces we find, therefore, that thepavements of the flat roofs of the courtyards and open halls had a decidedslope, and that the rain water was thus conducted to scuppers, throughwhich it fell into runnels communicating with a main drain, from which itwas finally discharged into the nearest river. It rained less in Chaldæa than in Assyria. But we may fairly conclude thatthe Chaldæan architects were as careful as their northern rivals to providesuch safeguards as those we have described; but their buildings are now insuch a condition that no definite traces of them are to be distinguished. On the other hand, the ruins in Lower Chaldæa prove that even in the mostancient times the constructor had then the same object in view; but themeans of which he made use were much more simple, although contrived withno little ingenuity. We shall here epitomize what we have learnt from oneof those few observers to whom we owe all our knowledge of the earliestChaldæan civilization. Mr. J. E. Taylor, British vice-consul at Bassorah, explored not a few ofthe mounds in the immediate neighbourhood of the Persian Gulf which markthe sites of the burying places belonging to the most ancient cities ofChaldæa. The summits of these mounds are paved with burnt brick; their mass consistsof heaped up coffins separated from one another by divisions of the samematerial. To insure the preservation of the bodies and of the objectsburied with them liquids of every kind had to be provided with a readymeans of escape. The structures were pierced, therefore, with a vast numberof vertical drains. Long conduits of terra-cotta (see Fig. 49) stretchedfrom the paved summit, upon which they opened with very narrow mouths, tothe base. They were composed of tubes, each about two feet long andeighteen inches in diameter. In some cases there are as many as forty ofthese one upon another. They are held together by thin coats of bitumen, and in order to give them greater strength their sides are slightlyconcave. Their interiors are filled in with fragments of broken pottery, which gave considerable support while they in no way hindered the passageof the water. These potsherds are even placed around the outsides of thetubes, so that the latter are nowhere in contact with the brick; they havea certain amount of play, and with the tubes which they encase they form aseries of shafts, like chimneys, measuring about four feet square. Everyprecaution was taken to carry off the water left by the storms. They werenot contented with the small opening at the head of each tube. The whole ofits dome-shaped top was pierced with small holes, that made it a kind ofcullender. Either through this or through the interstices of the potsherdpacking, all the moisture that escaped the central opening would find asafe passage to the level of the ground, whence, no doubt, it would becarried off to the streams in conduits now hidden by the mass of _débris_round the foot of every mound. [Illustration: FIG. 49. --Upper part of the drainage arrangements of amound. ] That these arrangements were well adapted to their purpose has been provedby the result. Thanks to the drains we have described, these sepulchralmounds have remained perfectly dry to the present day. Not only thecoffins, with the objects in metal or terra-cotta they contained, but eventhe skeletons themselves have been preserved intact. A touch will reducethe latter to powder, but on the first opening of their coffins they lookas if time had had no effect upon their substance. [190] By these details we may see how far the art of the constructor was pushedin the early centuries of the Chaldæan monarchy. They excite a strongdesire in us to discover the internal arrangements of his buildings, themethod by which access was given or forbidden to those chambers of theBabylonian temples and houses whose magnificence has been celebrated byevery writer that saw them before their ruin. Unhappily nothing has comedown to us of the monuments of Chaldæa, and especially of those of Babylon, but their basements and the central masses of the staged towers. TheAssyrian palaces are indeed in a better state of preservation, but even intheir case we ask many questions to which no certain answer is forthcoming. The great difficulty in all our researches and attempts at restoration, iscaused by the complete absence of any satisfactory evidence as to thenature of the roofs that covered rooms, either small or large. In mostcases the walls are only standing to a height of from ten to fifteenfeet;[191] in no instance has a wall with its summit still in place beendiscovered. The cut on the opposite page (Fig. 50) gives a fair idea of what a Ninevitebuilding looks like after the excavators have finished their work. It is aview in perspective of one of the gates of Sargon's city: the walls areeighty-eight feet thick, to which the buttresses add another ten feet;their average height is from about twenty-five to thirty feet, high enoughto allow the archway by which the city was entered to remain intact. Thisis quite an exception. In no part of the palace is there anything tocorrespond to this happy find of M. Place--any evidence by which we candecide the forms of Assyrian doorways. The walls are always from abouttwelve to twenty-eight feet in thickness (see Fig. 46. ) Rooms arerectangular, sometimes square, but more often so long as to be galleriesrather than rooms in the ordinary sense of the word. The way in which these rooms were covered in has been much discussed. SirHenry Layard believes only in flat roofs, similar to those of modern housesin Mossoul and the neighbouring villages. He tells us that he never cameupon the slightest trace of a vault, while in almost every room that heexcavated he found wood ashes and carbonized timber. [192] He is convincedthat the destruction of several of these buildings was due in the firstinstance to fire. Several pieces of sculpture, those from the palace ofSennacherib, for instance, may be quoted, which when found were black withsoot. They look like castings in relief that have been long fixed at theback of a fire-place. Long and narrow rooms may have been roofed with beams of palm or poplarresting upon the summits of the walls. As for the large halls, in thecentre they would be open to the sky, while around the opening would run aportico, similar to that of a Roman atrium, whose sloping roof wouldprotect the reliefs with which the walls were ornamented. [193] [Illustration: FIG. 50. --Present state of one of the city gates, Khorsabad. Perspective compiled from Place's plans and elevations. ] As to this, however, doubt had already been expressed by an attentive andjudicial observer like Loftus; who thought that the arch had played a veryimportant part in the architecture of Mesopotamia. [194] As he very justlyremarked, the conditions were rather different from those that obtained inthe maritime and mountainous provinces of Persia; there was no breeze fromthe gulf or from the summits of snowy mountains, to which every facilityfor blowing through their houses and cooling their heated chambers had tobe given; the problem to be solved was how best to oppose an impenetrableshield against a daily and long continued heat that would otherwise havebeen unbearable. Now it is clear that a vault with its great powers ofresistance would have been far better fitted to support a roof whosethickness should be in some reasonable proportion to the massive walls, than a ceiling of bad timber. In our day the mosques, the baths, and manyof the private houses of Mossoul and Bagdad have dome-shaped roofs. Withoutgoing as far as Mesopotamia, the traveller in Syria may see howintelligently, even in the least important towns, the native builder hasemployed a small dome built upon a square, to obtain a strong and soliddwelling entirely suited to the climate, a dwelling that should be warm inwinter and cool in summer. We must also point out that the state in which the interiors of rooms arefound by explorers, is more consistent with the hypothesis of a domed roofthan with any other. They are covered to a depth of from fifteen to twentyfeet with heaps of _débris_, reaching up to the top of the walls, so far asthe latter remain standing. [195] This rubbish consists of brick-earth mixedwith broken bricks, and pieces of stucco. Granting wooden roofs, how issuch an accumulation to be accounted for? Roofs supported by beams laidacross from one wall to the other, could never have safely upheld any greatweight. They must have been thin and comparatively useless as a defenceagainst the sun of Mesopotamia. On the other hand if we assume that vaultsof pisé were the chosen coverings, all the rest follows easily. They couldsupport the flat roof with ease, and the whole upper structure could bemade of sufficient thickness to exclude both the heat and the rain, whilethe present appearance of the ruins is naturally accounted for. Those who have lived in the East, those, even, who have extended a visit toAthens as far as Eleusis or Megara, must have stretched themselves, morethan once, under the stars, and, on the flat roofs of their temporaryresting-places, sought that rest that was not to be found in the hot andnarrow chambers within. They must then have noticed, as I have more thanonce, a large stone cylinder in one corner. In Greece and Asia Minor, itwill be in most cases a "drum" from some antique column, or a funerary_cippus_, abstracted by the peasantry from some neighbouring ruin. Thismorsel of Paros or Pentelic has to perform the office of a roller. Whensome heavy fall of rain by wetting and softening the upper surface of theterrace, gives an opportunity for repairing the ravages of a long drought, the stone is taken backwards and forwards over the yielding pisé. It closesthe cracks, kills the weeds that if left to themselves would soon transformthe roof into a field, and makes the surface as firm as a threshing-floor. The roofs of Assyrian buildings must have required the same kind oftreatment, and we know that in the present day it is actually practised. M. Place mentions rollers of limestone, weighing from two to threehundredweight, pierced at each end with a square hole into which woodenspindles were inserted to facilitate their management. [196] A certainnumber of these rollers were found within the chambers, into which theymust have fallen with the roofs. As soon as the terraces ceased to receivethe care necessary for keeping down the weeds and shrubs and keeping outthe water, the process of disintegration must have been rapid. The rainswould soon convert cracks into gaping breaches, and at the end of a fewyears, every storm would bring down a part of the roof. A century would beenough to destroy the vaults, and with them the upper parts of the walls towhich they were closely allied by the skill of the constructor. Thedisappearance of the archivolts and the great heaps of _débris_ are thusaccounted for. The roof materials were too soft, however, to damage intheir fall the figures in high relief or in the round that decorated thechambers beneath, or the carved slabs with which their walls were lined. Inspreading itself about these sculptures and burying them out of sight andmemory, the soft clay served posterity more efficiently than the mostcareful of packers. Among the first observers to suspect the truth as to the use of the vaultin Mesopotamia, were Eugène Flandin, who helped Botta to excavate thepalace of Sargon, [197] and Felix Thomas, [198] the colleague of M. Place. The reasons by which M. Thomas was led to the conclusion that the rooms inthe Ninevite palaces were vaulted, are thus given by M. Place, who may beconsidered his mouthpiece. [199] He does not deny that some of the Khorsabad reliefs bear the marks of fire, but he affirms, and that after the experience of four digging campaigns, that the conflagration was much less general than might be supposed fromthe statements of some travellers. He failed to discover the slightesttrace of fire in the hundred and eighty-four rooms and twenty-eight courtsthat he excavated. The marvellous preservation of the reliefs in many ofthe halls is inconsistent, in his opinion, with the supposition that thepalace was destroyed by fire; and if we renounce that supposition the mereaction of time is insufficient to account for the disappearance of such anextent of timber roofing, for here and there, especially near the doorways, pieces of broken beams and door panels have been found. "The wood is notall in such condition as the incorruptible cedar of the gilded palm-trees, but wherever it certainly existed, traces of it may be pointed out. Inadvanced decomposition it is no more consistent than powder, it may bepicked up and thrown aside, leaving a faithful cast of the beam or post towhich it belonged in the more tenacious clay. " [Illustration: FIG. 51. --Fortress; from the Balawat gates, in the BritishMuseum. ] All this, however, was but negative evidence. The real solution of theproblem was first positively suggested by the discovery of vaults in place, in the drains and water channels, and in the city gates. The bas-reliefs inwhich towns or fortresses are represented also support the belief thatgreat use was made of arched openings in Assyria, and the countries in itsneighbourhood (see Fig. 51). As soon as it is proved that the Assyriansunderstood the principle of the arch, why should it any longer be deniedthat they made use of it to cover their chambers? It is obvious that avault would afford a much better support for the weight above than anytimber roof. In the course of the explorations, a probable conjecture was changed intocomplete certainty. The very vaults for which inductive reasoning had shownthe necessity were found, if not in place, at least in a fragmentarycondition, and in the very rooms to which they had afforded a cover--andhere we must quote the words of the explorers themselves. In the most deeply buried quarters of the building, the excavations werecarried on by means of horizontal tunnels or shafts. "I was often obliged, "says M. Place, "to drive trenches from one side of the rooms to another inorder to get a clear idea of their shape and arrangement. On theseoccasions we often met with certain hard facts, for which, at the time, wecould give no explanation. These facts were blocks of clay whose undersides were hollowed segmentally and covered with a coat of stucco. Thesefragments were found sometimes a few feet from the walls, sometimes nearthe middle of the rooms. At first I was thoroughly perplexed to account forthem. Our trenches followed scrupulously the inner surfaces of the walls, which were easily recognizable by their stucco when they had no lining ofcarved slabs. What then were we to make of these arched blocks, also coatedwith stucco, but found in the centre of the rooms and far away from thewalls? Such signs were not to be disregarded in an exploration whereeverything was new and might lead to unforeseen results. Wherever a traceof stucco appeared I followed it up carefully. Little by little the earthunder and about the stuccoed blocks was cleared away, and then we foundourselves confronted by what looked like the entrance to an arched cellar. Here and there these portions of vaulting were many feet in length, fromfour to six in span, and three or four from the crown of the arch to thelevel upon which it rested. At the first glance the appearance of a vaultwas complete, and I thought I was about to penetrate into a cellar wheresome interesting find might await me. But on farther examination thispleasant delusion was dispelled. The pretended cellar came to an abruptend, and declared itself to be no more than a section of vaulting that hadquitted its proper place. .. . The evidence thus obtained was rendered stillmore conclusive by the discovery on the under side of several fragments ofpaintings which had evidently been intended for the decoration of aceiling. "[200] It is clear that these curvilinear and frescoed blocks were fragments of atunnel vault that had fallen in; and their existence explains the greatthickness given by the Assyrian constructor not only to his outer walls, but to those that divided room from room. The thinnest of the latter arehardly less than ten feet, while here and there they are as much as fifteenor sixteen. As for the outer walls they sometimes reach a thickness of fromfive and twenty to thirty feet. [201] The climate is insufficient to accountfor the existence of such walls as these. In the case of the outer wallssuch a reason might be thought, by stretching a point, to justify theirextravagant measurements, but with the simple partitions of the interior, it is quite another thing. This apparent anomaly disappears, however, if weadmit the existence of vaults and the necessity for meeting the enormousthrust they set up. With such a material as clay, the requisite solidity, could only be given by increasing the mass until its thickness wassometimes greater than the diameter of the chambers it inclosed. M. Place lays great stress upon the disproportion between the length andwidth of many of the apartments. There are few of which the greaterdiameter is not at least double the lesser, and in many cases it is four, five, and even seven times as great. He comes to the conclusion that thesecurious proportions were forced on the Assyrians by the nature of thematerials at their disposal. Such an arrangement must have been destructiveto architectural effect as well as inconvenient, but a clay vault could nothave any great span, and its abutments must perforce have been kept withina reasonable distance of each other. Taken by itself, this argument has, perhaps, hardly as much force as M. Place is inclined to give it. Doubtless the predilection for an exaggeratedparallelogram agrees very well with the theory that the vault was inconstant use by Mesopotamian architects, but it might be quoted with equalreason by the supporters of the opposite hypothesis, that of the timberroof. Our best reason for accepting all these pieces of evidence as corroborativeof the view taken by MM. Flandin, Loftus, Place, and Thomas is, in thefirst place, the incontestable fact that the entrances to the town ofKhorsabad were passages roofed with barrel vaults; secondly, the presenceamid the debris of the fragmentary arches above described; thirdly, thedepth of the mass of broken earth within the walls of each chamber;finally, the singular thickness of the walls, which is only to besatisfactorily explained by the supposition that the architect had toprovide solid abutments for arches that had no little weight to carry. It is difficult to say how the Assyrians set about building these arches ofcrude brick, but long practice enabled their architects to use thatunsatisfactory material with a skill of which we had no suspicion beforethe exhumation of Nineveh. Thanks to its natural qualities and to theexperienced knowledge with which it was prepared, their clay was tough andplastic to a degree that astonished the modern explorers on more than oneoccasion. The arched galleries cut during the excavations--sometimessegmental, sometimes pointed, and often of a considerable height andwidth--could never have stood in any other kind of earth without strong andnumerous supports. And yet M. Place tells us that these very galleries, exactly in the condition in which the mattock left them, "provided lodgingfor the labourers engaged and their families, and ever since they haveserved as a refuge for the inhabitants of the neighbouring villages. Workmen and peasants have taken shelter under vaults similar to those ofthe ancient Assyrians. Sometimes we cut through the accidentalaccumulations of centuries, where the clay, far from having been carefullyput in place, had rather lost many of its original qualities. Even there, however, the roof of our galleries remained suspended without any signs ofinstability, as if to bear witness that the Assyrian architect knew what hewas about when he trusted so much to the virtues of a fictilematerial. "[202] We may refer those who are specially interested in constructive methods toM. Place's account of the curious fashion in which the workmen of Mossoulwill build a pointed vault without the help of any of those woodencenterings in use in Europe. In our day, certainly, the masons of Mossouluse stone and mortar, but their example none the less proves that similarresults may once have been obtained in different materials. [203] A vaultlaunched into mid-air without any centering, and bearing the workmen whowere building it on its unfinished flanks, was a phenomenon calculated toastonish an architect. Taking everything into consideration the clay vaultsof Khorsabad are no more surprising than these domes of modernMossoul. [204] We cannot say for certain that the Assyrian builders made use of domes inaddition to the barrel vaults, but all the probabilities are in favour ofsuch an hypothesis. A dome is a peculiar kind of vault used for the covering of square, circular, or polygonal spaces. As for circular and polygonal rooms, nonehave been found in Assyria, but a few square ones have been disinterred. Onthe principal façade of Sargon's palace there are two of a fair size, someforty-eight feet each way. Thomas did not believe that a barrel vault wasused in these apartments; the span would have been too great. He soughttherefore for some method that would be at once well adapted to the specialconditions and in harmony with the general system. This he found in thehemispherical dome. All doubts on the subject were taken away, however, by the discovery of thebas-relief (Fig. 43) reproduced on page 145, in which we find a group ofbuildings roofed, some with spherical vaults, some with elliptical domesapproaching a cone in outline. This proves that the Mesopotamian architectswere acquainted with different kinds of domes, just as they were withvarieties of the barrel vault. It has been guessed that this bas-relief, which is unique in its way, merely represents the brick-kilns used in the construction of the palace ofSennacherib. To this objection there is more than one answer. The Assyriansculptures we possess represent but a small part of the whole, and eachfresh discovery introduces us to forms previously unknown. Moreover, hadthe sculptor wished to represent the kilns in which the bricks for thepalace were burnt, he would have shown the flames coming out at the top. Inreliefs of burning towns he never leaves out the flames, and in this case, where they would have served to mark the activity with which the buildingoperations were pushed on, he would certainly not have omitted them. Again, is not the building on the left of the picture obviously a flat-roofedhouse? If that be so we must believe, before we accept the kiln theory, that the sculptor made a strange departure from the real proportions of therespective buildings. The doorways, too, in the relief are exactly likethose of an ordinary house, while they bear no resemblance to the low andnarrow openings which have been used at all times for kilns. Why thenshould we refuse to admit that there were vaults in Nineveh, when Strabotells us expressly that "all the houses of Babylon were vaulted. "[205] Thomas invokes the immemorial custom of the East to support the evidence ofthis curious relief:--the great church of St. Sophia, the Byzantinechurches and the Turkish mosques, all of which had no other roof but acupola. In all of these he sees nothing but late examples of acharacteristic method of construction which had been invented and perfectedmany centuries before at Babylon and Nineveh. From the monuments with which those two great cities were adorned nothingbut the foundations and parts of the walls have come down to our day; butthe buildings of a later epoch, of the periods when Seleucia and Ctesiphonenjoyed the heritage of Babylon, have been more fortunate. In the ruinswhich are acknowledged to be those of the palaces built by the Parthian andSassanid monarchs, the upper structures are still in existence, and in amore or less well preserved condition. In these the dome arrangement isuniversal. Sometimes, as at Firouz-Abad (Fig. 52), we find the segment of asphere; elsewhere, as at Sarbistan (Fig. 53), the cupola is ovoid. Oursection of the latter building will give an idea of the internalarrangements of these structures, and will show how the architect contrivedto suspend a circular dome over a square apartment. [206] These monuments of an epoch between remote antiquity and the Græco-Romanperiod were built of brick, like the palaces of Nineveh. [207] Theexigencies of the climate remained the same, the habits and requirements ofthe various royal families that succeeded each other in the country werenot sensibly modified, while the Sargonids, the Arsacids and the Sassanidsall ruled over one and the same population. [Illustration: FIG. 52. --The Palace at Firouz-Abad; from Flandin andCoste. ] [Illustration: FIG. 53. --The palace at Sarbistan; from Flandin and Coste. ] The corporations of architects and workmen must have preserved thetraditions of their craft from century to century, traditions which hadtheir first rise in the natural capabilities of their materials and in thedata of the problem they had to solve. The historian cannot, then, beaccused of going beyond the limit of fair induction in arguing from thesemodern buildings to their remote predecessors. After the conquest ofAlexander, the ornamental details, and, still more, the style of thesculptures, must have been affected to a certain extent, first by Greek artand afterwards by that of Rome; but the plans, the internal structure, andthe general arrangement of the buildings must have remained the same. [Illustration: FIG. 54. --Section through the palace at Sarbistan; fromFlandin and Coste. ] There is nothing hazardous or misleading in these arguments from analogy;from the palace of Chosroes to that of Sargon is a legitimate step. Someday, perhaps, we may attempt to pursue the same path in the oppositedirection; we may endeavour to show that the survival of these examples andtraditions may very well have helped to direct architecture into a new pathin the last years of the Roman Empire. We shall then have to speak of aschool in Asia Minor whose works have not yet been studied with theattention they deserve. The buildings in question are distinguished chieflyby the important part played in their construction by the vault and thedome resting upon pendentives; certain constructive processes, too, are tobe found in them which had never, so far as we can tell, been known orpractised in the East. We can hardly believe that the chiefs of the schoolinvented from the foundation a system of construction whose principles wereso different from those of the Greeks, or even of the later Romans. Theymay, indeed, have perfected the system by grafting the column upon it, butit is at least probable that they took it in the first place from those whohad practised it from time immemorial, from men who taught them thetraditional methods of shortening and facilitating the labour of execution. The boundaries of Asia Minor "march" with those of Mesopotamia, and in thelatter every important town had buildings of brick covered with domes. TheRomans frequented the Euphrates valley, to which they were taken both bywar and commerce; their victories sometimes carried them even as far asCtesiphon on the Tigris, so that there was no lack of opportunity for thestudy of Oriental architecture on the very spot where it was born. Theycould judge of and admire the beauty it certainly possessed when the greatbuildings of Mesopotamia were still clothed in all the richness of theirdecoration. The genius of the Greeks had come nigh to exhausting the formsand combinations of the classic style; it was tired of continuous labour ina narrow circle and sighed for fresh worlds to conquer. We can easilyunderstand then, how it would welcome a system which seemed to afford thenovelty it sought, which seemed to promise the elements of a new departurethat might be developed in many, as yet unknown, directions. If we putourselves at this point of view we shall see that Isidore and Anthemius, the architects of St. Sophia, were the disciples and perpetuators of theforgotten masters who raised so many millions of bricks into the air at thebidding of Sargon and Nebuchadnezzar. [208] Whatever may be thought of this hypothesis, there seems to be little doubtthat the Assyrians knew how to pass from the barrel vault to thehemispherical, and even to the elliptical, cupola. As soon as they haddiscovered the principle of the vault and found out easy and expeditiousmethods of setting it up, all the rest followed as a matter of course. Their materials lent themselves as kindly to the construction of a dome asto that of a segmental vault, and promised equal stability in either case. As to their method of passing from the square substructure to the dome weknow nothing for certain, but we may guess that the system employed by theSassanids (see Fig. 54) was a survival from it. It is unlikely that timbercenterings were used to sustain the vaults during construction. Timber wasrare and bad in Chaldæa and men would have to learn to do without it. M. Choisy has shown--as we have already mentioned--that the Byzantinearchitects built cupolas of wide span without scaffolding of any kind, eachcircular course being maintained in place until it was complete by the mereadherence of the mortar. [209] M. Place, too, gives an account of how he saw a few Kurd women build anoven in the shape of a Saracenic dome, with soft clay and without anyinternal support. Their structure, at the raising of which his livelycuriosity led him to assist, was composed of a number of rings, decreasingin diameter as they neared the summit. [210] The domes of crude brick whichsurmounted many of the Kurd houses were put together in the same fashion, and they were often of considerable size. When asked by M. Place as to howthey had learnt to manage brick so skilfully, the oven-builders repliedthat it was "the custom of the country, " and there is no apparent reasonwhy that custom should not date back to a remote antiquity. The Assyrianshad recourse to similar means when they built the domes of their greatpalaces. They too, perhaps, left a day for drying to each circular course, and re-wetted its upper surface when the moment arrived for placing thenext. [211] [Illustration: FIG. 55. --Restoration of a hall in the harem at Khorsabad, compiled from Place. ] From the existence of domes--which he considers to be almost beyondquestion--M. Place deduces that of semi-domes, one of which he assigns tothe principal chamber of the harem in the palace at Khorsabad (Fig. 55). Feeling, perhaps, that this requires some justification, he finds it in amodern custom, which he thus describes:--"In the towns of this part of theEast, the inner court of the harem is, as a rule, terminated at one of itsextremities by a vault entirely open at one side, in the form of a hugeniche. It is, in fact, the half of a dome sliced in two from top tobottom; the floor, which is elevated a few steps above the pavement of thecourt, is strewn with carpets and cushions so as to form an open and airysaloon, in which the women are to be found by their visitors at certainhours. This divan is protected from rain by the semi-dome, and from thesun by curtains or mats hung across the arched opening. This arrangementmay very well be dictated by ancient tradition. It is well suited to theclimate, a consideration which never fails to exercise a decisive influenceover architecture. "[212] [Illustration: FIG. 56. --Royal Tent, Kouyundjik. British Museum. ] [Illustration: FIG. 57. --Tent, Kouyundjik. British Museum. ] And yet there would, perhaps, have been room for hesitation had no supportto this induction been afforded by the figured monuments; for theinhabitants of the province of Mossoul have deserted the traditions oftheir ancestors in more than one particular. They have given up the use ofcrude brick, for instance, so far, at least as the walls of their housesare concerned. They have supplied its place with stone and plaster, hencetheir dwellings are less fresh and cool than those of their fathers. Insuch a question the present throws a light upon the past, but the two havedistinctive features of their own, even when the physical characteristicsof the country have remained the same. The best evidence in favour of theemployment of such an arrangement in Assyria is that of the bas-relief. Wethere not infrequently encounter an object like those figured on this page. Sometimes it is in the midst of what appears to be an entrenched camp, sometimes in a fortified city. Its general aspect, certain minor details, and sometimes an accompanying inscription, permit us to recognize in it themarquee or pavilion of the king. [213] Now the roofs of these structuresevidently consist of two semi-domes, unequal in size and separated by anuncovered space. If such an arrangement was found convenient for a portableand temporary dwelling like a tent, why should it not have been applied tothe permanent homes both of the king and his people? Arches still standing in the city gates, fragments of vaults found withinthe chambers of Sargon's palace at Khorsabad, the evidence of thebas-reliefs and the existing methods of building in Mesopotamia--all concurin persuading us that the vault played an important part in theconstructions of Assyria, and consequently in those of Chaldæa; but weshould not go so far as to say that all the rooms in the palace atKhorsabad and elsewhere were covered with barrel vaults, domes, orsemi-domes. Our chosen guides, have, we think, allowed themselves to be alittle too absolute in this particular; it is quite possible that by theside of the vaulted chambers there were others with wooden roofs. Thisconclusion is suggested partly by Sir H. Layard's discovery of considerablequantities of wood ashes in the palaces he excavated, partly by theevidence of ancient texts that wood was often used throughout this regionto support the roofs at least of private houses. We may quote, in the firstplace, some remarks in Strabo's account of Susiana, which the Greekgeographer borrowed from one of his original authorities: "In order toprevent the houses from becoming too hot, their roofs are covered with twocubits of earth, the weight of which compels them to make their dwellingslong and narrow, because although they had only short beams, they had tohave large rooms, so as to avoid being suffocated. " This same writer, inspeaking of these roofs, describes a singular property of the palm-treebeams. The densest and most solid of them, he says, instead of yieldingwith age and sinking under the weight they have to support, take a gentleupward curve so as to become better fitted than at first for the support ofthe heavy roof. [214] The necessity for the presence of a thick roof between the sun and theinside of the rooms is here very clearly affirmed. It will also be noticedthat the general form of apartments in Susiana and Assyria did not escapethe observer in question. As he saw very clearly, the great disproportionbetween their length and their width was to be explained as easily by therequirements of a wooden roof as by those of a clay vault. In his attempt to describe Babylon, Strabo says[215]: "In the absence oftimber, properly speaking, beams and columns of palm-wood were used in thebuildings of Babylonia. These pillars were covered with twisted ropes ofrushes, over which several coats of paint were laid. The doors were coatedwith asphalte. Both doors and houses were very high. We may add that thehouses were vaulted, in consequence of the absence of wood. .. . There were, of course, no tile roofs in countries where it never rains, [216] such asBabylonia, Susiana and Sittacenia. " Strabo himself never visited Mesopotamia. This we know from the passage inhis introduction, in which he tells us exactly how far his voyagesextended, from north to south, and from east to west. [217] When he had todescribe Asia from the Taurus to India, he could only do so with the helpof passages borrowed from various authors, and in the course of his work ithas sometimes happened that he has brought into juxtaposition pieces ofinformation that contradict each other. [218] Something of the kind hashappened in the lines we have quoted, in which he first speaks of pillarsand timber roofs, and ends by declaring that all the Chaldæan houses werevaulted, although vaults and timber could not exist together. The truth is, in all probability, that one system of covering prevailed here and anotherthere, and that the seeming contradiction in the text is due to hastyediting. We may conclude from it that travellers had reported the existenceof both systems, and that each was to be explained by local conditions andthe varying supply of materials. The two systems still exist side by side over all Western Asia. From Syriato Kurdistan and the Persian Gulf the hemispherical cupola upon a squaresubstructure continually occurs. The timber roof is hardly less frequent;when the apartment in which it is used is of any considerable size it iscarried upon two or three rows of wooden columns. These columns rest uponcubes of stone, and a tablet of the same material is often interposedbetween them and the beams they support. A sort of rustic order is thusconstituted of which the shaft alone is of wood. We reproduce a sketch bySir H. Layard in which this arrangement is shown. It is taken from a houseinhabited by Yezidis, [219] in the district of Upper Mesopotamia called_Sinjar_ (Fig. 58). [Illustration: FIG. 58. --Interior of a Yezidi house; from Layard. ] We are inclined to think that both systems were occasionally found in asingle building. The tunnel vault and the joisted ceiling were equally wellsuited to the long galleries of Assyrian palaces. In one room, or suite ofrooms, nothing but brick may have been used, while in others wood may havehad the preference. Still more probably, one architect may have had apredilection for timber, while another may have preferred clay vaults. Ineither case the general arrangement, what we may call the spirit of theplan, would remain the same. When wooden roofs were used were they upheld by wooden uprights or bycolumns of any other material? Botta was at first inclined to say yes tothis question, but he did not attempt to conceal that excavation haddiscovered little to support such an hypothesis. [220] Such pillars, werethey of stone, would leave traces among the ruins in the shape of brokencolumns; were they of burnt bricks (and there could be no question of thecrude material), those bricks would be found on the spot they occupied andwould easily be recognized by their shape, which, as we have already shown, would have been specially adapted to the work they had to do. [221] Thepoints of junction with the pavement would also be visible. If we contendthat they were of wood, like those of the house figured above, we mustadmit that, at least in the more carefully built houses, such precautionsas even the peasants of the Yezidis do not neglect must have been taken, and the timber columns raised upon stone bases which would protect themfrom the sometimes damp floors. Neither these bases nor any marks of theirexistence have been found in any of the ruins; and we are therefore led tothe conclusion that to search for hypostyle halls in the Assyrian palaces, would be to follow the imagination rather than the reason. If we admit that architects made no use of columns to afford intermediatesupport to the heavy roofs, we may at first be inclined to believe thatwooden ceilings were only used in very narrow apartments, for we can hardlygive a length of more than from twenty-four to twenty-seven feet to beamsthat were called upon to support a thick covering of beaten earth as wellas their own weight. [222] Perhaps, however, the skill of their carpenterswas equal to increasing the span and rigidity of the beams used by a fewsimple contrivances. One of these is shown in our Fig. 60, a diagramcomposed by M. Chipiez to give an idea of the different methods ofconstruction used by, or, at least, at the command of, the Assyrianbuilder. All the rooms were surmounted by flat roofs, and our horizontal sectionsshow how these roofs were accommodated to the domes or the timber ceilingsby which they were supported. On the left of the engraving semicircularvaults are shown, on the right a timbered roof. The arrangement of thelatter is taken from an Etruscan tomb at Corneto, where, however, it iscarried out in stone. [223] A frame like this could be put together on thespot and offered the means of covering a wider space with the samematerials than could be roofed in by a horizontal arrangement. Further backrises one of those domes over square substructures whose existence seems tous so probable. Behind this again opens one of the courts by which so muchof the area of the palace was occupied. The composition is completed by awall with parapet and flanking towers. [Illustration: FIG. 59. --Fortress; from Layard's _Monuments_, 1st Series. ] After considering the method employed for roofing the palace apartments, wecome naturally to investigate their system of illumination. In view of theextravagant thickness of their walls it is difficult to believe that theymade use of such openings as we should call windows. The small loop-holesthat appear in some of the bas-reliefs near the summits of towers andfortified walls were mere embrasures, for the purpose of admitting a littleair and light to the narrow chambers within which the defenders could findshelter from the missiles of an enemy and could store their own arms andengines of war (see Fig. 59). The walls of Khorsabad even now areeverywhere at least ten feet high, and in some parts they are as much asfifteen, twenty, and five-and-twenty feet, an elevation far in excess of aman's stature, and they show no trace of a window. Hence we may at leastaffirm that windows were not pierced under the same conditions as in modernarchitecture. [224] [Illustration: FIG. 60. --Crude brick construction; compiled by CharlesChipiez. ] And yet the long saloons of the palace with their rich decoration had needof light, which they could only obtain through the doorways and theopenings left in the roof. When this was of wood the matter was simpleenough, as our diagram (Fig. 60) shows. Botta noticed, during his journeyto his post, another arrangement, of which, he thinks, the Assyrians mayvery well have made use. [Illustration: FIG. 61. --Armenian "Lantern;" from Botta. ] "The houses of the Armenian peasantry, " he says, "are sunk into the ground, so that their walls stand up but little above the level of the soil. Theyare lighted by an opening that serves at once for window and chimney, andis placed, as a rule, in the centre of the roof. The timber frame of thisopening is often ingeniously arranged (Fig. 61). Four thick beams, but veryroughly squared, intersect each other in the middle of the house. Acrosstheir angles slighter joists are placed, and this operation is repeatedtill a small dome, open at the top, for the entrance of light and theescape of smoke, has been erected. "[225] [Illustration: FIGS. 62-65. --Terra-cotta cylinders in elevation, sectionand plan; from Place. ] In the case of vaults how are we to suppose that the rooms were lighted? Wecan hardly imagine that rectangular openings were left in the crown of thearch, such a contrivance would have admitted very little light, while itwould have seriously compromised the safety of the structure. According toM. Place the desired result was obtained in more skilful fashion. Inseveral rooms he found terra-cotta cylinders similar to those figuredbelow. These objects, of which he gives a careful description, were aboutthirteen and a half inches in diameter and ten inches in height. We mayrefer our readers to the pages of M. Place for a detailed account of theobservations by which he was led to conclude that these cylinders were notstored, as if in a warehouse, in the rooms where they were afterwardsfound, but that they formed an integral part of the roof and shared itsruin. We may say that the evidence he brings forward seems to fairlyjustify his hypothesis. Penetrating the roof at various points these cylinders would afford apassage for the outer air to the heated chamber within, while a certainquantity of light would be admitted at the same time. The danger arisingfrom the rains could be avoided to a great extent by giving them a slightlyoblique direction. To this very day the Turkish bath-houses over the wholeof the Levant from Belgrade to Teheran, are almost universally lighted bythese small circular openings, which are pierced in great numbers throughthe low domes, and closed with immovable glasses. Besides which we canpoint to similar arrangements in houses placed both by their date andcharacter, far nearer to those of Assyria. The Sassanide monuments bearwitness that many centuries after the destruction of Nineveh the custom ofplacing cylinders of terra-cotta in vaults was still practised. In spite ofits small scale these circles may be distinguished in the woodcut of theSarbistan palace which we have borrowed from Coste and Flandin (Fig. 54). [226] These same writers have ascertained that the architects of Chosroes andNoushirwan employed still another method of lighting the rooms over whichthey built their domes. They gave the latter what is called an "eye, " aboutthree feet in diameter, through which the daylight could fall verticallyinto the room beneath. This is the principle upon which the Pantheon ofAgrippa is lighted; the only difference being one of proportion. InPersia, the diameter of the eye was always very small compared to that ofthe dome. If we are justified in our belief that the constructors of theParthian and Sassanide palaces were no more than the perpetuators ofsystems invented by the architects of Nineveh and Babylon, the Assyriandomes also may very well have been opened at the summit in this fashion. Inthe bas-relief reproduced in our Fig. 42, the two small cupolas aresurmounted with caps around a circular opening which must have admitted thelight. Moreover, the elaborate system of drainage with which thesubstructure of an Assyrian palace was honeycombed would allow any rainwater to run off as fast as such a hole would admit it. [227] Whatever may be thought of these conjectures, it is certain that thearchitects of Nineveh--while they did not neglect accessory sources ofillumination--counted chiefly upon the doors to give their buildings asufficient supply of light and air. As M. Place says, when we examine theplans of Sargon's palace at Khorsabad we are as much astonished at the sizeof the doorways as at the thickness of the walls. [228] "There is not a single doorway, even of the smallest chambers, even of thesimple ante-rooms for the use of servants and guards, that is not at leastsix feet or more wide; most of them are ten feet, and those decorated withsculptures even wider still. " In their present ruinous state, it is moredifficult to say for certain what their height may have been. Judging, however, from the ruins and from the usual proportions of height and widthin the voids of Assyrian buildings, the doors at Khorsabad must have risento a height of between fifteen and twenty-two feet. "Such measurements arethose of exceptionally vast openings, especially when we remember that mostof them gave access, not to state apartments, but to rooms used for themost ordinary purposes, store-rooms, ante-rooms, kitchens, serving-rooms ofall kinds, and bedrooms. When we find architects who were so reluctant asthose of Assyria to cut openings of any kind in their outer walls, usingdoorways of these extravagant dimensions, we may surely conclude that theywere meant to light and ventilate the rooms as well as to facilitate thecirculation of their inhabitants. "[229] Even in halls, which were lighted at once by a number of circular eyes likethose described and by a wide doorway, there would be no excess ofillumination, and the rooms of Assyria must, on the whole, have been darkerthan ours. When we remember the difference in the climates this fact ceasesto surprise us. With our often-clouded skies we seldom have too much light, and we give it as wide and as frequent passages as are consistent with thestability of our buildings. The farther north we go the more stronglymarked does this tendency become. In Holland, the proportion of voids tosolids is much greater than it is on the façade of a Parisian house, andthe same tendency may be traced from one end of Europe to the other. Buteven in Central Europe, as soon as the temperature rises above a certainpoint, curtains are drawn and jalousies closed, that is, the window issuppressed as far as possible. And is not that enough to suggest a probablereason for the want of windows characteristic of an Oriental dwelling? Anexplanation has been sometimes sought in the life of the harem and in thedesire of eastern sovereigns to withdraw themselves from the eyes of theirsubjects. The idleness, almost amounting to lethargy, of the presentmasters of the East has also been much insisted on. What, it is asked, dothese men want with light? They neither read nor work, they care nothingfor those games of skill or chance which form so large a part of westernactivity; absolute repose, the repose of sleep or stupefaction, is theirideal of existence. [230] These observations have hardly the force that has been ascribed to them. The harem is not the whole palace, and even in the modern East the_selamlik_, or public part of the house, is very differently arranged fromthe rooms set apart for the women. The hunting and conquering kings ofAssyria lived much in public. They appeared too often at the head of theirarmies or among the hounds for us to represent them--as the Greek traditionrepresented Sardanapalus--shut up within blind walls in distant and almostinaccessible chambers. We must guard ourselves against the mistake ofseeking analogies too close between the East of to-day and that of thecenturies before the Greek civilization. The people who now inhabit those countries are in a state of languor anddecay. Life has retired from them; their days are numbered, and the fewthey have yet to live are passed in a death-like trance. But it was notalways thus. The East of antiquity, the East in which man's intellect awokewhile it slumbered elsewhere, the East in which that civilization was bornand developed whose rich and varied creations we are engaged in studying, was another place. Its inhabitants were strangely industrious andinventive, their intellects were busied with every form of thought, andtheir activity was expended upon every art of peace and war. We must notdelude ourselves into thinking that the Chaldæans, who invented the firstmethods of science, that the Assyrians, who carried their conquests as faras the shores of the Mediterranean, that those Phoenicians who have beenhappily called "the English of antiquity, " had any great resemblance to theTurks who now reign at Bagdad, Mossoul, and Beyrout. But the climate has not changed, and from it we must demand the key to thecharacteristic arrangements of Mesopotamian palaces. Even now most of thebuildings of Mossoul are only lighted from the door, which is hardly evershut. Some rooms have no direct means either of lighting or ventilation, and these are the favourite retreats in summer. "I was enabled, " says M. Place, "to convince myself personally of this. In the consul's house therewere, on one side of the court, three rooms one within the other, of whichthe first alone was lighted from without, and even this had a coveredgallery in front of it, by which the glare was tempered. In the dog-days, when the mid-day sun rendered all work a punishment, the innermost of thesethree rooms was the only habitable part of the house. The serdabs, orsubterranean chambers, are used under the same conditions. They areinconvenient in some ways, but the narrowness of the openings, throughwhich light, and with it heat, can reach their depths, gives themadvantages not to be despised. "[231] The crude brick walls of ancient Assyria were far thicker than the rubbleand plaster ones of modern Mossoul, so that more light could be admitted tothe rooms without compromising their freshness. It seems to be proved thatin at least the majority of rooms at Khorsabad the architect provided othermeans of lighting and ventilation besides the doorways, wide and highthough the latter were. He pierced the roof with numerous oblique andvertical openings, he left square wells in the timber ceilings, andcircular eyes in the domes and vaults. If these were to fulfil theirpurpose of admitting light and air into the principal rooms, the lattermust have had no upper stories to carry. At Mossoul, walls are much thinnerthan at Nineveh, and interiors are simpler in arrangement and decoration. The twenty or five-and-twenty feet of clay of the Assyrian walls would makeit impossible to give sufficient light through the doors alone to thesculptures and paintings with which the rooms were adorned. We cannot doubtthat a top light was also required. The rooms of the palaces must, therefore, have succeeded one another in one horizontal plan. Slightdifferences of level between them were connected by short flights, usuallyof five carefully-adjusted steps. [232] In spite of all its magnificence theroyal dwelling was no more than a huge ground floor. With such methods of construction as those we have described, it would havebeen very difficult to multiply stories. Neither vaults nor timber ceilingscould have carried the enormous masses of earth of which even theirpartition-walls for the most part consisted, so that the architect wouldhave had no choice but to make his upper chambers identical in size withthose of his ground floors. This difficulty he was not, however, calledupon to face, because the necessity for providing his halls and corridorswith a top light, put an upper floor out of the question. No trace of sucha staircase as would have been required to give access to an upper storyhas been discovered in any of the Assyrian ruins, [233] and yet some meansof ascent to the terraced roofs must have been provided, if not for theinhabitants of the chambers below--who are likely, however, to have passedthe nights upon them in the hot season--at least for the workmen whose dutyit was to keep them in repair. Some parts of the palace, on the other hand, may have been raised muchabove the level of the rest. Sir Henry Layard found the remains of suchchambers in the palace of Assurnazirpal at Nimroud. [234] In the bas-relieffrom Kouyundjik, reproduced in our Fig. 39, an open gallery may be noticedat a great height above the soil. But neither this gallery nor the chambersdiscovered at Nimroud form what we should call a "first-floor. " Layard didnot conduct his excavations like an architect, and he fails to give us suchinformation as we have in the case of Khorsabad, but he tells us that thechambers in question formed the upper part of a sort of tower projectingfrom one angle of the façade. In the building represented on the Kouyundjikrelief, the gallery is also upheld by the main wall, and stands upon itssummit. From these observations we may conclude that when the Assyrianarchitect wished to erect chambers that should have a command over thebuildings about them and over the surrounding country, he placed them, notover his ground-floor, but upon solid and independent masses of bricks. The staircase, then, could not have had the internal importance by which itis distinguished in architectural systems that make use of several stories. On the other hand, it must have played a very conspicuous part externally, in front of the outer doors and the façades through which they werepierced. Fortresses, palaces, temples, all the great buildings of Chaldæaand Assyria, were built upon artificial mounds, upon a wide platform thatrequired an easy communication with the plain below. This could only beobtained by long flights of steps or by gently inclined planes. Steps woulddo for pedestrians, but horses, chariots, and beasts of burden generallywould require the last-named contrivance. All who have attemptedrestorations have copied the arrangement of these stairs and sloping roadsfrom the ruins of Persepolis, where the steps, being cut in the rockitself, are still to be traced. The brick slopes of Mesopotamia must havecommenced to disappear on the very day that their custodians first began toneglect their repair. Some confirmation, however, is to be found, even in the buildingsthemselves, of the hypothesis suggested by their situations. AtAbou-Sharein, for instance, in Lower Chaldæa, the staircase figured on thenext page (Fig. 66) may be seen at the foot of the building excavated byMr. Taylor; it gave access to the upper terrace of what seems to have beena temple. [235] Here the steps are no more than about twenty-six incheswide, but this width must often have been greatly surpassed elsewhere. Indeed, in the same building the first story was reached by a staircaseabout seventy feet long and sixteen wide. The stone steps were twenty-twoinches long, thirteen broad, and one foot deep. They were fixed with greatcare by means of bronze clasps. Unfortunately the explorer gives us neitherplan nor elevation of this monumental staircase. [Illustration: FIG. 66. --Outside staircases in the ruins of Abou-Sharein. ] Layard believed that, in passing the Mesopotamian mounds, he could oftendistinguish upon them traces of the flights of steps by which their summitswere reached. [236] On the eastern face of the palace of Sennacherib, hesays, the remains of the wide slopes by which the palace communicated withthe plain were quite visible to him. [237] One of these staircases isfigured in a bas-relief from Nimroud; it seems to rise to a line ofbattlements that form, no doubt, the parapet to a flat terrace behind. [238]Finally, in another relief, the sculptor shows two flights of steps bendinground one part of a mound and each coming to an end at a door into thetemple on its summit. The curve described by this ramp involved the use ofsteps, which are given in M. Chipiez's _Restoration_ (Plate IV. ). Aninteresting series of reliefs, brought to England from Kouyundjik, provesthat in the palace interiors there were inclined galleries for the use ofthe servants. The lower edges of the alabaster slabs are cut to the sameslope as that of the corridor upon whose walls they were fixed, and theirsculptures represent the daily traffic that passed and repassed withinthose walls. [239] On the one hand, fourteen grooms are leading fourteenhorses down to the Tigris to be watered; on the other, servants aremounting with provisions for the royal table in baskets on theirheads. [240] The steps of basalt and gypsum, that afford communication between rooms ofdifferent levels at Khorsabad, are planned and adjusted with great skilland knowledge. [241] The workmen who built those steps took, we may be sure, all the necessary precautions to prevent men and beasts from slipping onthe paved floors of the inclined galleries. These were constructed upon thesame plan as the ramps of M. Place's observatory, on which the pavementconsists of steps forty inches long, thirty-two inches wide, and less thanan inch high. Such steps as these give an inclination of about one inthirty-four, and the ramp on which they were used may be more justlycompared to an inclined plane, like that of the Seville Giralda or the Moleof Hadrian, than to a staircase. One might ascend or descend it onhorseback without any difficulty. [242] By this example we may see that although the Assyrian builder had nomaterials at his command equal to those employed by the Greek or Egyptian, he knew how to make ingenious and skilful use of those he had. We should be in a better position to appreciate these qualities ofinvention and taste had time not entirely deprived us of that part of thework of the Mesopotamian architects in which they were best served by theirmaterials. Assyria, like Egypt, practised construction "by assemblage" aswell as the two methods we have already noticed. She had a light form ofarchitecture in which wood and metal played the principal part. As mighthave been expected, however, all that she achieved in that direction hasperished, and the only evidence upon which we can attempt a restoration isthat of the sculptured monuments, and they, unhappily, are much lesscommunicative in this respect than those of Egypt. In the paintings of theTheban tombs the kiosks and pavilions of wood and metal are figured in allthe variety and vivacity derived from the brilliant colours with which theywere adorned. Nothing of the kind is to be found in Mesopotamia. Our onlydocuments are the uncoloured reliefs which, even in the matter of form, aremore reticent than we could have wished. But in spite of theirsimplification these representations allow us to perceive clearly enoughthe mingled elegance and richness that characterized the structures inquestion. [Illustration: FIG. 67. --Interior of the Royal Tent; from Layard. ] Thus in a bas-relief at Nimroud representing the interior of a fortress, acentral place is occupied by a small pavilion generally supposed torepresent the royal tent (Fig. 67). [243] The artist could not give acomplete representation of it, with all its divisions and the people itcontained. He shows only the apartment in which the high-bred horses thatdrew the royal chariot were groomed and fed. Before the door of thepavilion an eunuch receives a company of prisoners, their hands boundbehind them, and a soldier at their elbow. Higher up on the relief thesculptor has figured the god with fish's scales whom we have alreadyencountered (see Fig. 9). To him, perhaps, the king attributed the captureof the fortress that has just fallen into his hands. It is not, however, with an explanation of the scene that we are atpresent concerned; our business is with the structure of the pavilionitself, with the slender columns and the rich capitals at their summits, with the domed roof, made, no doubt, of several skins sewn together andkept in place by metal weights. The capitals and the two wild goats perchedupon the shafts must have been of metal. As for the tall and slender columns themselves, they were doubtless ofwood. The chevrons and vertical fillets with which they are decorated mayeither have been carved in the wood or inlaid in metal. [Illustration: FIG. 68. --Tabernacle; from the Balawat Gates. ] The pavilion we have just described was a civil edifice, the temporaryresting place of the sovereign. The same materials were employed in thesame spirit and with a similar arrangement in the erection of religioustabernacles (see Fig. 68). The illustration on this page is taken fromthose plates of beaten bronze which are known as the _Gates of Balawat_ andform one of the most precious treasures in the Assyrian Galleries of theBritish Museum. [244] They represent the victories and military expeditionsof Shalmaneser II. In the pavilion that we have abstracted from this longseries of reliefs may be recognized the field-chapel of the king. When thatcruel but pious conqueror wished to thank Assur for some great success, hecould cause a tabernacle like this to be raised in a few minutes even uponthe field of battle itself. It is composed of four light columns supportinga canopy of leather which is kept in form by a fringe of heavy weights. Rather above the middle of these columns two rings give an opportunity fora knotted ornament that could also be very quickly arranged, and thebrilliant colours of the knots would add notably to the gay appearance ofthe tabernacle. Under the canopy the king himself is shown standing in anattitude of worship and pouring a libation on the portable altar. Thelatter is a tripod, probably of bronze, and upon it appears a dish withsomething in it which is too roughly drawn to be identified. On the rightstands a second and smaller tripod with a vessel containing the liquidnecessary for the rite. The graphic processes of the Assyrian sculptor were so imperfect that atfirst we have some difficulty in picturing to ourselves the originals ofthese representations; in spite of the care devoted to many of theirdetails, the real constitution of these little buildings is not easilygrasped. In order to make it quite clear M. Chipiez has restored one ofthem, using no materials in the restoration but those for which authorityis to be found in the bas-reliefs (Fig. 70). M. Chipiez has placed his pavilion upon a salient bastion forming part of awide esplanade. Two staircases lead up to it, and the wall by which thewhole terrace is supported and inclosed is ornamented with those verticalgrooves which are such a common motive in Chaldæan architecture. In frontof the pavilion, on the balustrade of the staircase, and in the backgroundnear a third flight of steps, four isolated columns may be seen, the twoformer crowned with oval medallions, the two latter with cones. The meaningof these standards--which are copied from the Balawat Gates[245]--isuncertain. In the bas-reliefs in question they are placed before a stelewith a rounded top, which is shown at the top of our engraving. This stelebears a figure of the monarch; another one like it is cut upon a cylinderof green feldspar found by Layard close to the principal entrance toSennacherib's palace (see Fig. 69). [246] Though practically absent from the great brick palaces, the column hereplayed an important and conspicuous part. It furnished elegant and richlydecorated supports for canopies of wool that softly rose and fell with thepassing breeze. Fair carpets were spread upon the ground beneath, otherswere suspended to cross beams painted with lively colours, and swept theearth with the long and feathered fringes sewn upon their borders. [Illustration: FIG. 69. --The Seal of Sennacherib. Cylinder of greenfeldspar in the British Museum. ] The difference was great between the massive buildings by which theMesopotamian plains were dominated, and these light, airy structures whichmust have risen in great numbers in Chaldæa and Assyria, here on the banksof canals and rivers or in the glades of shady parks, there on the broadesplanades of a temple or in the courts of a royal palace. Between themountains of clay on the one hand and these graceful tabernacles with theirslender supports and gay coverings on the other, the contrast must havebeen both charming and piquant. Nowhere else do we find the distinctionbetween the house and the tent so strongly marked. The latter must haveheld, too, a much more important place in the national life than it dideither in Egypt or Greece. The monarch spent most of his time either inhunting or fighting, and his court must have followed him to the field. Moreover, when spring covers every meadow with deep herbage and brilliantflowers, an irresistible desire comes over the inhabitants of suchcountries as Mesopotamia to fly from cities and set up their dwellings amidthe scents and verdure of the fields. Again, when the summer heats havedried up the plains and made the streets of a town unbearable, an exodustakes place to the nearest mountains, and life is only to be prized when itcan be passed among the breezes from their valleys and the shadows of theirforest trees. [Illustration: FIG. 70. --Type of open architecture in Assyria; composed byCharles Chipiez. ] Even in our own day the inhabitants of these regions pass from the house tothe tent with an ease which seems strange to us. At certain seasons some ofthe nomad tribes betake themselves within the walls of Bagdad and Mossouland there set up their long black tents of goats' hair. [247] Judging fromthe bas-reliefs they did the same even in ancient Assyria; in some of thesea few tents may be seen sprinkled over a space inclosed by a line of wallsand towers. [248] Abraham and Lot slept in their tents even when they dweltwithin the walls of a city. [249] Lot had both his tent and a house atSodom. [250] Every year the inhabitants of Mossoul and the neighbouringvillages turn out in large numbers into the neighbouring country, and, during April and May, re-taste for a time that pastoral life to which aroof is unknown. The centuries have been unable to affect such habits as these, because theywere suggested, enforced, and perpetuated by nature herself, by the climateof Mesopotamia; and they have done much to create and develop that lightand elegant form of building which we may almost call the architecture ofthe tent. In these days and in a country into whose remotest corners thedecadence has penetrated, the tent is hardly more than a mere shelter; hereand there, in the case of a few chiefs less completely ruined than therest, it still preserves a certain size and elegance, but as a rule allthat is demanded of it is to be sufficiently strong and thick to resist thewind, the rain, and the sun. It was otherwise in the rich and civilizedsociety with which we are now concerned. Its arrangement and decorationthen called forth inventive powers and a refined taste of which we catch afew glimpses in the bas-reliefs. It gave an opportunity for the employmentof forms and motives which could not be used at all, or used in a veryrestricted fashion, in more solid structures, such as palaces and temples. Of all these that which most closely results from the necessities of woodenor metal construction is the column, and we therefore find that it is inthis tent-architecture that it takes on the characteristics thatdistinguish it from the Egyptian column and give it an originality of itsown. NOTES: [164] The remains of stone walls are at least so rare in Lower Mesopotamiathat we may disregard their existence. In my researches I have only foundmention of a single example. At Abou-Sharein TAYLOR found a building inwhich an upper story was supported by a mass of crude brick faced withblocks of dressed sandstone. The stones of the lower courses were heldtogether by mortar, those of the upper ones by bitumen. We have noinformation as to the "bond" or the size of stones used (_Journal of theRoyal Asiatic Society_, vol. Xv. P. 408). The materials for this revetmentmust have been quarried in one of those rocky hills--islands, perhaps, formerly--with which Lower Chaldæa is sparsely studded. TAYLOR mentions oneseven miles west of Mugheir, in the desert that stretches away towardsArabia from the right bank of the Euphrates (_Journal_, &c. Vol. Xv. P. 460). [165] We shall here give a _résumé_ of M. Place's observations (_Ninive etl'Assyrie_, vol. I. Pp. 31-34). [166] PLACE, _Ninive_, &c. Vol. I. P. [167] _Ibid. _ p. 33. [168] In every country in which buildings have been surmounted by flatroofs, this precaution has been taken--"When thou buildest a new house, then thou shalt make a battlement for thy roof, that thou bring not bloodupon thine house, if any man fall from thence. " (_Deuteronomy_ xxii. 8). See also _Les Monuments en Chaldée, en Assyrie et à Babylon, d'après lesrécentes découvertes archéologique, avec neuf planches lithographiés_, 8vo, by H. CAVANIOL, published in 1870 by Durand et Pedone-Lauriel. It containsa very good _résumé_, especially in the matter of architecture, of thoselabours of French and English explorers to which we owe our knowledge ofChaldæa and Assyria. [169] PLACE, _Ninive et l'Assyrie_, vol i. P. 64. [170] XENOPHON, _Anabasis_, iii. 4, 7-11. The identity of Larissa andMespila has been much discussed. Oppert thinks they were Resen andDour-Saryoukin; others that they were Calech and Nineveh. The question iswithout importance to our inquiry. In any case the circumference of sixparasangs (about 20-1/2 miles) ascribed by the Greek writer to his Mespilacan by no means be made to fit Khorsabad. [171] See the _History of Art in Ancient Egypt_, vol. I. P. 113. [172] BOTTA tells us how the courses of crude brick were distinguished onefrom another at Khorsabad (_Monuments de Ninive_, vol. V. P. 57). [173] Speaking of Hillah, GEORGE SMITH tells us (_Assyrian Discoveries_, p. 62):--"A little to the south rose the town of Hillah, built with the bricksfound in the old capital. The natives have established a regular trade inthese bricks for building purposes. A number of men are always engaged indigging out the bricks from the ruins, while others convey them to thebanks of the Euphrates. There they are packed in rude boats, which floatthem down to Hillah, and on being landed they are loaded on donkeys andtaken to any place where building is in progress. Every day when at HillahI used to see this work going on as it had gone on for centuries, Babylonthus slowly disappearing without an effort being made to ascertain thedimensions and buildings of the city, or to recover what remains of itsmonuments. The northern portion of the wall, outside the Babil mound, isthe place where the work of destruction is now (1874) most actively goingon, and this in some places has totally disappeared. " [174] LAYARD, _Discoveries_, &c. P. 110. [175] LAYARD, _Nineveh_, vol. Ii. P. 279. "The bricks had no mortar but themud from which they had been made, " says BOTTA (_Monuments de Ninive_, vol. V. P. 30). [176] LAYARD, _Discoveries_, &c. P. 503. [177] LAYARD, _Discoveries_, pp. 499 and 506. [178] TAYLOR, _Notes on the Ruins of Mugheir_ (_Journal of the RoyalAsiatic Society_, vol. Xv. P. 261). This mortar is still employed in thecountry; it is called _kharour_. [179] The most plentiful springs occur at Hit, on the middle Euphrates. They are also found, however, farther north, as at Kaleh-Shergat, near theTigris. Over a wide stretch of country in that district the bitumen wellsup through every crack in the soil (LAYARD, _Nineveh_, vol. Ii. P. 46). Asfor the bituminous springs of Hammam-Ali, near Mossoul, see PLACE, _Niniveet l'Assyrie_, vol. I. P. 236. [180] _Genesis_ xi. 3. [181] HERODOTUS, i. 179. [182] _Warka, its Ruins and Remains_, by W. KENNETH LOFTUS, p. 9. (In the_Transactions of the Royal Society of Literature_, second series, Part I. )According to SIR HENRY RAWLINSON this introduction of layers of reeds orrushes between the courses of brick continued in all this region at leastdown to the Parthian epoch. Traces of it are to be found in the walls ofSeleucia and Ctesiphon (RAWLINSON'S _Herodotus_, vol. I. P. 300 note 1). [183] LOFTUS, _Travels and Researches_, i. P. 169. The abundance of bitumenin the ruins of Mugheir is such that the modern name of the town has sprungfrom it; the word means the _bituminous_ (TAYLOR, _Notes on the Ruins ofMugheir_). [184] PLACE, _Ninive et l'Assyrie_, vol. I. P. 236; LAYARD, _Nineveh_, vol. Ii. P. 261. [185] LOFTUS, _Warka, its Ruins_, &c. P. 10. [186] PLACE, _Ninive_, vol. I. Pp. 29 and 248. [187] TAYLOR, _Notes on Abou-Sharein and Tell-el-Lahm_ (_Journal of theRoyal Asiatic Society_, vol. Xv. P. 408). [188] BOTTA, _Monument de Ninive_, vol. V. P. 58. [189] NIEBUHR (_Voyage en Arabie_, vol. Ii. P. 235) noticed this, and hisobservations have since been confirmed by many other visitors to the ruinsof Babylon. KER PORTER (vol. Ii. P. 391) noticed them in the ruins ofAl-Heimar. See also TAYLOR on "_Mugheir_, " &c. (_Journal_, &c. Vol. Xv. P. 261). At Birs-Nimroud these conduits are about nine inches high and betweenfive and six wide. They are well shown in the drawing given by FLANDIN andCOSTE of this ruin (_Perse ancienne et moderne_, pl. 221. Cf. Text 1, p. 181). [190] TAYLOR, _Notes on the Ruins of Mugheir_ (_Journal of the RoyalAsiatic Society_), vol. Xv. Pp. 268-269. [191] At Khorsabad the average height of the alabaster lining is about tenfeet; above that about three feet of brick wall remains. [192] LAYARD, _Nineveh_, vol. I. Pp. 127 and 350; vol. Ii. Pp. 40 and 350. As to the traces of fire at Khorsabad, see BOTTA, _Monument de Ninive_, vol. V. P. 54. [193] LAYARD, _Nineveh_, vol. Ii. Pp. 256-264. [194] LOFTUS, _Travels and Researches_, pp. 181-183. [195] This accumulation has sometimes reached a height of about 24 feet. PLACE, _Ninive_, vol. I. P. 294. [196] PLACE, _Ninive_, vol. I. Pp. 293-294. [197] E. FLANDIN, _Voyage archéologique à Ninive. 1. L'Architectureassyrienne. 2. La Sculpture assyrienne_ (_Revue des Deux-Mondes_, June 15and July 1, 1845). [198] For all that concerns this artist, one of the most skilfuldraughtsmen of our time, see the biographical notice of M. DeGirardot:--_Felix Thomas, grand Prix de Rome Architecte, Peintre, Graveur, Sculpteur_ (Nantes, 1875, 8vo. ). [199] PLACE, _Ninive_, vol. I. Pp. 249-269. [200] PLACE, _Ninive_, vol. I. Pp. 254-255. [201] _Ibid. _ p. 246. [202] PLACE, _Ninive_, vol. I. P. 264. [203] _Ibid. _ p. 265. RICH made similar observations at Bagdad. He noticedthat the masons could mount on the vault a few minutes after each coursewas completed (_Narrative of a Journey to the Site of Babylon_). [204] M. A. CHOISY, well known by his Essays on _L'Art de bâtir chez lesRomains_, shows that the same method was constantly used by the Byzantinearchitects. See his _Note sur la Construction des Voûtes sans cintragependant la Période byzantine_ (_Annales des Ponts et Chausées_, 1876, second period, vol. Xii. ). See also Mr. FERGUSSON'S account of the erectionof a huge stone dome without centering of any kind, by an illiterateMaltese builder, at Mousta, near Valetta (_Handbook of Architecture_, Second Edition, vol. Iv. P. 34). --ED. [205] STRABO, xvi. I. 5, Hoi oikoi kamarôtoi pantes dia tên axulian. [206] For a description of these buildings see FLANDIN and COSTE, _Voyageen Perse, Perse ancienne, Text_, pp. 24-27, and 41-43 (6 vols. Folio, nodate. The voyage in question took place in 1841 and 1842). [207] Brick played, at least, by far the most important part in theirconstruction. The domes and arcades were of well-burnt brick; the straightwalls were often built of broken stone, when it was to be had in theneighbourhood. At Ctesiphon, on the other hand, the great building known asthe _Takht-i-Khosrou_ is entirely of brick. [208] See M. AUGUSTE CHOISY'S _Note sur la Construction des Voûtes_, &c. P. 14. This exact and penetrating critic shares our belief in these relationsbetween the Chaldæan east and Roman Asia. [209] _Note sur la Construction des Voûtes sans cintrage_, p. 12. [210] PLACE, _Ninive_, vol. I. Pp. 266-267. [211] As M. CHOISY remarks (_L'Art de bâtir chez les Romains_, p. 80), eachhorizontal course, being in the form of a ring, would have no tendency tocollapse inwards, and a dome circular on plan would demand some means forkeeping its shape true rather than a resisting skeleton. [212] _Ninive_, vol. I. P. 131. [213] In both the examples here reproduced the sculptor has indicated thecords by which the canvas walls were kept in place. We find almost the sameprofile in a bas-relief at Khorsabad (BOTTA, _Monument de Ninive_, pl. 146), but there it is cut with less decision and there are no cords. Between the two semi-domes the figure of a man rises above the wall to hismiddle, suggesting the existence of a barbette within. Here the artist mayhave been figuring a house rather than a tent. [214] STRABO, xv. 3, 10. [215] STRABO, xvi. 1, 5. [216] Keramôi d' ou chrôntai, says Strabo. These words, as Letronneremarked _à propos_ of this passage, combine the ideas of a tiled roof andof one with a ridge. The one notion must be taken with the other; hence wemay infer that the Babylonian houses were flat-roofed. [217] STRABO, ii. 5, 11. [218] See M. AMÉDÉE TARDIEU'S reflections upon Strabo's method of work, inhis _Géographie de Strabon_ (Hachette, 3 vols, 12mo. ), vol. Iii. P. 286, note 2. [219] As to this singular people and their religious beliefs, theinformation contained in the two works of Sir H. LAYARD (_Nineveh_, vol. 1. Pp. 270-305, and _Discoveries_, pp. 40-92) will be read with interest. Thanks to special circumstances Sir H. Layard was able to become moreintimately acquainted than any other traveller with this much-abused andcruelly persecuted sect. He collected much valuable information upondoctrines which, even after his relation, are not a little obscure andconfused. The Yezidis have a peculiar veneration for the evil principle, orSatan; they also seem to worship the sun. Their religion is in fact aconglomeration of various survivals from the different systems that havesuccessively obtained in that part of Asia. They themselves have no clearidea of it as a whole. It would repay study by an archæologist ofreligions. [220] BOTTA, _Monument de Ninive_, vol. V. P. 70. [221] See above, page 118, note 1. [222] Some rooms are as much as thirty feet wide. They would require joistsat least thirty-three feet long, a length that can hardly be admitted inview of the very mediocre quality of the wood in common use. [223] _Gailhabaud, Monuments anciens et modernes_, vol. I. ; plate entitled_Tombeaux superposés à Corneto_. [224] PLACE, _Ninive_, vol. I. P. 309. In this passage M. Place affirmsthat Mr. Layard discovered in a room of one of the Ninevite palaces, several openings cut at less than four feet above the floor level. It is, moreover, certain that these openings were included in the original plan ofthe building, because the reliefs are interrupted so as to leave room forthe window without injury to the scenes sculptured upon them; but, adds M. Place, this example is unique, one of those exceptions that help to confirma rule. We have in vain searched through the two works of Sir Henry Layardfor the statement alluded to by M. Place. The English explorer only oncementions windows, and then he says: "Even in the rooms bounded by the outerwalls there is not the slightest trace of windows" (_Nineveh_, vol. Ii. P. 260). [225] BOTTA, _Monument de Ninive_, vol. V. P. 73. [226] FLANDIN et COSTE, _Voyage en Perse; Perse ancienne_, plates 28 and29; and, in the text, page 25. These openings occur in the great Sassanidepalace at Ctesiphon, the _Takht-i-Khosrou_ (_ibid. _ pl. 216, and text, p. 175). Here the terra-cotta pipes are about eight inches in diameter. According to these writers similar contrivances are still in use in Persia. [227] In the cupola of the palace at Sarbistan (Fig. 54), a window may beperceived in the upper part of the vertical wall, between the pendentivesof the dome. Such openings may well have been pierced under Assyrian domes. From many of the illustrations we have given, it will be seen that theNinevite architects had no objection to windows, provided they could beplaced in the upper part of the wall. It is of windows like ours, piercedat a foot or two above the ground, that no examples have been found. [228] PLACE. _Ninive_, vol. I. Pp. 312-314. [229] PLACE, _Ninive_, vol. I. P. 313. [230] _Ibid. _ p. 310 [231] PLACE, _Ninive_, vol. I. P. 311. [232] PLACE, _Ninive_, vol. I. P. 307. [233] See BOTTA, _Monument de Ninive_, vol. V. P. 53; _Place_, _Ninive_, vol. I. Pp. 306, 307. [234] LAYARD, _Nineveh_, vol. Ii. P. 15. [235] TAYLOR, _Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society_, vol. Xv. P. 409. [236] LAYARD, _Discoveries_, p. 260. [237] LAYARD, _Discoveries_, pp. 645-6. [238] LAYARD, _Monuments_, &c. , first series, plate 19. This relief isreproduced in PLACE, _Ninive_, vol. Iii. Plate 40, fig. 6. [239] British Museum; Kouyundjik Gallery, Nos. 34-43. See also LAYARD'S_Monuments_, plates 8 and 9. --ED. [240] A second inclined gallery of the same kind was found by LAYARD inanother of the Kouyundjik palaces (_Discoveries_, p. 650). [241] PLACE, _Ninive_, vol. I. Pp. 306, 307. [242] PLACE, _Ninive_, vol. I. P. 140. [243] As to the great size sometimes reached by the tents of the Arabchiefs, and the means employed to divide them into several apartments, seeLAYARD, _Discoveries_, p. 313, and the sketch on page 321. [244] There is a photographic reproduction of these interesting reliefs inthe fine publication undertaken by the Society of Biblical Archæology. Thiswork, which is not yet (1883) complete, is entitled _The Bronze Ornamentsof the Gates of Balawat_, _Shalmaneser_ II. 859-825, edited, with anintroduction, by Samuel BIRCH, with descriptions and translations byTheophilus G. PINCHES, folio, London. The three first parts are before us. The motive reproduced above belongs to the plate marked F, 5. [245] They are to be found on the sheet provisionally numbered B, 1, in thepublication above referred to. [246] This cylinder, which is now in the British Museum, was perhaps theactual signet of the king. [247] LAYARD, _Nineveh_, vol. Ii. P. 272. [248] LAYARD, _Monuments of Nineveh_, first series, plate 77; secondseries, plates 24 and 36. [249] _Genesis_, xiii. 12. [250] _Genesis_, xix. § 4. --_The Column. _ As Chaldæa, speaking broadly, made no use of stone in its buildings, thestone column or shaft was unknown to its architects; at least not a singlefragment of such a thing has been found among the ruins. Here and therecylindrical piers built up of small units seem to have been employed. Theseare sometimes of specially moulded bricks, [251] sometimes of sandstonefragments supported by a coat of masonry. Time has separated the stones ofthe latter, and it is now only represented by fragments whose shape betraystheir original destination. Taylor, indeed, found one of these piers stillin place during his excavations at Abou-Sharein, but his sketch anddescription are so confused that it is quite useless to reproducethem. [252] On the other hand, Chaldæa preceded Assyria in the art of raising airystructures mainly composed of wood and metal, and by them she was led tothe use of slender supports and a decoration in which grace and elegancewere the most conspicuous features. We have a proof of this in a curiousmonument recently acquired by the British Museum. It comes from Abou-Abba, about sixteen miles south-west of Bagdad, and is in a marvellous state ofpreservation. Abou-Abba has been recognized as the site of the ancientSippara, one of the oldest of Chaldæan towns. Its sanctuaries, in which thesun-god, Samas, was chiefly adored, always maintained a great importance. The monument in question is a tablet of very close-grained grey stone11-1/3 inches long 6 inches high and, in the centre, about 3 inches thick. Its thickness increases from top to bottom. The edge is grooved. High upon the obverse there is a bas-relief, beneath this commences a longinscription which is finished on the reverse. [253] Shorter inscriptions areengraved on the field of the relief itself. The whole work--figures, inscriptions, and outer mouldings--is executed with the utmost care. Thelaborious solicitude with which the smallest details are carried out is tobe explained by the destination of this little plaque, namely, the templein the centre of Sippara in which a triad consisting of Sin, Samas, andIstar was the object of worship. [254] The relief itself--which we reproduce from a cast kindly presented to us byDr. Birch--occupies rather less than half of the obverse (Fig. 71). Itrepresents a king called Nabou-Abla-Idin, who reigned about 900, doinghomage to the sun-god. [255] We shall return to this scene and itscomposition when the time arrives for treating Chaldæan sculpture. Atpresent we only wish to speak of the pavilion under which the deity isenthroned upon a chair supported by two beings half man and half bull. This kind of tabernacle is bounded, above and at the back of the god, by awall of which there is nothing to show the exact nature. Its graceful, sinuous line, however, seems to exclude the idea, sufficiently improbablein itself, of a brick vault. It may possibly have been of wood, though itwould not be easy to obtain this elegant curve even in that material. But such forms as this are given with the greatest ease in metal, and weare ready to believe that what the artist here meant to represent was ametal frame, which could at need be hidden under a canopy of leather orwool, like those we have already encountered in the Assyrian bas-reliefs(Figs. 67 and 68). The artist has in fact made use of a graphic processcommon enough with the Egyptians. [256] He has given us a lateral elevationof the tabernacle with the god in profile within it, because his skill wasunequal to the task of showing him full front and seated between the twocolumns of the façade. The single column thus left visible has been represented with great skilland care; the sculptor seems to have taken pleasure in dwelling upon itssmallest details. Slender as it is, it must have been of wood. The markingsupon it suggest the trunk of a palm, but we may be permitted to doubtwhether it was allowed to remain in its natural uncovered state. Even inthe climate of Chaldæa a dead tree trunk exposed to the air would have nogreat durability. Sooner or later the sun, the rain, the changes oftemperature, would give a good account of it, and besides, a piece of roughwood could hardly be made to harmonize with the luxury that must assuredlyhave been lavished by the people of Sippara upon the sanctuary of theirgreatest divinity. It is probable, therefore, that the wood was overlaid with plates of gildedbronze, fastened on with nails. This hypothesis is confirmed by one of M. Place's discoveries atKhorsabad. [257] There, in front of the Harem, he found several largefragments of a round cedar-wood beam almost as thick as a man's body. Itwas cased in a bronze sheath, very much oxydized and resembling the scalesof a fish in arrangement (Fig. 72). The metal was attached to the wood by alarge number of bronze nails. Comparing these remains with certainbas-reliefs in which different kinds of trees appear (Fig. 27) we caneasily see that the Ninevite sculptors meant to represent the peculiarroughnesses of palm bark. Their usual methods are modified a little by therequirements of the material and the size of the beam upon which it wasused. Each scale was about 4-1/2 inches high, and according to thecalculations of M. Place, the whole mast must have been fromfive-and-thirty to forty feet high. Working for spectators on a lower leveland at some distance, the smith thought well to make his details as regularand strongly marked as he could; to each scale or leaf he gave a raisededge to mark its contour and distinguish it from the rest. The generaleffect was thus obtained by deliberate exaggeration of the relief and by aconventionality that was justified by the conditions of the problem to besolved. [Illustration: FIG. 71. --Homage to _Samas_ or _Shamas_. Tablet fromSippara. Actual size. Drawn by Saint-Elme Gautier. ] At a little distance from this broken beam M. Place found a leaf of goldwhich is now in the Louvre; it presents the same ovoid forms as the bronzesheathing, and, moreover, the numerous nail holes show that it was meant tofulfil the same purpose as the bronze plates. The place in which it wasfound, its dimensions and form, all combine to prove that it was laid uponthe bronze as we should lay gold leaf. It bears an inscription in cuneiformcharacters. [Illustration: FIG. 72. --Sheath of a cedar-wood mast, bronze. ] We are inclined to take these plates for models in restoring the columns ofthe Sippara tabernacle. There is nothing in the richness of this doublecovering of bronze and gold to cause surprise, as the inscription whichcovers part of the face and the whole of the back of the tablet is nothingbut a long enumeration of the gifts made to the shrine of Samas by thereigning king and his predecessors. This column has both capital and base. The former cannot have been ofstone; a heavy block of basalt or even of limestone would be quite out ofplace in such a situation. As for the base it is hardly more than arepetition of the capital, and must have been of the same material; andthat material was metal, the only substance that, when bent by the hand orbeaten by the hammer, takes almost of its own motion those graceful curvesthat we call _volutes_. We believe then in a bronze capital gilded. Under the volutes three rings, or _astragali_, may be seen. By their means the capital was allied to theshaft. The former consisted of two volutes between which appeared avertical point resembling one of the angles of a triangle. The base is thesame except that it has no point, and that the rings are in contact withthe ground instead of with the shaft. These volutes may also be perceivedon the table in front of the tabernacle, where they support the large diskby which the sun-god is symbolized. [Illustration: FIG. 73. --Interior of a house supported by wooden pillars;from the gates of Balawat. British Museum. ] Before quitting this tablet we may point to another difference between thecolumn of Sippara and the shafts of the same material and proportions thatwe have encountered in the Assyrian bas-reliefs (Figs. 67, 68, and 69). Inthe latter the column rises above the canopy, which is attached to itsshaft by brackets or nails. At Sippara the canopy rests upon the capitalitself. The same arrangement may be found in Assyrian representations ofthese light structures; it will suffice to give one example taken from thegates of Balawat (Fig. 73). Here, too, the proportions of the columns provethem to have been of wood. They do not rise above the entablature. Thearchitrave rests upon them, and, as in Greece and Egypt, its immediateweight is borne by abaci. At present our aim is to prove that Assyria derived from Chaldæa the firstidea of those tall and slender columns, the shafts of which were of woodsheathed in metal, and the capitals of the latter material. The gracefuland original forms of Chaldæan art would have prepared the way for acolumnar architecture in stone, had that material been forthcoming. Babylon, however, saw no such architecture. Her plastic genius never cameunder the influence that would have led her to import stone from abroad;and the grace and variety of the orders remained unknown to her builders. Like Egypt, Chaldæa gave lessons but received none. The forms of her artare to be explained by the inborn characteristics of her people and thenatural conditions among which they found themselves placed. In Assyria these conditions were rather different. The stone column wasused there, but used in a timid and hesitating fashion. It never reachedthe freedom and independence that would have characterized it had it arisennaturally from the demands of construction. [258] [Illustration: FIG. 74. --Assyrian capital, in perspective; compiled fromPlace. ] We only possess one column, or rather one fragment of a column, fromAssyria, and that was found by M. Place at Khorsabad (Fig. 74). It is ablock of carefully worked and carved limestone about forty inches high, andincluding both the capital and the upper part of the shaft in its singlepiece. Such a combination could not long exist in architectonic systems in whichthe stone column played its true part. It is a survival from the use ofwood. Another characteristic feature is the complete absence both from thisfragment and from the columns in the sculptured reliefs of vertical linesor divisions of any kind, no trace of a fluted or polygonal shaft has beenfound. [259] In writing the history of the Egyptian column we explained how the naturaldesire for as much light as possible led the architects of Beni-Hassan totransform the square pier, first into an octagonal prism, secondly into onewith sixteen sides. [260] And to this progressive elaboration of thepolyhedric shaft the flutes seemed to us to owe their origin. On the otherhand, with tall and slender supports such as those afforded by palm trunksno necessity for reduction and for the shaving of angles would arise, andthose flutes whose peculiar section is owing to the desire for a happy playof light and shadow, would never have been thought of. If we imitate anatural timber shaft in stone we have a smooth cylindrical column like thatseen in Fig. 74. Again, the shafts of the columns in the bas-reliefs, appear slender incomparison with those of Egypt, or with the doric shafts of the oldestGreek temples (see Fig. 41 and 42). In the fragmentary column fromKhorsabad (Fig. 74) we have only a small part of the shaft but if we mayjudge from the feeble salience of the capital, its proportions must havebeen slender rather than heavy and massive. Wherever the stone column has been used in buildings of mediocre size, thearchitect seems to have been driven by some optical necessity to make hisangle columns more thickset than the other supports. Thus it was inAssyria, in the little temple at Kouyundjik (Fig. 42), where the outercolumns are sensibly thicker than those between them; at Khorsabad (Fig. 41) the same result was obtained by rather different means. The edificerepresented in this bas-relief bears no little similarity to certainEgyptian temples and to the Greek temple _in antis_. [261] The strength ofthese angular piers contrasts happily with the elegance of the columnsbetween them. The latter are widely spaced, and, as in some Egyptianbuildings, the architrave is but a horizontal continuation of the cornerpiers. If we analyse the column and examine its three parts separately we shall beled to similar conclusions. The stone column no doubt bore the architraveupon its capital wherever it was used, and both in Chaldæa and Assyria wefind the same arrangement in those light structures which we have classedas belonging to the architecture of the tent (Figs. 70 and 72). The originof the forms employed in stone buildings is most clearly shewn by thefrequent occurrence of the volute, a curvilinear element suggested by theuse and peculiar properties of metal. [Illustration: FIG. 75. --Capital; from a small temple. ] We find these volutes everywhere, upon shafts of stone and woodindifferently. We are tempted to think, when we examine the details of ourFig. 67, that the first idea of them was taken from the horns of the ibexor the wild goat. The column on the right of this cut bears a fir conebetween its volutes, those on the left have small tablets on which areperched the very animals whose heads are armed with these horns. However this may be, the form in question, like all others borrowed fromnature by man, was soon modified and developed by art. The curve wasprolonged and turned in upon itself. In one of the capitals of the littletemple represented at Kouyundjik (Fig. 42), two pairs of these horns may berecognized one above the other (Fig. 75), but nowhere else do we find suchan arrangement. Whether the column be of wood, as in the Sippara tablet(Fig. 71), or of stone, as in those buildings in which the weight andsolidity of the entablature points decisively to that material (Figs. 41and 42), we find a volute in universal use that differs but slightly in itsgeneral physiognomy from the familiar ornament of the Ionic capital. [Illustration: FIG. 76. --View of a palace; from Layard. ] Let us revert for a moment to the country house or palace of which we gavea general view in Fig. 39. We shall there find on the highest part of thebuilding an open loggia supported by small columns many times repeated. Wereproduce this part of the relief on a larger scale (Fig. 76), so that itsdetails may be more clearly seen. A very slight familiarity with thegraphic processes of the Assyrians is sufficient to inform the reader thatthe kind of trellis work with which the bed of the relief is covered issignificant of a mountainous country. The palace rises on the banks of ariver, which is indicated by the sinuous lines in the right lower corner. The buildings themselves--which are dominated here and there by the roundtops of trees, planted, we may suppose, in the inner courts--stand uponmounds at various heights above the plain. The lowest of these look likeisolated structures, such as the advanced works of a fortress. Next comes aline of towers, and then the artificial hill crowned by the palace properlyspeaking. The façade of the latter is flanked by tall and salient towers, across whose summits runs the open gallery to which we have referred. [262]This is supported by numerous columns which must by their generalarrangement and spacing, have been of wood. The gallery consisted, in allprobability, of a platform upheld by trunks of trees, either squared orleft in the rough and surmounted by capitals sheathed in beaten bronze. The volute is here quite simple in shape; elsewhere we find it doubled, asit were, so that four volutes occur between the astragali and the abacus(Figs. 42 and 77). [263] In other examples, again, it is elongated upwardsuntil it takes a shape differing but little from the acanthus leaves of theCorinthian capital (Fig. 78). [264] This volute is found all over Assyria and Chaldæa. It decorates the anglesof the small temple represented on the stone known as Lord Aberdeen's BlackStone (Fig. 79). It occurs also on many of the ivories, but these, perhaps, are for the most part Phoenician. But in any case the Assyrians madeconstant use of it in the decoration of their furniture. In an ivoryplaque, of which the British Museum possesses several examples, we find aman standing and grasping a lotus stem in his left hand (Fig. 80). Thisstem rests upon a support which bears a strong resemblance to the Sipparacapital (Fig. 71); it has two volutes separated by a sharp point. Thefondness of the Assyrians for these particular curves is also betrayed inthat religious and symbolic device which has been sometimes called the_Tree of Life_. Some day, perhaps, the exact significance of this emblemmay be explained, we are content to point out the variety and happyarrangement of the sinuous lines which surround and enframe the richlydecorated pilaster that acts as its stem. We gave one specimen of this treein Fig. 8; we now give another (Fig. 81). The astragali, the ibex hornsand the volutes, may all be easily recognized here. [Illustration: FIG. 77. --Capital; from a small temple. ] [Illustration: FIG. 78. --Capital. ] [Illustration: FIG. 79. --Chaldæan tabernacle. ] [Illustration: FIG. 80. --Ivory plaque found at Nimroud. Actual size. British Museum. ] The only stone capital that has come down to us has, indeed, no volutes(Fig. 74) but it is characterized by the same taste for flowing lines androunded forms. Its general section is that of a cyma reversa surmounted bya flattened torus, and its appearance that of a vase decorated withcurvilinear and geometrical tracery. There is both originality and beautyin the contours of the profile and the arrangement of the tracery; thesection as a whole is not unlike that of the inverted bell-shaped capitalsat Karnak. [265] [Illustration: FIG. 81. --_The Tree of Life_; from Layard. ] This type must have been in frequent use, as we find it repeated in fourbases found still in place in front of the palace of Sennacherib by SirHenry Layard. They were of limestone and rested upon plinths and a pavementof the same material (Fig. 82). [266] In these the design of the ornament isa little more complicated than the festoon on the Khorsabad capital, butthe principle is the same and both objects belong to one narrow class. We again encounter this same base with its opposing curves in a curiousmonument discovered at Kouyundjik by Mr. George Smith. [267] This is a smalland carefully executed model, in yellowstone, of a winged human-headedbull, supporting on his back a vase or base similar in design to thatfigured above. This little object must have served as a model for thecarvers engaged upon the palace walls. We shall not here stop to examinethe attributes and ornaments of the bull, they are well shown in our Figs. 83 and 84, and their types are known by many other examples. Our aim is toshow that we have rightly described the uses to which it was put. Thesemight have remained obscure but for the discovery, in the south-westernpalace at Nimroud, of a pair of winged sphinxes, calcined by fire but stillin their places between two huge lions at one of the doors. Before theircontours disappeared--and they rapidly crumbled away upon contact with theair--Layard had time to make a drawing of the one that had suffered least(Fig. 85). In his description he says that between the two wings was a sortof plateau, "intended to carry the base of a column. "[268] [Illustration: FIG. 82. --Ornamented base, in limestone. ] Surprised at not finding any trace of the column itself, he gives outanother conjecture: that these sphinxes were altars upon which offeringsto the gods, or presents to the king were placed. This hypothesisencounters many objections. We may easily account for the disappearance ofthe column by supposing it to have been of wood. If it was stone, it mayhave been carried off for use as a roller by the inhabitants of theneighbouring villages, before that part of the building to which itbelonged was so completely engulfed and hidden by the ruins as itafterwards became. [269] Moreover we can point to a certain number ofAssyrian altars, and their shapes are very different from this. [Illustration: FIG. 83. --Model of a base, side view. Actual size. ] [Illustration: FIG. 84. --The same, seen from in front. ] Finally, all our doubts are removed by a bas-relief from the palace ofAssurbanipal, which is now in the British Museum (Fig. 86). The upper partof this carved picture is destroyed, but enough remains to show that itreproduced the façade of some richly decorated building. Four columnssupported on the backs of so many lions, and two flat pilasters upheld inthe same fashion by winged griffins, may readily be distinguished. Thatthese griffins are not repeated on the left of the relief, is due perhapsto the haste or laziness of the sculptor. He may have thought he had doneenough when he had shown once for all how these pedestals were composed. However this may have been, the lions in this relief play exactly the same_rôle_ as that attributed by us to the little model found by George Smith, and to the winged sphinx discovered by Sir Henry Layard before one of thedoors at Nimroud. A base in the form of a vase or cushion is insertedbetween the back of the animal and the bottom of the shaft. In thepilaster--if we may believe that the artist took no liberties withfact--the junction is direct without the interposition of any ornamentalmotive. [Illustration: FIG. 85. --Winged Sphinx carrying the base of a column; fromLayard. ] [Illustration: FIG. 86. --Façade of an Assyrian building; from a bas-reliefin the British Museum. Height 10 inches. ] In what M. Place calls the state doorways (_portes ornées_) of Khorsabad, the arches spring from the backs of the great mitred bulls that guard theentrance. [270] But, whether the columns rose from the backs of animals realor fantastic, they always seem to have had a base. Almost the only instanceof its absence is in the open gallery in Fig. 76, and there, perhaps, theyare hidden by a balustrade. Everywhere else we find a more or lessornamental member interposed between the shaft and the ground. At Khorsabad(Fig. 41) it is a simple torus (Fig. 87), at Kouyundjik (Fig. 42) it is akind of cushion (Fig. 88), which we find represented in not a few of thebas-reliefs. The curves bear a distant resemblance to the volutes of acapital; above this base appears a ring or astragal, the origin of whichmay be easily guessed. The original timber column, the newly felled treethat was set up to support the roof of a tent or a house, must have beenplaced upon a block of stone or wood, to which it was joined, in somedegree, by hollowing out the latter and setting the foot of the timber beamin the hollow, and then hiding the junction by those reed bands that, astravellers tell us, were still used for the same purpose in the last yearsof Babylon. [271] In time a ring of metal would take the place of the reeds, and when stone columns came to be used, a feature which was at first anecessity, or, at least, a useful expedient and a guarantee of duration andsolidity, came at last to be simply an ornament. [Illustration: FIGS. 87, 88. --Bases of columns; from the bas-reliefs. ] * * * * * We have now studied the Assyrian column as a whole and in detail. Most ofits features seem to us to be survivals from the methods and processes ofwhat we have called the architecture of the tent. The stone column had noplace in those structures of crude brick of which the real nationalarchitecture of Mesopotamia consisted; it was not at home there; thesurrounding conditions were unfavourable to its development. And yet, intime, it did, as we have seen, put in a rare appearance, at least in thecase of that one of the two sister nations by which a sufficient supply ofstone could be obtained, but even then it filled an ornamental andauxiliary rather than a vital function. Its remains are only to be found bypatient search, and even in the bas-reliefs its representations are few andfar between. By making diligent use of these two channels of informationarchæology has succeeded in demonstrating the existence of the Assyriancolumn and describing its forms, but at the same time it has been compelledto recognize how narrow was its use, especially in the great structures onwhich Mesopotamian builders lavished all the resources of their art. Inthose it was employed mainly for the decoration of outbuildings, and itwill be well to inquire how it acquitted itself of such a task. * * * * * The column seems to have been introduced in those gateways to which theAssyrian architect attached so much importance. [272] Read carefully SirHenry Layard's description of his discovery of two sphinxes upon one of thefaçades of the south-western palace at Kouyundjik (Fig. 83); he gives noplan of the passage where he found them, but his narrative[273] suggeststhe existence of some kind of porch in front of the large opening. It musthave been upheld by a pair of columns on the backs of the two sphinxes, andmay have consisted of one of those wooden canopies which are so common inthe modern architecture of the East. [274] We are inclined to recognize a pent house of this kind, but of morecomplicated construction in the Kouyundjik bas-relief figured above (Fig. 83). No door is shown, but that, perhaps, is due to the sculptor'sinability to suggest a void, or the two central perpendicular lines mayhave been joined by a horizontal one on the upper part of the relief, whichis lost, and thus a doorway indicated; it would then have a couple ofpilasters and a couple of columns on each flank. In classic architecture we find nothing that can be compared with thiscurious notion of placing columns and pilasters on the backs of real orimaginary animals, on a lion, a winged bull, or a sphinx. In the modernEast, however, it is still done. The throne of the Shah, at Teheran, issupported by columns which, in their turn, stand on the backs of lions. Singularly enough the same idea found favour with European architects inthe middle ages, who often made use of it in the porches of their Christiancathedrals. [275] Hence, the old formula often found in judicial documents, _sedente inter leones_, --sitting between the lions--which, was used ofepiscopal judgments delivered in the church porch. In Italy, in buildingsof the Lombardic style, these lions are to be found in great numbers and inthis same situation. At Modena there is one in the south porch of thecathedral that strongly reminded me by its style and handling of thefigures now existing in Cappadocia, of the lion at Euiuk, for example; inboth instances it is extended on the ground with its fore paws laid uponsome beast it has caught. [276] We could hardly name a motive more dear toOriental art than this. Between the predilections of the modern East andthose of Assyria and Chaldæa there are many such analogies. We shall nottry to explain them; we shall be content with pointing them out as theypresent themselves. Various facts observed by Sir Henry Layard and the late George Smith, showthat the column was often employed to form covered alleys stretching from adoor to the edge of the platform, doubtless to the landings on which thestepped or inclined approaches to the palace came to an end. Sir HenryLayard[277] found four bases of limestone (Fig. 82) on the north side ofSennacherib's palace. They were in couples, one couple close to the palacewall, the other in a line with it but some eight-and-twenty yards fartherfrom the building. In each pair the distance from centre to centre was 9feet 3 inches. With such a width the covered way may very well have beenroofed with wood, a hypothesis which is supported by the discovery, at thesame point, of the remains of crude brick walls. The columns would mark inall likelihood the two extremities of the passage. As for the otherconjecture thrown out by the explorer, it seems to us to be much lessprobable. He asks whether these bases may not have been the pedestals ofstatues. Many Assyrian statues have been found together with theirpedestals, and these are always simple in the extreme and without any kindof ornament. Moreover, the statues themselves were made rather to be set upagainst a wall than to pass an independent existence in an open courtyard. Moreover, George Smith saw two of these bases in place at one of theentrances to the palace of Assurbanipal. Unfortunately he gives no drawingand his description is wanting in clearness, but he seems to have noticedthe traces left by a cylindrical shaft on the upper surface of one base;his expression, "a flat circle to receive the column, " evidently means thatthe latter was sunk into the substance of the base. [278] Here, no doubt wasthe end of a gallery, like that in front of Sennacherib's palace. There must in all probability have been other remains of these columnsbesides those noticed by the English explorer, but at Khorsabad alone werethe excavations superintended by a professional architect, there alone werethey watched by the trained eye of a man capable of giving its true meaningand value to every detail of a ruinous building. At Nimroud, at Kouyundjik, at Nebbi-Younas, many interesting traces of ancient arrangements may havebeen obliterated in the course of the excavations without those who stoodby having the least suspicion of their significance. We might perhaps, if it were worth while, come upon further representationsof columns on engraved stones, on ivories, and bronzes, [279] but upon suchsmall objects forms are indicated in a very summary fashion, and, besides, they would be nothing more than curtailed repetitions of motives shown inmore detail and upon a larger scale elsewhere. Our readers may fairlyjudge, from the examples we have placed before them, of the appearance ofthose columns of wood and metal, which the Chaldæans used in the light andgraceful tabernacles figured for us on the relief from Sippara, and of themore durable stone supports of the Assyrians. Long habit and an excessiverespect for tradition, hindered the latter from turning the column to itsfullest use. They stopped half way. They employed the feature with suchtimidity that we can point to nothing that can be called an Assyrian order. They produced nothing to compare with the rich and varied colonnades thatwe admired in the hypostyle halls of Egypt. And yet we cannot say that theyshowed any lack of originality or invention in their choice of decorationsfor the bases and capitals of their columns. Their favourite motive seemsto have been the volute, to which, however, they gave an endless variety. They used it, no doubt, in many ways that now escape us, and by applying itnow to this purpose and now to that, and sometimes with the happiestresults, they accumulated an amount of experience as to the value of thosegraceful curves which was of great value to their successors. Who thosesuccessors were and how they carried to perfection a form which had itsorigin on the banks of the Tigris and Euphrates, will be shown in thecourse of our history. NOTES: [251] See above, p. 118, note 1. [252] TAYLOR, _Notes on Abou-Sharein, and Tell-el-Lahm_, (_Journal of theRoyal Asiatic Society_, vol. Xv. P. 404). --ED. [253] This inscription is published in full in the _Cuneiform Inscriptionsof Western Asia_, vol. V. Part ii. [254] The names of these three deities are furnished by the inscriptionwhich runs beneath the canopy of the pavilion (see Fig. 71). [255] The disk upon the table is enough by itself to betray the identity ofthe god, but as if to render assurance doubly sure, the artist has takenthe trouble to cut on the bed of the relief under the three small figures, an inscription which has been thus translated by MM. OPPERT and MÉNANT:"Image of the Sun, the Great Lord, who dwells in the temple of Bit-para, inthe city of Sippara. " [256] See our _History of Art in Ancient Egypt_, vol. Ii. Chap. 1, § 1. [257] PLACE, _Ninive_, vol. I. Pp. 120-122, and vol. Iii. Plate 73. [258] In this connection Sir H. LAYARD makes an observation to which theattention of the artist should be drawn. Whenever pictures of _Belshazzar'sFeast_ and the _Last Night of Babylon_ are painted massive Egyptian pillarsare introduced: nothing could be more contrary to the facts (_Discoveries_, p. 581). [259] M. PLACE, indeed, encountered an octagonal column on the mound ofKaramles, but the general character of the objects found in that excavationled him to conclude positively that the column in question was a relic fromthe Parthian or Sassanide epoch (_Ninive_, vol. Ii. Pp. 169, 170). [260] _History of Art in Ancient Egypt_, vol. Ii. P. 95. [261] _Ibid. _ vol. I. P. 397, fig. 230; and vol. Ii. P. 105, fig. 84. [262] The profiles of the capitals in this gallery led Sir H. LAYARD tospeak of "small pillars with capitals in the form of the Ionic volute"(_Discoveries_, p. 119) (?). [263] A similar arrangement of volutes may be found on the rough columnsengraved upon one of the ivory plaques found at Nimroud (LAYARD, _Monuments_, &c. , first series, plate 88, fig. 3). [264] We reproduce this capital from RAWLINSON'S _Five Great Monarchies_(vol. I. P. 333); but we should have liked to be able to refer either tothe relief in which it occurs, or to the original design which must havebeen made in the case of those slabs which had to be left at Nineveh. Wehave succeeded in finding neither the relief nor the drawing, so that wecannot guarantee the fidelity of the image. [265] See _Art in Ancient Egypt_, vol. Ii. P. 120, fig. 95. [266] LAYARD forgets to give the height of this base: he is content to tellus that its greatest diameter is 2 feet 7 inches, and its smallest 11-1/2inches. This latter measurement must have been taken at the junction withthe shaft (_Discoveries_, p. 590). [267] George SMITH, _Assyrian Discoveries_, sixth edition, 8vo. 1876, p. 431. [268] LAYARD, _Nineveh_, vol. I. P. 349, at a little distance the explorerfound the bodies of two lions placed back to back, which seemed to haveformed a pedestal of the same kind. Their heads were wanting, and the wholegroup had suffered so much from fire, that it was impossible either tocarry it off or to make a satisfactory drawing from it (_ibid. _ p. 351). [269] This suggestion seems inconsistent with the state of the ruin at thespot where the discovery was made. Sir Henry Layard describes thesesphinxes as buried in charcoal, and so calcined by the fire that they fellinto minute fragments soon after exposure to the air. Anything carried ontheir backs must have fallen at the time of the conflagration, and, if astone column, it would have been found under the charcoal. --ED. [270] PLACE, _Ninive_, vol. Iii. Plate 11. [271] STRABO, xvi. 1, 5. [272] Thomas has placed one of these porches in his restoration of Sargon'spalace at Khorsabad. It is supported by two columns, and serves to mark oneof the entrances to the harem. (PLACE, _Ninive_, vol. Iii. Plate 37 _bis_. ) [273] LAYARD, _Nineveh_, vol. I. Pp. 349, 350. [274] Numerous examples are figured in COSTE and FLANDIN'S _Perse Moderne_, plates 3, 7, 9, 26, 27, 54, &c. They cast a wide shadow in front of thedoorways, and sometimes run along the whole length of the façade. Somelittle support to M. Perrot's theory is afforded by a circumstance on whichLayard dwells strongly in the passage referred to above, namely, that thesphinxes were found buried over their heads in charcoal, which may verywell have been the remains of such a porch; its quantity seems too greatfor those of a ceiling. --ED. [275] This coincidence struck Professor Rawlinson, who compares one ofthese Assyrian columns to a column in the porch of the Cathedral of Trent. He reproduces them both in his _Five Great Monarchies_, vol. I. P. 313. [276] See PERROT and GUILLAUME, _Exploration archéologique de la Galatie_, vol. Ii. Pl. 57. [277] _Discoveries_, p. 590. [278] GEORGE SMITH, _Assyrian Discoveries_, p. 431. [279] One curious example of this is figured in the work of M. CHIPIEZ, _Histoire critique de l'Origine et de la Formation des Ordres grecs_, p. 20. See also LAYARD, _Discoveries_, p. 444, where a bas-relief from thepalace of Sennacherib is figured, upon which appears a coffer supported bya foot in the shape of a column, which ends in a regular volute. § 5. --_The Arch. _ In the preceding pages we have determined the _rôle_ played by the columnin Assyria, and have explained that in spite of the care and taste lavishedupon some of its details, it never rose above the rank of a secondary andsubordinate member. There is nothing, then, to surprise us in the fact thatthe Assyrian architect never placed his arches or vaults upon columns orpiers; he seems never to have had a glimpse of the great possibilities sucha procedure involved, a procedure from which upon the very soil of theEast, his remote descendants were to evolve the architecture of theByzantine church and the Arab mosque. His archivolts and the pendentives ofhis vaults always rest upon thick walls, and yet almost every variety ofthe simple arch or tunnel-vault are to be found among the ruins of hisbuildings. * * * * * [Illustration: FIG. 89. --Tomb-chamber at Mugheir; from Taylor. ] Like all the other forms of Assyrian architecture the arch was invented inChaldæa. The use of small sized materials must have led to its earlydiscovery in that country. But the only arches now standing occur in thebetter preserved monuments of Assyria. On the other hand the tombs of LowerChaldæa furnish more than one example of that false, corbelled or off-setvault, that we have already encountered in Egypt. [280] The chamber figuredbelow is taken from the necropolis of Mugheir, formerly "Ur of theChaldees. " It is built of crude brick bound with mud. The vault issupported by walls sloping upwards and outwards like those of a moderntunnel (Fig. 89). [281] Such a method of construction is only adapted to buildings of smalldimensions; it could not be used for chambers with wide roofs, or where anygreat weight was to be upheld. The arches upon which, according to bothStrabo and Diodorus, [282] the hanging gardens of Babylon were supported, must have been real centred arches. As to whether they were of pisé, likethose of Khorsabad, the Greek writers tell us nothing. From what we know ofthe habits of the Chaldæan builder we may conclude that they were truearches with voussoirs either of bricks burnt in the kiln, or so well driedthat they were almost as hard and durable as those that had passed throughthe fire. This conjecture is confirmed by the fact that the structures inquestion lasted till the Macedonian conquest. Strabo and Diodorus speak ofthe great temple of Bel as so ruinous that its original height could not beguessed, even approximatively. It was otherwise with the hanging gardens. Of these they give the measurements, on plan, of the platforms and piers, together with their heights, and the heights of the arches. We should findit difficult to explain the preciseness of these measurements and theiragreement one with another, unless we supposed that both writers had someexact authority, such as one of the companions or historians of Alexander, to refer to. The kings of Persia lived at Babylon for a part of the year. These princes may well have been indifferent to the preservation of thenational fanes, they may even have hastened their destruction, as Xerxes issaid to have done, in order to punish and humiliate the rebelliousBabylonians. But in their own interest they would see that proper care wastaken of those hanging gardens by which their stay in the city would berendered more pleasant than it would otherwise have been, from whose loftyplatforms their watchful eyes could roam over the city and the adjoiningplain, and follow the course of the great river until it disappeared on thesouth amid groves of waving palm. After the rise of Seleucia and Ctesiphon, however, the gardens would rapidly hasten to decay, but they must have beensolidly built in the first instance to last as long as they did. The pisévaults of the Ninevite palaces could never have stood so well. In spite ofthe layers of lead and bitumen which, as Diodorus tells us, were spreadupon their terraces, the summer rains must in time have found their wayinto their walls and set up a process of disintegration which could havebut one end. Real brick with good mortar could alone resist suchinfluences, and those, no doubt, were the materials used in the Babyloniangardens. If their substructures should ever be found and laid open, we havelittle doubt that arches as carefully built as those of the Assyrian ruinswill be brought to light. The gateways of the town built by Sargon at the foot of his palace moundwere roofed with semicircular vaults. [283] In order to study theirconstruction more closely, M. Place demolished one of these arches piece bypiece, the one numbered three on his plan. [284] It was already condemned todestruction by the necessity for carrying off its sculptures. The total height from pavement to keystone, was twenty-four feet sixinches, from the centre of the keystone to the springing of the arch itselfwas eight feet, the total width of the opening, measured at the feet of thecaryatides, was fourteen feet four inches. The bricks had not been burnt in a kiln but they had been subjected to aprolonged desiccation. The system of construction was as simple aspossible. The perpendicular side walls passed into the vault without anypreparation, and the arch when complete had no inward projection and nostructural ornament but the inner faces of the carefully placed voussoirs;as all the bricks were of the same size and shape something more than theirslightly trapezoidal form was required to keep them in place, and a softerclay was used to bind them together. With the addition of this rude cementeach brick became a long and narrow wedge and determined the curve of thevault in which it was placed. Some idea of the appearance of this triplearch may be formed from the illustration we have compiled from M. Thomas'selevation of an alcove in one of the harem apartments at Khorsabad (Fig. 90). This vault is not in existence, but its component parts were foundamong the ruins of Sargon's palace. [285] [Illustration: FIG. 90. --Interior of a chamber in the harem of Sargon'spalace at Khorsabad; compiled from Place. ] There is one detail in the decoration of these doorways that should becarefully noted. Wherever the architect makes use of a round-headed openinghe reinforces its outlines with a kind of semicircular frieze, to whichbrilliant colours or bold reliefs would give no little decorative value. In what M. Place calls _portes ornées_, this ornamental archivolt is ofenamelled bricks, in the subordinate entrances it is distinguished from therest of the wall merely by its salience. In neither case, however, does itend in any kind of impost, it returns horizontally without the arch andforms an ornament along a line corresponding to the spring of the vaultwithin. We give an example of this peculiarly Assyrian arrangement from oneof the gateways at Dour-Saryoukin (Fig. 91). Nothing like it is to befound, so far as we know, among the buildings of any other ancient people. [Illustration: FIG. 91. --Return round the angle of an archivolt in one ofthe gates of Dour-Saryoukin; compiled from Place. ] From the point of view of the special study on which we are now busy, theinhabited and visible part of an Assyrian building is less interesting thanthose channels hidden in the substructures which acted as drains. Thesechannels existed in all the palaces. Layard encountered them at Nimroudand Kouyundjik, [286] but it was at Khorsabad that they were found in thebest condition and most carefully studied. [287] We shall make use chieflyof the observations of MM. Place and Thomas in our explanation of a curioussystem of sewers that does, perhaps, more honour to the Ninevite builderthan any other part of his work. Every detail of their construction is fullof interest, --the general arrangement, the choice of materials and thevarious methods of vaulting brought into play. In nearly all the rooms there is an opening in the middle of the pavementtowards which the rest of the floor has a gentle slope. It is a round holecut through the centre of a square stone set among the bricks and leadingto a circular brick conduit. In the first specimen described by M. Place, this descending pipe is five feet four inches deep, and rather more thaneleven inches in diameter. It leads into an almost horizontal conduit witha similar section and of the same materials. This latter channel is gentlyinclined through the whole of its length; it terminates in the main drainof which the cut on the next page gives a section in perspective (Fig. 92). [288] The floor of this sewer was formed of large limestone slabs overpassing theinside width of the channel by several inches. By this means the internaljoints were reduced to a minimum, and a further precaution was taken byplacing the slabs in a bath of asphalte, which was also used to coat theoblique channels and the foot of the vertical pipe. The low perpendicularwalls upon which the vault was to be placed were built upon the outer edgeof these wide slabs. They were of four-inch bricks, carefully laid. The most remarkable thing about this drain is the construction of thevault. The bricks composing it are trapezoidal in shape, two of their edgesbeing slightly rounded, the one concave, the other convex. The radius ofthis curve varies with each brick, being governed by its destined place inthe vault. These bricks go therefore in pairs, and as there are fourcourses of bricks on each side of the vault, four separate and differentmoulds would be required, besides a fifth, for a brick of which we shallpresently have to speak. The four narrow sides of these bricks differsensibly one from another. The two curved faces being at differentdistances from the centre, are of unequal lengths, while, as the loweroblique edge is some inches below the upper in the curve, these two edgeshave different directions. In their disinclination to use stone voussoirs, the Assyrian builders here found themselves compelled to mould bricks ofvery complicated form, and the way in which they accomplished their taskspeaks volumes for their skill. [Illustration: FIG. 92. --Drain at Khorsabad, with pointed arch. Section inperspective. ] If we cast a glance at our Fig. 92 the first thing that strikes us is theabsence of a keystone to the vault. The two rows of voussoirs that are infull view thrust against each other only by a single sharp edge; there isno keystone between them. In the row immediately behind, however, there isa stone (imperfectly seen in our illustration) that seems to play the partof a key. Thus we find that only at each alternate vertical course was thearch of burnt and moulded brick complete. The openings left at the summitsof the other courses must have been filled in in some way, and, in fact, the line of voids which ran along the top of the extrados was filled inwith brick earth, beaten tight and forming the best of keys. So that thevault was completed and consolidated by the same material as that used tomake its channel impervious to water. [289] This vault has another strange singularity which at first is verysurprising. The whole structure has a sensible inclination in the directionof its length, suggesting that some accident had happened to it in courseof erection. Such an explanation must be rejected, however, because at themoment of discovery the whole arrangement was uninjured, and, moreover, thefilling of clay must have rendered any movement of the kind impossible. M. Place's explanation seems the best. He thinks the slope was given merely tofacilitate the work of the bricklayers. The first course of voussoirs wouldbe sloped in this fashion, and would rest upon some mass of crude brick inthe centre of the building. The bricks of the second course would leanagainst it, and their weight would be brought in to add cohesion andsolidity to the whole structure instead of being entirely occupied inadding to the perpendicular thrust, while the ease with which they could beplaced without an internal support would be much increased. Assisted bythis simple expedient, two bricklayers with their labourers could build thevault at a very rapid rate. We may believe that the notion of building inthis way would never have occurred to the Assyrian architects but for theirhabit of dispensing with timber centres. This slope had an effect upon the arrangement of the bricks which should benoticed. In all other vaults, such as those of the city gates, the unitsare laid upon their longest sides, and a vertical section shows theirshortest diameters. Here, on the other hand, the bricks stand on theiredges, and their largest surfaces are in contact, on each side, with thenext vertical course. If the full benefit of the natural cohesion betweenone brick and another was to be obtained, this method of laying them wasabsolutely necessary. Internally, the drain we have been studying was four feet eight inches highfrom the floor to the crown of the vault. Its width was three feet nineinches, and its general slope very slight. It may be followed for a totallength of about 220 feet, after which falls of earth have carried away thearch and the whole northern part of the esplanade, so that no trace of themouth by which it opened on the plain can be traced. The other sewer described by M. Place may be more summarily dismissed. Inspite of their drawings and minute descriptions, explorers have not yetsucceeded in explaining the eccentricities of construction it presents. Ithas two channels, one above the other, which are similar neither in slopenor section. Moreover this double sewer is abruptly interrupted in themiddle of the artificial mound through which it runs. Must we believe thatit was never finished or used? We shall not attempt to answer thisquestion, but shall content ourselves with pointing to the similaritiesbetween this tunnel and the last described. The same large stone slabs upona layer of bitumen, the same inclination of the body of the vault, the samebricks formed in different moulds according to their place in the vault, are found in each. Our Fig. 93 shows the two channels and their position one above the other. The pavement of the terrace, which consists of a double bed of largebricks, rests upon the extrados of the upper channel. This vault issemicircular; it has three voussoirs on each side, which, with the key, make seven in each vertical course. But in consequence either of an errorin measurement or of a mistake in calculating the shrinking of the bricks, there was a gap between the third voussoir on the right and the key. Thisgap was filled in by the insertion of a stone cut into the shape of awedge. But for this fault--which, however, had no appreciable effect uponits solidity--the vault would be perfect. [290] The narrow triangularopening of the lower channel may be seen below it. The semicircular vault gradually and insensibly changes into an ellipticalone. The side walls become lower, at each yard their height is diminishedby the thickness of a brick, and finally they disappear about the middleof the total length. At the point shown in our Fig. 94 the arch has lostits supports and rests directly upon the pavement of the channel. Itsellipse is composed of eight voussoirs, four on each side, and a key with asmall wedge-shaped stone voussoir on each side of it. Between the twopoints shown in our Figs. 93 and 94 the upper and lower sewers have becomeone, the vaulted roof of the first and the paved floor of the second beingcontinued in a single tunnel. At the point where this tunnel comes to asudden end it is closed by a wall, through which two small openings arepierced to serve as outlets for the sewer within (Fig. 94). [Illustration: FIG. 93. --Sewer at Khorsabad, with semicircular vault;compiled from Place. ] At different points on the Khorsabad mound, M. Place found other sewers, some with depressed, some with basket-handle vaults, while, at Nimroud, channels were discovered which were square in section and covered withlarge slabs of limestone. [291] The Assyrian architects seem, however, tohave had a decided preference for the vault in such a situation. Theyexpected it to give greater solidity, and in that they were not mistaken. The vaults of burnt brick, though set without cement, have remainedunshaken and close in their joints, and the sewers they inclose are theonly voids that have remained clear in the ruins of the buildings to whichthey belong. [Illustration: FIG. 94. --Sewer at Khorsabad, with elliptical vault;compiled from Place. ] We may, perhaps, be accused of dwelling too minutely upon these Assyrianvaults. We have done so because there is no question more interesting ormore novel in the whole history of architecture than the true origin of thekeyed vault and the different uses to which it has been put. OttfriedMüller looked upon the Etruscans as the inventors of the vault; he believedthat the Greek builders learnt the secret from the early inhabitants ofItaly, [292] and that the arches of the Roman _Cloaca Maxima_ built by theTuscan architects of the Tarquins, were the oldest that had come down tous from antiquity. The archæological discoveries of the last fifty yearshave singularly falsified his opinion and given an age to the vault neverbefore suspected. Even in the days of the Ancient Empire the Egyptians seemto have understood its principle; in any case the architects of Amenophis, of Thothmes, of Rameses, made frequent and skilful use of it long beforethe Ninevite palaces in which we have found it were erected. [293] But thepossession of stones of enormous size enabled the Egyptians to dispense toa great extent with the arch, and we need not be surprised, therefore, thatthey failed to give it anything like its full development. They kept it inthe background, and while using it when necessary in their tombs, in theoutbuildings of their temples, in their private dwellings and warehouses, they never made it a conspicuous element of their architectural system. They may well be admired for the majesty of their colonnades and themagnificence of their hypostyle halls, but not for the construction oftheir vaults, for the imitation of which, moreover, they gave littleopportunity. In Chaldæa and Assyria the conditions were different. Supposing thearchitecture of those two countries to be yet entire, should we find in itvaults rivalling in age the arch in a tomb at Abydos which Marietteattributes to the sixth dynasty?[294] Probably not. So far as we can judge, Chaldæan civilization does not date from so remote a past as that of Egypt, but it appears certain that the principles of the vault were discovered andput in practice by the Chaldees long before the comparatively modern timesin which the segmental and pointed arches of Nineveh were erected. Thelatter alone are preserved because they have been hidden during all thesecenturies under the heaped-up ruins of the buildings to which theybelonged, while those of Chaldæa have been carried away piece by piece, andtheir materials used again and again by the modern population ofMesopotamia. In spite, however, of the absence of such direct evidence, we may affirmwithout fear that the Chaldæan architects soon discovered the principle ofthe arch, and used it at least in its simplest and least complex forms. Weare led to these conclusions not only by their restriction to small unitsof construction--a restriction which is sure, sooner or later, to lead tothe discovery in question--but also by induction from the monuments we havejust been studying. The arches under the hanging gardens of Babylon, thevaults of the sewers and gateways, the domes that covered the great squarechambers in the Ninevite palaces--all these were derived, we may be sure, from the ancient civilization. We cannot believe that such consummate skillin the management of a difficult matter was arrived at in a day. The purelyempiric knowledge of statics it implies could only have been accumulated bya long series of more or less happy experiments. Thus only can we explain the ease with which the Assyrian buildersurmounted difficulties some of which would have puzzled a modernarchitect, such as the pisé vaults erected over spacious galleries withoutany kind of centering, and the domes over square chambers, for which somesystem of pendentives--that is, of arches or other intermediate forces--bywhich the base of the cupola could be allied to the top of the supportingwall, must have been contrived. The accurate calculation of forces betweenthe thrust of the vaults and the strength of the retaining walls, thedexterity with which the curves employed are varied and carried insensiblyone into the other, the skill with which the artificial materials areprepared for their appointed office, are also surprising. By carefulmoulding and manipulation the Assyrian builder made his brick voussoirs aswell fitted for their work as the cut stone of our day. Each brick had itsown shape and size, so that it was assigned in advance a particular placein the vault and its own part in assuring the final stability of thebuilding. In all this we cannot avoid seeing the results of a patient andlong-continued process of experiment and education carried on through manycenturies in all the workshops of Mesopotamia. The art of building vaults with small units of construction was, then, carried farther in Mesopotamia than in Egypt; it was there more franklydeveloped; it was there forced with greater success to supply the place ofstone and timber. It was in fact more of an indigenous art in the valley ofthe Tigris and Euphrates than anywhere else, more inspired by the permanentand unchanging conditions of the country--in a word, more national. In these days the historian sets himself with devotion to follow in all itsinvolutions the long chain of thought and effort by which man has been ledfrom his primitive barbarism to the well-being of modern civilization, andto his domination--every day more complete and more intelligent--over theminor forces of nature. It is the duty of criticism, as its methodsgradually perfect themselves, to add daily to its perspicacity and powersof observation, and to lessen as much as possible the occasions, still sonumerous, when the thread of evidence breaks in its hands and the truerelations of facts to each other become obscured. Even yet we cannot sayfor certain to which nation of the ancient world the invention of the archbelongs. In those remote ages the principle may have been discovered morethan once or twice in different and distant countries whose inhabitantswere busied over the same task. We have no reason to believe that Chaldæalearnt the secret from Egypt, or Etruria from the East. It is none the lesstrue, however, that the unknown architects of Babylon and Nineveh made fulluse of it at an earlier date and in more intelligent fashion than any oftheir rivals. To them must be given the credit of being the masters andart-ancestors of the men who built the Pantheon and the Church of SaintSophia, Santa Maria del Fiore, and Saint Peter's in Rome, and moreespecially of those great modern engineers to whom the principle of thearch has been a chief element in their success. NOTES: [280] _Art in Ancient Egypt_, vol. Ii. P. 82. [281] This chamber is 7 feet long, 3 feet 7 inches wide, and 5 feet high. TAYLOR, _Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society_, vol. Xv. P. 272. [282] STRABO, xvi. 1, 5. DIODORUS, ii. 10. [283] PLACE, _Ninive_, vol. I. Pp. 170-182 and 256-259, vol. Iii. Plates9-18. [284] PLACE, _Ninive_, vol. Iii. Plate 2. [285] PLACE, _Ninive_, vol. I. P. 128. [286] LAYARD, _Nineveh_, vol. I. P. 134; vol. Ii. Pp. 79 and 261. _Discoveries_, pp. 162-165. [287] PLACE, _Ninive_, vol. I. Pp. 269-280 and plates 38 and 39. [288] We have endeavoured to combine M. Thomas's longitudinal elevation, vertical section, and transverse section (PLACE, _Ninive_, plate 38), inour single cut. [289] The same process was employed at Nimroud in a drain or water channel, of which LAYARD gives a sketch (_Discoveries_, p. 164). In connection withthese vaults we must remember that a pointed arch has no key properlyspeaking; the top stone is merely a joint. It looks as if the Assyrianarchitect had a kind of instinctive appreciation of the fact. [290] The slope, the height, and the width of this channel are not the samethroughout. In some places it is wide enough to allow two men to walkabreast in it. [291] LAYARD, _Nineveh_, vol. I. P. 79. [292] OTTFRIED MÜLLER, _Handbuch der Archäologie der Kunst_, § 107 and 168(3rd edition). [293] _Art in Ancient Egypt_, vol. I. P. 112, and vol. Ii. Chap. Ii. § 4. [294] _Ibid. _ vol. Ii. Fig. 44. § 6. --_Secondary Forms. _ (_Doors, windows, steles, altars, obelisks, mouldings. _) We have been obliged to dwell at length on the arch and the column becausethose two elements of construction are of the greatest importance to allwho wish to gain a true idea of Mesopotamian art and of its influence uponneighbouring peoples and over subsequent developments of architecture. Onthe other hand we shall have very little to say upon what, in speaking ofEgyptian art, we called _secondary forms_. [295] We have already had occasion to speak of some of these, such as windows anddoors. We have explained how the nature of his materials and the heat ofthe climate led the architect to practically suppress the former, while, on the other hand, he gave extravagant dimensions to the latter. It was tothe door that the rooms had mainly to look for the light and air, withwhich they could not entirely dispense. We have now to give a few detailsas to the fashion in which these large openings were set in the walls thatenframed them. As for salient decorative members--or mouldings, to givethem their right name--their list is very short. We shall, however, findthem in some variety in a series of little monuments that deserve, perhaps, more attention than they have yet received--we mean altars, steles, andthose objects to which the name of _obelisks_ has, with some inaccuracy, been given. Some of these objects have no little grace of their own, andserve to prove that what the Chaldæans and Assyrians lacked was neithertaste nor invention, but the encouragement that the possession of a kindlymaterial would have given to their genius. Doorways seem to have been generally crowned with a brick archivolt;round-headed doors occur oftener than any others on the bas-reliefs, butrectangular examples are not wanting (see Fig. 43). In the latter case thelintel must have been of wood, metal, or stone. Naturally the bronze andtimber lintels have disappeared, while in but a single instance have theexplorers found one of stone, namely that discovered by George Smith at theentrance to a hall in the palace of Sennacherib (Fig. 95). It consists of ablock of richly carved limestone. Its sculptures are now much worn, buttheir motives and firm execution may still be admired. Two winged dragons, with long necks folded like that of a swan, face each other, the narrowspace between them being occupied by a large two-handled vase. Above thesethere is a band of carved foliage, the details of which are lost in theshadow cast by a projecting cornice along the top of the lintel. [296] Thenecklace round the throat of the right-hand dragon should be noticed. It is surprising that stone lintels are so rare, especially as thecorresponding piece, if we may call it so, namely, the sill or threshold, was generally of limestone or alabaster, at least in the more important andmore richly-decorated rooms. [Illustration: FIG. 95. --Decorated lintel, 6 feel long and 10 inches high. British Museum. ] The exploration of the Assyrian palaces has brought three systems offlooring to light--beaten earth, brick pavements, and pavements oflimestone slabs. [297] In the palace of Sargon nearly every chamber, exceptthose of the harem, had a floor of beaten earth, like that in a modernfellah's house. Even the halls in which the painted and sculptureddecoration was most sumptuous were no exceptions to this rule. There isnothing in this, however, to surprise those who have lived in the East;like the Turks, Arabs, and Persians of our own time, the Chaldæans andAssyrians were shod, except when fighting or hunting, with those_babooshes_ or sandals that are so often figured in the bas-reliefs. Thesemust have been taken off, as they are to-day, before entering a temple, apalace, or a harem. Moses was required to take off his shoes beforeapproaching the burning bush, because the place on which he stood was holyground. In the houses of their gods, in those of their kings and rich men, the floor would be covered with those rich carpets and mats that from oneend of the East to the other conceal from sight the floors of white wood orbeaten earth. In summer the mats are fresh and grateful to the bare feet, in the winter the carpets are soft and warm. The floors themselves arehardly ever seen, so that we need feel no surprise at their being leftwithout ornament. So, too, was it in all probability in the palaces ofSargon and of other kings, and in the sacred buildings. Elsewhere, however, we find a pavement constructed with the most scrupulouscare, and consisting of three distinct parts, --two layers of large brickswith a thick bed of sand interposed between them. The lower course ofbricks is set in a bed of bitumen which separates it from the earth andprevents any dampness passing either up or down. This system of paving wasused in most of the harem chambers at Khorsabad as well as in the opencourts and upon the terraces. Lastly, in certain rooms of the seraglio andharem, in a few of the courts, in the vestibules, before the gates of thecity, and in paths across wide open spaces, a limestone pavement has beenfound. Wherever this pavement exists, the stones are of the same kind andplaced in the same manner. The limestone is exactly similar to that in theretaining walls described on page 147. The stones are often more than threefeet square, and from two feet six inches to two feet ten inches thick. Their shape is not that of a regular solid; it is more like a reversedcone, the base forming the pavement and the narrow end being buried in theground. These stones are simply placed side by side without the use ofmortar or cement of any kind, but their weight and peculiar shape gave asingular durability to the pavement for which they were used. Most of the sills belong to this class. And in Assyria where doorways wereseveral yards deep and two or three wide, these sills were in reality thepavements of passages or even chambers. [298] The materials for these pavements were always different from those of thefloors on each side of them. In the entrances to the brick-paved courtslarge stones were used; in the passages between rooms floored with beatenearth bricks were introduced. The stone thresholds were mostly alabasterlike the sculptured slabs upon the chamber walls. As a rule they were of asingle piece, the great extent of surface, sometimes as much as ten oreleven square yards, notwithstanding. In the entries flanked by the wingedbulls the sills were carved with inscriptions, which were comparativelyrare elsewhere. Sometimes we find a rich and elaborate ornamentation inplace of the wedges; it is made up of geometrical forms and conventionalfoliage and flowers; the figures of men and animals are never introduced. Such an arrangement was in better taste than the mosaic thresholds of theRomans where men were shown in pictures destined to be trodden under foot. The Assyrian carver doubtless took his designs from the carpets in theadjoining chambers. [Illustration: FIG. 96. --Sill of a door, from Khorsabad. Louvre. Length 40inches. Drawn by Bourgoin. [299]] A good idea of these designs may be formed from the slab figured below. Thecentre is occupied by a number of interlacing circles, betraying no littleskill on the part of the ornamentist. The "knop and flower" border ofalternately closed and shut lotus flowers is separated from the centre by aband of rosettes. The whole is distinguished by thought and a severe taste. The indented corners, where the pivots of the doors were placed, and theslot for the lower bolt of the door near the centre, should be noticed. These details prove that in this instance the door was a double one. Inother cases the absence of the slot and the presence of only one pivot holeshow that single doors were also used. [300] The doors always openedinwards, being folded back either against the sides of the entry itself oragainst the walls of the chamber. Many of these sills or thresholds show no sign of a pivot at eithercorner, whence we may conclude that many of the openings were left withoutdoors, and could only have been closed by those suspended carpets or matsof which such ready use is made in hot countries. In very magnificent buildings metal thresholds sometimes replaced those ofstone or brick. In the British Museum there is a huge bronze sill that wasfound in a ruined temple at Borsippa, by Mr. Rassam. Its extreme length issixty inches, its width twenty, and its thickness about three and a halfinches. It bears an inscription of Nebuchadnezzar the arrangement of whichproves that the sill when complete had double its present length, or aboutten feet. Its upper surface is decorated with large rosettes within squareborders. We need hardly say that it is a solid casting, and that its weightis, therefore, by no means trifling. The workmen who put in place and thosewho cast it must both have thoroughly understood what they were about. Evennow, we are told, the latter operation would be attended by somedifficulty. [301] The founders who produced this casting could have no difficulty over theother parts of the door-case, and we have no reason to doubt the statementof Herodotus, who thus ends his account of how the walls of Babylon werebuilt: "The walls had a hundred gates, all of bronze; their jambs andlintels were of the same material. "[302] These lintels and jambs must have been, like the Borsippa threshold, ofmassive bronze, or they would soon have been crushed by the weight they hadto support. On the other hand, had doors themselves been entirely of thatmetal it would have been very difficult if not impossible to swing themupon their hinges, especially in the case of city gates like those justreferred to. It is probable, then, that they were of timber, covered andconcealed by plates of bronze. Herodotus indeed narrates what he saw, likea truthful and intelligent witness, but he was not an archæologist, and itdid not occur to him when he entered the famous city which formed the goalof his travels, to feel the shining metal and find out how much of it wassolid and how much a mere armour for a softer substance behind. From fragments found at Khorsabad, M. Place had already divined that theAssyrians covered the planks of their doors with bronze plates, but alldoubts on the point have been removed by a recent discovery, which hasproved once for all that art profited in the end by what at first wasnothing more than a protection against weather and other causes ofdeterioration. In 1878 Mr. Hormuzd Rassam, the fellow traveller of SirHenry Layard, found in the course of his excavations in Assyria for theBritish Museum, some metallic bands covered with _repoussé_ reliefs andbearing the name of Shalmaneser III. (895-825). The site of this discoverywas Balawat, an artificial mound about fifteen miles to the east ofMossoul. [303] As soon as these bands had been examined in London bycompetent archæologists, they were recognized as having belonged to theleaves of a wooden door, which must have been nearly twenty-seven feet highand about three inches thick. This latter dimension has been deduced fromthe length of the nails used to keep the bands in place. At one end thesebands were bent with the hammer round the pivot to which each half of thedoor was attached. These pivots, judging from the bronze feet into whichthey were "stepped, " were about twelve inches in diameter. It is easy to see from their shape how these feet were fixed and how theydid their work (Fig. 97). The point of the cone was let into a hollowsocket prepared for it in a block cut from the hardest stone that could befound. Such a material would resist friction better and take a higherpolish than brick, so that it was at once more durable and less holding. Sockets of flint, basalt, trachyte, and other volcanic rocks have beenfound in great numbers both in Assyria and Chaldæa. [304] Instances of theuse of brick in this situation are not wanting, [305] however, and now andthen the greenish marks left by the prolonged contact of metal have beendiscovered in the hollows of these sockets. [306] [Illustration: FIG. 97. --Bronze foot from the Balawat gates and itssocket. [307] British Museum. ] More than one method was in use for fixing the pivots of the doors andenabling them to turn easily. Sir Henry Layard brought from Nimroud fourheavy bronze rings which must have been used to supplement these hollowsockets. [308] In one way or another bronze occupied a very important placein the door architecture of the Assyrians. In those cases where it neithersupplied the door-case nor ornamented its leaves, it was at least used tofix the latter and to enable them to turn. In Assyrian façades doors had much greater importance than in thosearchitectural styles in which walls are broken up by numerous openings. Their great size, their rich and varied ornamentation, the importantfigures in high relief with which the walls about them were adorned, thesolemn tints of bronze lighted up here and there by the glory of gold, thelively colours of the enamelled bricks that formed their archivolts, andfinally the contrast between the bare and gleaming walls on either side andtheir depths of shadow--all these combined to give accent to the doorwaysand to afford that relief to the monotony of the walls of which they stoodin so great a need. For Assyrian mouldings are even poorer than those ofEgypt. The softness of crude brick, the brittle hardness of burnt brick, are neither of them well disposed towards those delicate curves by which askilful architect contrives to break the sameness of a façade, and to givethe play of light and shadow which make up the beauty of a Greek orFlorentine cornice. The only mouldings encountered in Assyria have been found on a fewbuildings or parts of buildings in which stone was employed. We may quoteas an instance the retaining wall of the small, isolated structureexcavated by Botta towards the western angle of the Khorsabad mound, and byhim believed to be a temple. [309] The wall in question is built of ahardish grey limestone, the blocks being laid alternately as stretchers andheaders. The wall is complete with plinth, die and cornice (Figs. 98 and99). The latter is a true cornice, composed of a small torus or bead, ascotia, and a fillet. The elements are the same as those of the Egyptiancornice, except in the profile of the hollow member, which is here a_scotia_ and in Egypt a _cavetto_, to speak the language of modernarchitects. The Egyptian moulding is at once bolder and more simple, whilethe vertical grooves cut upon its surface give it a rich and furnishedaspect that its Assyrian rival is without. [310] We have another example of Assyrian mouldings on the winged sphinx foundby Layard at Nimroud (Fig. 85)--the sphinx, that is, that bore a column onits back. In section this moulding may be compared to a large _scotia_divided into two _cavettos_ by a _torus_. Its effect is not happy. TheAssyrians had too little experience in stone-cutting to enable them tochoose the most satisfactory proportions and profiles for mouldings. We may also point to the entablatures upon the small pavilions reproducedin our Figs. 41 and 42. They are greatly wanting in elegance; in oneespecially--that shown in Fig. 42--the superstructure is very heavy inproportion to the little temple itself and its columns. [Illustration: FIGS. 98, 99. --Assyrian mouldings. Section and elevation;from Botta. ] The only moulding, if we may call it so, borrowed by Assyria from Chaldæa, and employed commonly in both countries, is a brick one. Loftus was thefirst to point it out. He discovered it in the ruined building, doubtlessan ancient temple, in the neighbourhood of Warka, and called by the natives_Wuswas_. This is his description:--"Upon the lower portion of the buildingare groups of seven half-columns repeated seven times--the rudest perhapswhich were ever reared, but built of moulded semicircular bricks, andsecurely bonded to the wall. The entire absence of cornice, capital, baseor diminution of shafts, so characteristic of other columnar architecture, and the peculiar and original disposition of each group in rows like palmlogs, suggest the type from which they sprang. "[311] With his usual penetration, Loftus divines and explains the origin of theseforms. The idea must have been suggested, he thinks, by the palm trunksthat were used set closely together in timber constructions, or at regularintervals in mud walls. In either case half of their thickness would bevisible externally, and would naturally provoke imitation from architectsin search of ornament for the bald faces of their clay structures. [312] [Illustration: FIG. 100. --Façade of a ruined building at Warka; fromLoftus. ] As to the effect thus obtained, the rough sketch given by Loftus hardlyenables us to decide (see Fig. 100). From Assyria, however, come bettermaterials for a judgment. We there often find these perpendicular ribs, generally in groups of seven, in buildings that have been carefully studiedand illustrated upon a sufficient scale. We give an example from one of theharem gates at Khorsabad (Fig. 101), by which we may see at once that anornamental motive of no little value was afforded by these huge verticalreeds with their play of alternate light and shadow, and the happy contrastthey set up between themselves and the brilliant hues of the painted wallsand enamelled bricks. The whole had a certain elegant richness that canhardly be appreciated without the restoration, in every line and hue, ofthe original composition. Both at Warka and in the Khorsabad harem, these vertical ribs areaccompanied by another ornament which may, perhaps, have been in even morefrequent use. We mean those long perpendicular grooves, rectangular insection, with which Assyrian and Chaldæan walls were seamed. In the haremwall these grooves flank the group of vertical reeds right and left, dividing each of the angle piers into two quasi-pilasters. At Warka theyappear in the higher part of the façade, above the groups of semi-columns. They serve to mark out a series of panels, of which only the lower partshave been preserved. The missing parts of the decoration may easily besupplied by a little study of the Assyrian remains. The four sides of thebuilding at Khorsabad, called by M. Place the _Observatory_, are decorateduniformly in this fashion. The general effect may be gathered from ourrestoration of one angle. The architect was not content with decorating hiswall with these grooves alone; he divided it into alternate compartments, the one salient, the next set back, and upon these compartments he ploughedthe long lines of his decoration. These changes of surface helped greatlyto produce the varied play of light and shadow upon which the architectdepended for relief to the bare masses of his walls. The most ordinaryworkmen could be trusted to carry out a decoration that consisted merely inrepeating, at certain measured intervals, as simple a form as can beimagined, and, in the language of art as in that of rhetoric, there is nofigure more effective in its proper place than repetition. [Illustration: FIG. 101. --Decoration of one of the harem gates, atKhorsabad; compiled from Place. ] The necessity for something to break the monotony of the brickarchitecture was generally and permanently felt, and in those Parthian andSassanide periods in which, as we have said, the traditions of the oldChaldæan school were continued, we find the panel replaced by wall arcadesin which the arches are divided from each other by tall pilasters. Ingeneral principle and intention the two methods of decoration areidentical. The Egyptian architect had recourse to the same motive, first, in the tombsof the Ancient Empire for the decoration of the chamber walls in themastabas; secondly, for the relief of great brick surfaces. The resemblanceto the Mesopotamian work is sometimes very great. [313] We have explained this form by one of the transpositions so frequent in thehistory of architecture, namely, a conveyance of motives from carpentry tobrickwork and masonry. [314] In the former the openings left in the skeletonare gradually filled in, and these additions, by the very nature of theirmaterials, most frequently take the form of panels. The grooves that definethe panels in brick or stone buildings represent the intervals left by thecarpenter between his planks and beams. They could also be obtained veryeasily upon the smooth face of beams brought into close contact, either bymeans of the gouge or some other instrument capable of cutting into thewood. We may safely assert that in Chaldæa and Assyria, as in Egypt, it waswith carpentry that the motive in question originated. On the other hand, if there be a form that results directly from the systemof construction on which it is used, that form is the crenellation withwhich, apparently, every building in Mesopotamia was crowned. [315] [Illustration: FIG. 102. --View of an angle of the observatory at Khorsabad;compiled from Place. ] The Assyrian brickwork in which so many vast undertakings were carried outconsists of units all of one dimension, and bonded by the simplealternation of their joints. Supposing a lower course to consist of twoentire bricks, the one above it would be one whole brick flanked on eitherside by a half brick. An Assyrian wall or building consists of the infiniterepetition of this single figure. Each whole brick lies upon the jointbetween two others, and every perpendicular wall, including parapet orbattlement, is raised upon this system. [Illustration: FIG. 103. --Lateral façade of the palace at Firouz-Abad; fromFlandin and Coste. ] [Illustration: FIG. 104. --Battlements from an Assyrian palace. ] Far from being modified by the crenellations, this bond regulates theirform, dimensions, and distribution. The crenellations of the palace wallsconsist of two rectangular masses, of unequal size, placed one upon theother. The lower is two bricks'-length, or about thirty-two inches, wide, and the thickness of three bricks, or about fourteen inches, high. Theupper mass equals the lower in height, while its width is the length of asingle brick, or sixteen inches. The total height of the battlement, between twenty-eight and twenty-nine inches, is thus divided into twomasses, one of which is twice the size of the other (see Fig. 104). Thebattlements are all the same, and between each pair is a void which isnothing but the space a battlement upside down would occupy. Fill thisspace with the necessary bricks, and a section of wall would be restoredidentical in bond with that below the battlements, with the one exceptionthat the highest block of the battlement, being only one brick wide, isformed by laying three whole bricks one upon the other. [316] The crenellations we have been describing are those upon the retainingwalls of Sargon's palace at Khorsabad. Those of the _Observatory_ areslightly different in that they are three stories high instead of two (Fig. 105). The lowest is three bricks wide, the second three, the topmost two. They are each three bricks high. Why were these battlements given a heightbeyond those of the royal palace? That question may be easily answered. Thecrenellations of the observatory were destined for a much more loftysituation than those of the palace. The base of the former monument roseabout 144 feet above the summit of the artificial hill upon which it wasplaced; the total elevation was about 190 feet, a height at which ordinarybattlements, especially when for the most part they had nothing but theface of the higher stories to be relieved against, would be practicallyinvisible. [Illustration: FIG. 105. --Battlements from the Khorsabad _Observatory_. ] Whether composed of two or three stages this battlement was alwaysinscribed within an isosceles triangle; in fact, when a third story wasadded, the height and the width at the base increased in the sameproportions. M. Place lays great stress upon this triangle. He makes it cutthe upper angles of each of the superimposed rectangles, as we have done inour Figs. 104 and 105, and he points out how such a process gives anoutline similar to that of a palisade cut into points at its summit, aprecaution that is often taken to render the escalade of such an obstaclemore difficult, and M. Place is inclined to think that the idea of thesecrenellations was suggested by those of a wooden palisade, a succession ofrectangles being substituted for a triangle in order to meet the specialconditions of the new material. To us, however, it hardly appears necessaryto go back to the details of wooden construction to account for theseforms. We find no sign of M. Place's spiked palisades in the bas-reliefs. The inclosures of the Mesopotamian fields must have consisted of palmtrunks and strong reeds; planks were hardly to be cut from the trees of thecountry. Moreover, the mason and bricklayer saw the forms of thesebattlements repeated by their hand every instant. Whenever they began afresh course the first brick they placed upon the joint between two unitsof the course below was the first step towards a battlement. The decorationobtained by the use of these battlements was not a survival from a previousform, it was a natural consequence from the fundamental principle ofAssyrian construction. It has been thought that some of the buildings represented on thebas-reliefs have triangular denticulation in place of the battlementsfigured on the last page;[317] and there are, in fact, instances in thereliefs of walls denticulated like a palisade (see Fig. 38), but these mustnot, we think, be taken literally. In most cases the chisel has been at thetrouble to show the real shapes of the battlements (Fig. 42), but in someinstances, as in this, it has been content to suggest them by a series ofzig-zags. Here and there we may point out a picture in stone which forms atransition between the two shapes, in Fig. 41 for example. Such anabbreviation explains itself. It is, in fact, nothing more than animitation of the real appearance of the rectangular battlements when seenfrom a distance. [318] The architect was not content with the mere play of light and shadeafforded by these battlements. He gave them a slight salience over thefaçade and a polychromatic decoration. About three feet below the base ofthe crenellations the face of the wall was brought forward an inch or two, so that the battlements themselves, and some eight or ten courses of bricksbelow them, overhung the façade by that distance, forming a kind ofrudimentary cornice (see Fig. 106). In very elaborate buildings enamelledbricks were inserted between the battlements and this cornice. These weredecorated with white rosettes of different sizes upon a blue ground. Theexplorers of Khorsabad encountered numberless fragments of these bricks andsome whole ones in the heaps of rubbish at the foot of the external walls. Their situation proved that they had come from the top of the walls, and onthe whole we may accept the restoration of M. Thomas, which we borrow fromthe work of M. Place, as sufficiently justified (Fig. 106). [319] This method of crowning a wall may seem poor when compared to the Greekcornice, or even to that of Egypt, but in view of the materials with whichhe had to work, it does honour to the architect. The long band of shadownear the summit of the façade, the bands of brilliantly coloured ornamentabove it, and the rich play of light and shade among the battlements, thewhole relieved against the brilliant blue of an Eastern sky, must have hada fine effect. The uniformity from which it suffered was a defect common toMesopotamian architecture as a whole, and one inseparable from the absenceor comparative disuse of stone. But in the details we have been studying wefind yet another illustration of the skill with which these peoplecorrected, if we may so phrase it, the vices of matter, and by a frank useof their materials and insistence upon those horizontal and perpendicularlines which they were best fitted to give, evolved from it an architecturethat proved them to have possessed a real genius for art. [Illustration: FIG. 106. --Battlements of Sargon's palace at Khorsabad;compiled from Place. ] The Assyrians seem to have been so pleased with these crenellations thatthey placed them upon such small things as steles and altars. In one of theKouyundjik reliefs (Fig. 42) there is a small object--a pavilion or altar, its exact character is not very clearly shown--which is thus crowned. Another example is to be found in a bas-relief from Khorsabad (Fig. 107). [Illustration: FIG. 107. --Altar; from Rawlinson. ] We are thus brought to the subject of altars. These are sufficiently variedin form. In the Kouyundjik bas-relief (Fig. 42) we find those shapes at thefour angles which were copied by the peoples of the Mediterranean, and ledto the expression, "the horns of the altar. " In the Khorsabad relief (Fig. 107) the salience of these horns is less marked. On the other hand, the dieor dado below them is fluted. Another altar brought from Khorsabad to theLouvre is quite different in shape (Fig. 108). It is triangular on plan. Above a plinth with a gentle salience rises the altar itself, supported ateach angle by the paw of a lion. The table is circular, and decoratedround the edge with cuneiform characters. [Illustration: FIG. 108. --Altar in the Louvre. Height 32 inches. [320]] A third type is to be found in an altar from Nimroud, now in the BritishMuseum (Fig. 109); it dates from the reign of Rammanu-nirari, who appearsto have lived in the first half of the eighth century before our era. [321]The rolls at each end of this altar are very curious and seem to be theprototype of a form with which the Græco-Roman sarcophagi have made usfamiliar. [Illustration: FIG. 109. --Altar in the British Museum. Height 22 inches, length at base 22 inches. ] The various kinds of steles are also very interesting. The most remarkableof all is one discovered at Khorsabad by M. Place (Fig. 100). The shaft iscomposed of a series of perpendicular bands alternately flat and concave, exactly similar to the flutes of the Ionic order. The summit is crowned bya plume of palm leaves rising from a double scroll, like two consolesplaced horizontally and head to head. The grace and slenderness of thisstele are in strong contrast to the usually short and heavy forms affectedby the Assyrian architects, especially when they worked in stone. It isdifficult to say what its destination may have been. It was discoveredlying in the centre of an outer court surrounded by offices and othersubordinate buildings; it has neither figure nor inscription. [322] The basewas quite rough and shapeless, and must have been sunk into the soil of thecourt, so that the flutes began at the level of the pavement. M. Placesuggests that it may have been a _milliarium_, from which all the roads ofthe empire were measured. We do not know that there is a single fact tosupport such an unnecessary guess. The stele of which we have been speaking is unique, but of anotherpeculiarly Assyrian type there is no lack of examples, namely, of that towhich the name _obelisk_ has, with some want of discrimination, beenapplied. The Assyrian monoliths so styled are much shorter in theirproportions than the lofty "needles" of Egypt, while their summits, instead of ending in a sharp pyramidion, are "stepped" and crowned with anarrow plateau. (Fig. 111. ) These monoliths were never very imposing insize, the tallest is hardly more than ten feet high. [Illustration: FIG. 110. --Stele from Khorsabad. Plan and elevation; fromPlace. ] [Illustration: FIG. 111. --The obelisk of Shalmaneser II. In the BritishMuseum. [323] Height 78 inches. Drawn by Bourgoin. ] Whatever name we choose to give to these objects, there can be no doubt asto their purpose. They are commemorative monuments, upon which both writerand sculptor have been employed to celebrate the glory of the sovereign. Along inscription covers the base of the shaft, while the upper part of eachface is divided into five pictures, the narrow bands between them bearingshort legends descriptive of the scenes represented. It was, of course, important that such figured panegyrics should be afforded the best possiblechance of immortality; and we find that most of these obelisks are composedof the hardest rocks. Of the four examples in the British Museum, three areof basalt and one only of limestone. [Illustration: FIG. 112. --Rock-cut Stele from Kouyundjik. British Museum. ] Another type of stele in frequent employment was that with an arched topand inclosing an image of the king. It is often represented on thebas-reliefs[324] (Fig. 42), and not a few examples of it are in ourmuseums. When we come to speak of Assyrian sculpture we shall have toreproduce some of them. We find a motive of the same kind, but more ornateand complicated, in the bas-relief from Kouyundjik figured above (Fig. 112). A hunting scene is carved on a wall of rock at the top of a hill. Alion attacks the king's chariot from behind; the king is about to piercehis head with an arrow while the charioteer leans over the horses and seemsto moderate the determination with which they fly. [325] The sculpture issurrounded by a frame arched at the top and inclosed by an architrave withbattlemented cornice. The whole forms a happily conceived little monument;it is probable that it was originally accompanied by an explanatoryinscription. This analysis of what we have called secondary forms has shown how greatwas the loss of the Chaldæan architect and of his too docile Assyrianpupil, in being deprived--by circumstances on the one hand and want ofinclination on the other--of such a material as stone. Without it theycould make use of none of those variations of plan and other contrivancesof the same kind by which the skilful architect suggests the internalarrangement of his structures on their façades. For such purposes he had toturn to those constituents of his art to which we shall devote our nextsection. NOTES: [295] _Art in Ancient Egypt_, vol. Ii. Ch. Ii. [296] GEORGE SMITH, _Assyrian Discoveries_, pp. 146, 308, 429. This lintelhas been fixed over the south doorway into the Kouyundjik Gallery of theBritish Museum. When examined in place, the running ornament in the hollowof the cornice will be easily recognized--in spite of the mutilation of itsupper edge--as made up of a modified form of the palmette motive, which hadits origin in the fan-shaped head of the date palm. The eight plumes ofwhich the ornament consists are each formed of three large leaves or loopsand two small pendant ones, the latter affording a means of connecting eachplume with those next to it. --ED. [297] PLACE, _Ninive_, vol. I. Pp. 295-302. [298] PLACE, _Ninive_, vol. I. Pp. 302, 303. [299] Two much better examples of this same work may be seen in theAssyrian basement-room of the British Museum. --ED. [300] PLACE, _Ninive_, vol. I. P. 314. [301] We here quote the opinion of Mr. Ready, the well-known director ofthe museum workshops. In April, 1882, he had examined this curiousmonument, which is now placed in the public galleries close to the Balawatgates. [302] HERODOTUS, ii. 179: Pylai de enestasi perix tou teicheos hekaton, chalkeai pasa kai stathmoi te kai huperthuma hôsautôs. [303] An account of the discovery and a short description of the remains, will be found in an article by Mr. Theo. G. PINCHES, published in the_Transactions of the Society of Biblical Archæology_, and entitled: _TheBronze Gates discovered by Mr. Rassam at Balawat_ (vol. Vii. Part i. Pp. 83-118). The sculptured bronze from these gates is not all, however, in theBritish Museum. Mr. Rassam's workmen succeeded in appropriating a certainnumber in the course of the excavations, and thus M. Gustave Schlumbergerhas become possessed of a few pieces, while others of much greaterimportance have come into the hands of M. De Clercq. M. F. LENORMANT haspublished in the _Gazette Archéologique_ (1878) a description of the piecesbelonging to M. Schlumberger, with two plates in heliogravure. We havealready referred to the great work which is now in course of publication bythe _Society of Biblical Archæology_; it will put an exact reproduction ofthis interesting monument in the hands of Assyriologists and thoseinterested in the history of art. We shall return to these gates when wecome to treat of sculpture. [304] A number of sockets found by M. De Sarzec in the ruins of Tello arenow deposited in the Louvre. M. PLACE found some at Khorsabad (_Ninive_, vol. I. P. 314), and Sir Henry LAYARD on the sites of the towns in UpperMesopotamia (_Discoveries_, p. 242). The British Museum has a considerablenumber found in various places. [305] In the same case as the Balawat gates there is a brick, which hasobviously been used for this purpose. [306] PLACE, _Ninive_, vol. I. P. 314. [307] In the British Museum there are some smaller bronze objects of thesame kind from the palace of Sennacherib. Others were found by M. PLACE inthe palace of Sargon (_Ninive_, plate 70, fig. 6), so that they must havebeen in frequent use. [308] LAYARD (_Discoveries_, p. 163) gives a sketch of one of theseobjects. Its internal diameter is about five inches, and its weight 6 lbs. 3-3/4 oz. These rings are now in the British Museum. [309] BOTTA, _Monument de Ninive_, vol. V. Pp. 53-55. [310] BOTTA, _Monument de Ninive_, plates 149 and 150. See also LAYARD, _Discoveries_, p. 131, and FERGUSSON, _History of Architecture_, vol. I. P. 185 (2nd edition). [311] LOFTUS, _Travels and Researches_, p. 175. [312] M. Place offers a similar explanation of the engaged columns thatwere found in many parts of the palace at Khorsabad (_Ninive_, vol. Ii. P. 50). He has brought together in a single plate all the examples ofpilasters and half columns that he encountered in that edifice. Similarattempts to imitate the characteristic features of a log house are found inmany of the most ancient Egyptian tombs. See _Art in Ancient Egypt_, vol. Ii. P. 62 and fig. 37. [313] See, for instance, in _Art in Ancient Egypt_, vol. I. Figs. 123, 124, 201, and in vol. Ii. Pp. 55-64, and figs. 35-37 and 139. [314] _Art in Ancient Egypt_, vol. I. P. 117. [315] We here give a résumé of M. PLACE'S observations on this point. Hemade a careful study of these crenellations. _Ninive_, vol. Ii. Pp. 53-57. [316] See M. PLACE'S diagrams, _Ninive_, vol. Ii. P. 54. [317] PLACE, _Ninive_, vol. Ii. P. 53. [318] M. Perrot dismisses the evidence of those who believe in a palisadeorigin of the Assyrian battlements in what is, perhaps, rather too summarya fashion. The fact is that the great majority of the crenellated buildingsin the reliefs have triangular battlements, while the theory that they aremerely a hasty way of representing the stepped crenellations is to someextent discredited by their frequent occurrence side by side with thelatter on the same relief. The Balawat gates, for instance, contain somenine or ten examples of the triangular, and four or five of the stepped, shape. In the series of sculptured slabs representing the siege of a cityby Assurnazirpal (10 to 15 in the Kouyundjik gallery at the BritishMuseum), there are examples of both forms, and in more than one instancethe triangular battlements are decorated with lines and rosettes--similarin principle to those shown above in fig. 106--that can hardly bereconciled with the notion that their form is the result of haste on thepart of the artist. In the Assyrian Basement Room in the British Museumthere is an interesting bas-relief representing Assyrian soldiers busy withthe demolition of a fortified wall, probably of some city just taken. Theair is thick with the materials thrown down from its summit, among them agreat number of planks or beams, which seem to suggest that timber wasfreely employed in the upper works of an Assyrian wall. If this was so, thepointed battlements in the reliefs may very well represent those in whichtimber was used, and the stepped ones their brick imitations. Both formswere used as decorations in places where no real battlements could haveexisted, as, for instance, on the tent of Sennacherib, in the well-knownbas-relief of the siege of Lachish (see fig. 56). --ED. [319] PLACE, _Ninive_, vol. Ii. P. 85. [320] There is an altar almost exactly similar to this in the BritishMuseum. It was found in front of the temple of the War God, Nimroud. --ED. [321] Upon some other monuments brought from the same place by Mr. HormuzdRassam, and also exhibited in the Nimroud central saloon, we may read bythe side of Rammanu-nirari's name that of his spouse Sammuramat, who seemsto have been associated with him in the government, and to have been therecipient of particular honours. The name of this princess has caused someto recognize in her the fabulous Semiramis of the Greek writers. Inconsequence of facts that have escaped us she may well have furnished thefirst idea for the romantic legends whose echo has come down to our times. [322] PLACE, _Ninive_, vol. I. P. 96; vol. Ii. Pp. 71-73. [323] Besides the obelisk of Shalmaneser II. , which is in a marvellousstate of preservation, the British Museum possesses three other objects ofthe same kind. Two of these were made for Assurnazirpal; the third, themost ancient of all, dates from the time of Tiglath Pileser I. ; unhappilyonly fragments of it remain. [324] See also BOTTA, _Monument de Ninive_, vol. I. Plate 64. We here findan instance of one of these arched steles erected before a fortress. [325] ?--ED. § 7. --_Decoration. _ Mesopotamia was no exception to the general rule that decoration isgoverned by construction. To take only one example, and that from an art wehave already studied, the Egyptian temple was entirely of stone, and itsdecoration formed a part of the very substance of what we may call theflesh and blood of the edifice. The elements of that rich and brilliantdecoration are furnished by those mouldings which make up in vigour whatthey lack in variety, by the slight relief or the hardly perceptibleintaglio of the shadowless figures cut by the sculptor in stone, andcovered by the painter with the liveliest colours. This sumptuousdecoration, covering every external and internal surface, may no more bedetached from it than the skin of an animal may be detached from itsmuscles. The union is even more intimate in this case, the adherence morecomplete. So long as the Egyptian walls remain standing, the blocks oflimestone, sandstone, or granite of which they are composed, can never beentirely freed from the images, that is, from the expression of thethoughts, cut upon them by the men of forty centuries ago. In Assyria the case was different. There buildings were of brick, each unitbeing in the vast majority of cases a repetition of its neighbour. In veryfew instances were the bricks of special shapes, and the buildings in whichthey were used could only be decorated by attached ornament, similar inprinciple to the mats and hangings we spread over the floors and walls thatwe wish to hide. This result they obtained in one of two ways; they eithercased their walls in stone, an expensive and laborious process, or theycovered them with a decoration of many colours. As soon as stone came into use, it must have offered an irresistibletemptation to the chisel of the sculptor and the ornamentist; and so wenearly always find it decorated with carvings. Sometimes, as in the linteland thresholds described above (Figs. 95 and 96), the motives are purelyornamental. Elsewhere, in the gates of the Assyrian palaces, and in theplinths of the walls that surround their courts and halls, we find bothfigures in the round and in low relief. In a future chapter we shallattempt to define the style of these works and to determine their merit. For the present we must be content with pointing out the part played bysculpture in the general system of decoration. In Chaldæa sculpture must have played a very feeble part in the _ensemble_of a building, stone was too costly in consequence of the distance it hadto be carried. From the ruins of Chaldæa no colossi, like those whichflanked the entrances of the Ninevite palaces, none of those longinscriptions upon alabaster slabs which have been of such value for thestudent of Assyrian history, have been brought. This latter material andall the facilities it offered to the sculptor was apparently entirelyneglected by the Chaldæans. In Lower Mesopotamia the hard volcanic rockswere chiefly used. They were preferred, no doubt, for their durability, butthey were little fitted for the execution of figures of any size, andespecially was it impossible to think of using them for such historicbas-reliefs as those upon which the Assyrians marshalled hundreds, orrather thousands, of busy figures. Chaldæan doorways may, however, havebeen sometimes flanked with lions and bulls, [326] we are indeed tempted toassign to such a position one monument which has been described bytravellers, namely, the lion both Rich and Layard saw half buried in thehuge ruin at Babylon called the _Kasr_. [327] It is larger than life. Itstands upon a plinth, with its paws upon the figure of a struggling man. There is a circular hole in its jaw bigger than a man's fist. Theworkmanship is rough; so too, perhaps, is that of the basalt lion seen byLoftus at Abou-Sharein. This latter is about fifty-four inches high and itsoriginal place may very well have been before one of the doorways of thebuilding. [328] Of all animal forms, that of the lion was the first to afford materials fordecorative composition of any value, and even after all the centuries thathave passed, the lion has not lost his vogue in the East. We might, if wechose, multiply examples of this persistence, but we shall be content withquoting one. In the centre of Asia Minor, at the village of Angora, inwhich I passed three months of the year 1861, I encountered these lions atevery turn. A short distance off, in the village of Kalaba, there was afountain of Turkish construction in which a lion, quite similar in style tothose of Assyria, had been inserted. [329] In the court of a mosque therewas a lion in the round, a remarkable work by some Græco-Romansculptor. [330] There and in other towns of Asia Minor, lions from theSeljukian period are by no means rare, and even now they are made inconsiderable numbers. After the labours of the day we sometimes passed theevenings in the villas of the rich Greek merchants, which were nearly allon the east of the town. Most of these houses were of recent construction, and were filled with mirrors, fine carpets, and engravings. In front of thehouse, and in the centre of a large paved and trellised court, there werefountains, sometimes ornamented with considerable taste, in which, on greatoccasions, a slender jet of water would give coolness to the air. Theangles of nearly every one of these fountains were marked with small whitemarble lions, heavy and awkward in shape, but nevertheless considered atAngora to be the last word of art. They are imported from Constantinopletogether with the basins of the fountains. In spite of all this, however, some doubts may be felt as to thedestination of the lions found among the Chaldæan ruins. The only monumentthere discovered which seems to have certainly belonged to anarchitectural decoration is one found by Sir Henry Layard in his too sooninterrupted explorations in the Kasr. It is a fragment of a limestone slabfrom the casing of a façade (Fig. 113). The upper parts of two male figuressupport a broken entablature beneath which the name of some divinity iscut. [331] The chief interest of this fragment lies in the further evidence it affordsof a close connection between the arts of Chaldæa and those of Babylon. There is nothing either in the costume or features of these individualsthat may not be found in Assyria. The tiara with its plumes and rosettes, the crimped hair and beard, the baton with its large hilt, are all commonto both countries, while the latter object is to be found on the rocks ofBavian and as far north as the sculptures of Cappadocia. [Illustration: FIG. 113. --Fragment from Babylon. British Museum. Height 11inches, width 9 inches. ] A study of those reliefs in which nothing but purely ornamental motives aretreated, leads us to exactly the same conclusion. Take for instance thegreat bronze threshold from Borsippa, of which we have already spoken; therosettes placed at intervals along its tread are identical with thoseencountered in such numbers in Assyria. In the extreme rarity of stone in his part of the world the Chaldæanarchitect seems to have practically reserved it for isolated statues, forvotive bas-reliefs, for objects of an iconic or religious character, butnevertheless, we have sufficient evidence to prove that such decorativesculpture as found a place in the Chaldæan buildings, did not sensiblydiffer from that to which Assyria has accustomed us. From all that we have said as to the distribution of stone, it will beunderstood that we must turn to Assyria to obtain a clear idea of themeasures by which buildings of crude brick were rendered more sightly byornament in the harder material. We can hardly imagine an Assyrian palacewithout those series of bas-reliefs which now line the walls of our museumsmuch in the same fashion as they covered those of Sargon's andSennacherib's palaces, and yet it is unlikely that in the beginning theAssyrian palaces had these carved walls. The casing of stone and alabastermust have been originally employed for more utilitarian purposes--to hidethe grey and friable material within, to protect it from damage, and tooffer a surface to the eye which should at least be inoffensive. The upperparts of the walls would be covered with a coat of stucco, which could berenewed whenever necessary, but for the lower part, for all that was withinreach of the crowds that frequented the public halls of the seraglio, whopassed through its gates or those of the city itself, some more efficientprotection would be required. The constructor was thus led to encase thelower parts of his walls in a cuirass of stone imposed upon their brickcores. The slabs of which he made use for this purpose varied between threeand ten feet in height, and between six and fifteen in width. Their averagethickness was about eight inches. The way in which these slabs were fixed is hardly worthy of such cleverbuilders, and, in fact, the Assyrians seem to have never succeeded inmastering the difficulties inherent in the association of two heterogeneousmaterials. The slabs were of gypsum or limestone, the wall of pisé, materials which are not to be easily combined. The Assyrians contentedthemselves with simply placing the one against the other. No trace of anytie is to be found. A "tooth" has been given to the inner faces of theslabs by seaming them in every direction with the chisel, and, perhaps, some plastic substance may at the last moment have been introduced betweenthem and the soft clay, but no trace of any other contrivance for keepingthe two materials together has been found. After the general mass of thebuilding--its clay walls and vaults--were complete, a different class ofworkmen was brought in to line its chambers and complete their decoration. The crude brick would by that time have become dry, and no longer in acondition to adapt itself to the roughnesses of the alabaster slabs. Theliquid clay, like that of an earthenware "body, " wets and softens thesurface of the brick while it enters into every hollow of the stone and soallies the one with the other. We recommend this conjecture to those whomay undertake any future excavation in Assyria. It lies with them toconfirm or refute it. However this may have been, the constructor made use of more than onemethod of giving greater solidity to his walls as a whole. His slabs werenot only let into each other at the angles, in some chambers there weresquared angle pieces of a diameter great enough to allow them to sink moredeeply into the crude brick behind, and thus to offer steady points ofsupport in each corner. Finally the separate slabs were held together atthe top by leaden dovetails like the metal clamps used to attach copingstones to each other. Such precautions were rendered comparatively useless by the fact that thewhole work was faulty at the base. Halls and chambers had no solidfoundation or pavement, so that the heavy slabs of their decoration restedupon a shifting soil, quite incapable of carrying them without flinching. In many places they sank some inches into the ground, the soft earth behindpushing them forward, and in their fall the row to which they belonged wasinevitably involved. The excavators have again and again found whole linesof bas-reliefs that appeared to have fallen together. Such an accident is athing for posterity to rejoice over. Prone upon a soft and yielding soilthe works of the sculptor are better protected than when standing erect, their upper parts clear, perhaps, of the ruin that covers their feet, andexposed to the weather at least, and, too often, to the brutality of anignorant population. Such defects are sufficient to prove that these slabs were never meant tocarry any great weight; far from affording a support to the wall behind, they required one to help them in maintaining their own equilibrium. On theother hand they protected it, as we have said above, from too rapiddeterioration. At Khorsabad this stone casing is in very bad condition at many points, inthe halls and passages of the outbuildings and in the courtyards adjoiningthe city gates for instance. [332] There the stones are only smoothed down, and their obvious purpose is merely to protect the crude brick within. Thepurely architectural origin of this system of casing is thus clearly shown. But the presence of these slabs set upright against the wall offered atemptation to the ambitious architect that he was not likely to resist. Thelimestone and alabaster of which they were composed afforded both a kindlysurface for the chisel, and a certain guarantee of duration for the formsit struck out. In every Assyrian palace we may see that the king, itsbuilder, had a double object in view, the glorification of the gods, andthe transmission to posterity of his own image and the memory of his reign. To these ends the architect called in the sculptor, under whose hands therudely dressed slabs took the historic forms with which we are familiar. Of all parts of the palace the doorways were most exposed to injury fromthe shocks of traffic, and we find their more solid plinths surmounted byhigher and thicker slabs than are to be found elsewhere. These slabs arecarved with the images of protecting divinities. Huge winged and man-headedbulls (Plate X)[333] or lions (Fig. 114), the speaking symbols of force andthought, met the approaching visitor. Sometimes a lion, reproducing withsingular energy the features of the real beast, was substituted for thehuman-headed variety (Plate VIII). [334] These guardians of the gate always had the front part of their bodiessalient in some degree from the general line of the wall. The head andbreast, at least, were outside the arch. Right and left of the passagewere very thick slabs, also carved into the form of winged bulls inprofile, and accompanied by protecting genii. These latter divinities aresometimes grave and noble in mien, obviously benevolent (Figs. 8 and 29), sometimes hideous in face, and violent in gesture. In the latter case theyare meant to frighten the profane or the hostile away from the dwellingthey guard (Figs. 6 and 7). All these figures are in much higher reliefthan the sculptures in the inner chambers. [Illustration: FIG. 114. --Human-headed lion. Nimroud; from Layard. ] All this shows that the sculptor thoroughly understood how to make the bestof his opportunities when he was once called in to ornament those massivedoor-frames and slabs which at first were no more than additional supportsfor the building to which they were applied. He varied the shapes of theseblocks according to their destined sites, and increased their size so asto give gigantic proportions to his man-headed bulls and lions. Some of thewinged bulls are from sixteen to seventeen feet high. [335] In spite of thelabour expended upon the carving and putting in place of these hugefigures, they are extremely numerous, hardly less so, indeed, than theOsiride piers of Egypt. [336] In the palace of Sargon at Khorsabad, twenty-six pairs have been counted; in that of Sennacherib at Kouyundjik, there were ten upon a single façade. [337] In those passages, halls, and courtyards, whose destination justified sucha luxury, the sculptor utilized the stone lining of the walls with equalskill, but in a slightly different spirit. The figures on the façade had tobe seen from a great distance, and were exposed to the full light of theMesopotamian sun, so that their colossal proportions and the variedboldness of their relief had an obvious justification. The sculptures inthe interior were smaller in scale and were strictly _bas-reliefs_. Withthe shortening of the distance from which they could be examined, theirscale was made to conform more closely to the real stature of human beings. In some very spacious halls a few of the figures are larger than life, while in the narrowest galleries they become very small, the alabasterslabs being divided into two stories or more (see Fig. 115). [338] There is another singularity to be noticed _apropos_ of these sculptures. The themes treated outside are very different from those inside thepalaces. The figures in the former position are religious and supernatural, those in the interior historical and anecdotic. There is much variety inthe details of these narrative sculptures, but their main theme is alwaysthe glorification, and, in a sense, the biography of the sovereign. [Illustration: FIG. 115. --Bas-relief with several registers. Width 38inches. Louvre. Drawn by Bourgoin. ] In the Egyptian temple the figures which form its _illumination_ are spreadindifferently over the whole surface of the walls. In a Greek temple, onthe other hand, sculpture was confined with rare exceptions to the upperpart of the building, to the pediments chiefly, and the frieze. TheAssyrian method was neither that of the Egyptians nor that of the Greeks. At Nineveh, the sculptor did not, as in Egypt, sow his figures broadcastover the whole length and breadth of the building, neither did he raisethem, as in Greece, above the heads of the crowd; he marshalled them uponthe lowest part of a wall, upon its plinth. Their feet touched the soil, their eyes were on a level with those that looked at them; we might saythat they formed an endless procession round every hall and chamber. Thereasons for such an arrangement are to be sought for, not in any æsthetictendency of the Assyrian artist, but in the simple fact that only in thestone cuirass, within which the lower parts of the brick walls were shutup, could he find the kindly material for his chisel. Nowhere else in thewhole building could the stone, without which his art was powerless, beintroduced. But as the lateral development of Assyrian buildings was great, so too wasthe field offered to the Assyrian sculptor. It has been calculated that thesculptured slabs found in the palace of Sargon would, if placed in a row, cover a distance of nearly a mile and a half. Their superficies is equal toabout an acre and a half. By this it will be seen that sculpture played animportant part in the decoration of an Assyrian palace, but as it wasconfined to the lower part of the walls, some other method had to beinvented for ornamenting those surfaces on which the chisel could not beused. In Chaldæa, where there was so little stone, it was practically thewhole building that had to be thus contrived for. In both countries theproblem was solved in the same fashion--by the extensive use of enamelledbrick and painted stucco, and the elaboration of a rich, elegant, andwithal original system of polychromy. Explorers are unanimous in the opinion that neither burnt nor sun-driedbrick was ever left without something to cover its nakedness. It was alwayshidden and protected by a coat of stucco. [339] At Nineveh, according to M. Place, this stucco was formed by an intimate mixture of burnt chalk withplaster, by which a sort of white gum was made that adhered very tightly tothe clay wall. [340] Its peculiar consistence did not permit of its beingspread with a brush; a trowel or board must have been used. The thicknessof this cement was never more than one or two millimetres. [341] Itscohesive force was so great that in spite of its thinness it acted as anefficient protector. It has often been found in excellent condition, bothupon flat and curved surfaces, upon the walls of courtyards and chambers, on the under sides of vaults, wherever in fact a stone casing did notsupply its place. It would seem that some buildings had no outward ornament beyond thebrilliant whiteness of this stucco, the effect of which may be seen at thepresent day in the whitewashed houses of the East. The glare of such a wallwas happily contrasted with the soft verdure that sometimes grew about it, and the dark blue of the sky against which its summit was relieved. Such acontrast gives importance and accent to the smallest building, as painterswho treat the landscapes of the South thoroughly understand. We have reason to believe, however, that as a rule the white stucco servedas a background and support to other colours. No Chaldæan interiors havecome down to us, while the exteriors are in such bad preservation that wecan hardly form any true judgment of the colours and designs with whichthey were once adorned. But in the case of Assyria we know pretty well howthe decorator understood his business, and it is probable that, like hiscolleagues, the architect and the sculptor, he was content to perpetuatethe traditions of his Chaldæan masters. In certain cases the decorator makes use of wide unbroken tints. This isthe simplest way of using colour. In the palace of Sargon, for instance, wherever the sculptured slabs are absent we find a plinth painted black indistemper. These plinths are from two to nearly four feet high, accordingto the extent of the courts or chambers in which they occur. The object ofsuch a dado is clear; it was to protect the lower part of the wall, if notagainst deliberate violence, at least against dirt. A white stucco in sucha position would soon have been disfigured by spots and various marks whichwould be invisible on a black background. Moreover, the contrast betweenthe plinth and the white wall above it must have had a certain decorativeeffect. [342] This coloured dado is to be found even in places to which it seems quiteunsuited. At Khorsabad, for instance, it runs across the foot of thosesemicircular pilasters we noticed in one of the harem chambers (Fig. 101). These pilasters stand upon a plinth between three and four feet high, sothat any contact with the dirt of the floor need not have been feared. Theexistence of the dado in such a position is to be accounted for bysupposing that the decorator considered it as the regular ornament for thebottom of a wall. It is more difficult to understand why the alcovesbelieved by MM. Place and Thomas to have been bedrooms were in each casepainted with this same band of black. [343] The most curious example of the employment of unbroken tints to which wecan point, is in the case of M. Place's observatory. The stages of thatbuilding were each about twenty feet high, and each was painted a colour ofits own; the first was white, the second black, the third red, the fourthwhite. When the excavations were made, these tints were still easilyvisible. The building seems originally to have had seven stages, and thethree upper ones must certainly have been coloured on the same principle asthose below them. In his restoration, Thomas makes the fifth vermilion, thesixth a silver grey, while he gilds the seventh and last. [344] In thischoice and arrangement of tints there is nothing arbitrary. It is foundedon the description given by Herodotus of Ecbatana, the capital of theMedes. "The Medes . .. Built the city now called Agbatana, the walls ofwhich are of great size and strength, rising in circles one within theother. The plan of the place is, that each of the walls should out-top theone beyond it by the battlements. The nature of the ground, which is agentle hill, favours this arrangement in some degree, but it was mainlyeffected by art. The number of the circles is seven, the royal palace andthe treasuries standing within the last. The circuit of the outer wall isvery nearly the same with that of Athens. Of this wall the battlements arewhite, of the next black, of the third scarlet, of the fourth blue, of thefifth orange; all these are coloured with paint. The two last have theirbattlements coated respectively with silver and gold. "[345] Between the series of colours found upon the ruin in question and the listhere given by Herodotus there is, so far as they go, an identity whichcannot be due to chance. The Medes and Persians invented nothing; theirwhole art was no more than an eastern offshoot from that of Mesopotamia. Itwas in Chaldæa that the number seven first received an exceptional andquasi sacred character. Our week of seven days is a result from the earlyworship of the five great planets and of the sun and moon. There were alsothe seven colours of the rainbow. From such indications as these the earlyarchitects of Assyria must have determined the number of stages to be givento a religious building; they also regulated the order of the colours, eachone of which was consecrated by tradition to one of those great heavenlybodies. We can easily understand how the silver white of the penultimatestage was chosen to symbolize the moon, while the glory of the gold uponthe upper story recalled that of the noonday sun. Thus must we figure the tower with seven stages which Nebuchadnezzarboasted of having restored in more than its early magnificence. Thesearrangements of coloured bands had a double value. Each tint had a symbolicand traditional signification of its own, and the series formed by theseven was, so to speak, a phrase in the national theology, an appeal to theimagination, and a confession of piety. At the same time the chiefdivisions of the monument were strongly marked, and the eye was attractedto their number and significance, while the building as a whole was moreimposing and majestic than if its colour had been a uniform white from baseto summit. The colours must have been frequently renewed. In the interior, where the temperature was not subject to violent changes, where there was neither rain nor scorching sun, the architect made use ofpainting in distemper to reinforce the decoration in his more luxuriouschambers. Unfortunately these frescoes are now represented by nothing but afew fragments. In the course of the excavations numerous instances of theiruse were encountered, but in almost every case exposure to the air wasrapidly destructive of their tints, and even of their substance. Theyoccurred chiefly in the rooms whose walls were lined in their lower partswith sculptured slabs. By dint of infinite painstaking M. Place succeededin copying a few fragments of these paintings. [346] According to theexamples thus preserved for us, human figures were mingled with purelyornamental motives such as plumes, fillets, and rosettes. The colours hereused were black, green, red, and yellow, to which may be added a fifth inthe white of the plaster ground upon which they were laid. Flesh tints wereexpressed by leaving this white uncoloured. [Illustration: FIG. 116. --Ornament painted upon plaster; from Layard. ] [Illustration: FIG. 117. --Ornament painted upon plaster; from Layard. ] Several fragments of these painted decorations have also been preserved bySir Henry Layard. The simplest of them all is a broad yellow band edged oneach side by a line of alternately red and blue chevrons separated fromeach other by white lines. Down the centre of the yellow band there is arow of blue and white rosettes (Fig. 116). Another example in which thesame colours are employed is at once more complex and more elegant (seeFig. 117). Finally, in a third fragment, a slightly simplified version ofthis latter motive serves as a lower border to a frieze upon which twobulls face each other, their white bodies being divided from the yellowground by a thick black line. The battlements at the top are dark blue(Fig. 118). An idea of the tints used in this decoration may be obtainedfrom Fig. 2 of our plate xiv. [Illustration: FIG. 118. --Ornament painted upon plaster; from Layard. ] It was upon the upper parts of walls where they were beyond the reach ofaccidental injury that these painted decorations were placed. M. Place hadreason to think that they were also used on the under-sides of vaults. Inrooms in which a richer and more permanent kind of ornament wasunnecessary, paint alone was used for decoration. In several chamberscleared by George Smith at Nimroud, that explorer found horizontal bands ofcolour, alternately red, green, and yellow, and where the stone casing ofthe lower walls was not sculptured, these stripes were continued over itssurface. [347] The artist to whom the execution of this work was intrusted must havearranged so that his tints were in harmony with those placed by anotherbrush on many details of the sculptured slabs. We shall discuss thequestion of polychromy in Assyrian sculpture at a future opportunity; atpresent we are content with observing that the effect of the reliefs wasstrengthened here and there by the use of colour. The beard, the hair, and the eyebrows were tinted black; such things as thefringes of robes, baldricks, flowers held in the hand, were coloured blueand red. The gaiety thus given brought a room into harmony, and preventedthe cool grey of the alabaster slabs from presenting a disagreeablecontrast with the brilliant tones spread over the roofs and upper walls. We might thus restore the interior of an Assyrian apartment and arrive at awhole, some elements of which would be certainly authentic and others atleast very probable. The efforts hitherto made in this direction leave muchto be desired, and give many an opportunity to the fault-finding critic;and that because their makers have failed to completely master the spiritof Mesopotamian architecture as shown in its remaining fragments. [348] It would be much less easy, it would in fact be foolhardy, to attempt therestoration of a hall from a Babylonian palace. Our information is quiteinsufficient for such a task. We may affirm, however, that where thearchitect had no stone to speak of, the decorations must have had asomewhat different character from those in which that invaluable materialwas freely used. The general tendencies of both countries must have beenthe same, but between Nineveh and Babylon, still more between the capitalof Assyria and the towns of Lower Chaldæa, there were differences of whichnow and then we may succeed in catching a glance. Compelled to trust almostentirely to clay, the artist of Chaldæa must have turned his attention tocolour as a decoration much more exclusively than his Assyrian rival. His preoccupation with this one idea is betrayed very curiously in thefaçade of one of those ruined buildings at Warka which Loftus has studiedand described. [349] We borrow his plan and elevation of the detail to whichwe refer (Fig. 119). [Illustration: FIG. 119. --Plan and elevation of part of a façade at Warka;from Loftus. ] In the first place the reader will recognize those semicircular pilastersor gigantic reeds to which we have already alluded as stronglycharacteristic of Chaldæan architecture, and one of the most certain signsof its origin. The chevrons, the spiral lines and lozenges of the coloureddecoration with which the semi-columns, and the salient buttress by whichthey are divided into two groups, are covered, should be curiously noticed. The ornament varies with each structural division. Loftus, however, waschiefly struck by the process used to build up the design. The whole faceof the wall is composed of terra-cotta cones (Fig. 120) engaged in a mortarcomposed of mud mixed with chopped straw. The bases of these cones areturned outwards and form the surface of the wall. Some preserve the naturalcolour of the terra-cotta, a dark yellow, others have been dipped--beforefixing no doubt--in baths of red and black colouring matter. By the aid ofthese three tints an effect has been obtained that, according to Loftus, isfar from being disagreeable. The process may be compared to that of mosaic, cones of terra-cotta being substituted for little cubes of coloured stoneor glass. [350] [Illustration: FIG. 120. --Cone with coloured base; from Loftus. ] Upon the same site M. Loftus found traces of a still more singulardecoration. A mass of crude brick had its horizontal courses divided fromeach other by earthenware vases laid so that their open mouths were flushwith the face of the wall. Three courses of these vases were placed oneupon another, and the curious ornament thus made was repeated three timesin the piece of wall left standing. The vases were from ten to fifteeninches long externally, but inside they were never more than ten inchesdeep, so that their conical bases were solid. [351] The dark shadows oftheir open mouths afforded a strong contrast with the white plaster whichcovered the brickwork about them. The consequent play of light and shadowunrelieved by colour was pleasing enough. In spite, however, of their thickwalls, these vases could hardly resist successfully the weight of thebricks above and the various disintegrating influences set up by theircontraction in drying. Most of the vases were broken when Loftus saw them, though still in place. Cone mosaics and the insertion of vases among the bricks afforded afterall but a poor opportunity to the decorative architect. Had the builders ofChaldæa possessed no more efficient means than these of obtaining beauty, their structures would hardly have imposed themselves as models upon theirrich and powerful neighbours of Assyria so completely as they did. Someprocess was required which should not restrict the decorator to the curvesand straight lines of the simpler geometrical figures, which should allowhim to make use of motives furnished by the animal and vegetable kingdom, by man and those fanciful creations of man's intellect that resulted fromhis attempts to figure the gods. We can hardly doubt that the Chaldæans, like their northern neighbours, made frequent use of paint in thedecoration of the wide plaster walls that offered such a tempting surfaceto the brush. No fragment of such work has come down to us, but we haveevery reason to believe that the arrangement of motives and the choice oflines were the same as in Assyria. We may look upon the mural paintings inthe Ninevite palaces as copies preserving for us the leadingcharacteristics of their Chaldæan originals. Even in Chaldæa, which had a drier climate than Assyria, paintings indistemper could not have had any very long life on external walls. They hadnot to do with the sky of Upper Egypt where years pass away without thefall of a single shower. Some means of fixing colour so that it should notbe washed away by the first rain was sought, and it was found in theinvention of enamel, in the coating of the bricks with a coloured materialthat when passed with them through the fire would be vitrified and wouldsink to some extent into their substance. A brick thus coated could neverlose its colour; the latter became insoluble, and so intimately combinedwith the block to which it was attached that one could hardly be destroyedwithout the other. Sir H. Layard tells us that many fragments of brickfound in the Kasr were covered with a thick glaze, the colours of which hadin no way suffered with time. Fragments of ornaments and figures could bedistinguished on some of them. The colours most often found were a verybrilliant blue, red, dark yellow, white, and black. [352] We have again to look to the Assyrian ruins for information as to the wayin which these enamelled bricks were composed into pictures. No explorerhas found anything in the remains of a Chaldæan city that can be comparedto the archivolt of enamelled bricks discovered by M. Place over one of thegateways of the city founded by Sargon. [353] We can hardly doubt however that the art of the enameller was discovered inChaldæa and thence transported into Assyria. Everything combines to give usthat assurance, an examination of the ruins in Mesopotamia and of theobjects brought from them as well as the explicit statements of theancients. Every traveller tells that there is not a ruin at Babylon in which hundredsof these enamelled bricks may not be picked up, and they are to be foundelsewhere in Chaldæa. [354] A certain number of fragments are now in theBritish Museum and the Louvre with indications upon them leaving no doubtas to whence they came. [355] As for the blocks of the same kind coming fromNineveh and its neighbourhood they are very numerous in our collections. Itis easy therefore to compare the products of Chaldæan workshops with thoseof Assyrian origin. The comparison is not to the advantage of the latter. The enamel on the Babylonian bricks is very thick and solid; it adheresstrongly to the clay, and even when brought to our comparatively humidclimates it preserves its brilliancy. It is not so with bricks fromKhorsabad and Nimroud, which rapidly tarnish and become dull when withdrawnfrom the earth that protected them for so many centuries. Their firing doesnot seem to have been sufficiently prolonged. [356] Necessity is the mother of invention, the proverb says. If there be anycountry in which clay has been compelled to do all that lay in its power itmust surely be that in which there was no other material for theconstruction and decoration of buildings. The results obtained by theenameller were pretty much the same in Assyria and Chaldæa, and we areinclined to look upon the older of the two nations as the inventor of theprocess, especially as it could hardly have done without it so well as itsyounger rival, and in this opinion we are confirmed by the superior qualityof the Babylonian enamel. It is possible that there may be some truth inthe assertion that most of the glazed bricks that have come down to usbelonged to the restorations of Nebuchadnezzar; but even supposing that tobe so, they show a technical skill so consummate and sure of itself that itmust then have been very far removed from its infancy. The fatherland ofthe enameller is Southern Mesopotamia and especially Babylonia, whereenamelled bricks seem to have been used in extraordinary quantities. The wall of Dour-Saryoukin, the town built by Sargon, has been found intactfor a considerable part of its height. As in the retaining wall of thepalace, coloured brick has there been used with extreme discretion. It isfound only over the arches of the principal doors and, perhaps, in the formof rosettes at the springing of the battlements. The remainder of the greatbreadths of crude brick was coated with white plaster. [357] It was otherwise at Babylon. Ctesias, who lived there for a time, thusdescribes the palace on the right bank of the Euphrates: "In the interiorof the first line of circumvallation Semiramis constructed another on acircular plan, upon which there are all kinds of animals stamped on thebricks while still unburnt; nature is imitated in these figures by theemployment of colours[358]. .. . The third wall, that in the middle, wastwenty stades round . .. On its towers and their curtain-walls every sortof animal might be seen imitated according to all the rules of art, both asto their form and colour. The whole represented the chase of variousanimals, the latter being more than four cubits (high)--in the middleSemiramis on horseback letting fly an arrow against a panther and, on oneside, her husband Ninus at close quarters with a lion, which he strikeswith his lance. "[359] Diodorus attributes all these buildings to his fabulous Semiramis. He wasmistaken. It was the palace built by Nebuchadnezzar that he had before him;his eyes rested upon the works of those sovereigns of the second Chaldeeempire who presided at a real art renaissance--at the re-awakening of acivilization that was never more brilliant than in the years immediatelypreceding its fall. The historian's mistake is of little importance here. We are mainly interested in the fact that he actually saw the walls ofwhich he speaks and saw them covered with pictures, the material for whichwas furnished by enamelled brick. These bricks must have been manufactured in no small quantity to permit ofdecorations in which there were figures nearly six feet high. [360] We mayform some idea of this frieze of animals from one in the palace of Sargonat the foot of the wall on each side of the harem doorway (plate xv. ). [361]As for the hunting incidents, we may imagine what they were like from theAssyrian sculptures (Fig. 5). At Babylon as at Nineveh the palette of the enameller was very restricted. Figures were as a rule yellow and white relieved against a blue ground. Touches of black were used to give accent to certain details, such as thehair and beard, or to define a contour. The surface of the brick was notalways left smooth; in some cases it shows hollow lines in which certaincolours were placed when required to mark distinctive or complementaryfeatures. As a rule motives were modelled in relief upon the ground, sothat they were distinguished by a gentle salience as well as by colour, acontrivance that increased their solidity and effect. [362] This may beobserved on the Babylonian bricks brought to Europe by M. Delaporte, consul-general for France at Bagdad. They are now in the Louvre. On one wesee the three white petals belonging to one of those Marguerite-shapedflowers that artists have used in such profusion in painted and sculptureddecoration (Figs. 22, 25, 96, 116, 117). Another is the fragment of a wing, and must have entered into the composition of one of those winged geniithat are hardly less numerous in Assyrian decoration (Figs. 4, 8, and 29). Upon a third you may recognize the trunk of a palm-tree and on a fourth thesinuous lines that edge a drapery. [363] M. De Longperier calculated fromthe dimensions of this latter fragment that the figure to which it belongedmust have been four cubits high, exactly the height assigned by Ctesias tothe figures in the groups seen by him when he visited the palace of theancient kings. [364] M. Oppert also mentions fragments which had formed part of similarimportant compositions. Yellow scales separated from one another by blacklines, reminded him of the conventional figure under which the Assyriansrepresented hills or mountains; on others he found fragments of trees, onothers blue undulations, significant, no doubt, of water; on others, again, parts of animals--the foot of a horse, the mane and tail of a lion. Athick, black line upon a blue ground may have stood for the lance of ahunter. Upon one fragment a human eye, looking full to the front, might berecognized. [365] We might be tempted to think that in these remains M. Oppert saw all that was left of the pictures which excited the admirationof Ctesias. Inscriptions in big letters obtained by the same process accompanied andexplained the pictures. The characters were white on a blue ground. M. Oppert brought together some fifteen of these monumental texts, but he didnot find a single fragment upon which there was more than one letter. Theinscriptions were meant to be legible at a considerable distance, for theletters were from two to three inches high. In later days Arab architectsfollowed the example thus set and pressed the elegant forms of the cuficalphabet into their service with the happiest skill. [366] For the composition of one of these figures of men or animals a largenumber of units was required, and in order that it might preserve itsfidelity it was necessary not only that the separate pieces should exactlycoincide but that they should be fixed and fitted with extreme nicety. AtBabylon they were attached to the wall with bitumen. On the posteriorsurface of several enamelled bricks in the Louvre a thick coat of thissubstance may be seen; it has preserved an impression of all theroughnesses on the surface of the crude mass to which it was applied. It isimpossible to decide whether this natural mortar was allowed to fill thejoints between one enamelled square and another or not. None of thesebricks have been found in place, and none, so far as we know, unbroken. Thecoat at the back may have rendered the adherence so complete that nofurther precaution was necessary. In Assyria, so far at least as Khorsabadis concerned, they were content with less trouble. The bricks forming theenamelled archivolt of which we have spoken are attached to the wall with amortar in which there is but little adhesive power. [367] It offered noresistance when M. Place stripped the archway in order that he might enrichhis own country with the spoils of Sargon. But for an accident that senthis boats to the bottom of the Tigris not far from Bassorah this beautifulgateway would have been rebuilt in Paris. [368] To fit all these squares into their proper places was a delicate operation, but it was rendered easy by long practice. Signs, or rather numbers, forthe guidance of the workmen, have been noticed upon the uncovered faces ofthe crude brick walls. [369] Still more skill was required for the properdistribution of a figure over the bricks by whose apposition it was to becreated. No retouches were possible, because the bricks were painted beforefiring. The least negligence would be punished by the interruption of thecontours, or by their malformation through a failure of junction between aline upon one brick and its continuation on the next. There was but one wayto prevent such mistakes, and that was by preparing in advance what weshould call a cartoon. On this the proposed design would be traced over anetwork of squares representing the junctions of the bricks. The brickswere then shaped, modelled, and numbered; each was painted according to thecartoon with its due proportion of ground or figure as the case might be, and marked with the same number as that on the corresponding square in thedrawing. [370] The colour was laid separately on each brick; this is provedby the existence on their edges of pigment that has overflowed from theface and been fired at the same time as the rest. Thus were manufactured those enamelled bricks upon which the modern visitorto the ruins of Babylon walks at every step. Broken, ground almost topowder as they are, they suffice to show how far the art of enamelling waspushed in those remote days, and how great an industry it must have been. We can have no doubt that colours fixed in the fire must have formed thechief element in the decoration of the buildings of Nebuchadnezzar, of thatBabylon whose insolent prosperity so impressed the imagination and provokedthe anger of the Jewish prophets. It was to paintings of this kind thatEzekiel alluded when he reproved Jerusalem under the name of Aholiba forits infidelity and its adoption of foreign superstitions: "For when she sawmen portrayed upon the wall, the images of the Chaldæans portrayed withvermilion, girded with girdles upon their loins, exceeding in dyed attireupon their heads, all of them princes to look to, after the manner of theBabylonians of Chaldæa, the land of their nativity. "[371] The "paintings in the temple of Belos, " described by Berosus, were in allprobability carried out in the same way. They decorated the walls of thegreat temple of Bel Merodach at Babylon, where "all kinds of marvellousmonsters with the greatest variety in their forms" were to be seen. [372] We see therefore, that both by sacred and profane writers is the importantpart played by these paintings in the palaces and temples of the capitalaffirmed. And Ctesias, who is not content with allusions, but enters intominute details, tells us how the work was executed, and how its durabilitywas guaranteed. The modern buildings of Persia give us some idea as to theappearance of those of Babylon. No doubt the plan of a mosque differsentirely from that of a temple of Marduk or Nebo, but the principle of thedecoration was the same. If the wand of an enchanter could restore theprincipal buildings of Babylon we should, perhaps, find more than one towhich the following description of the great mosque of Ispahan might beapplied with the change of a word here and there: "Every part of thebuilding without exception is covered with enamelled bricks. Their groundis blue, upon which elegant flowers and sentences taken from the Koran aretraced in white. The cupola is blue, decorated with shields and arabesques. One can hardly imagine the effect produced by such a building on anEuropean accustomed to the dull uniformity of our colourless buildings; heis filled with an admiring surprise that no words can express. "[373] If we should set about making such a comparison, the principal differenceto be noticed would be that arising out of the prohibitions of the Koran. The Persian potter had to content himself with the resources of pureornament, resources upon which he drew with an exquisite skill that forbidsus to regret the absence of men and animals from his work. The colouredsurfaces of the Babylonian buildings must have had more variety than thoseof the great mosque at Ispahan or the green mosque at Broussa. But the samegroups and the same personages were constantly repeated in the sameattitudes and tints, so that their general character must have been purelydecorative. Even when they were combined into something approaching ascene, care was taken to guard, by conventionality of treatment and thefrequent repetition of familiar types and groups, against its attracting toitself the attention that properly belonged to the composition of which itformed a part. The artist was chiefly occupied with the general effect. Hisaim was to give a certain rhythm to a succession of traditional forms whoseorder and arrangement never greatly varied, to fill the wide surfaces ofhis architecture with contrasts and harmonies of colour that should delightthe eye and prevent its fatigue. Were the colours as soft and harmonious as we now see them in thosebuildings of Persia and Asia Minor that will themselves soon be little morethan ruins? It is difficult to answer this question from the very smallfragments we possess of the coloured decorations of the Babylonian templesand palaces, but the conditions have remained the same; the wants to besatisfied and the processes employed a century ago were identical withthose of Babylon and Nineveh; architect and painter were confronted by thesame dazzling sun, and, so far as we can tell, taste has not sensiblychanged over the whole of the vast extent of country that stretches fromthe frontiers of Syria to the eastern boundaries of the plateau of Iran. New peoples, new religions, and new territorial divisions have beenintroduced, but industrial habits have remained; in spite of politicalrevolutions the workman has transmitted the secrets of his trade to hissons and grandsons. Oriental art is now threatened with death at the handsof Western competition. Thanks to its machines Europe floods the mostdistant markets with productions cheaper than those turned out by thenative workman, and the native workman, discouraged and doubtful ofhimself, turns to the clumsy imitation of the West, and loses his hold ofthe art he understood so well. Traditions have become greatly weakenedduring the last half century, but in the few places where they stillpreserve their old vitality they may surely be taken as representative ofthe arts and industries of many centuries ago, and as the linealdescendants of those early products of civilization on which we areattempting to cast new light. If, as everything leads us to believe, thecolours and patterns worked by the women of Khorassan and Kurdistan ontheir rugs and carpets are identical with those on the hangings in thepalaces of Sargon, of Nebuchadnezzar, and of Darius, why should we notallow that the tints that now delight us on the mosques of Teheran andIspahan, of Nicæa and Broussa, are identical with those employed by theChaldæan potter? There is no doubt that both had a strong predilection for blue--for themarvellous colour that dyed the most beautiful flower of their fields, thatglowed on their distant mountains, in their lakes, in the sea, and in theprofound azure of an almost cloudless sky. Nature seems to have chosen bluefor the background of her changing pictures, and like the artists of modernPersia those of antique Mesopotamia understood the value of the hint thusgiven. In the fragments of Babylonian tiles brought home by travellers blueis the dominant colour; and blue furnishes the background for those twocompositions in enamelled brick that have been found _in situ_. The blue ofBabylon seems however to have had more body and to have been darker inshade than that of the Khorsabad tiles. We have already referred to this inferiority in the Assyrian enamel. It maybe explained by the fact that the Assyrian architect looked to sculpturefor his most sumptuous effects; he used polychromatic decoration only forsubordinate parts of his work, and he would therefore be contented withless careful execution than that required by his Babylonian rival. Theglazed tiles of Assyria were not, as in Chaldæa, quasi bas-reliefs. Theirtints were put on flat; the only exception to this being in the case ofthose rosettes that were made in such extraordinary numbers for use on theupper parts of walls and round doorways; in these the small central boss ismodelled in low relief (see Figs. 121 and 122). [Illustration: FIGS. 121, 122. --Rosettes in glazed pottery. Louvre. ] These glazed bricks were chiefly used by the Assyrian architect upondoorways and in their immediate neighbourhood. [374] M. Place found thedecoration of one of the city gates at Khorsabad almost intact. [375] Theenamel is laid upon one edge of the bricks, which are on the average threeinches and a half thick. Figures are relieved in yellow, and rosettes inwhite against the blue ground. A band of green marks the lower edge of thetiara. [376] The same motives and the same figures were repeated for thewhole length of the band. The figures are winged genii in differentpostures of worship and sacrifice. They bear in their hands those metalseals and pine cones that we so often encounter in the bas-reliefs. Distributed about the entrance these genii seem to be the protectors of thecity, they are beneficent images, their gesture is a prayer, a promise, abenediction. On each side of the arch, at its springing, there is one ofgreater stature than his companions (Fig. 123). His face is turned towardsthe vaulted passage. Upon the curve of the archivolt smaller figures faceone another in couples; each couple is divided from its neighbours byrosettes (Fig. 124). [Illustration: FIG. 123. --Detail of enamelled archivolt. Khorsabad. FromPlace. ] The other composition is to be found on a plinth in the doorway of theharem at Khorsabad. This plinth was about twenty-three feet long, andrather more than three feet high. Its ornament was repeated on both sidesof the doorway. [377] It consisted of a lion, an eagle, a bull, and a plough(Plate XV). Upon the returning angles the king appears, standing, on theone side with his head bare, on the other covered with a tiara. Thebackground is blue, as in the city gates; green was only used for theleaves of the tree, in which some have recognized a fig-tree. [Illustration: FIG. 124. --Detail from enamelled archivolt. Khorsabad. FromPlace. ] In these two examples the decoration is of an extreme simplicity; thefigures are not engaged in any common action; there is, in fact, nopicture. The artist sometimes appears to have been more ambitious. ThusLayard found at Nimroud the remains of a decoration in which the painterhad apparently attempted to rival the sculptor: he had represented a battlescene analogous to those we find in such plenty in the bas-reliefs. [378] Asimilar motive may be found in a better preserved fragment belonging to thesame structure (Plate XIV, Fig. 1). [379] A single brick bears fourpersonages, a god, whose arms only are left, the king, his patera in hand, offering a libation, an eunuch with bow and quiver, and finally an officerwith a lance. George Smith also found a fragment of the same kind atNimroud (see Fig. 125). It shows the figure of a soldier, from the kneesupwards, armed with bow and lance, and standing by the wheel of a chariot. Above his head are the remains of an inscription which must have beencontinued on the next brick. The word _warriors_ may still bedeciphered. [380] This figure may have formed part of some attempt on thepart of the decorator to narrate in colour some of the exploits of the kingfor whom the palace was built. [Illustration: FIG. 125. --Enamelled brick in the British Museum. ] There is a difference between such fragments as this and the glazed tilesof the Khorsabad gates. In the latter the enamelled edges of several brickswere required to make a single figure. In the bricks from Nimroud on theother hand, whole figures are painted on their surface, and in fact asingle brick had several figures upon it which were, therefore, on a muchsmaller scale. A decoration in which figures were some two and three feethigh, was well suited for use in lofty situations where those restricted tothe surface of a single brick would have been hardly visible. The lattermust, then, have been fixed on the lower parts of the wall, but as none ofthem have yet been found in place we cannot say positively that it was so. Such representations were, moreover, quite exceptional. Most of the piecesof glazed brick that have been found in the ruins show nothing but theremains of figures and motives ornamental rather than historical in theirgeneral character. [381] Besides the rosettes of which we have had occasionto speak so often we encounter at every step a spiral ornament the designof which remains without much modification, while a certain variety isgiven to its general effect by changing the arrangement of its colours. Inthe example reproduced in Fig. 126 large black disks, like eyes, areembraced by a double spiral in which blue and yellow alternate. [382] [Illustration: FIG. 126. --Ornament upon enamelled brick. British Museum. ] There is one curious class of glazed tiles in which this motive continuallyreappears. These tiles are thinner than the ordinary brick. Their shape issometimes square but with their sides slightly concave (Fig. 127), sometimes circular, in the form of a quoit (Fig. 128). In each case similardesigns are employed, flowers, palmettes, &c. These are carried out inblack upon a white ground and arranged symmetrically about a round hole inthe middle of the tile. These things must have been manufactured for somespecial purpose, and the name of Assurnazirpal, that may be read upon ourfirst fragment (Fig. 127), shows that they belonged to some great work ofdecoration whose main object was to glorify the name of that sovereign. Ithas been guessed that they formed centres for a coffered ceiling, and thereis nothing to negative the conjecture. The opening in the centre may havebeen filled with a boss of bronze or silver gilt. As we have already shown, appliqué work of this kind played a great part in Assyrian decoration;doors were covered with it and there are many signs that both in Chaldæaand Assyria many other surfaces were protected in the same fashion. [Illustration: FIG. 127. --Fragment of a glazed brick. Width 14 inches. British Museum. ] [Illustration: FIG. 128. --Fragment of a glazed brick. Diameter 17 inches. British Museum. ] After the careful examination of its ruins Taylor came to the conclusionthat the upper story of a staged tower at Abou-Sharein had gilt walls. Hefound a great number of small and very thin gold plates upon the plateauthat formed the summit of the building, and with them the gilded nails withwhich they had been fixed. [383] In his life of _Apollonius of Tyana_, Philostratus gives a description of Babylon that appears taken fromauthentic sources, and he notices this employment of metal. "The palaces ofthe King of Babylon are covered with bronze which makes them glitter at adistance; the chambers of the women, the chambers of the men and theporticoes are decorated with silver, with beaten and even with massive goldinstead of pictures. "[384] Herodotus speaks of the silvered and gildedbattlements of Ecbatana[385] and at Khorsabad cedar masts incased in gildedbronze were found, [386] while traces of gold have been found on some crudebricks at Nimroud. [387] Seeing that metal was thus used to cover widesurfaces, and that, as we shall have occasion to show, the forms ofsculpture, of furniture, and of the arts allied to them in Mesopotamia, prove that the inhabitants of that region were singularly skilled in themanipulation of metal, whether with the chisel or the hammer, the aboveconjecture may very well be true; the sheen of the polished surface wouldbe in excellent harmony with the enamelled faïence about it. It has been suggested that some of the carved ivories may have been usedto ornament the coffers. This suggestion in itself seems specious enough, but I failed to discover a single ivory in the rich collection of theBritish Museum whose shape would have fitted the openings in thetiles. [388] It is certain, however, that ivory was used in theornamentation of buildings. "I incrusted, " says Nebuchadnezzar, "thedoor-posts, the lintel, and threshold of the place of repose with ivory. "The small rectangular plaques with which several cases and many drawers arefilled in the British Museum may very well have been used for thedecoration of doors, and the panels of ceilings and wainscots. They were sonumerous, especially in the palace of Assurnazirpal at Nimroud, that wecannot believe them all to have come off small and movable pieces offurniture. We are confirmed in this idea by the fact that none of theseivories are unique or isolated works of art. In spite of the care and tasteexpended on their execution they were in no sense gems treasured for theirrarity and value; they were the products of an active manufactorydelivering its types in series, we might almost say in dozens. The moreelegant and finished among them are represented three, four, and five timesover in the select case in the British Museum. We may safely say that theexamples preserved of any one model are by no means all that were made; infact, in the drawers in which the smaller fragments are preserved, wenoticed the remains of more than one piece which had once been similar tothe more perfect specimens exhibited to the public. Thus there are in the Museum four replicas of the little work shown in ourFig. 129. [389] The head of a woman, full face, and with an Egyptianhead-dress, is enframed in a narrow window and looks over a balcony formedof columns with the curious capitals already noticed on page 211. Besidethese four more or less complete examples, the Museum possesses severaldetached heads (Fig. 130) which once, no doubt, belonged to similarcompositions. [Illustration: FIG. 129. --Ivory tablet in the British Museum. Drawn bySaint-Elme Gautier. ] The beauty of the ivory surface was often enhanced by the insertion ofcoloured enamels and lapis-lazuli in the hollows of the tablet. Traces ofthis inlay may be seen on many of the Museum ivories, especially on thoserecently brought from Van, in Armenia. The tablets also show traces ofgilding. [Illustration: FIG. 130. --Fragment of an ivory tablet. ] All this proves that the Mesopotamian decorator had no contemptibleresources for the ornamentation of his panelled walls and cofferedceilings. These chiselled, enamelled, and gilded ivories must have been setin frames of cedar or cypress. The Assyrian texts bear witness in more thanone place to the use of those fine materials, and the Hebrew writers makefrequent allusion to the luxurious carpentry imitated by their own princesin the temple at Jerusalem. [390] In one of his invectives against NinevehZephaniah cries: "Desolation shall be in the thresholds: for he shalluncover the cedar work. "[391] The more we enter into detail the richer and more varied does thedecoration of these buildings appear. In our day the great ruins are sadand monotonous enough. The rain of many centuries has washed away theirpaint; their ornaments of metal and faïence, of ivory and cedar, havefallen from the walls; the hand of man has combined with the slow action oftime to reduce them to their elements, and nothing of their original beautyremains but here and there a fragment or a hint of colour. And yet when webring these scanty vestiges together we find that enough is left to givethe taste and invention of the Assyrian ornamentist a very high place inour respect. That artist was richly endowed with the power of inventinghappy combinations of lines, and of varying his motives without losingsight for an instant of his original theme. We may show this very clearly by a more careful study of two motivesalready encountered, the rosette, and the running ornament which is knownin its countless modifications as the "knop and flower pattern. " These twomotives are united in those great thresholds which have been found now andthen in such marvellous preservation. They also occur in certainbas-reliefs representing architectural decorations, so that we are inpossession of all the documents required for the formation of a true ideaof their varied beauties. In the Assyrian Basement Room of the BritishMuseum there is a fine slab of gypsum of which we reproduce one corner inour Fig. 131. [392] Besides the daisy shaped rosette which is soconspicuous, there is one of more elaborate design which we reproduce on alarger scale and from another example in our Fig. 132. It is inclosed in asquare frame adorned with chevrons. This frame with the rosette it inclosesmay be taken as giving some idea of the ceiling panels or coffers. [Illustration: FIG. 131. --Threshold from Kouyundjik. From Layard. ] In this rosette it should be noticed that beyond the double festoon aboutthe central star appears the same alternation of bud and flower as in thestraight border. That flower has been recognized as the Egyptian lotus, butLayard believes its type to have been furnished, perhaps, by a scarlettulip which is very common towards the beginning of spring inMesopotamia. [393] We ourselves believe rather in the imitation of a motivefrom the stuffs, the jewels, the furniture, and the pottery thatMesopotamia drew from Egypt at a very early date through the intermediaryof the Phoenicians. The Phoenicians themselves appropriated the same motiveand introduced it with their own manufactures not only into Mesopotamia butinto every country washed by the Mediterranean. Our conjecture is to someextent confirmed by an observation of Sir H. Layard's. This lotus flower isonly to be found, he says, in the most recent of Assyrian monuments, inthose, namely, that date from the eighth and seventh centuries B. C. , centuries during which the Assyrian kings more than once invaded Phoeniciaand occupied Egypt. [394] In the more ancient bas-reliefs flowers with avery different aspect--copied in all probability directly from nature--arealone to be found. Of these some idea may be formed from the adjoining cut. It reproduces a bouquet held in the hand of a winged genius in the palaceof Assurnazirpal (Fig. 133). [Illustration: FIG. 132. --Rosette. ] The lotus flower is to be found moreover in monuments much older than thoseof the Sargonids, but that does not in any way disprove the hypothesis ofa direct plagiarism. The commercial relations between the valleys of theNile and the Euphrates date from a much more remote epoch, and about thecommencement of the eighteenth dynasty the Egyptians seem to have occupiedin force the basin of the Khabour, the principal affluent of the Euphrates. Layard found many traces of their passage over and sojourn in thatdistrict, among them a series of scarabs, many of which bore thesuperscription of Thothmes III. [395] So that the points of contact werenumerous enough, and the mutual intercourse sufficiently intimate andprolonged, to account for the assimilation by Mesopotamian artists of amotive taken from the flora of Egypt and to be seen on almost every objectimported from the Nile valley. This imitation appears all the more probableas in the paintings of Theban tombs dating from a much more remote periodthan the oldest Ninevite remains, the pattern with its alternate bud andflower is complete. Many examples may be found in the plates of Prissed'Avennes' great work;[396] one is reproduced in our Fig. 134. [Illustration: FIG. 133. --Bouquet of flowers and buds; from Layard. ] [Illustration: FIG. 134. --Painted border; from Thebes, after Prisse. ] The Assyrians borrowed their motive from Egypt, but they gave it more thanEgyptian perfection. They gave it the definitive shapes that even Greecedid not disdain to copy. In the Egyptian frieze the cones and flowers aredisjointed; their isolation is unsatisfactory both to the eye and thereason. In the Assyrian pattern they are attached to a continuousundulating stem whose sinuous lines add greatly to the elegance of thecomposition. The distinctive characters of the bud and flower are also verywell marked by the Assyrian artists. The closed petals of the one the openones of the other and the divisions of the calix are indicated in afashion that happily combines truth with convention. In our Fig. 135 wereproduce, on a larger scale, a part of the slab already illustrated atpage 240, so that the merits of its workmanship may be better appreciated. [Illustration: FIG. 135. --Fragment of a threshold; from Khorsabad. Louvre. Drawn by Bourgoin. ] [Illustration: FIG. 136. --Door ornament; from Kouyundjik. After Rawlinson. ] The painter also made use of this motive. In a bas-relief from the palaceof Assurbanipal we find the round-headed doorway illustrated in Fig. 136. Its rich decoration must have been carried out in glazed bricks, similar tothose discovered by M. Place on one of the gates of Khorsabad. Here, however, the figures of supernatural beings are replaced by rosettes and bytwo lines of the knop and flower ornament. [Illustration: FIG. 137. --Palmette; from Layard. ] [Illustration: FIG. 138. --Goats and palmette; from Layard. ] Vegetable forms brought luck to the Assyrian decorator. Even after taking amotive from a foreign style of ornament he understood, so to speak, how tonaturalize a plant and to make its forms expressive of his ownindividuality. Our only difficulty is to make a choice among the numerousillustrations of his inventive fertility; we shall confine ourselves toreproducing the designs embroidered upon the royal robes of Assurnazirpal. We need hardly say that these robes do not now exist, but the Ninevitesculptor copied them in soft alabaster with an infinite patience that doeshim honour. He has preserved for us every detail with the exception ofcolour. The lotus is not to be found in this embroidery; its place is takenby the palmette or tuft of leaves (Fig. 137), through which appear stemsbending with the weight of the buds they bear. Animals, real and imaginary, are skilfully mingled with the fan-shaped palmettes; in one place we findtwo goats (Fig. 138), in another two winged bulls (Fig. 139). Bulls andgoats are both alike on their knees before the palmette, which seems tosuggest that the latter is an abridged representation of that sacred treewhich we have already encountered and will encounter again in thebas-reliefs, where it is surrounded by scenes of adoration and sacrifice. This motive has the double advantage of awakening religious feeling in thespectators, and of provoking a momentary elegance of line and movement inthe two pairs of animals. On the other hand we can hardly explain themotive represented in our Figs. 140 and 141--a motive already met with inthe figured architecture of the bas-reliefs and in the glazed tiles--byanything but an artistic caprice. In some cases the rosette and thepalmette are introduced in a single picture (142). [Illustration: FIG. 139. --Winged bulls and palmette; from Layard. ] We have ventured to supplement the scanty remains of architecturaldecoration by these illustrations from another art, because all Babylonianornament, whether for carpets, hangings, or draperies, for works in beatenmetal, in paint or enamelled faïence, is governed by the same spirit andmarked by the same taste. In every form impressed upon matter by theancient inhabitants of Mesopotamia the same symbols, the same types, andthe same motives are repeated to infinity. The examples we have broughttogether suffice to show the principal characteristics of that decoration. It had doubtless one great defect, it was too easily separated from thebuilding to which it belonged; it was fragile, apt to fall, and thereforeunlikely to have any very long duration. But the architect was not to blamefor that. The defect in question was consequent on the poverty of thematerial with which he had to work. Given the conditions under which helaboured, and we cannot deny that he showed great skill in making the bestof them. He understood how to contrast wide unbroken surfaces with certainimportant parts of his _ensemble_, such as cornices, plinths, andespecially doorways. Upon these he concentrated the efforts of the painterand sculptor; upon these he lavished all the hues of the Assyrian palette, and embellished them with the carved figures of men and gods, of kings andgenii, of all the countless multitudes who had fought and died for Assyriaand its divine protector, the unconquered and unconquerable Assur. [Illustration: FIG. 140. --Stag upon a palmette; from Layard. ] [Illustration: FIG. 141. --Winged bull upon a rosette; from Layard. ] If, not content with this general view of Assyrian decoration, we enterinto it in detail, we shall find its economy most judiciously arranged andunderstood. When the sculptor set himself to carve the slabs that enframe adoor or those that protect the lower parts of a wall, he sought to renderwhat he saw or imagined as precisely and definitely as possible. He went tonature for inspiration even when he carved imaginary beings, and copiedher, in fragments perhaps, but with a loyal and vigorous sincerity. Everywhere, except in certain pictures with a strictly limited function, heobeyed an imagination over which a sure judgment kept unsleeping watch. Hispolychromatic decorations fulfilled their purpose of amusing and delightingthe eye without ever attempting to deceive it. Such is and must always bethe true principle of ornament, and the decorators of the great buildingsof Babylon and Nineveh seem to have thoroughly understood that it was so;their rich and fertile fancy is governed, in every instance to which we canpoint, with unfailing tact, and to them must be given the credit of havinginvented not a few of the motives that may yet be traced in the art of theMedes and Persians, in that of the Syrians, the Phoenicians, the peoples ofAsia Minor, and above all in that of the Greeks--those unrivalled masterswho gave immortality to every artistic combination that they chose toadopt. [Illustration: FIG. 142. --Stag, palmette, and rosette; from Layard. ] NOTES: [326] The cuneiform texts mention the "two bulls at the door of the templeE-schakil, " the famous staged tower of Babylon. Fr. LENORMANT, _LesOrigines de l'Histoire_, vol. I. P. 114 (2nd edition, 1880). [327] RICH, _Narrative of a Journey to the Site of Babylon in 1811, and aMemoir on the Ruins_, p. 64. LAYARD, _Discoveries_, p. 507. According toRich, this lion was of grey granite; according to Layard, of black basalt. [328] LOFTUS says nothing of this lion in those _Travels and Researches_which we have so often quoted. It was, perhaps, on a later occasion that hefound it. We came upon it in a collection of original sketches andmanuscript notes (_Drawings in Babylonia by W. K. Loftus and H. Churchill_)in the custody of the keeper of Oriental antiquities at the British Museum. We have to express our acknowledgments to Dr. Birch for permission to makeuse of this valuable collection. [329] PERROT, GUILLAUME ET DELBET, _Exploration archéologique de laGalatie_, vol. Ii. Pl. 32. [330] _Exploration archéologique_, vol. Ii. Pl. 11. [331] LAYARD, _Discoveries_, p. 508. [332] PLACE, _Ninive_, vol. Ii. Pp. 68-70. [333] This character of a tutelary divinity that we attribute to the wingedbull is indicated in the clearest manner in the cuneiform texts: "In thispalace, " says Esarhaddon, "the _sedi_ and _lamassi_ (the Assyrian names forthese colossi) are propitious, are the guardians of my royal promenade andthe rejoicers of my heart, may they ever watch over the palace and neverquit its walls. " And again: "I caused doors to be made in cypress, whichhas a good smell, and I had them adorned with gold and silver and fixed inthe doorways. Right and left of those doorways I caused _sedi_ and_lamassi_ of stone to be set up, they are placed there to repulse thewicked. " (ST. GUYARD, _Bulletin de la Religion assyrienne_, in the _Revuede l'Histoire des Religions_, vol. I. P. 43, note. ) [334] PLACE, _Ninive_, vol. Iii, plate 21. [335] Those in the Louvre are fourteen feet high; the tallest pair in theBritish Museum are about the same. [336] _Art in Ancient Egypt_, vol. Ii. Pt. Ii. P. 92, fig. 70. [337] On the subject of these winged bulls see Fr. LENORMANT, _Les Originesde l'Histoire_, vol. I. Chap. 3. [338] The bas-relief here reproduced comes from the palace of Assurbanipalat Kouyundjik. In the fragment now in the Louvre there are three stories, but the upper story, being an exact repetition of that immediately belowit, has been omitted in our engraving. [339] LOFTUS, _Travels and Researches_, p. 176. LAYARD, _Discoveries_, pp. 529, 651. BOTTA, _Monument de Ninive_, vol. V. P. 44. In the book of Danielthe hand that traces the warning words upon the walls of Belshazzar'spalace traces them "_upon the plaster of the wall_" (DANIEL v. 5). [340] PLACE, _Ninive_, vol. I. P. 77. [341] At Warka, however, LOFTUS found in the building he calls _Wuswas_ alayer of plaster which was from two to four inches thick. (_Travels_, p. 176. ) [342] PLACE, _Ninive_, vol. Ii. Pp. 77, 78. [343] PLACE, _Ninive_, vol. Iii. Plate 25. [344] _Ibid. _ vol. I. Pp. 141-146; vol. Ii. Pp. 79, 80; vol. Iii. Plates 36and 37. [345] HERODOTUS (Rawlinson's translation), i. 98. [346] PLACE, _Ninive_, vol. Iii. Plate 32. [347] G. SMITH, _Assyrian Discoveries_, pp. 77, 78. LAYARD (_Nineveh_, vol. Ii. P. 130) also says that some rooms had no other decoration. [348] In writing thus we allude chiefly to the restorations given by Mr. James Fergusson in _The Palaces of Nineveh and Persepolis Restored_ (1 vol. 8vo. Murray), a work that was launched upon the world at far too early adate, namely, in 1851. Sir H. , then Mr. , LAYARD, had not yet published hissecond narrative (_Discoveries in the Ruins of Nineveh and Babylon_) northe second series of _Monuments of Nineveh_, neither had the great work ofMM. Place and Thomas on the palace of Sargon (a work to which we owe somuch new and authentic information) appeared. In Mr. Fergusson'srestorations the column is freely used and the vault excluded, so that inmany respects his work seems to us to be purely fanciful, and yet it isimplicitly accepted by English writers to this day. Professor RAWLINSON, while criticising Mr. Fergusson in his text (_The Five Great Monarchies_, vol. I. P. 303, note 6), reproduces his restoration of the great court atKhorsabad, in which a colonnade is introduced upon the principle of thehypostyle halls of Persepolis. Professor Rawlinson would, perhaps, havebeen better advised had he refrained from thus popularizing a vision which, as he himself very justly declares, is quite alien to the genius ofAssyrian architecture. [349] LOFTUS, _Travels and Researches_, pp. 187-189. [350] LOFTUS thinks that the process was very common, at least in LowerChaldæa. He found cones imbedded in mortar at several other points in theWarka ruins, but the example we have reproduced is the only one in whichwell-marked designs could still be clearly traced. TAYLOR saw cones of thesame kind at Abou-Sharein. They had no inscriptions, and their bases wereblack (_Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society_, vol. Xv. P. 411). Theyformed in all probability parts of a decoration similar to that describedby Loftus. In Egypt we find cones of terra-cotta crowning the façades ofcertain Theban tombs (RHIND, _Thebes, its Tombs and their Tenants_, p. 136). Decoratively they seem allied to the cones of Warka, but thereligious formulæ they bear connects them rather with the cones found by M. De Sarzec at Tello, which bear commemorative inscriptions. To these weshall return at a later page. [351] LOFTUS, _Travels and Researches_, pp. 190, 191 [352] LAYARD, _Discoveries_, p. 607. Rich also bears witness to theabundance of these remains in his _Journey to the Ruins of Babylon_. Seealso OPPERT, _Expédition scientifique_, vol. I. P. 143. [353] A French traveller of the last century, DE BEAUCHAMP (he was consulat Bagdad), heard an Arab workman and contractor describe a room he hadfound in the Kasr, the walls of which were lined with enamelled bricks. Upon one wall, he said, there was a cow with the sun and moon above it. Hisstory must, at least, have been founded on truth. No motive occurs oftenerin the Chaldæan monuments than a bull and the twin stars of the day andnight. (See RENNELL, _History of Herodotus_, p. 367. ) [354] LOFTUS collected some fragments of these enamelled bricks at Warka, "similar to those found, " he says, "at Babylon in the ruins of the Kasr"(_Travels and Researches_, p. 185). TAYLOR also tells us that he foundnumerous fragments of brick enamelled blue at Mugheir (_Journal of theRoyal Asiatic Society_, vol. Xv. P. 262). [355] The most interesting of these fragments, those that allow the subjectof which they formed a part to be still divined, have been published by M. DE LONGPERIER, _Musée Napoléon III. _ plate iv. [356] I examined at the British Museum the originals of the glazed bricksreproduced by Layard in his first series of _Monuments_, some of which wehave copied in our plates xiii. And xiv. The outlines of the ornament arenow hardly more than distinguishable, while the colour is no more than apale reflection. [357] LOFTUS believes that the external faces of Assyrian walls were not, as a rule, cased in enamelled bricks. He disengaged three sides of thenorthern palace at Kouyundjik without finding any traces of polychromaticdecoration. (_Travels and Researches_, p. 397. Note. ) [358] Kath' hon en ômais eti tais plinthois dietetupôto thêria, pantodapatê tôn chrômatôn philotechnia tên alêtheian apomimoumena (DIODORUS, ii. 8, 4. ) Diodorus expressly declares that he borrows this description fromCtesias (hôs Ktêsias phêsin), _ibid. _ 5. [359] Enêsan de en tois purgois kai teichesi zôa pantodapa philotechnôstois te chrômasi kai tois tôn tupôn apomimasi kataskeuasmena. (DIODORUS, ii. 8, 6. ) [360] Pantoiôn thêriôn . .. Hôn êsan ta megethê pleion ê pêchôn tettarôn. Four cubits was equal to about five feet eight inches. At Khorsabad thetallest of the genii on the coloured tiles at the door are only 32 incheshigh; others are not more than two feet. [361] PLACE, _Ninive_, vol. Iii. Plates 24 and 31. [362] "The painting, " says M. OPPERT, "was applied to a kind of roughlyblocked-out relief. " (_Expédition scientifique_, vol. I. P. 144. ) [363] De Longperier, _Musée Napoléon III. _, plate iv. [364] This palace was then inhabited for a part of the year by theAchemenid princes, of whom Ctesias was both the guest and physician. [365] OPPERT, _Expédition scientifique_, vol. I. Pp. 143, 144. [366] Two of these enamelled letters are in the Louvre. See also upon thissubject, PLACE, _Ninive_, vol. Ii. P. 86. I have also seen some in thecollection of M. Piot. [367] PLACE, _Ninive_, vol. I. P. 236. [368] Only two rafts arrived at Bassorah; eight left Mossoul, so that onlyabout a fourth of the antiquities collected reached their destination insafety. The cases with the objects despatched by the Babylonian mission, that is by MM. Fresnel, Oppert, and Thomas, were included in the samedisaster. But for this the Assyrian collections of the Louvre would be lessinferior than they are to those of the British Museum. [369] PLACE, _Ninive_, vol. I. P. 253. [370] PLACE, _Ninive_, vol. Ii. P. 253. These marks were recognized uponmany fragments found at Babylon by MM. Oppert and Thomas (OPPERT, _Expédition scientifique_, vol. I. Pp. 143, 144). LOFTUS has transcribedand published a certain number of marks of the same kind which he foundupon glazed bricks from the palace at Suza. These are sometimes cut in thebrick with a point, sometimes painted with enamel like that on the face. (_Travels and Researches_, p. 398. ) [371] EZEKIEL xxiii. 14, 15. [372] BEROSUS, fragment i. § 4, in vol. Ii. Of the _Fragmenta HistoricorumGræcorum_ of Ch. MÜLLER. [373] TEXIER, _Armenie et Perse_, vol. Ii. P. 134. In the same work thedetails of the magnificent decoration upon the mosque of the Sunnites atTauris (which afforded a model for that at Ispahan) will be foundreproduced in their original colours. It is strange that this art ofenamelled faïence, after being preserved so long, should so recently havebecome extinct in the East. "At the commencement of the last century, " saysM. TEXIER (vol. Ii. P. 138), "the art of enamelling bricks was no lessprosperous in Persia than in the time of Shah-Abbas, the builder of thegreat mosque at Ispahan (1587-1629); but now the art is completely extinct, and in spite of my desire to visit a factory where I might see the work inprogress, there was not one to be found from one end of Ispahan to theother. " According to the information I gathered in Asia Minor, it was alsotowards the beginning of the present century that the workshops of Nicæaand Nicomedia, in which the fine enamelled tiles on the mosques at Broussawere made, were finally closed. In these _fabriques_ the plaques which havebeen found in such abundance for some twenty years past in Rhodes and otherislands of the Archipelago were also manufactured. [The manufacture ofthese glazed tiles is by no means extinct in India, however. At manycentres in Sindh and the Punjab, glazed tiles almost exactly similar tothose on the mosque at Ispahan, so far as colours and ornamental motivesare concerned, are made in great numbers and used for the same purposes asin Persia and ancient Mesopotamia. There is a tradition in India that theart was brought from China, through Persia, by the soldiers of Gingiz-Khan, but a study of the tiles themselves is enough to show that they are asurvival from the art manufactures of Babylon and Nineveh. For detailedinformation on the history and processes used in the manufacture of thesetiles, see Sir George BIRDWOOD'S _Industrial Arts of India_, part ii. Pp. 304-310, 321, and 330; also Mr. DRURY FORTNUM'S report on the Sindh potteryin the International Exhibition of 1871. --ED. ] [374] Sir H. LAYARD noticed this at the very beginning of his explorations:"Between the bulls and the lions forming the entrances in different partsof the palace were invariably found a large collection of baked bricks, elaborately painted with figures of animals and flowers, and with cuneiformcharacters" (_Nineveh_, vol. Ii. P. 13). [375] PLACE, _Ninive_, vol. I. P. 234; vol. Iii. Plates 9 and 17. [376] _Ibid. _ vol. Iii. Plate 14. We should have reproduced thiscomposition in colour had the size of our page allowed us to do so on aproper scale. M. Place was unable to give it all even in a double-pageplate of his huge folio. [377] PLACE, _Ninive_, vol. Iii. Plates 23-31. [378] Layard, _Monuments_, 2nd series, plates 53, 54. Elsewhere(_Discoveries_, pp. 166-168) Layard has given a catalogue and summarydescription of all these fragments, of which only a part were reproduced inthe plates of his great collection. [379] _Ibid. _ plate 55. [380] GEO. SMITH, _Assyrian Discoveries_, p. 79. [381] Botta gives examples of some of these bricks (_Monument de Ninive_, plates 155, 156). Among the motives there reproduced there is one that wehave already seen in the bas-reliefs (fig. 67). It is a goat standing inthe collected attitude he would take on a point of rock. The head of theibex is also a not uncommon motive (LAYARD, _Monuments_, first series, plate 87, fig. 2; see also BOTTA). [382] Fig. 1 of our Plate XIV. Reproduces the same design, but with a moresimple colouration. [383] J. E. TAYLOR, _Notes on Abou-Sharein_, p. 407 (in the _Journal of theRoyal Asiatic Society_, vol. Xv. ). [384] PHILOSTRATUS, _Life of Apollonius_, i. 25. Cf. DIONYSIUS PERIEGETES, who says of Semiramis (v. 1007, 1008): autar ep' akropolêi megan domon eisato Bêlôi chrusôi t' êd' elephanti kai agurôi askêsasa. [385] HERODOTUS, i. 98. [386] See above, p. 202. [387] LAYARD, _Nineveh_, vol. Ii. P. 264, note 1. Frequent allusions tothis use of metal are to be found in the wedges. In M. LENORMANT'Stranslation of the London inscription (_Histoire ancienne_, vol. Ii. P. 233, 3rd edition) in which Nebuchadnezzar enumerates the great works he haddone at Borsippa, I find the following words: "I have covered the roof ofNebo's place of repose with gold. The beams of the door before the oracleshave been overlaid with silver . .. The pivot of the door into the woman'schamber I have covered with silver. " [388] Among the fragments of tiles brought from Nimroud by Mr. GeorgeSmith, and now in the British Museum, there are two like those reproducedabove, to which bosses or knobs of the same material--glazedearthenware--are attached. The necks of these bosses are pierced with holesapparently to receive the chain of a hanging lamp, and are surrounded attheir base with inscriptions of Assurnazirpal stating that they formed partof the decoration of a temple at Calah. --ED. [389] The size of our engraving is slightly above that of the objectitself. [390] 1 _Kings_ vi. 15; vii. 3. [391] ZEPHANIAH ii. 14. [392] The design consists entirely in the symmetrical repetition of thedetails here given. [In this engraving the actual design of the pavementhas been somewhat simplified. Between the knop and flower that forms theouter border and the rosettes there is a band of ornament consisting of thesymmetrical repetition of the palmette motive with rudimentary volutes, much as it occurs round the outside of the tree of life figured on page213. In another detail our cut differs slightly from the original. In thelatter there is no corner piece; the border runs entirely across the end, and the side borders are stopped against it. --ED. ] [393] LAYARD, _Discoveries_, p. 184, note. [394] LAYARD, _Nineveh_. Vol. Ii. P. 212, note. [395] LAYARD, _Discoveries_, p. 281. [396] PRISSE D'AVENNES, _Histoire de l'Art égyptien d'après les Monuments_(2 vols folio): see the plates entitled _Couronnements et Frisesfleuronnés_. § 8. --_On the Orientation of Buildings and Foundation Ceremonies. _ The inhabitants of Mesopotamia were so much impressed by celestialphenomena, and believed so firmly in the influence of the stars over humandestiny, that they were sure to establish some connection between thoseheavenly bodies and the arrangement of their edifices. All the buildingsof Chaldæa and Assyria are orientated; the principle is everywhereobserved, but it is not always understood in the same fashion. [Illustration: FIG. 143. --Plan of a temple at Mugheir; from Loftus. ] Mesopotamian buildings were always rectangular and often square on plan, and it is sometimes the angles and sometimes the centres of each face thatare directed to the four cardinal points. It will easily be understood thatthe former system was generally preferred. The façades were of such extentthat their direction to a certain point of the horizon was not evident, while salient angles, on the other hand, had all the precision of anastronomical calculation; and this the earliest architects of the Chaldeesthoroughly understood. Some of the buildings examined by Loftus and Tayloron the lower Euphrates may have been restored, more or less, byNebuchadnezzar and his successors, but it is generally acknowledged thatthe lower and less easily injured parts of most of these buildings datefrom the very beginnings of that civilization, and were constructed by theprinces of the early empire. Now both at Warka and at Mugheir one corner ofa building is always turned towards the true north. [397] An instance ofthis may be given in the little building at Mugheir in which the lowerparts of a temple have been recognized (Fig. 143). The same arrangement isto be found in the palace excavated by M. De Sarzec at Tello. [398] [Illustration: FIG. 144. --Plan of the town and palace of Sargon atKhorsabad; from Place. ] Most of the Assyrian architects did likewise. See for example the plan ofSargon's city, Dour-Saryoukin (Fig. 144). Its circumvallation incloses analmost exact square, the diagonals of which point to the north, south, east and west respectively. [399] In the large scale plans that we shallgive farther on of the palace and of some of its parts it will be seen thatthe parallelograms of which that building was composed also had theirangles turned to the four cardinal points. It was the same with thestructures sprinkled over the summit of the vast mound of Kouyundjik, inthe centre of what once was Nineveh. [Illustration: FIG. 145. --General plan of the remains at Nimroud; fromLayard. 1, 2, 3 Trenches, 4 Central palace, 5 Tombs, 6 South-eastern edifice, 7South-western palace, 8 North-western palace, 9 High pyramidal mound. ] On the other hand in those ruins at Nimroud that have been identified withthe ancient Calah, it is the sides of the mound and of the buildings uponit that face the four cardinal points (Fig. 145). The plan given by Layardof the square staged tower disengaged in his last digging campaign at thenorth-western angle of the mound shows this more clearly. [400] Nearly halfthe northern side is occupied by the salient circular mass that is such aconspicuous object to one looking at the mound from the plain. We do notknow what caused this deviation from the traditional custom; a reasonshould perhaps be sought in the configuration of the ground, and in thecourse here followed by the river which then bathed the foot of theartificial hill upon which stood the royal dwellings of theTiglath-Pilesers and Assurnazirpals. The first of these two methods of orientation had the advantage ofestablishing a more exact and well defined relation between the dispositionof the building and those celestial points to which a peculiar importancewas attached. It must also be remembered that such an arrangement gave amore agreeable dwelling than the other. No façade being turned directly tothe north there was none entirely deprived of sunlight, while at the sametime there was none that faced due south. The sun as it ran its dailycourse would light for a time each face in turn. The religious ideas that led to orientation are revealed in other details, in the time chosen for commencing the foundations of temples or palaces, and in certain rites that were accomplished afterwards--doubtless with thehelp of the priesthood--in order to place the building under the protectionof the gods and to interest them in its duration. There were ceremoniesanalogous to those now practised when we lay foundation stones. In theChaldee system the first stone, the seed from which the rest of the edificewas to spring, was an angle stone, under or in which were depositedinscribed plaques. These contained the name of the founder, together withprayers to the gods and imprecations on all who should menace the stabilityof the building. This custom dated from the very beginning of Chaldæancivilization, as is proved by a curious text translated by M. Oppert. [401]It was discovered at Sippara and dates from the time of Nabounid, one ofthe last kings of Babylon. Many centuries before the reign of that prince atemple raised to the sun by Sagaraktyas, of the first dynasty, had beendestroyed, and its foundations were traditionally said to inclose thesacred tablets of Xisouthros, who has been identified with the Noah of theBible. Nabounid recounts the unsuccessful efforts that had been made beforehis time to recover possession of the precious deposit. Two kings ofBabylon, Kourigalzou and Nebuchadnezzar, and one king of Assyria, Esarhaddon, had made the attempt and failed. One of the three hadcommemorated his failure in an inscription to the following effect: "I havesearched for the angle stone of the temple of Ulbar but I have not foundit. " Finally Nabounid took up the quest. After one check caused by aninundation he renewed the search with ardour; he employed his army upon it, and at last, after digging to a great depth, he came to the angle-stone:"Thus, " he says, "have I recovered the name and date of Sagaraktyas. " [Illustration: FIG. 146. --Bronze statuette. 8-1/4 inches high. Louvre. ] In the ruins of the ancient royal city recovered by M. De Sarzec at Tellothe traces of similar precautions have everywhere been found. In themiddle of the great mass of ruins whose plan we are still awaiting, "Ifound, " says M. De Sarzec, "at a depth of hardly 30 centimetres (one footEnglish) below the original level of the soil four cubical massesconsisting of large bricks cemented with bitumen, and measuring about 80centimetres across each face. In the centre of each cube there was a cavity27 centimetres long by 12 wide and 35 deep. In each case this hollowcontained a small bronze statuette packed, as it were, in an impalpabledust. In one cavity the statuette was that of a kneeling man (Fig. 146), inanother of a standing woman (Fig. 147), in another of a bull (Fig. 148). Atthe feet of each statue there were two stone tablets, set in most cases inthe bitumen with which the cavity was lined. One of these tablets wasblack, the other white. It was upon the black as a rule that a cuneiforminscription similar, or nearly so, to the inscriptions on the statuetteswas found. "[402] Abridgments of the same commemorative and devotional form of words arefound upon those cones of terra-cotta that were discovered in such numbersamong the foundations and in the interstices of the structure (Fig. 149). [403] [Illustration: FIG. 147. --Bronze statuette. 8-1/4 inches high. Louvre. ] The Mesopotamian builder was not satisfied with relying upon talismansbuilt into the lower part of a building or strewn under the pavements. Taylor ascertained at Mugheir and Loftus at Sinkara that engraved cylinderswere built into the four angles of the upper stories. A brick had beenomitted, leaving a small niche in which they were set up on end. [404]Profiting by the hint thus given Sir Henry Rawlinson excavated the anglesof one of the terraces of the Birs-Nimroud at Babylon, and to theastonishment of his workmen he found the terra-cotta cylinders upon whichthe reconstruction of the temple by Nebuchadnezzar is narrated exactly atthe point where he told them to dig. [405] These little tubs are calledcylinders--a not very happy title. As some of them are about three feethigh (Fig. 150) they can take commemorative inscriptions of vastly greaterlength than those cut upon small hard-stone cylinders. Some of theseinscriptions have as many as a hundred lines very finely engraved. Manyprecious specimens dating from the times of Nebuchadnezzar and hissuccessors have been found in the ruins of Babylon. [406] [Illustration: FIG. 148. --Bronze statuette. 10 inches high. Louvre. ] Thus from the beginning to the end of Chaldæan civilization the custom waspreserved of consecrating a building by hiding in its substance objects towhich a divine type and an engraved text gave both a talismanic and acommemorative value. As might be supposed the same usage was followed in Assyria. In the palaceof Assurnazirpal at Nimroud, Sir Henry Layard found some alabaster tabletswith inscriptions on both their faces hidden behind the colossal lions atone of the doorways. [407] The British Museum also possesses a series ofsmall figures found at Nimroud but in a comparatively modern building, thepalace of Esarhaddon. They have each two pairs of wings, one pair raised, the other depressed. They had been strewn in the sand under the thresholdof one of the doors. [Illustration: FIG. 149. --Terra-cotta cone. Height 6 inches. Louvre. ] It was at Khorsabad, however, that the observations were made which havemost clearly shown the importance attached to this ceremony ofconsecration. M. Oppert tells us that during the summer of 1854, "M. Placedisinterred from the foundations of Khorsabad a stone case in which werefive inscriptions on five different materials, gold, silver, antimony, copper and lead. Of these five tablets he brought away four. The leaden onewas too heavy to be carried off at once, and it was despatched to Bassorahon the rafts with the bulk of the collection, whose fate it shared. " Theother four tablets are in the Louvre. Their text is almost identical. M. Oppert gives a translation of it. [408] According to his rendering, theinscription--in which the king speaks throughout in the first person--endswith this imprecation: "May the great lord Assur destroy from the face ofthis country the name and race of him who shall injure the works of myhand, or who shall carry off my treasure!" A little higher up, where Sargon recounts the founding of the palace, occurs a phrase which M. Oppert translates: "The people threw theiramulets. " What Sargon meant by this the excavations of M. Place have shown. In the foundations of the town walls, and especially in the beds of sandbetween the bases of the sculptured bulls that guard the doorways, he foundhundreds of small objects, such as cylinders, cones, and terra-cottastatuettes. The most curious of these are now deposited in the Louvre. Thenumbers and the character of these things prove that a great number of thepeople must have assisted at the ceremony of consecration. [Illustration: FIG. 150. --Terra-cotta cylinder. One-third of actual size;from Place. ] Several of these amulets were not without value either for their materialor their workmanship, but the great majority were of the roughest kind, some being merely shells or stones with a hole through them, which musthave belonged to the poorest class of the community. In many cases theirproper use could be easily divined; the holes with which they were piercedand other marks of wear showed them to be personal amulets. [409] Thosepresent at the ceremony of consecrating the foundations must have detachedthem from the cords by which they were suspended, and thrown them, upon theutterance of some propitiatory formula by the priests, into the sand aboutto be covered with the first large slabs of alabaster. The terra-cotta cylinders were in no less frequent use in Assyria than inChaldæa. M. Place found no less than fourteen still in place in niches ofthe harem walls at Khorsabad. The long inscription they bore containedcircumstantial details of the construction of both town and palace. Likethat on the metal tablets, it ended with a malediction on all who shoulddare to raise their hands against the work of Sargon. [410] As for the cylinders hidden in each angle of a building, none, we believe, have as yet been found in Assyria; perhaps because no search or aninefficient search has been made for them. We have dwelt at some length upon the orientation of buildings, upon theimportance attached to their angle stones, and upon the precautions takento place an edifice under the protection of the gods, and to preserve thename of its founder from oblivion. We can point to no stronger evidencethan that furnished by these proceedings as a whole, of the highcivilization to which the people of Chaldæa and Assyria had attained at avery early date. The temple and palace did not spread themselves out uponthe soil at the word of a capricious and individual fancy; a constant willgoverned the arrangement of its plan, solemn rites inaugurated itsconstruction and recommended its welfare to the gods. The texts tell usnothing about the architects, who raised so many noble monuments; we knowneither their names, nor their social condition, but we can divine fromtheir works that they had strongly established traditions, and that theycould look back upon a solid and careful education for their profession. Asto whether they formed one of those close corporations in which the secretsof a trade are handed down from generation to generation of their members, or whether they belonged to the sacerdotal caste, we do not know. We areinclined to the latter supposition in some degree by the profoundlyreligious character of the ceremonies that accompanied the inception of abuilding, and by the accounts left by the ancients of those priests whomthey called _the Chaldæans_. It was to these Chaldæans that Mesopotamiansociety owed all it knew of scientific methods and modes of thought, andit is, perhaps, fair to suppose that they turned to the practice of thearts those intellects which they had cultivated above their fellows. Architecture especially requires something more than manual skill, practice, and natural genius. When it is carried so far as it was inChaldæa it demands a certain amount of science, and the priests who byright of their intellectual superiority held such an important place in thestate, may well have contrived to gain a monopoly as architects to theking. In their persons alone would the scientific knowledge required forsuch work be combined with the power to accomplish those sacred rites whichgave to the commencement of a new building the character of a contractbetween man and his deity. NOTES: [397] LOFTUS, _Travels and Researches_, p. 171. [398] _Les Fouilles de Chaldée, communication d'une Lettre de M. De Sarzecpar M. Léon Heuzey_, § 2 (_Revue archéologique_, November, 1881). [399] PLACE, _Ninive_, vol. I. Pp. 17, 18. BOTTA had previously made thesame observation (_Monument de Ninive_, vol. V. P. 25). [400] LAYARD, _Discoveries_, plan 2, p. 123. [401] OPPERT, _Expédition scientifique de Mésopotamie_, vol. I. P. 273. [402] _Les Fouilles de Chaldée, communication d'une Lettre de M. DeSarzec_, by M. Léon HEUZEY (_Revue archéologique_, November, 1881). [403] As to the notions attached to these cones, whether sprinkled aboutthe foundations of a building, set up in certain sanctuaries, or carriedupon the person, an article published by M. LEDRAIN, _à propos_ of an agatecone recently added to the collections of the Louvre, may be read withadvantage. Its full title is _Une Page de Mythologie sémitique_ (_laPhilosophie positive, Revue_, 14th year, 1882, pp. 209-213). [404] Taylor, _Notes on the Ruins of Mugheir_ (_Journal_, &c. Vol. Xv. , pp. 263, 264). LOFTUS, _Travels_, &c. P. 247. [405] See the _Athenæum_ for January 20, 1855 (No. 1421), p. 84. "After twomonths' excavation Colonel Rawlinson was summoned to the work by theinformation that . .. A wall had been found and laid bare to a distance of190 feet, and that it turned off at right angles at each end, to beapparently carried all round the mound, forming a square of abouttwenty-seven feet in height, surmounted by a platform. He immediately rodeto the excavation, examined the spot, where he found the workmen quitediscouraged and hopeless, having laboured long and found nothing. He wasnow, however, well aware of these facts, and at once pointed out the spot, near the corner, where the bricks should be removed. In half an hour asmall hollow was found, from which he immediately directed the head workmanto 'bring out the commemorative cylinder'--a command which, to the wonderand bewilderment of the people, was immediately obeyed; and a cylindercovered with inscriptions was drawn out from its hiding-place oftwenty-four centuries, as fresh as when deposited there by the hands, probably, of Nebuchadnezzar himself! The Colonel added in a note that thefame of his magical power had flown to Bagdad, and that he was besiegedwith applications for the loan of his wonderful instrument to be used inthe discovery of hidden treasures!" [406] Among these we may mention the Philips cylinder, from which, inspeaking of the great works carried out by Nebuchadnezzar, LENORMANT giveslong extracts in his _Manuel d'Histoire ancienne_, vol. Ii. Pp. 233 and235. [407] LAYARD, _Nineveh_, vol. I. P. 115, and vol. Ii. P. 91. [408] OPPERT, _Expédition en Mésopotamie_, vol. Ii. Pp. 343-351. [409] PLACE, _Ninive_, vol. I. P. 188. [410] OPPERT, _Expédition scientifique_, vol. I. Pp. 354 _et seq. _ § 9. --_Mechanical Resources. _ The Chaldæans and Assyrians were never called upon to transport suchenormous masses as some of the Egyptian monoliths, such as the obelisks andthe two great colossi at Thebes. But the stone bulls that decorated thepalaces of Nineveh were no light weight, and it was not without difficultythat the modern explorers succeeded in conveying them to the borders of theTigris and loading them on the rafts upon which they began their longjourneys to Paris and London. In moving such objects from place to placethe Assyrians, like the Egyptians, had no secret beyond that of patience, and the unflinching use of human arms and shoulders in unstintednumber. [411] We know this from monuments in which the details of theoperation are figured even more clearly and with more pictorial power thanin the bas-relief at El-Bercheh, which has served to make us acquaintedwith the methods employed in taking an Egyptian colossus from the quarry toits site. In Mesopotamia, as in Egypt, there were waterways that could be used at anyseason for the transport of heavy masses. Quarries were made as near thebanks of the Euphrates and Tigris as possible, and when a stone monster hadto be carried to a town situated at some distance from both those riversthe canals by which the country was intersected in every direction suppliedtheir place. Going down stream, and especially in flood time, no means ofpropulsion were required; the course of the boats or rafts was directed bymeans of heavy oars like those still used by the boatmen who navigate theTigris in _keleks_, or rafts, supported on inflated hides; in ascending thestreams towing was called into play, as we know from one of the Kouyundjikbas-reliefs. [412] In this the stone in course of transport is oblong inshape and is placed upon a wide flat boat, beyond which it extends both atthe stern and the bows. It is securely fastened with pieces of wood heldtogether by strong pins. There are three tow ropes, two fastened to thestone itself and the third to the bow of the boat. The towers pull upon these cables by means of smaller cords passed roundthe shoulders of each and spliced to the main ropes; by such means theycould bring far more weight to bear than if they had been content to holdthe cable in their hands, as in Egypt. The bas-relief in question ismutilated, but we may guess that a hundred men were attached to each cable, which would make three hundred in all obeying the single will of thesuperintending engineer who is perched upon the stone and directing theirmovements. On each flank of the gang march overseers armed with swords andrattans that would be quick to descend on the back and loins of anyshirker. More than one instance of such punishment may be seen on the bas-reliefreproduced in part in our Fig. 151. In its lower division two or three ofthese slave-drivers may be seen with their hands raised against theworkmen; in one case the latter sinks to the ground beneath the blowsrained upon him. The way in which the whole series of operations isrepresented in this Kouyundjik relief is most curious. High up in the fieldwe often find the king himself, standing in his chariot and urging on thework. The whole occupies several of Layard's large plates. We can onlyreproduce the central group, which is the most interesting to the studentof engineering in ancient Mesopotamia. [Illustration: FIG. 151. --The transport of a bull. Height of the slab, 7feet 3 inches; British Museum. ] The block of alabaster that we saw a moment ago on a boat towed by hundredsof human arms has been delivered to the sculptors and has put on, undertheir hands, the rough form of a mitred, human-headed bull. It will becompleted after being put in place; the last touches of the chisel and thebrush will then be given to it; but the heaviest part of the work isalready done and the block has lost much of its original size and weight. Firmly packed with timber, the bull lies upon its side upon a sledge whichis curved in front like a boat, or a modern sleigh. Two cables are fastenedto its prow and two to its stern. The engineer is again seated upon thestone and claps his hands to give the time, but now he is accompanied bythree soldiers who appear to support his authority by voice and gesture. Inorder to prevent friction and to facilitate the movement of the sledge, rollers are thrust beneath its runners as they progress. Before the hugemass will start, however, the straining cords and muscles have to be helpedby a thrust from behind. This is given by means of a huge lever, upon whicha number of men pull with all their weight, while its curved foot isengaged under the sledge. A workman is occupied with the reinforcement ofthe fulcrum by thrusting a wedge in between its upper surface and the loweredge of the lever. When everything is ready a signal will be given, the menbehind will throw their weight upon the lever, the sledge will rise alittle, the ropes will strain and tighten, and the heavy mass will glideforward upon the greased rollers until arms and legs give out and aninterval for rest is called, to be followed presently by a repetition ofthe same process. Every precaution is taken to minimize the effect of anyaccident that may take place in the course of the operation. Behind thesledge spare ropes and levers are carried, some upon men's backs, others onsmall handcarts. There are also a number of workmen carrying rollers. We shall only refer to one more of these reliefs and that the one withwhich the series appears to close (Fig. 152). This carved picture has beenthought, not without reason, to represent the erection of the bull[413] inits destined place. After its slow but uninterrupted march the huge monsterhas arrived upon the plateau where it has been awaited. By one great finaleffort it has been dragged up an inclined plane to the summit of the moundand has been set upon its feet. Nothing remains to be done but to pull andthrust it into its place against the doorway it has to guard and ornament. The same sledge, the same rollers, the same lever, the same precautionsagainst accident are to be recognized here as in the last picture. The onlydifference is in the position of the statue itself. Standing upright likethis it is much more liable to injury than when prone on its flank. Newsafeguards have therefore been introduced. It is packed under its bellywith squares of wood and inclosed in scaffolding to prevent dangerousvibration. Additional precautions against this latter danger are providedby gangs of men who walk at each side and hold, some ropes fastened to theuprights of the scaffolding, others long forked poles engaged under itshorizontal pieces. By these means equilibrium could be restored after anyextra oscillation on the part of the sledge and its burden. All these manoeuvres are remarkable for the skill and prodigality withwhich human strength was employed; of all the scientific tools invented toeconomise effort and to shorten the duration of a task, the only one theyseem ever to have used was the most simple of all, the lever, an instrumentthat must have been invented over and over again wherever men tried to liftmasses of stone or wood from the ground. Its discovery must, in fact, havetaken place long before the commencement of what we call civilization, although its theory was first expounded by the Greek mathematicians. [Illustration: FIG. 152. --Putting a bull in place; from Layard. ] In a relief in the palace of Assurnazirpal at Nimroud, there is a pulleyexactly similar to those often seen over a modern well. [414] A cord runsover it and supports a bucket. There is no evidence that the Assyriansemployed such a contrivance for any purpose but the raising of water. Wecannot say that they used it to lift heavy weights, but the fact that theyunderstood its principle puts them slightly above the Egyptians asengineers. NOTES: [411] As to the simplicity of Egyptian engineering, see the _History of Artin Ancient Egypt_, vol. Ii. P. 72, and fig. 43. [412] See LAYARD, _Monuments_, 2nd series, plate ii. The same author givesa detailed description of this picture in his _Discoveries_, pp. 104-106. [413] LAYARD, _Discoveries_, p. 112. [414] LAYARD, _Nineveh_, vol. Ii. P. 32. § 10. --_On the Graphic Processes Employed in the Representations ofBuildings. _ The Chaldæans and Assyrians knew as little of perspective as they did ofmechanics. When they had to figure a building and its contents, or alandscape background, they could not resist the temptation of combiningmany things which could not be seen from a single standpoint. Like thepainters and sculptors of Thebes they mixed up in the most naive fashionthose graphic processes that we keep carefully apart. All that they caredabout was to be understood. We need not here reproduce the observations wemade on this subject in the corresponding chapter of Egyptian Art;[415] itwill suffice to give a few examples of the simultaneous employment byNinevite sculptors of contradictory systems. [Illustration: FIG. 153. --Chaldæan plan. Louvre. ] It is not difficult to cite examples of things that may, with some littleingenuity, be brought within the definition of a plan. The most curious andstrongly marked of these is furnished by one of the most ancient monumentsthat have come down to us; we mean a statue found at Tello in Lower Chaldæaby M. De Sarzec. It represents a personage seated and holding on his kneesan engraved tablet on which two or three different things are represented(Fig. 153). On the right there is one of those styles with which letters orimages were cut in the soft clay, at the bottom of the tablet there is ascale which we know from another monument of the same kind to have beenoriginally 10. 8 inches in length, _i. E. _ the Babylonian half-cubit or span. By far the larger part of the field, however, is occupied by an irregularfigure in which the trace of a fortified wall may be easily recognized. When these monuments were first brought to France this statue was supposedto be that of an architect. When the inscriptions were interpreted, however, this opinion had to be modified in some degree. They were found tocontain the same royal title as the other figure of similar style andmaterial discovered by M. De Sarzec on the same spot, the title, namely, ofthe individual whom archæologists have at present agreed to callGudea. [416] It therefore seems to represent that prince in the character ofan architect, as the constructor of the building in which his statues wereplaced as a sacred deposit. Must we take it to be the plan of his royalcity as a whole, or only of his palace? It is difficult to answer thisquestion, especially while no precise information has been obtained fromthe inscriptions, whose interpretation presents many difficulties. Therecan, however, be no doubt that the engraver has given us a plan accordingto his lights of a wall strengthened by flanking towers, of which thosewith the boldest salience guard the six passages into the interior. We find a still more simple plan upon an Assyrian monument of much laterdate, namely, upon the armour of beaten bronze that formerly protected thegates of Balawat. In this example (Fig. 154) the doorways, the angles, andthe centres of the two longer curtains are strengthened by towers. [Illustration: FIG. 154. --Assyrian plan; from the Balawat gates in theBritish Museum. ] [Illustration: FIG. 155. --Plan and section of a fortress; from Layard. ] The way in which the sculptor has endeavoured to suggest the crenellationsshows that these plans are not drawn on the same principal as ours; thereis no section taken at the junction with the soil or at a determinedheight; the draughtsman in all probability wished to give an idea of theheight of the flanking towers. His representation is an ideal _projection_similar to those of which we find so many examples in Egypt, only that herewe have the towers laid flat outside the fortification to which they belongin such a fashion that their summits are as far as possible from the centreof the structure. We shall see this better in another plan of the same kindin which the details are more carefully made out (Fig. 155). It comes froma bas-relief, on which a circular fortress, divided into four equal partsby walls radiating from its centre, is portrayed. In this relief we find another favourite process of the Egyptians employed, namely, that in which a vertical section is combined with a projection, sothat the interior of the building and its arrangements may be laid open tothe spectator. In this instance we can see what is passing in the fourprincipal chambers of the castle. In each chamber one or two persons areoccupied over what appear to be religious rites. [Illustration: FIG. 156. --Plan, section, and elevation of a fortified city;from Layard. ] In another Nimroud bas-relief we find a still greater variety of processesused upon a single work (Fig. 156). The picture shows the king enthroned inthe centre of a fortified city which he has just captured. Prisoners arebeing brought before him; his victorious troops have erected their tents inthe city itself. Beside these tents three houses of unequal size representthe dwellings of the conquered. The _enceinte_ with its towers isprojected on the soil in the fashion above noticed; a longitudinal sectionlays bare the interiors of the tents and shows us the soldiers at theirvarious occupations. As for the houses, they are represented by theirprincipal façades, which are drawn in elevation. [Illustration: FIG. 157. --Plan and elevation of a fortified city; fromLayard. ] When he had to deal with more complicated images, as in the reliefs atKouyundjik representing the conquests and expeditions of Assurbanipal, theartist modified his processes at will so as to combine in the narrow spaceat his disposal all the information that he thought fit to give. See forinstance the relief in which the Assyrians celebrate their capture ofMadaktu, an important city of Susiana, by a sort of triumph (Fig. 157). The town itself, with its towered walls and its suburbs in which everyhouse is sheltered by a date tree, is figured in the centre. At the top andsides the walls are projected outwards from the city; at the bottom theyare thrown inwards in order, no doubt, to leave room for the tops of thedate trees. Moreover, the sculptor had to find room for a large building onthe right of his fortification. This is, apparently, the palace of theking. Guarded by a barbican and surrounded by trees it rises upon itsartificial mound some little distance in front of the city. The artist alsowished to show that palace and city were protected by a winding riverteeming with fish, into which fell a narrower stream in the neighbourhoodof the palace. If he had projected the walls of the palace and its barbicanin the same way as those of the other buildings he would either have had toencroach upon his streams and to hide their junction or to divert theircourse. In order to avoid this he made use of several points of view, andlaid his two chief structures on the ground in such a fashion that theyform an oblique angle with the rest of the buildings. The result thusobtained looks strange to us, but it fulfilled his purpose; it gave a clearidea of how the various buildings were situated with respect to each otherand it reproduced with fidelity the topographical features of the conqueredcountry. The chief desire of the sculptor was to be understood. That governingthought can nowhere be more clearly traced than in one of the reliefsdealing with the exploits of Sennacherib. [417] Here he had to explain thatin order to penetrate into a mountainous country like Armenia, the king hadbeen compelled to follow the bed of a torrent between high wooded banks. Inthe middle of the picture we see the king in his chariot, followed byhorsemen and foot soldiers marching in the water. Towards the summit of therelief, the heights that overhang the stream are represented by the usualnetwork. But how to represent the wooded mountains on this side of thewater? The artist has readily solved the question, according to his lights, by showing the near mountains and their trees upside down, a solution whichis quite on all fours, in principle, with the plans above described. Thehills are projected on each side of the line made by the torrent, so thatit runs along their bases, as it does in fact; but in this case thetopsy-turviness of the trees and hills has a very startling effect. Theintentions of the artist, however, are perfectly obvious; his process ischildish, but it is quite clear. None of these plans or pictures have, any more than those of Egypt, a scaleby which the proportions of the objects introduced can be judged. The men, who were more important in the eye of the artist than the buildings, arealways taller than the houses and towers. This will be seen still moreclearly in the figure we reproduce from the Balawat gates (Fig. 158). Itrepresents a fortress besieged by Shalmaneser II. , three people stand uponthe roof of the building; if we restore their lower limbs we shall see thattheir height is equal to that of the castle itself. [418] [Illustration: FIG. 158. --Fortress with its defenders; from the Balawatgates. ] This short examination of the spirit and principles of Assyrian figurationwas necessary in order to prevent embarrassment and doubt in speaking ofthe architectural designs and other things of the same kind that we mayfind reproduced in the bas-reliefs. Unless we had thoroughly understood thesystem of which the sculptors made use, we should have been unable to baseour restorations upon their works in any important degree; and, besides, ifthere be one touchstone more sure than another by which we may determinethe plastic genius of a people, it is the ingenuity, or the want of it, shown in the contrivance of means to make lines represent the thickness ofbodies and the distances of various planes. In this matter Chaldæa andAssyria remained, like Egypt, in the infancy of art. They were evenexcelled by the Egyptians, who showed more taste and continuity in themanagement of their processes than their Eastern rivals. Nothing so absurdis to be found in the sculptures of the Nile valley as these hills andtrees turned upside down, and we shall presently see that a likesuperiority is shown in the way figures are brought together in thebas-reliefs. In our second volume on Egyptian art we drew attention to someTheban sculptures in which a vague suspicion of the true laws ofperspective seemed to be struggling to light. The attempt to apply them tothe composition of certain groups was real, though timid. Nothing of thekind is to be found in Assyrian sculpture. The Mesopotamian artist neverseems for a moment to have doubted the virtues of his own method, a methodwhich consisted in placing the numerous figures, whose position in a spaceof more or less depth he wished to suggest, one above another on the fieldof his relief. He trusted, in fact, to the intelligence of the spectator, and took but little pains to help the latter in making sense of the imagesput before him. NOTES: [415] _Art in Ancient Egypt_, vol. Ii. Chapter i. § 1. [416] M. J. HALÉVY disputes this reading of the word. As we are unable todiscuss the question, we must refer our readers to his observations (_LesMonuments Chaldéens et la Question de Sumir et d'Accad_) in the _Comptesrendus de l'Académie des Inscriptions_, 1882, p. 107. M. Halévy believes itshould be read as the name of the prince Nabou or Nebo. The question isonly of secondary importance, but M. Halévy enlarges its scope by reopeningthe whole matter of debate between himself and M. Oppert as to the truecharacter of what Assyriologists call the Sumerian language and writtencharacter. The _Comptes rendus_ only gives a summary of the paper. The samevolume contains a _résumé_ of M. Oppert's reply (1882, p. 123:_Inscriptions de Gudéa_, et seq). [417] LAYARD, _Discoveries_, p. 341. [418] The same disproportion between men and buildings is to be found inmany other reliefs (see figs. 39, 43, and 60). [Illustration] CHAPTER III. FUNERARY ARCHITECTURE. § 1. --_Chaldæan and Assyrian Notions as to a Future Life. _ Of the remains that have come down to us from ancient Egypt the oldest, themost important in some respects, and beyond dispute the most numerous, arethe sepulchres. Of the two lives of the Egyptian, that of which we know themost is his posthumous life--the life he led in the shadows of thatcarefully-hidden subterranean dwelling that he called his "good abode. "While in every other country bodies after a few years are nothing but a fewhandfuls of dust, in Egypt they creep out in thousands to the light of day, from grottoes in the flanks of the mountains, from pits sunk through thedesert sand and from hollows in the sand itself. They rise accompanied bylong inscriptions that speak for them, and make us sharers in their joysand sorrows, in their religious beliefs and in the promises in which theyplaced their hopes when their eyes were about to close for ever. Apeculiarity of which Egypt offers the only instance is thus explained. Thehouse of the Memphite citizen and the palace of the king himself, can onlynow be restored by hints culled from the reliefs and inscriptions--hintswhich sometimes lend themselves to more than one interpretation, while thetombs of Egypt are known to us in every detail of structure andarrangement. In more than one instance they have come down to us with theirequipment of epitaphs and inscribed prayers, of pictures carved and paintedon the walls and all the luxury of their sepulchral furniture, exactly infact as they were left when their doors were shut upon their silent tenantsso many centuries ago. [419] We are far indeed from being able to say this of Assyria and Chaldæa. Inthose countries it is the palace, the habitation of the sovereign, that hassurvived in the best condition, and from it we may imagine what the housesof private people were like; but we know hardly anything of their tombs. Chaldæan tombs have been discovered in these latter years, but they areanonymous and mute. We do not possess a single funerary inscription datingfrom the days when the two nations who divided Mesopotamia between themwere still their own masters. The arrangements of the nameless tombs inlower Chaldæa are extremely simple and their furnishing very poor, if wecompare them with the sepulchres in the Egyptian cemeteries. As forAssyrian burying-places, none have yet been discovered. Tombs havecertainly been found at Nimroud, at Kouyundjik, at Khorsabad, and in allthe mounds in the neighbourhood of Mossoul, but never among or below theAssyrian remains. They are always in the mass of earth and various _débris_that has accumulated over the ruins of the Assyrian palaces, which isenough to show that they date from a time posterior to the fall of theMesopotamian Empires. Any doubts that may have lingered on this point havebeen removed by the character of the objects found, which are never olderthan the Seleucidæ or the Parthians, and sometimes date even from the Romanepoch. [420] What then did the Assyrians do with their dead? No one has attacked thisquestion more vigorously than Sir Henry Layard. In his attempt to answer ithe explored the whole district of Mossoul, but without result; he pointedout the interest of the inquiry to all his collaborators, he talked aboutit to the more intelligent among his workmen, and promised a reward towhoever should first show him an Assyrian grave. He found nothing, however, and neither Loftus, Place, nor Rassam have been more successful. Neithertexts nor monuments help us to fill up the gap. The excavations of M. DeSarzec have indeed brought to light the fragments of an Assyrian stele inwhich a funerary scene is represented, but unfortunately its meaning is byno means clear. [421] I cannot point to an Assyrian relief in which the sametheme is treated. Among so many battle pictures we do not find a singlescene analogous to those so often repeated in the pictures and sculpturesof Greece. The death and burial of an Assyrian warrior gave a theme to noAssyrian sculptor. It would appear that the national pride revolted fromany confession that Assyrians could be killed like other men. All thecorpses in the countless battlefields are those of enemies, who aresometimes mutilated and beheaded. [422] These despised bodies were left to rot where they fell, and to feed thecrows and vultures;[423] but it is impossible to believe that theAssyrians paid no honours to the bodies of their princes, their nobles, andtheir relations, and some texts recently discovered make distinct allusionsto funerary rites. [424] We can hardly agree to the suggestions of M. Place, who asks whether it is not possible that the Assyrians committed theircorpses to the river, like the modern Hindoos, or to birds of prey, likethe Guebres. [425] Usages so entirely out of harmony with the customs ofother ancient nations would certainly have been noticed by contemporarywriters, either Greek or Hebrew. In any case some allusion to them wouldsurvive in Assyrian literature, but no hint of the kind is to be found. But after we have rejected those hypotheses the question is no nearer tosolution than before; we are still confronted by the remarkable fact thatthe Assyrians so managed to hide their dead that no trace of them has everbeen discovered. A conjecture offered by Loftus is the most inviting. [426]He reminds us that although cemeteries are entirely absent from Assyria, Chaldæa is full of them. Between Niffer and Mugheir each mound is anecropolis. The Assyrians knew that Chaldæa was the birthplace of theirrace and they looked upon it as a sacred territory. We find the Ninevitekings, even when they were hardest upon their rebellious subjects in thesouth, holding it as a point of honour to preserve and restore the templesof Babylon and to worship there in royal pomp. Perhaps the Assyrians, orrather those among them who could afford the expenses of the journey, hadtheir dead transferred to the graveyards of Lower Chaldæa. The lattercountry, or, at least, a certain portion of it, would thus be a kind ofholy-land where those Semites whose earliest traditions were connected withits soil would think themselves assured of a more tranquil repose and ofprotection from more benignant deities. The soil of Assyria itself wouldreceive none but the corpses of those slaves and paupers who, counting fornothing in their lives, would be buried when dead in the first convenientcorner, without epitaph or sepulchral furnishing. This hypothesis would explain two things that need explanation--the absencefrom Assyria of such tombs as are found in every other country of theAncient World, and the great size of the Chaldæan cemeteries. Both Loftusand Taylor received the same impression, that the assemblages of coffins, still huge in spite of the numbers that have been destroyed during the lasttwenty centuries, can never have been due entirely to the second and thirdrate cities in whose neighbourhood they occur. Piled one upon another theyform mounds covering wide spaces of ground, and so high that they may beseen for many miles across the plain. [427] This district must have been thecommon cemetery of Chaldæa and perhaps of Assyria; the dead of Babylon musthave been conveyed there. Is it too much to suppose that by means of riversand canals those of Nineveh may have been taken there too? Was it not inexactly that fashion that mummies were carried by thousands from one end ofthe Nile valley to the other, to the places where they had to rejoin thereancestors?[428] But we need not go back to Ancient Egypt to find examples of corpses makinglong journeys in order to reach some great national burying-place. Loftusreceived the first hint of his suggestion from what he himself saw atNedjef and at Kerbela, where he met funeral processions more than once onthe roads of Irak-Arabi. From every town in Persia the bodies of ShiiteMussulmans, who desire to repose near the mortal remains of Ali and hisson, are transported after death into Mesopotamia. [429] According to Loftusthe cemetery of Nedjef alone, that by which the mosque known as_Meched-Ali_ is surrounded, receives the bodies of from five to eightthousand Persians every year. Now the journey between Nineveh and Calah andthe plains of Lower Chaldæa was far easier than it is now--consideringespecially the state of the roads--between Tauris, Ispahan, and Teheran, onthe one hand and Nedjef on the other. The transit from Assyria to Chaldæacould be made, like that of the Egyptian mummy, entirely by water, that isto say, very cheaply, very easily, and very rapidly. We are brought up, however, by one objection. Although as a rule subject tothe Assyrians, the Chaldæans were from the eleventh to the seventh centurybefore our era in a constant state of revolt against their northernneighbours; they struggled hard for their independence and waged long andbloody wars with the masters of Nineveh. Can the Assyrian kings have daredto confide their mortal remains to sepulchres in the midst of a people whohad shown themselves so hostile to their domination? Must they not havetrembled for the security of tombs surrounded by a rebellious and angrypopulace? And the furious conflicts that we find narrated in the Assyrianinscriptions, must they not often have interrupted the transport of bodiesand compelled them to wait without sepulture for months and even years? Further explorations and the decipherment of the texts will one day solvethe problem. Meanwhile we must attempt to determine the nature ofChaldæo-Assyrian beliefs as to a future life. We shall get no help fromHerodotus. Intending to describe the manners and customs of the Chaldæansin a special work that he either never wrote or that has been lost, [430] hetreated Mesopotamia in much less ample fashion than Egypt, in his history. All that he leaves us on the subject we are now studying is this passingremark, "The Babylonians put their dead in honey, and their funerarylamentations are very like those of the Egyptians. "[431] Happily we havethe Chaldæan cemeteries and the sculptured monuments of Assyria to which wecan turn for information. The funerary writings of the Egyptians allow usto read their hearts as an open book. We know that the men who lived in thedays of the ancient empire looked upon the posthumous life as a simplecontinuation of life in the sun. They believed it to be governed by thesame wants, but capable of infinite prolongation so long as those wantswere supplied. And so they placed their dead in tombs where they weresurrounded by such things as they required when alive, especially by meatand drink. Finally, they endeavoured to ensure them the enjoyment of thesethings to the utmost limit of time by preserving their bodies againstdissolution. If these were to fall into dust the day after they enteredupon their new abode, the provisions and furniture with which it wasstocked would be of no use. The Chaldæans kept a similar object before them. They neglected nothing tosecure the body against the action of damp, in the first place by makingthe sides of their vaults and the coffins themselves water-tight, secondly, by providing for the rapid escape of rain water from the cemetery, [432]and, finally, if they did not push the art of embalming so far as theEgyptians, they entered upon the same path. The bodies we find in theoldest tombs are imperfect mummies compared with those of Egypt, but theskeleton, at least, is nearly always in an excellent state of preservation;it is only when handled that it tumbles into dust. In the more spacioustombs the body lies upon a mat, with its head upon a cushion. In most casesthe remains of bandages and linen cloths were found about it. Mats, cushions, and bandages had all been treated with bitumen. A smallterra-cotta model in the British Museum shows a dead man thus stowed in hiscoffin; his hands are folded on his breast, and round the whole lower partof the body the bands that gave him the appearance of a mummy may betraced. The funerary furniture is far from being as rich and varied as it is in thetombs of Egypt and Etruria, but the same idea has governed the choice ofobjects in both cases. When the corpse is that of a man we find at hisside the cylinder which served him as seal, his arms, arrow heads of flintor bronze, and the remains of the staff he carried in his hand. [433] In awoman's tomb the body has jewels on its neck, its wrists and ankles; jewelsare strewn about the tomb and placed on the lid of the coffin. Among othertoilet matters have been found small glass bottles, fragments of a bouquet, and cakes of the black pigment which the women of the East still employ tolengthen their eyebrows and enhance their blackness. [434] [Illustration: FIGS. 159, 160. --Vases; from Warka. British Museum. ] The vases which are always present in well-preserved tombs, show the ideasof the Mesopotamians on death more clearly than anything else. Upon thepalm of one hand or behind the head is placed a cup, sometimes of bronze, oftener of terra-cotta. From it the dead man can help himself to the wateror fermented liquors with which the great clay jars that are spread overthe floor of his grave are filled (Figs. 159 and 160). Near these also wefind shallow bowls or saucers, used no doubt as plates for holding food. Date-stones, chicken and fish bones are also present in great numbers. Inone tomb the snout of a swordfish has been found, in another a wild boar'sskull. It would seem too that the idea of adding imitation viands to realones occurred to the Chaldæans as well as to the Egyptians. [435] From onegrave opened by Taylor four ducks carved in stone were taken. The sepulchres in which the objects we have been mentioning were found, arethe most ancient in Chaldæa--on this all the explorers are agreed. Theirsituation in the lowest part of the funerary mounds, the aspect of thecharacters engraved upon the cylinders and the style of the things theycontained, all go to prove their age. In similar tombs discovered by M. DeSarzec at Sirtella, in the same region, a tablet of stone and a bronzestatuette, differing in no important particular from those deposited infoundation stones, were found. The texts engraved upon them leave no doubtas to their great antiquity. [436] It is then to the early Chaldæan monarchythat we must assign these tombs, which so clearly betray ideas and beliefspractically identical with those that find their freest expression in themastabas of the ancient Egyptian Empire. In Mesopotamia, as in Egypt, the human intellect arrived with the lapse oftime at something beyond this childish and primitive belief. Men did not, however, repel it altogether as false and ridiculous; they continued tocherish it at the bottom of their hearts, and to allow it to impose certainlines of action upon them which otherwise could hardly be explained orjustified. As in Egypt, and in later years in Greece, a new and moreabstract conception was imposed upon the first. Logically, the secondtheory was the negation of its predecessor, but where imagination andsentiment play the principal _rôle_, such contradictions are lost sight of. We have elsewhere[437] traced the process by which the imagination was ledto sketch out a new explanation of the mystery of death. As man'sexperience increased, and his faculty for observation became more powerful, he had to make a greater mental effort before he could believe in theimmortality of the body, and in a life prolonged to infinity in thedarkness of the tomb. In order to satisfy the craving for perpetuity, asomething was imagined, we can hardly say what, a shade, an _imago_, thatdetached itself from the body at the moment of death, and took itself offwith the lightness of a bird. A great space, with no definite size, shape, or situation, in which these shades of the departed could meet each otherand enjoy greater freedom than in the tomb, was added to the firstconception. This less material belief was better adapted than the first tothe moral instincts of humanity. A material and organic existence passed inthe grave dealt out the same fate to good and bad alike. On the otherhand, nothing was more easy than to divide the kingdom of the shades intotwo compartments, into two distinct domains, and to place in one thosewhose conduct had been deserving of reward; in the other, those whosecrimes and vices had been insufficiently punished upon earth. It is not to the Chaldæan sepulchres that we owe our knowledge that theSemites of Mesopotamia followed in the footsteps of the Egyptians, whenthey found themselves in face of the problem of life and death; it is tothe literature of the Assyrians. Among those tablets of terra-cotta fromthe library of Assurbanipal that are now preserved in the British Museum, George Smith discovered, in 1873, a mythological document in which thedescent of Istar to the infernal regions in search of her lover Tammouz isrecounted. Of this he gives a first translation, which is already out ofdate. Since his discovery was announced, the most learned Assyriologistshave made a study of the document, and now even those among them who mostseldom think alike, are in agreement as to its meaning except in a fewunimportant particulars. [438] No doubt remains as to the generalsignificance of the piece; we may even compare it with other documents fromthe same library in which there is much to confirm and complete itscontents. Even if there were no evidence to the contrary, we might safely affirm thatthe first conception was not effaced from the minds of the Assyrians by thesecond. M. Halévy has translated an Assyrian text, whose meaning he thusepitomizes: "What becomes of the individual deposited in a tomb? A curiouspassage in one of the 'books' from the library of Assurbanipal answers thisquestion, indirectly, indeed, but without any ambiguity. After death thevital and indestructible principle, the incorporeal spirit, is disengagedfrom the body; it is called in Assyrian _ékimmou_ or _égimmou_. .. . The_ékimmou_ inhabits the tomb and reposes upon the bed (_zalalu_) of thecorpse. If well treated by the children of the defunct, he becomes theirprotector; if not, their evil genius and scourge. The greatest misfortunethat can befall a man is to be deprived of burial. In such a case hisspirit, deprived of a resting-place and of the funerary libations, leads awandering and miserable existence; he is exposed to all kinds ofill-treatment at the hands of his fellow spirits, who show him no mercy. " Here we find certain elements of that primitive belief that would escape usin a mere examination of the Chaldæan tombs. We see how they understood theconnection between the living and the dead, and why they so passionatelydesired to receive due sepulture. These ideas and sentiments are identicalwith those which M. Fustel de Coulanges has analysed so deeply in his _Citéantique_. They subsisted in all their strength in Assyria, and must havehad all the consequences, all the social effects that they had elsewhere, and yet we find mentioned a home for the dead, a joyless country in whichthey could assemble in their countless numbers; as Egypt had its _Ament_and Greece her _Hades_, so Chaldæa and Assyria had their hell, their placeof departed ghosts. We know from the narrative of Istar that they lookedupon it as an immense building, situated in the centre of the earth andbounded on every side by the great river whose waters bathe the foundationsof the world. This country of the dead is called the "land where one seesnothing" (_mat la namari_), or the "land whence one does not return" (_matla tayarti_). The government of the country is in the hands of Nergal, thegod of war, and his spouse Allat, the sister of Astarte. The house issurrounded by seven strong walls. In each wall there is a single door, which is fastened by a bolt as soon as a new comer has entered. Each dooris kept by an incorruptible guardian. We cannot quote the whole of thestory; we give, however, a few lines in which the chief features of theAssyrian conception is most clearly shown. Istar speaks:-- Let me return [toward the house], * * * * * [Toward] the house in which Irkalla lives, In which the evening has no morning, [Towards the country] whence there is no return, [Whose inhabitants, ] deprived of light, [Have dust for food] and mud to nourish them, A tunic and wings for vesture, [Who see no day, ] who sit in the shadows, [In the house] into which I must enter, [They live there, ] (once) the wearers of crowns, [The wearers] of crowns who governed the world in ancient days, Of whom Bel and Anou have perpetuated the names and memory. There too stand the foundations of the earth, the meeting of the mighty waters, In the palace of dust into which I must come, Live the prince and the noble, Live the king and the strong man, Live the guardians of the depths of the great gods, Live Ner and Etana. A long dialogue follows between Istar and the guardian of the gate, bywhich we find that there was a rigorous law compelling all who came tostrip themselves of their clothes before they could enter. In spite of herresistance, Istar herself was obliged to submit to this law. From othertexts we learn that the entrance to these infernal regions was situated atthe foot of the "northern mountain, " a sort of Assyrian Olympus. According to the fragment above quoted the condition of the dead was trulypiteous; they had no food but dust and mud; their dwelling is sometimescalled _bit-edi_, the "house of solitude, " because in the life of miseryand privation they lead no one takes any thought for others, his only careis to relieve his own troubles. Consequently there are no families nor anysocial or common life. The conscience protested against the injustice ofconfounding with the crowd those mortals who had distinguished themselveswhen alive by their exploits or virtues. Thus we find in a recently copiedpassage from the great epic of Izdubar, the Assyrian Hercules, that valiantsoldiers--those no doubt who had fallen in the "Wars of Assur"--wererewarded for their prowess. As soon as they entered the shadow kingdom theywere stretched upon a soft couch and surrounded by their relations. Theirfather and mother supported the head the enemy's sword had wounded, theirwives stood beside them and waited on them with zeal and tenderness. Theywere refreshed and had their strength restored by the pure water of life. The idea of a final reward is expressed in still more unmistakable accentsin a religious song of which two fragments have come down to us. The poetcelebrates the felicity of the just taking his food with the gods andbecome a god himself:-- Wash thy hands, purify thy hands, The gods, thine elders, will wash and purify their hands; Eat the pure nourishment in the pure disks, Drink the pure water from the pure vases; Prepare to enjoy the peace of the just! * * * * * They have brought their pure water, Anat, the great spouse of Anou, Has held thee in her sacred arms; Iaou has transferred thee into a holy place; He has transferred thee from his sacred hands; He has transferred thee into the midst of honey and fat, He has poured magic water into thy mouth, And the virtue of the water has opened thy mouth. * * * * * As to where this paradise was placed we have no certain information. Itcould hardly have been a mere separate district of that abode of shadesthat is painted in such sombre colours. We must suppose that it was open tothe sunlight; it was perhaps on one of the slopes of the _NorthernMountain_, in the neighbourhood of the luminous summit on which the godsand goddesses had their home. The idea of a reward for the just carries as its corollary that of apunishment for the unjust, but in spite of the logical connection betweenthe two notions, we cannot affirm that the Elysium of these Semites had aTartarus by its side. No allusion to such a place has been found in any ofthe texts already translated. On the other hand, we find some evidence thatthe Assyrians believed in the resurrection of the dead. Marduk and hisspouse Zarpanitu often bear the title of "those who make the dead liveagain" (_muballith_ or _muballithat miti_ or _mituti_). The same epithet issometimes given to other deities, especially to Istar. As yet we do notknow when and under what conditions renewed life was to be granted. We need hardly add that the ideas that find expression in the Assyriantexts were by no means peculiar to the northern people. All Assyriologistsagree that in everything connected with the intellect, the Assyriansinvented nothing; they did nothing but adapt and imitate, translate andcopy from the more prolific Chaldæans, who furnished as it were the breadupon which their minds were nourished. It is the Chaldee intellect that westudy when we question the texts from the library of Assurbanipal. Other passages in these terra-cotta books help to complete and illustratethose from which we have, as it were, gained a first glimpse of theAssyrian Under-world; but we shall never, in all probability, know it as wealready know that of the Egyptians. This is partly, perhaps, because it wasless complex, and partly because the fascination it exercised over the mindof man was not so great. History contains no mention of a people more preoccupied with the affairsof the grave than the Egyptians. Doubtless the Chaldæans had to give acertain amount of their attention to the same problem, and we know that itwas resolved in the same sense and by the same sequence of beliefs both onthe banks of the Euphrates and on those of the Nile; but other questionswere more attractive to the peoples of Mesopotamia. Their curiosity wasroused chiefly by the phenomena of the skies, by the complicatedphantasmagoria offered nightly in the depths above. These they setthemselves to observe with patience and exactitude, and it is to the habitsthus formed that they, in part at least, owed their scientific superiorityand the honour they derive from the incontestable fact that they havefurnished to modern civilization elements more useful and more readilyassimilated than any other great people of the remote past. And yet the Semites of Chaldæa were not without myths relating to the abodeof departed souls of which some features may be grasped. In order to get abetter comprehension of them, we must not only look to the discovery andtranslation of new texts, but to the intelligent study of figuredrepresentations. At least this seems to be the lesson of a curious monumentrecently discovered. [439] People may differ as to the significance of this or that detail, but no onewill deny that the plaque is religious and funerary in its generalcharacter, and that, whatever may have been its purpose, it is as a wholeconnected with the memory and worship of the dead, and therefore that thisis the place for such remarks as we have to make upon it. The object in question is a bronze plaque, sculptured on both faces, whichPéretié acquired at Hama in Northern Syria. The dealer from whom he boughtit declared that it came into his hands from a peasant of Palmyra. As towhere the latter found it we know nothing. In any case the oasis of Tadmorwas a dependency of Mesopotamia as long as the power of the Chaldæan andAssyrian monarchies lasted, and the characteristic features of the work inquestion are entirely Assyrian. In that respect neither Péretié norClermont-Ganneau made any mistake. This plaque is a tall rectangle in shape. At its two upper angles there aresalient rings or staples, apparently meant to receive a cord or chain. Atthe bottom it has a slight ledge, suggesting that it stood upon its baseand was suspended at the same time. However this may have been, it shouldbe carefully noticed that both of its faces were meant to be seen. The face we call the obverse is entirely occupied by the body of afantastic quadruped, partly chiselled in slight relief, partly engraved. This monster is upright on his hind feet; his back is turned to thespectator, while the lower part of his body is seen almost in profile. Heclings with his two fore feet to the upper edge of the plaque, and looksover it as over a wall. His fore paws and his head are modelled in theround. He has four wings; two large ones with imbricated feathers grow fromhis shoulders, while a smaller pair are visible beneath them. Thisarrangement we have already encountered in undoubted Assyrian monuments(see Figs. 8, 29, and 123). If we turn the plaque, we find ourselves faceto face with the beast. His skull is depressed, his features hideous, hisgrinning jaws wrinkled like those of a lion or panther. His felinecharacter is enforced by his formidable claws. The body, lithe and lean as that of a leopard, is covered with areticulated marking. His upturned tail nearly touches his loins, whileanother detail of his person exactly reproduces the contours of asnake. [440] The hind feet are those of a bird-of-prey. [Illustration: FIG. 161. --Plaque of chiselled bronze. Obverse. From the_Revue archéologique_. ] We must now describe the reverse of this singular monument (Fig. 162). Inthe first place its upper edge is surmounted by the claws and face of thebeast just described, which thus dominates, as it were, the scenes depictedbelow. These scenes are divided by horizontal bands into four divisions, and thosedivisions are by no means arbitrary; they show us what the sculptor thoughtas to the four regions into which the Assyrian universe was divided. Thoseregions are the _heavens_, the _atmosphere_, the _earth_, and _hell_ or_hades_. The highest division is the narrowest of all. It only contains the starsand a few other symbols grouped almost exactly as we find them on not a fewmonuments of Mesopotamia. [441] The non-sidereal emblems in this divisionare, no doubt, the attributes of gods who live beside the stars in thedepths of the firmament. [Illustration: FIG. 162. --Plaque of chiselled bronze. Reverse. ] In the second division we find seven animal-headed personages passing fromright to left. We need not stop to describe their appearance or gesture; wehave already encountered them at Nineveh mounting guard at the palacegates (Figs. 6 and 7); they belong to the class of demons who, according tocircumstances, are alternately the plagues and protectors of mankind. Theplace they occupy represents a middle region between heaven and earth, namely, the atmosphere, which was believed to be entirely peopled by thesegenii. The third division contains a funerary scene by which we are at oncetransported to earth. On the right there is a standard or candelabrum, andon the left a group of three figures. One of these appears to be a man, theother two have lions' heads and resemble the genii of the division above. The most important group, however, is the one in the middle. A man swathedin a kind of shroud is stretched on a bed, at the head and foot of whichappear two of those personages, half man and half fish, in which the Oannesof Berosus has been recognized (Figs. 9 and 67). [442] The figure on the bedmust be that of a corpse wrapped in those linen bandages of which so manyfragments have been found in the tombs of Lower Chaldæa. The two fish-likegods brandish something over the corpse which appears, so far as it can bemade out, to be a flower or bunch of grass. Their gesture appears to be oneof benediction, like that of a modern priest with the holy-water-sprinkler. The lowest division is by far the most roomy of the four. It evidentlyrepresents the regions under the earth, and both its size and thecomplication of its arrangements show us that it was, in the opinion of theartist, more important than either of the three above it. The whole of itslower part is occupied by five fishes all swimming in one direction, aconventional symbol always employed by Assyrian artists to represent ariver. The left bank is indicated by a raised line running from one side ofthe plaque to the other. On this bank towards the left of the relief thereare two shrubs or reeds above which appears a group of objects whosecharacter is not easily made out. Are they ideographic signs or funeralofferings? The latter more likely. At any rate we may distinguish vases, bottles, a small box or comb and especially the foot of a horse drawn withgreat precision. At the other end of this division a hideous monsteradvances on the river bank. Its semi-bestial, semi-human head is flat andscarred, with a broad upturned nose and a mouth reaching to the ears. Theupper part of its body is that of a man, although its skin is seamed allover with short vertical lines meant to indicate hairs. One arm is raisedand the other lowered, like those of the genii in the second division. Histail is upturned, his feet are those of a bird, and his wings show over hisleft shoulder. On the whole, the resemblance between this figure and thenondescript beast on the obverse of the plaque is so great that we aretempted to think that they both represent the same being. Upon the river and in the centre of this division a scene is going forwardthat takes up more than a third of the whole field. It is no doubt the mainsubject. A small boat glides down the stream, its poop adorned with thehead of a quadruped, its prow with that of a bird. In this boat there is ahorse, seen in profile and with its right fore leg bent at the knee. Theattitude of this animal, which seems born down by a crushing weight, is tobe explained by the rest of the composition. The poor quadruped bears onhis back, in fact, the body of a gigantic and formidable divinity, whomakes use of him not in the orthodox fashion but merely as a kind ofpedestal; his or rather her right knee rests upon the horse's back whileher left foot--which is that of a bird-of-prey--grasps the animal's head. The legs of this strange monster are human, and so is her body, but here, as in the personage walking by the river side, we find the short scratchesthat denote hair; her head is that of a lioness. For although her sex mayappear doubtful to some it is difficult to explain the action of the twolion-cubs that spring towards her breasts otherwise than by M. Clermont-Ganneau's supposition that they are eager for nourishment. The bosom attacked by the two cubs is seen from in front, but the headabove it is in profile, and so high that it rises above the line thatdivides this lower division from the one immediately above it. The jaws areopen, that is to say they grin in harmony with those of the monster lookingover the top of the plaque, with the genii of the third division and thatof the river bank. All this, however, was insufficient to satisfy theartist's desire for a terror-striking effect, and in each hand of thegoddess he has placed a long serpent which hangs vertically downwards, andshows by its curves that it is struggling in her grip. Between the limbs ofthe goddess and the horse's mane there is something that bears a vagueresemblance to a scorpion. We cannot pretend to notice every detail of this curious monument as theirexplanation would lead us too far, and, with all the care we could givethem, we should still have to leave some unexplained. We shall be satisfiedwith pointing out those features of the composition whose meaning seems tobe clear. In the first place the division of the field into four zones should benoticed; it coincides with what we know of the Assyrian mode of dividingthe universe among the powers of heaven, the demons, mankind, and the dead. The chief incident of the third zone shows us that, like the Egyptians, theAssyrians wished to assure themselves of the protection of some benevolentdeity after death. In the Nile valley that protector was Osiris, inMesopotamia Anou, Oannes, or Dagon, the fish god to whom man owed theadvantages of civilization in this world and his safety in the next. Thekingdom of shadows, into which he had to descend after death, was peopledwith monstrous shapes, to give some idea of which sculptors had gone farafield among the wild beasts of the earth, and had brought togetherattributes and weapons that nature never combines in a single animal, suchas the claws of the scorpion, the wings and talons of the eagle, the coilsof the serpent, the mane and muzzle of the great carnivora. The conceptionwhich governs all this is similar to that of which we see the expression inthose Theban tombs where the dead man prosecutes his voyage along thestreams of Ament, and runs the gauntlet of the grimacing demons who wouldseize and destroy him but for the shielding presence of Osiris. And theresemblance is continued in the details. The boat is shaped like theEgyptian boats;[443] the river may be compared to the subterranean Nile ofthe Theban tombs, while it reminds us of the Styx and Acheron of theGrecian Hades. We remember too the line of the chant we have quoted: "There too stand the foundations of the earth, the meeting of the mighty waters. " Certain obscure points that still exist in connection with theChaldæo-Assyrian _inferno_ and with the personages by whom it is peopled, will, no doubt, be removed as the study of the remains progresses. We havebeen satisfied for the moment to explain, with the help of previousexplorers, the notions of the Semites of Mesopotamia upon death and asecond life, and to show that they did not differ sensibly from those ofthe Egyptians or of any other ancient people whose ideas are sufficientlyknown to us. NOTES: [419] See _Art in Ancient Egypt_, vol. I. Chapter 3. [420] Upon the tombs found at Nimroud see LAYARD, _Nineveh_, vol. I. Pp. 17-19 and p. 352; vol. Ii. Pp. 37, 38. Some funerary urns discovered atKhorsabad are figured in BOTTA, _Monument_, &c. Plate 165. There is onenecropolis in Assyria that, in the employment of terra-cotta coffins, resembles the graveyards of Chaldæa; it is that of Kaleh-Shergat, which haslong been under process of rifling by the Arabs, who find cylinders, engraved stones, and jewels among its graves. PLACE judges from theappearance of the coffins and other objects found that this necropolisdates from the Parthian times (_Ninive_, vol. Ii. Pp. 183-185). LAYARD isof the same opinion (_Nineveh_, vol. Ii. Pp. 58, 154, 155). Mr. Rassamfound tombs at Kouyundjik, but much too late to be Assyrian (LOFTUS, _Travels and Researches_, p. 198, note). Loftus found some bones in aroughly-built vault some seventeen feet below the level of thesouth-eastern palace at Nimroud, but he acknowledges he saw nothing to leadhim to assign these remains to the Assyrian epoch more than to any other(_Travels and Researches_, p. 198). Layard was disposed to see in the longand narrow gallery cleared by him at Nimroud (in the middle of the stagedtower that rises at the north-western corner of the mound) a sepulchralvault in which the body of a king must once have been deposited(_Discoveries_, pp. 126, 128), but he confesses that he found nothing init, neither human remains nor any trace of sepulchral furniture. Hisconjecture is therefore entirely in the air, and he himself only puts itforth under all reserve. The difficulty of this inquiry is increased by thefact that the people of different religions by whom the Assyrians weresucceeded always chose by preference to bury their dead at high levels. Even in our own day it is, as a rule, upon the heights studded over theplains that Christians, Mussulmans, and Yezidis establish their cemeteries;and these have become grave obstacles to the explorer in consequence of thenatural disinclination on the part of the peasantry to disturb what may bethe ashes of their ancestors. BENNDORF (_Gesichtshelme_, plate xiv. Figs. 1and 2) reproduces two golden masks similar to those found at Mycenæ, whichwere found, the one at Kouyundjik, the other at some unknown point in thesame district; he mentions (pp. 66, 67) a third discovery of the same kind. But the character of the objects found with these masks seems clearly toshow that the tombs from which they were taken were at least as late as theSeleucidæ, if not as the Roman emperors (Cf. HOFFMANN, in the_Archäologische Zeitung_ for 1878, pp. 25-27). [421] When we come to speak of Chaldæan sculpture, we shall give areproduction of this relief. We cannot make much use of it in the presentinquiry, because its meaning is so obscure. The stone is broken, and theimperfections of the design are such that we can hardly tell what theartist meant to represent. The two figures with baskets on their heads forinstance--are they bringing funeral offerings, or covering with earth theheaped-up corpses on which they mount? [422] LAYARD, _Monuments_, 1st series, plates 14, 21, 26, 57, 64, &c. [423] In more than one battle scene do we find these birds floating overthe heads of the combatants (LAYARD, _Monuments_, 1st series, plates 18, 22, 26, &c). We may also refer to the curious monument from Tell-lôh, inwhich vultures carrying off human heads and limbs in the clouds arerepresented. For an engraving of it see our chapter on Chaldæan sculpture. [424] See an article published by M. J. HALÉVY in the _Revuearchéologique_, vol. Xliv. P. 44, under the title: _L'Immortalité de l'Âmechez les Peuples sémitiques_. [425] PLACE, _Ninive_, vol. Ii. P. 184. [426] LOFTUS, _Travels and Researches_, pp. 198, 199. [427] LOFTUS especially speaks strongly upon this point (_Travels_, &c. P. 199). "By far the most important of these sepulchral cities is Warka, wherethe enormous accumulation of human remains proves that it was a peculiarlysacred spot, and that it was so esteemed for many centuries. It isdifficult to convey anything like a correct notion of the piles upon pilesof human relics which there utterly astound the beholder. Excepting onlythe triangular space between the three principal ruins, the whole remainderof the platform, the whole space between the walls, and an unknown extentof desert beyond them, are everywhere filled with the bones and sepulchresof the dead. There is probably no other site in the world which can comparewith Warka in this respect; even the tombs of Ancient Thebes do not containsuch an aggregate amount of mortality. From its foundation by Urukh untilfinally abandoned by the Parthians--a period of probably 2, 500 years--Warkaappears to have been a sacred burial-place!" [428] See the curious paper of M. E. LE BLANT entitled: _Tables égyptiennesà Inscriptions grecques_ (_Revue archéologique_, 1874). [429] In his sixth and seventh chapters LOFTUS gives a very interestingaccount of his visits to the sanctuaries of Nedjef and Kerbela. [430] The work he alludes to as his Assurioi logoi (i. 184). [431] HERODOTUS, i. 198. [432] See above, pp. 158-9 and fig. 49. The details that here follow areborrowed from the narrations of those who have explored the sepulchralmounds of lower Chaldæa. Perhaps the most important of these relations isthat of Mr. J. E. TAYLOR, to which we have already referred so often(_Notes on the Ruins of Mugheir_, to which may be added his _Notes onAbou-Sharein and Tell-el-Lahm_, p. 413, in the same volume of the_Journal_). Cf. LOFTUS's eighteenth chapter (_Travels_, &c. P. 198) and thepages in LAYARD's _Discoveries_, from 556 to 561. [433] "Each of the Babylonians, " says HERODOTUS (i. 195), "carries a sealand a walking-stick carved at the top into the form of an apple, a rose, alily, an eagle, or something similar, for it is not their habit to use astick without an ornament. " [434] LOFTUS, _Travels_, p. 212. [435] See _Art in Ancient Egypt_, vol. I. P. 145, note 3. [436] _Les Fouilles de Chaldée, communication d'une Lettre de M. DeSarzec_, par LÉON HEUZEY, § 1 (in the _Revue archéologique_ for November, 1881). [437] _Art in Ancient Egypt_, vol. I. Pp. 127 _et seq. _ [438] M. OPPERT has translated this text in full in a work entitled:_L'Immortalité de l'Âme chez les Chaldéens_ (_Annales de philosophiechrétienne_, vol. Viii. 1884), and he has reproduced his version with a fewmodifications of detail in _Fragments Mythologiques_ (Quantin, 1881, 18mo). M. HALÉVY has given long extracts from the same document in an article inthe _Revue des Études Juives_ (October-December, 1881), entitled: _LesInscriptions peintes de Citium_, § 2; he has returned to the same subjectin an article in the _Revue archéologique_ (July, 1882), _L'Immortalité del'Âme chez les Peuples sémitiques_. We reproduce his translation as themost recent. Herr SCHRADER has devoted a whole book to the translation andexplanation of this same myth (_Die Hoellenfahrt der Istar_, Giessen, 1874). [439] See M. CLERMONT-GANNEAU'S _L'Enfer assyrien_, first part (_Revuearchéologique_ vol. Xxxviii. And plate xxv. ). The second article, whichshould have contained the explanation of this little monument, has neverappeared, to the great regret of all who appreciate the knowledge andpenetration of that learned writer at their proper value. The first articleis nothing but a detailed description, which we abridge. Certain doubtswere expressed at the time of its publication as to the authenticity ofthis object; nothing, however, has happened to confirm them. Both incomposition and execution it is excellent. M. Péretié, moreover, was notone to be easily deceived. M. Clermont-Ganneau described and illustratedthis bronze plate from photographs, but since his paper appeared he hasagain visited the East and seen and handled the original. [440] M. CLERMONT-GANNEAU reminds us that this peculiarity is repeated in amonster on one of the Nimroud reliefs (see LAYARD, _Monuments_, series ii. Plate 3). [441] See above, p. 72, and Figs. 3, 10, 11, 12. See also the notes to M. Clermont-Ganneau's article. He has no difficulty in showing how general wasthe use of these emblems. [442] See page 65. [443] Compare Figs. 23, 31, and especially 159 and 209 of _Art in AncientEgypt_, vol. I. § 2. --_The Chaldæan Tomb. _ The principle of the Chaldæan sepulchre was similar to that of the Egyptianmastaba or hypogeum; it had to supply the same wants and to render the sameservices; the task imposed upon the architect was in each case governed bythe same general idea. Why then have we found nothing in Mesopotamia thatmay be compared, even at the most respectful distance, with the splendidtomb-houses of the Theban necropolis, nor even with those of Phoenicia, Asia Minor, or Etruria? The reason for the difference is easily told; it isto be found in the nature and configuration of the country itself. Therewere no mountains in whose sides tomb-chambers could be cut, and in theloose permeable soil of the plain it would have been practically impossibleto establish pits that should be at once spacious and durable. We shall find, no doubt, in almost every country, sepulchres constructedabove the soil like palaces and temples. In Egypt we have alreadyencountered the pyramid, but even there the tomb-chamber is in most casescut in the rock itself, and the huge mass of stone above it is nothing morethan a sort of colossal lid. Funerary architecture is not content, likethat of civil or religious buildings, to borrow its materials from therock; it cuts and chisels the living rock itself. In every country thefirst idea that seems to occur to man, when he has the mortal remains ofhis own people to make away with, is to confide them to the earth. Inmountainous countries rock is everywhere near the soil and rises through ithere and there, especially on the slopes of the hills. It is as a rule bothsoft enough to be easily cut with a proper tool, and hard enough, or atleast sufficiently capable of hardening when exposed to the air, faithfullyto preserve any form that may be given to it. As soon as man emerged frombarbarism and conceived the desire to carry with him into the next worldthe goods he had enjoyed in this, the hastily cut hole of the savage becamefirst an ample chamber and then a collection of chambers. It became arichly furnished habitation, a real palace. But even then the features thatdistinguish a house of the living from one of the dead were carefullypreserved. The largest of the tombs in the Biban-el-Molouk is no more thanthe development of the primitive grave. As for those tombs in which thesepulchral chamber is above the ground, as in the famous Mausoleum ofHalicarnassus, they are merely brilliant exceptions, embodiments ofprincely caprice or architectural ambition. Funerary architecture is, invirtue of its destination, a subterranean architecture, an architecture ofthe rock. The countries in which it has been managed with the greatestpower and originality are those whose soil lent itself most kindly to thework of excavation. The limestone and sandstone chains of the Nile valley, the abrupt flanks of Persian ravines, of Cappadocian and Lycian hillsides, and the rocky slopes of Greece and Etruria, were excellently fitted for thework of the funerary architect. If the civilization of the Mesopotamian Semites had originated in thecountry above Nineveh, at the foot of those hills in which the Tigris hasits springs, the fathers of the people would perhaps have cut tomb chamberslike those of Egypt in the soft gypsum, and, in later years, theirdescendants, instead of breaking entirely with the traditions of the pastwould have raised _tumuli_ in the plains and constructed within them brickchambers to take the place of vaults cut in the living rock. Chaldæa wouldthen have been dotted over with sepulchral mounds like those with which thesteppes of central Russia are covered. Nothing of the kind has as yet beendiscovered; none of the _tells_ or mounds of sun-dried bricks have yet beenidentified as tombs, and that is because, as we have seen, the course ofcivilization was from south to north; the first impulse came from theshores of the Persian Gulf, from the people inhabiting alluvial plainsconsisting merely of sand and broken stone. From the very first hour thesepeople had to compel clay, kneaded and dried in the sun or the brick kiln, to render the services which are demanded from stone elsewhere. They werecontent therefore with entombing their dead either in small brick vaults, under large terra-cotta covers, or in coffins of the latter material. The tomb chamber illustrated in our Fig. 89 may be taken as a type. It isfive feet high by seven feet long, and three feet seven inches wide. Thevault is closed at the top by a single row of bricks and at each end by adouble wall of the same material. There are no doors. The tombs once shutmust have been inaccessible. The structure was put together with such carethat neither dust nor water could get within it. Some of these graves, andamong them this particular one, inclosed only one skeleton. Taylor foundfourteen clay vases in it, not to mention other objects such as a walkingstick, rings, cylinders, and bronze cups. Besides these there was a goldwaist-band about an inch wide, showing it to be the grave of a rich man. Inother tombs as many as three, four, and even eleven skeletons were found. In these the brick under the head and the bronze cup in the hand weresometimes missing, but the water jars were always there. [Illustration: FIG. 163. --Tomb at Mugheir; from Taylor. ] In other parts of the same cemetery the dead instead of being placed in avault were laid upon an area paved with large well burnt bricks and coveredwith a huge terra-cotta lid. These lids were in several pieces, joinedtogether with reeds soaked in bitumen. We give a section (Fig. 163) andelevation (Fig. 164) of one of these peculiar sepulchres. The whole wasabout seven feet long, three high, and three wide. The body of the lid is formed of several rings decreasing in thickness withtheir distance from the ground. The top is an oval plateau divided intoeight symmetrical compartments by flat bands. The skeleton always lies onits side, generally the left, the limbs being drawn up as shown in theengraving (163). Taylor gives a complete list of the objects found in thistomb together with notes as to their exact position. [Illustration: FIG. 164. --Tomb at Mugheir; from Taylor. ] [Illustration: FIG. 165. --Tomb at Mugheir; from Taylor. ] Sometimes the covering is more simple in construction and has a domed top(Fig. 165). Elsewhere in the same necropolis numerous examples of a stillmore elementary form of burial were discovered. The skeletons of childrenwere found between two hollow plates, and full grown bodies in a kind ofdouble vase into which they could only have been thrust with somedifficulty and that after being doubled up. Still more often coffins wereof the form shown in our Fig. 166. The diameter of these cylindrical jarswas about two feet. The joint between them was sealed with bitumen. At oneend there was a hole to allow the gases generated by decomposition toescape. None of these coffins contained more than one skeleton, but narrowas they were room had been found for the vases and dishes. These weremostly of earthenware, but a few of bronze were also encountered. Eachcoffin held an arrow-head of the latter material, while the feet and handsof the skeleton were adorned with iron rings. In several cases the remainsof gold ornaments, of sculptured ivories and engraved shells, werediscovered. [Illustration: FIG. 166. --Tomb, or coffin, at Mugheir; from Taylor. ] Finally the fashion seems to have changed, and a more elegant form ofcoffin to have come into use. It was still of terra-cotta, but its surfacewas covered with a rich glaze originally blue but now mostly of a darkgreen. Here and there, on the parts shielded best from the atmosphere, theblue has preserved its colour. The general shape of these coffins is thatof a shoe or slipper; the oval opening through which the body wasintroduced has a grooved edge for the adjustment of the lid. The small holefor the escape of gas is at the narrow end. This type seems to date fromthe last centuries of antiquity rather than from the time of the ChaldæanEmpire; its examples are found close to the surface of the cemeteries, whence we may fairly conclude that they were the last accessions. It isstill more significant that the images stamped upon the panels with whichthe lids are decorated have little to remind us of the bas-reliefs ofAssyria and Chaldæa, and it is not until we turn to the medals of theParthians and Sassanids that we find anything to which they can be readilycompared. [444] In the cemeteries of Lower Chaldæa the various receptacles for human dustthat we have described are heaped vertically one upon another, so that withthe passage of time they have formed huge mounds covering vast spaces andrising conspicuously above the plain (see Fig. 167, letter c). Loftus tellsus that at Warka he dug trenches between thirty and forty feet deep withoutreaching the lowest stratum of sepulchres. There was no apparent order intheir arrangement. Sometimes brick divisions were found for a certainlength, as if used to separate the tombs of one family from those ofanother. A layer of fine dust, spread evenly by the winds from the desert, separated the coffins. Terra-cotta cones inscribed with prayers had beenthrown into the interstices. Sometimes, as at Mugheir, the mound thusformed is surmounted by a paved platform upon which open the drains thattraverse the mass. [445] In most cases these mounds have been turned over inall their upper parts by the Arabs. It is probable that in ancient dayseach of these huge cemeteries had priests and superintendents told off towatch over them, to assign his place to each new comer, and to levy feeslike those paid in our day to the mollahs attached to the Mosques of Nedjefand Kerbela. They guarded the integrity of the mound, and when it hadreached the regulation height, caused it to be paved and finally closed. In none of these cemeteries has any tomb been discovered that by its size, richness, or isolation, proclaimed itself the burial place of royalty, andyet the sovereigns of Mesopotamia must have had something analogous to thevast and magnificent sepulchres of the Egyptian kings. Their tombs must atleast have been larger and more splendid than those of private individuals. In the case of Susiana we know that it was so through an inscription ofAssurbanipal. The Assyrian king gives a narrative of his campaign. He tellsus how his soldiers penetrated into the sacred forests and set fire tothem, and then to show more clearly with how stern a vengeance he hadvisited the revolted Elamites, he added: "The tombs both of their ancientand their modern kings, of those kings who did not fear Assur and Istar, mylords, and had troubled the kings, my fathers, I threw them down, Idemolished them, I let in the light of the sun upon them, then I carriedaway their corpses into Assyria. I left their shades without sepulture anddeprived them of the offerings of those who owed them libations. "[446] If the Elamite dynasty had its royal necropolis near Susa, in whichfunerary rites were celebrated down to the moment of the Assyrian conquest, it could hardly have been otherwise with the powerful and pious monarchiesof Chaldæa. History has in fact preserved a few traditions of the royalsepulchres of that country. Herodotus mentions the tomb of that QueenNitocris to whom he attributes so many great works;[447] it is supposedthat she was an Egyptian princess and the wife of Nabopolassar. Accordingto the historian she caused a sepulchral chamber to be constructed forherself in the walls of Babylon, above one of the principal gates. So faras the terms of the inscription are concerned he may have been hoaxed bythe native dragomans, but there is nothing to rouse our scepticism in thefact of a tomb having been contrived in the thickness of the wall. AtSinkara Loftus discovered two corbel-vaulted tombs imbedded in a mass ofmasonry which had apparently served as basement to a temple rebuilt byNebuchadnezzar. [448] Some of the Babylonian princes, however, were buried in that part of theChaldæan territory that was inclosed by the Euphrates and Tigris andcontained most of the cemeteries of which we have been speaking. Accordingto Arrian, Alexander, on his way back from Lake Pallacopas, passed close tothe tomb of one of the ancient kings, "They say, " adds the historian, "thatmost of the former kings of Assyria were buried among the lakes andswamps. "[449] [Illustration: FIG. 167. --Map of the ruins of Mugheir; from Taylor. H, H, H, H, circumference of 2, 946 yards; _a_, platform of house; _b_, pavement at edge of platform; _c_, tomb mound; _d, e, g, h, k, l, m_, points at which excavations were made; _f, f, f, f_, comparatively openspace with very low mounds; _n, n_, graves; _o_, the great two-storiedruin. ] Loftus suggests that these royal tombs should be sought at Warka, but hefound no ruin to which any such character could be certainly assigned. Theonly mention of a royal Assyrian tomb in history is of a kind that tells usnothing. "Semiramis, " says Diodorus, "buried Ninus within the boundarywalls of the palace, she raised a mound of extraordinary size over histomb; Ctesias says it was nine stades high and ten wide. The townstretching to the middle of the plain, near the Euphrates, [450] thefunerary mound was conspicuous at many stades' distance like an acropolis;they tell me that it still exists although Nineveh was overthrown by theMedes when they destroyed the Assyrian empire. " The exaggerations in whichCtesias indulged may here be recognized. It is impossible to take seriouslystatements which make the tomb of Ninus some 5, 500 feet high and 6, 100 indiameter. The history of Ninus and Semiramis as Ctesias tells it, is nomore than a romantic tale like those of the _Shah-Nameh_. All that we maysurely gather from the passage in question is that, at the time ofCtesias, and perhaps a little later, the remains of a great staged-towerwere to be seen among the ruins of Nineveh. The popular imagination haddubbed this the tomb of Ninus, just as one of the great heaps of debristhat now mark the site is called the tomb of Jonah. All that has hitherto been recovered in the way of Mesopotamian tombarchitecture is of little importance so far as beauty is concerned, and wemay perhaps be blamed for dwelling upon these remains at such length in ahistory of art. But we had our reasons for endeavouring to reunite andinterpret the scanty facts by which some light is thrown on the subject. Ofall the creations of man, his tomb is that, perhaps, which enables us topenetrate farthest into his inner self; there is no work of his hands intowhich he puts more of his true soul, in which he speaks more naively andwith a more complete acknowledgment of his real beliefs and the bases ofhis hopes. To pass over the Chaldæan tomb in silence because it is amediocre work of art would be to turn a blind eye to the whole of one sideof the life of a great people, a people whose _rôle_ in the development ofthe ancient civilization was such as to demand that we should leave nostone unturned to make ourselves masters of their every thought. NOTES: [444] LOFTUS, _Travels_, &c. , pp. 203-4. The British Museum possessesseveral fine specimens of these glazed-ware coffins. The details given byLOFTUS (chapter xx. ), upon the necropolis of Sinkara may be read withinterest. [445] See above, p. 158, and fig. 49. [446] M. Stanislas GUYARD published a translation of this passage in the_Journal asiatique_, for May-June, 1880, p. 514; some terms which hadremained doubtful, were explained by M. AMIAUD, in the same journal forAugust-September, 1881, p. 237. [447] HERODOTUS, i. 187. [448] LOFTUS, _Travels_, &c. , pp. 248-9. [449] ARRIAN, _Anabasis_, vii. 22. [450] DIODORUS, ii. 7, 1-2. [Illustration] CHAPTER IV. RELIGIOUS ARCHITECTURE. § 1. --_Attempts to restore the Principal Types. _ In spite of all our researches we have not succeeded in finding in thewhole of Mesopotamia a real sepulchre, a tomb on which the talent of thearchitect has been lavished as well as the structural skill of the builder. The Chaldæans and Assyrians made greater efforts when they had to honour agod than when they were called upon to provide a lodging for their dead. Ofall the structures they raised, their temples seem to have been the mostambitious in height and in grandeur of proportion though not in extent ofground covered. This the classic writers tell us, and their assertions areconfirmed in more than one particular by documents written in the Assyrianlanguage. We can also check their statements to some extent by the study ofthe monuments themselves or rather of their somewhat scanty remains. We shall seek in vain for ruins that may be compared to those of theEgyptian sanctuaries. The nature of the materials employed in the valley ofthe Euphrates made the degradation of a building and the obliteration ofits lines far more rapid than elsewhere. And yet in many cases the almostformless aspect of structures once so greatly admired, does not preventthose who know how to crossexamine them from restoring many of their formerarrangements; and both in the bas-reliefs and in some very small monumentswe find certain sculptured sketches that have been recognized asrepresenting temples. These sketches are very imperfect and very much abridged: the ruinsthemselves are confused; of the Greek and Assyrian texts some are short andvague, others excite our scepticism. Without wishing to deny the value ofthe methods employed or the importance of the results obtained, we canhardly believe that the certainty with which technical terms are translatedis well founded. There are some of these terms which if they occurred in aGreek inscription would cause no little embarrassment by their purelyspecial character, and that even to one who might unite in his singleperson the qualifications of a Greek scholar with those of an architect orsculptor. We hope, though we hardly expect to see our hope realized, thatsome day a Mesopotamian temple may be found in good preservation. Untilthen we cannot give to our restorations of such buildings anythingapproaching the accuracy or completeness so easily attained when the greatreligious edifices of Greece or Egypt are in question. We find none ofthose well defined elements, those clear and precise pieces of informationwhich elsewhere allow us to obliterate the injuries worked by time andhuman enemies. The foot of every wall is heaped about with such formlessmasses of brick and brick dust, that it is almost impossible to make fullexplorations or to take exact measurements. One must be content with anapproximation to the truth. With the one exception of the staged tower at Khorsabad, we shall notattempt to give a single restoration in the proper sense of the word. Notthat we mean to say that the different temple models given in our PlatesII. , III. , and IV. , and in our Fig. 173, are creations of our fancy. No oneof the four pretends to reconstruct one famous building more than another. They are abstract types, each representing, in its general features, one ofthe varieties into which Assyro-Chaldæan temples may be divided. Thearrangements in which the originality of each type consists were only fixedby M. Chipiez after long researches. In each case he has taken for hispoint of departure either a Greek or Assyrian text, a sculptured relief, orfacts gleaned by the examination of original sites; in most cases he hasbeen able to supplement and correct the information gained from one ofthese sources by that from another. He has thus entered into the spirit ofMesopotamian architecture, and restored the chief forms it put on in itsreligious buildings according to time and district. He cannot say that allthe details figured were found united, as they may be here, on a singlebuilding; but they are not inventions, no one of them is without authority, and the use to which they are put has been decided by the examination ofactual remains. We may say the same of proportions. These are the result ofstudy and of the collation of one ruin and one piece of evidence withanother; they have not been taken from any single building. Finally therewere certain details, such as the trace and elevation of the ramps, thatwere full of difficulty. M. Chipiez arrived at the solution finally adoptedby an inductive process, by carefully weighing the obvious conditions ofthe problem and choosing those arrangements by which its requirementsseemed most simply and conveniently met. In virtue of their generalcharacter M. Chipiez's restorations reach a high degree of probability. They may be compared, if we may use the expression, to those triumphs ofhistorical synthesis in which no attempt is made to narrate events as theyoccurred and in all their details, but in which a whole people lives, andthe character of a whole century is summed up, in a picture whose everyline and colour is borrowed from reality. [451] In spite of their apparent variety, all the buildings we shall describe inthe present chapter may be referred to a single fundamental type. They areeach formed of several cubic masses superimposed one upon another anddiminishing in volume in proportion to their height in the monument. Wehave already explained how such a system came to be adopted. [452] It wasdetermined by the limitations of the only material at the architect'sdisposal, and it had at least this advantage, that it enabled him torelieve the monotony of the Chaldæan plains with artificial mountains whosevast size and boldness of line were calculated to impress the minds of thepeople, and to give them a great idea of their master's power and of themajesty of the deities in whose honour they were raised. [Illustration: FIG. 168. --View of the Birs Nimroud; after Felix Thomas. ] Mesopotamia was covered, then, by buildings resembling a stepped pyramid intheir general outlines. We find them in the reliefs (Fig. 10), and in theoldest cities we can frequently recognize the confused ruins of their twoor three lower stories. Our only doubt is connected with the possible useof these buildings, the _zigguratts_ of the Assyrian texts. We shall nothere stop to recapitulate the evidence in favour of their religiouscharacter; it will suffice to quote the description given by Herodotus ofthe temple of Bel or Belus at Babylon. As to whether the ruins of thatbuilding are to be identified with _Babil_ (Fig. 37) or the _Birs-Nimroud_(Fig. 168) we shall inquire presently. This is the description ofHerodotus:-- "In the other (fortress) was the sacred precinct of Jupiter Belus, a squareinclosure two furlongs each way with gates of solid brass; which was alsoremaining in my time. In the middle of the precinct there was a tower ofsolid masonry, a furlong in length and breadth, upon which was raised asecond tower, and on that a third, and so on up to eight. The ascent to thetop is on the outside, by a path which winds round all the towers. When oneis about half way up one finds a resting-place and seats, where persons arewont to sit some time on their way to the summit. On the topmost towerthere is a spacious temple, and inside the temple stands a couch of unusualsize, richly adorned with a golden table by its side. There is no statue ofany kind set up in the place nor is the chamber occupied of nights by anyone but a single native woman. .. . Below in the same precinct there is asecond temple, in which is a sitting figure of Jupiter all of gold . .. Outside the temple are two altars. "[453] This description is, of course, very short; it omits many details that weshould have wished to find in it; but like nearly all the descriptions ofHerodotus it is very clear. The old historian saw well, and his mindretained what he saw. From his recital it is plain that this was the finestof the Babylonian temples, and that even when partly ruinous, under thesuccessors of Alexander, its colossal dimensions were yet able to astonishforeign visitors. We may, then, take it as the type of the Chaldæan temple, as the finest religious building in the first city of Mesopotamia. Nebuchadnezzar reconstructed it and made it higher and richer in itsornamentation than before, but he kept to the ancient foundations and madeno change in the general character of the plan. In this single edifice weregathered up all the threads of a long tradition; it was, as it were, thesupreme effort, the last word of the national art: and Herodotus declaresplainly that it was a staged tower. Such an assertion puts the matter beyond a doubt, and enables us to pointto the staged tower as the form chosen by these people and made use ofthroughout their civilization for the buildings raised in honour of theirgods. And having dismissed this fundamental question we have now to give arapid description of the principal varieties of the type as they have beenestablished by M. Chipiez. And as we go on we shall point out theauthorities for each restoration; whether the ruins themselves, theinscribed texts, or the sculptured reliefs. [Illustration: FIGS. 169-171. --Longitudinal section, plan and horizontalsection of the rectangular type of Chaldæan temple. ] In the first line we must place the RECTANGULAR CHALDÆAN TEMPLE (Plate II. And Figs. 169, 170, and 171). We have put it first because the remains fromwhich it has been reconstructed have all been found in Lower Chaldæa, thatis, amongst the oldest of the Chaldæan cities. As we learn from the texts, these temples were repaired under the last kings of Babylon, and it wastheir antiquity that made them dear both to the people and their kings. Wemay believe, therefore, that in restoring them care was taken to preservetheir ancient features. It would be the upper part of their retaining wallsthat required renewal, and these would be rebuilt on their ancientfoundations. Here and there the latter exist even at the present day, and the names of the earliest Chaldæan princes may be read upon theirbricks. [454] [Illustration: PLATE II. RECTANGULAR CHALDÆAN TEMPLE Restored by Ch. Chipiez. ] The remains studied by Messrs. Taylor and Loftus at Warka (Fig. 172), Abou-Sharein, and Mugheir have furnished the chief elements for ourrestoration, which bears a strong resemblance to the ruin at Warka calledBouvariia (A on the map), and one still stronger to that temple at Mugheirwhose present state is shown in our Figs. 48 and 143. This first type ischaracterized by the form of its lower, and the situation of its upper, stages. The latter are not placed in the centre of the platform on whichthey stand; they are thrown back much nearer to one of the two shortersides than to the other, so that the building has a front and a back. Thefront is almost entirely taken up with wide staircases. [455] The staircaseleading from the first story to the second must alone have been concealedin the interior of the building, an arrangement which avoided the necessityfor breaking up the ample solidity of that imposing stage (see Plate II. ). [Illustration: FIG. 172. --Map of Warka with its ruins; from Loftus. A, Bouvariia; B, Wuswas; C, ruin from the Parthian epoch; D, buildingdecorated with coloured cones (see page 279). ] The surroundings of the temple in our plate--the background of slightlyundulating plain, the houses similar to those found by Taylor and Loftus, in which they discovered vaulted passages traversing the thickness of thewalls[456]--are, of course, purely imaginary. The temple itself, like the palace at Khorsabad, was raised on a vastplatform upon which the city walls abutted. This platform was reached bywide flights of steps. [457] Lateral ramps led to a second platform, inclosed on every side, with which the sacred part of the building, theHaram, began. We have already spoken of the panelled ornament with whichthe great, flat surfaces of its walls were relieved. [458] The lowest stageof the temple was provided with buttresses like those that still exist inthe temple of Mugheir (Fig. 43). A high, rectangular plinth--decorated inour restoration with glazed faïence[459]--was interposed between the firstand second stage. [460] A rectangular chapel decorated, in all probability, with metal plaques and glazed polychromatic bricks, crowned the whole. Traces of this chapel have been found at Mugheir, and the wealth of itsdecoration is attested by many pieces of evidence. [461] At Abou-Shareinalso there are vestiges of a small and richly ornamented sanctuary crowningthe second stage of a ruin whose aspect now bears a distinct resemblance tothat of the temple at Mugheir. The triple row of crenellations we havegiven to this sanctuary or chapel was suggested by the altars and obelisks(Fig. 107 and 111). Here, as at Nineveh, these battlements must have beenthe one universal finish to the walls. The use to which we have put them isquite in harmony with the spirit of Mesopotamian architecture, but there isno direct evidence of their presence in these buildings. In this particularour restoration is conjectural. A glance at our longitudinal section (Fig. 169) will show that we have leftthe main body of this great mass of sun-dried brick absolutely solid. Itwas in vain that, at Mugheir, trenches and shafts were cut through theflanks of the ruin, not a sign of any apartment or void of the mostelementary kind was found. [462] This Mugheir temple rises hardly more than fifty feet above the level ofthe plain. The restoration by M. Chipiez, for which it furnished theelements, shows a height of 135 feet; judging from the proportions of itsremains the building can hardly have been higher than that. But it iscertain that many temples reached a far greater height, otherwise theirsize could not have made any great impression upon travellers who had seenthe Egyptian pyramids. Even now the Birs-Nimroud, which has been undergoingfor so many centuries a continual process of diminution, rises no less than235 feet above the surrounding country, [463] and Strabo, the only Greekauthor who says anything precise as to the height of the greatest of theBabylonian monuments, writes thus: "This monument, which was, they say, overthrown by Xerxes, was a square pyramid of burnt brick, one stade(606-3/4 feet) high, and one stade in diameter. "[464] The arrangement by which such a height could be most easily reached wouldbe the superposition of square masses one upon another, each mass beingcentrally placed on the upper surface of the one below it. The weight wouldbe more equally divided and the risks of settlement more slight than in anyother system. Of this type M. Chipiez has restored two varieties. We shallfirst describe the simpler of the two, which we may call the SQUARESINGLE-RAMPED CHALDÆAN TEMPLE (Figs. 173, 174, 175, 176). The principal elements for this restoration have been taken from the stagedtower at Khorsabad known as the _Observatory_, but M. Chipiez has expandedits dimensions until they almost reach those ascribed to the temple of Belby Strabo. Moreover, he had to decide a delicate question which thediscovery of the Khorsabad _Observatory_, where only the four lower stagesremained, had done nothing to solve, namely the plan and inclination of theramp. In M. Thomas's restoration of the Khorsabad tower, the last sectionof the ramp at the top, is parallel to that at the bottom, and the crowningplatform is not exactly upon the central axis of the building. [465] In M. Chipiez's restoration the top platform is in the centre, like those belowit, and the upper end of his ramp is vertically over the spot where itleaves the ground. This result has been obtained by a peculiar arrangementof the inclined plane which must have been known to the Mesopotamianarchitects, seeing how great was their practice and how desirable, in theireyes, was the symmetrical aspect which it alone could give. We havesuggested the varied colours of the different stages by changes of tone inour engraving. In spite of the words of Herodotus M. Chipiez has only givenhis tower seven stages, because that number seems to have been sacred andtraditional, and Herodotus may very well have counted the plinth or theterminal chapel in the eight mentioned in his description. Bearing in minda passage in Diodorus--"At the summit Semiramis placed three statues ofbeaten gold, Zeus, Hera, and Rhea"[466]--we have crowned its apex with sucha group. The phrase of Herodotus, "Below . .. There is a second temple, " hasled us to introduce chapels contrived in the interior of the mass andopening on the ramp at the fifth and sixth stories. There is nothing toforbid the idea that such chambers were much more numerous than this, andopened, sometimes on one, sometimes on another, of the four faces. [Illustration: FIG. 173. --Type of square, single-ramped Chaldæan temple. Compiled by Ch. Chipiez. ] The buildings at the lower part of our engraving are imaginary, but theyare by no means improbable. Among them may be distinguished the wideflights of steps and inclined planes by which the platform on which thetemple stood was reached. [467] At the foot of the temple on the right ofthe engraving there is a palace, on the left two obelisk-shaped steles anda small temple of a type to be presently described. Behind the towerstretch away the waters of a lake. Nebuchadnezzar, in one of hisinscriptions, speaks of surrounding the temple he had built with a lake. [Illustration: FIGS. 174-176. --Transverse section, plan, and horizontalsection of a square, single-ramped, Chaldæan Temple. ] [Illustration: FIGS. 177-179. --Transverse section, plan, and horizontalsection of a square, double-ramped Chaldæan Temple. ] In seeking to vary the effect produced by these external ramps, the idea ofa more complicated arrangement than the one last noticed may have occurredto the Chaldees. This M. Chipiez has embodied in his restoration of aSQUARE DOUBLE-RAMPED CHALDÆAN TEMPLE (Plate III. And Figs. 177, 178, and179). As in the last model, there are seven stages, each stage being squareon plan, but the difference consists in the use of two ramps leading frombase to summit. Each of these keeps to its own side of the building, onlyapproaching the other on the front and back façades at the fourth, fifth, and sixth stages (see Plate III). In order that the building as a wholeshould have a symmetrical and monumental appearance, it was necessary thatall its seven stages--with the exception of the first, to which a ratherdifferent _rôle_ was assigned--should be of equal height. But their lengthand width differed in proportion to their height in the building. Thecontinual shortening of the distance within which the incline had to bepacked, would, if we suppose each ramp confined to one side of the tower, have required the slope to become steeper with each story. Such a want ofparallelism would have been very ugly, and there was but one means ofavoiding it, and that was to continue the ramps nearly to the centre of thefront at the fourth and sixth stages, and to the centre of the posteriorfaçade at the fifth. The advantages of such an arrangement are obvious. Banished mostly to the flanks the double ramp left four stages clearboth at front and back, providing an ample promenade. On the other three itshowed itself just sufficiently to "furnish" the building and diversify itsaspect without in any way encumbering it. The whole structure terminated ina chapel placed on the central axis of the tower, and surmounted by acupola. The inscriptions mention the dome covered with leaves of chiselledgold which crowned at Babylon that temple "to the foundations of the earth"which was restored by Nebuchadnezzar. [468] [Illustration: PLATE III. CHALDÆAN TEMPLE SQUARE ON PLAN AND WITH DOUBLERAMP Restored by Ch. Chipiez. ] In these texts another sanctuary included in the same building and placedhalf way between the base and summit is mentioned. This was the sepulchralchamber of Bel-Merodach in which his oracle was consulted; in M. Chipiez'srestoration the entrance to this sanctuary is placed in the middle of thefifth story. The vast esplanade about the base of the temple was suggested by thedescription of Herodotus. It is borne by two colossal plinths flanked andretained by buttresses. In our plate the lower of these two plinths is onlyhinted at in the two bottom corners. In the distance behind the templeitself may be seen one of those embattled walls which divided Babylon intoso many fortresses, and, still farther away, another group of largebuildings surrounded by a wall and the ordinary houses of the city. This double-ramped type is at once the most beautiful and the mostworkmanlike of those offered by these staged towers. With a single ramp weget a tower whose four faces are repetitions of each other, but here wehave a true façade, on which a happy contrast is established between theunbroken stages and those upon which the ramps appear--between obliquelines and lines parallel with the soil. The building gains in repose andsolidity, and its true scale becomes more evident than when the eye is ledinsensibly from base to summit by a monotonous spiral. [Illustration: FIGS. 180-182. --Square Assyrian temple. Longitudinalsection, horizontal section and plan. ] We cannot positively affirm that the architects of Mesopotamia understoodand made use of the system just described; there is no positive evidenceon the point. [469] It contains, however, nothing but a logical developmentfrom the premises, nothing but what is in perfect keeping with Mesopotamianhabits, nothing that involves difficulties of execution or constructionbeyond those over which we know them to have triumphed. Besides, we haveproofs that they were not content to go on servilely reproducing one andthe same type for twenty centuries; their temples were not all shaped inthe same mould. The type of the Mugheir temple differed sensibly from thatof the Khorsabad _Observatory_. One of the Kouyundjik sculptures reveals acurious variant of the traditional theme, so far as Assyria was concerned, in an arrangement of the staged tower that we should never have suspectedbut for the survival of this relief (Fig. 34). The picture in question isno doubt very much abridged and far from true to the proportions of theoriginal, but yet it has furnished M. Chipiez with the elements of arestoration in which conjecture has had very little to say. This we havecalled the SQUARE ASSYRIAN TEMPLE (see Plate IV. And Figs. 180-182). [Illustration: PLATE IV. SQUARE ASSYRIAN TEMPLE Restored by Ch. Chipiez. ] According to the relief the tower itself rises upon a dome-shaped mound infront of which there are a large doorway and two curved ramps. From allthat we know of Assyrian buildings of this kind we may be sure that theoriginal of the picture was so placed. The form of the mound may bedescribed as reproducing the extrados of a depressed arch. This is the onlyform on which flights of steps with a curve similar to that here showncould be constructed. The design of the steps in our plate correspondsexactly to that indicated more roughly by the sculptor; no other means ofaffording convenient access to the base of the tower--at least outside themound--could have been contrived. Two doors were pierced at the head of thesteps through the large panels with which the lower stage of the toweritself was decorated, and from that point, so far as we can tell from therelief, the ascent was continued by means of internal staircases. Thesculptor has only shown three stages, but--unless the absence of anythingabove has been caused by the mutilation of the slab--we may suppose that hehas voluntarily suppressed a fourth. [470] In any case the third story istoo large to have formed the apex of the tower. The general proportionssuggest at least one more stage for the support of the usual chapel. Thelatter we have restored as a timber structure covered with metal plates, skins, or coloured planks. The three stages immediately below the chapel wehave decorated with painted imitations of panels, carried out either infresco or glazed brick. As for the internal arrangements we know verylittle. The great doorway with which the mound itself is prefaced in therelief must have led to some apartment worthy of its size and importance;we have therefore pierced the mass in our section with a suite of severalchambers. At the second story another doorway occurs; it is much smallerand more simple, and the chamber to which it led must have beencomparatively unimportant. In our Fig. 180 it is restored as the approachto the internal staircase. In order to vary the framework of our restorations and to show Assyrianarchitecture in as many aspects as possible, we have placed this templewithin a fortified wall, like that of Khorsabad. Within a kind of bastiontowards the left of the plate we have introduced one of those smalltemples of which remains have been found at Khorsabad and Nimroud. Thewalls of the town form a continuation of those about the temple. In frontof the principal entrance to the sacred inclosure we have set up acommemorative stele. * * * * * Aided by these restorations we hope to have given a clearer and more vivididea of Chaldæan art than if we had confined ourselves to describing thescanty remains of their religious buildings. We have now to give a rapidreview of those existing ruins whose former purposes and arrangements maystill to a certain extent be traced. NOTES: [451] These restorations of the principal types of Chaldæan temples wereexhibited by M. CHIPIEZ in the Salon of 1879, under the title _Tours àÉtages de la Chaldée et de l'Assyrie_. [452] Chapter II. § 2. [453] HERODOTUS, i, 181-3, Rawlinson's version. By Jupiter, or rather Zeus, we must understand Bel-Merodach. Diodorus calls the god of the temple ZeusBelus. [454] LOFTUS, _Travels_, &c. , p. 131. See also TAYLOR's papers in vol. Xv. Of the _Royal Asiatic Society's Journal_. [455] LOFTUS, (p. 129). "It rather struck me, however, from the gradualinclination from top to base, that a grand staircase of the same width asthe upper story, occupied this side of the structure. " [456] LOFTUS, _Travels_, &c. , p. 133. [457] At Warka, around the ruin called _Wuswas_ by the Arabs, LOFTUS tracedthe plan of these great courtyards and platforms (_Travels_, p. 171). [458] See above, p. 246, figs. 100 and 102. [459] Numerous pieces of glazed tile were found in these ruins. [460] The idea of this plinth was suggested to M. Chipiez by a remark madeon page 129 of LOFTUS's _Travels_: "Between the stories is a gradualstepped incline about seven feet in perpendicular height, which mayhowever, be accidental, and arise from the destruction of the upper part ofthe lower story. " [461] See TAYLOR, _Journal_, &c. , pp. 264-5. [462] LOFTUS, _Travels_, p. 130. It was the same with the _Observatory_ atKhorsabad. [463] LAYARD, _Discoveries_, p. 495. [464] The authorities made use of by Strabo for his description of Babylon, all lived in the time of Alexander and his successors; no one of them couldhave seen the temple intact and measured its height. Founded upon traditionor upon the inspection of the remains, the figure given by the geographercan only be approximate. I should think it is probably an exaggeration. [465] See PLACE, _Ninive_, vol. Iii, plate 37. [466] DIODORUS, ii, 9, 5. [467] These courts must have been at certain times of the day the meetingplace of large numbers of the population, like the courtyards of a modernmosque. Shops in which religious emblems and other _objèts-de-piété_ weresold would stand about them, just as in the present day the traveller findsa regular fair in the courtyard of the mosque _Meshed-Ali_. Among thecommodities that change hands in such places, white doves are very common(LOFTUS, _Travels_, p. 53). In this perhaps, we may recognize the survivalof a pagan rite, the sacrifice of a dove to the Babylonian Istar, thePhoenician Astarte, and the Grecian Aphrodite. It was in the courtyards ofone of these temples that those sacred prostitutions of which HERODOTUSspeaks, took place (i. 199). The great extent of the inclosures is readilyexplained by the crowds they were then required to accommodate. [468] "I undertook in Bit-Saggatu, " says the king, "the restoration of thechamber of Merodach; I gave to its cupola the form of a lily, and I coveredit with chiselled gold, so that it shone like the day, " London inscription, translated by M. Fr. LENORMANT, in his _Histoire ancienne_, vol. Ii. Pp. 228-229. See also a text of Philostratus in his life of _Apollonius ofTyana_, (i. 25). The sophist who seems to have founded his description ofBabylon on good information, speaks of a "great brick edifice plated withbronze, which had a dome representing the firmament and shining with goldand sapphires. " [469] The idea has also occurred to M. OPPERT of restricting the ramp totwo sides of the tower, to the exclusion of the others (_Expéditionscientifique_, vol. I. P. 209); but so far as we understand hissystem--which he has not illustrated with any figure--he does not doublehis incline, he merely alternates its side at each stage, so that part ofit would be on the north-west, part on the south-west face of his tower. [470] The original of this relief has not been brought to Europe. We aretherefore unable to decide whether Layard's draughtsman has accuratelyrepresented its condition or not. § 2. --_Ruins of Staged Towers. _ In describing the first of our four types we had occasion to point to thebuildings at Warka and Mugheir, which enabled us to restore what may becalled the Lower Chaldæan form of temple. The mounds formed by the remainsof those buildings had not been touched for thousands of years, they hadentirely escaped such disturbance as the ruins of Babylon have undergonefor so many centuries at the hand of the builders of Bagdad and Hillah; andit is probable that explorations carried on methodically and withintelligent patience would give most interesting results. If, for instance, the foundations of all walls were systematically cleared, we should beenabled to restore with absolute certainty the plans of the buildings towhich they belonged. To the monuments discovered by the English explorerswe must now add a find made by M. De Sarzec at Tello, of which, however, full details have yet to be furnished. [471] We take the following from thetoo short letter that was read to the Academy of Inscriptions on the 2nd ofDecember 1881. "Finally, it was in that part of the building marked H thatopens upon the court B that I found the curious structure of which I spoketo you. This solid mass of burnt brick and bitumen, with diminishingterraces rising one above the other, reminds us of thoseChaldæo-Babylonian structures whose probable object was to afford a refugeto the inhabitants from the swarms of insects and burning winds thatdevastate these regions for nine months of the year. " Here, we believe, M. De Sarzec is in error; the only refuges against the inflamed breath of thedesert were the _serdabs_, the subterranean chambers with their scantylight and moistened walls, and the dark apartments of Assyrian palaces withtheir walls of prodigious thickness. The great terraces erected at such avast expenditure of labour were not undertaken merely to escape themosquitoes; we may take M. De Sarzec's words, however, as a proof that atSirtella as in all the towns of Lower Chaldæa, the remains of a buildingwith several stories or stages are to be recognized. [Illustration: FIG. 183. --Map of the ruins of Babylon; from Oppert. ] The ruins on the site of Babylon may be divided into four principal groups, each forming small hills that are visible for many miles round; they aredesignated on the annexed map by the names under which they are commonlyknown. These are, in their order from north to south, _Babil_, _El-Kasr_(or _Mudjelibeh_) and _Tell-Amran_, on the left bank; on the right bank themost conspicuous of them all, the _Birs-Nimroud_. [472] Most of those whohave studied the topography of Babylon are disposed to see in the Kasr andin Tell-Amran the remains of a vast palace, or rather of several palaces, built by different kings, and those of the famous hanging gardens; while inBabil (Plate I. And Fig. 37) and the Birs Nimroud (Fig. 168) they agree torecognize all that is left of the two chief religious buildings of Babylon. Babil would be the oldest of them all--the _Bit-Saggatu_ or "temple of thefoundations of the earth" which stood in the very centre of the royal cityand was admired and described by Herodotus. The Birs-Nimroud wouldcorrespond to the no less celebrated temple of Borsippa, the _Bit-Zida_, the "temple of the planets and of the seven spheres. " At Babil no explorations have thrown the least light upon the dispositionof the building. In the whole of its huge mass, which rises to a height ofsome 130 feet above the plain, no trace of the separate cubes or of theirdimensions is to be found. All the restorations that have been made arepurely imaginary. At Birs-Nimroud the excavations of Sir Henry Rawlinson in1854 were by no means fruitless but, unhappily, we are without any detailedaccount of their results. So far as we have been told, it would appear thatthe existence of at least six of the seven stages had been ascertained andthe monument, which, according to Sir Henry Rawlinson's measurements, isnow 153 feet high; can have lost but little of its original height. We canhardly believe however, that the violence of man and the storms of so manycenturies have done so little damage. [473] It seems to be more clearlyproved that, in shape, the temple belonged to the class we have describedunder the head of THE RECTANGULAR CHALDÆAN TEMPLE. [474] The axis of thetemple, the vertical line upon which the centre of the terminal chapel musthave been placed, was not at an equal distance from the north-western andsouth-eastern sides, so that the building had its gentlest slope--taking itas a whole--towards the south-east. [475] On that side the cubical blocks ofwhich it was composed were so placed as to leave much wider steps than onthe north-west. The temple therefore had a true façade, in front of whichpropylæa, like the one introduced in our restoration from the ruins atMugheir, were placed. The difference consists in the fact that here thestages are square on plan. The lowest stage was 273 feet each way; itrested upon a platform of sun-dried brick which rose but a few feet abovethe level of the plain. Supposing these measurements to be exact they suggest a building which wasnothing extraordinary either in height or mass. The dimensions furnished byRich and Ker-Porter are much greater. Both of these speak of a base astade, or about 606 feet, square, which would give a circumference of noless than 2, 424 feet--not much less than half a mile. In any case thetemple now represented by Babil must have been the larger of the two. M. Oppert mentions 180 metres, or about 600 feet, as one diameter of thepresent rather irregular mass. That would still be inferior to the Pyramidof Cheops, which is 764 feet square at the base, and yet the diameter of600 feet for Babil is, no doubt, in excess of its original dimensions. Theaccumulation of rubbish must have enlarged its base in every direction. It seems clear, therefore, that the great structures of Chaldæa wereinferior to the largest of the royal tombs of Egypt, both in height andlateral extent. We do not know how far the subsidiary buildings by whichthe staged towers are surrounded and supplemented in our plates may haveextended, but it is difficult to believe that their number or importancecould have made the ensemble to which they belonged a rival to Karnak, oreven to Luxor. If we may judge from the texts and the existing ruins, the religiousbuildings of Assyria were smaller than those of Chaldæa. When the TenThousand traversed the valley of the Tigris in their famous retreat, theypassed close to a large abandoned city, which Xenophon calls Larissa. As towhether his Larissa was Calah (Nimroud), or Nineveh (Kouyundjik), we neednot now inquire, but his short description of a staged tower is of greatinterest: "Near this town, " he says, "there was a stone pyramid two plethra(about 203 feet) high; each side of its base was one plethron inlength. "[476] The tower cleared by Layard at Nimroud is perhaps the very one seen byXenophon. [477] The Greek soldier speaks of a stone pyramid while theNimroud tower is of brick, but the whole of its substructure is cased withthe finer material to a height of nearly twenty-four feet, which is quiteenough to account for Xenophon's statement. As for his dimensions, theyshould not be taken too literally. In their rapid and anxious march theGreek commanders had no time to wield the plumb-line or themeasuring-chain; they must have trusted mainly to their eyes in arriving ata notion of the true size of the buildings by which their attention wasattracted. The tower at Nimroud must have been about 150 feet square, measured along its plinth; the present height of the mound is 141 feet, andnothing above the first stage now exists. As Layard remarks, one or twostories more must be taken into the account, and they would easily make upan original elevation of from 200 to 240 feet, or about that of the Larissatower. Xenophon made use of the word pyramid because his language furnishedhim with no term more accurate. Like the true pyramid, the staged towerdiminished gradually from base to summit, and there can be no doubt as tothe real character of the building seen by the Greeks, as may be gatheredfrom their leader's statement, that the "barbarians from the neighbouringvillages took refuge upon it in great numbers. " Such buildings as thepyramids of Egypt and Ethiopia could have afforded no refuge of the kind. Afew could stand upon their summits, supposing them to have lost theircapstones, but it would require the wide ramps and terraces of the stagedtower to afford a foothold for the population of several villages. [478] Nothing but the first two stages, or rather the plinth and the first stage, now remain at Nimroud of what must have been the chief temple of Calah. There is no trace either of the ramp or of the colours with which thedifferent stories were ornamented. The Khorsabad tower discovered by Placeis more interesting and much more instructive as to the arrangement andconstitution of these buildings. [479] [Illustration: FIG. 184. --Actual condition of the so-called _Observatory_, at Khorsabad; from Place. ] This tower was previously hidden under a mass of _débris_, which gave it aconical form like that at Nimroud. Botta had already noticed its existence, but he failed to guess its real character, which, indeed, was only divinedby Place when his explorations were far advanced. As soon as all doubt wasremoved as to the real character of the monument, M. Place took every careto preserve all that might yet exist of it, and our Fig. 184 shows thestate of the building after the excavations were complete. Three wholestages and part of a fourth (to say nothing of the plinth) were still inexistence. The face of each stage was ornamented with vertical grooves, repeating horizontally the elevation of the Assyrian stepped battlements(Fig. 102); the coloured stucco, varying in hue from one stage to another, was still in place, and confirmed the assertions of Herodotus as to thetraditional sequence of tints. [480] The external ramp, with its pavement ofburnt brick and its crenellated parapet, was also found. [481] At its basethe first stage described upon the soil a square of about 143 feet eachway. Each of the three complete stages was twenty feet three inches high. Upon such data M. Thomas had no difficulty in restoring the whole building. Evidently the fourth story could not have been the original apex, as itwould have been strange indeed, if, when all the rest of the Khorsabadpalace had lost its upper works, the sun-dried bricks of the _Observatory_alone had resisted the agents of destruction. Moreover the materials of thehigher stories still exist in the 40, 000 cubic yards of rubbish which coverthe surrounding platform to an average depth of about ten feet. [Illustration: FIG. 185. --The _Observatory_ restored. Elevation. ] How many stages were there? Struck by the importance of the number seven inAssyrian architecture, M. Thomas fixed upon that number. Even at Khorsabaditself the figure continually crops up. The city walls had seven gates. Oneof the commonest of the ornamental motives found upon the external andinternal walls of the Harem is the band of seven half columns illustratedon page 247. Herodotus tells us of the seven different colours used on theconcentric walls of Ecbatana. Finally, in assigning seven stories to thebuilding we get a total elevation of 140 feet, which corresponds so closelyto the 143 feet of the base that we may take the two as identical, andaccount for the slight difference between them, amounting only to aboutthree inches for each story, by the difficulty in taking correctmeasurements on a ruined structure of sun-dried brick. And we shouldremember that Strabo tells us in a passage already quoted that the heightof the great temple at Babylon was equal to its shorter diameter, anarrangement that may to some extent have been prescribed by custom. [Illustration: FIG. 186. --The _Observatory_ restored. Plan. ] So far then as its main features are concerned, we may look upon therestoration we borrow from M. Place's work as perfectly authentic (Figs. 185 and 186). Our section (Fig. 187) is meant to show that no trace of anyinternal chamber or void of the smallest kind was discovered by the Frenchexplorers. It is, however, quite possible that such chambers were contrivedin the upper stories, but we have no evidence of their existence. We maysay the same of the resting-places mentioned by Herodotus in hisdescription of the temple of Belus. But supposing that edifice to have hadseven stages, its ramp must have been about a thousand yards long, and itis likely enough that halting places were provided on such a long ascent. [Illustration: FIG. 187. --The _Observatory_. Transverse section throughAB. ] It is not until we come to discuss the object of such a building that wefeel compelled to part company with MM. Place and Thomas. They areinclined to believe that it was an observatory rather than a temple, andunder that title they have described it. Although we have made use of thename thus given we do not think it has been justified. There is nothing, says M. Place, among the ruins at Khorsabad to show that the tower everbore any chapel or tabernacle upon its apex. But according to their ownhypothesis it has lost its three highest stories, so why should they expectto find any vestige of such a chapel, seeing that it must have been thefirst thing to disappear? There is absolutely nothing to negative the ideathat it may have been of wood, in which case its total disappearance wouldnot be surprising, even after the platform had been thoroughly explored;and that is far from being the case at present. Moreover there is somelittle evidence that the purpose of the pyramid was religious. Two stonealtars were found in its neighbourhood. Whether they came from its summitor from the esplanade, they justify us in believing the _Observatory_ tohave been a temple. We are confirmed in this belief by thesimilarity--which M. Place himself points out--between it and the chiefmonuments of Babylon, as described by Herodotus. It seems to beincontestable that Chaldæa adopted this form for the largest and mostsumptuous of her temples, and why should we suppose the Assyrians to havebroken with that tradition and to have devoted to a different use buildingsplanned and constructed on the same principle? It is true that tablets have been found in the royal archives at Kouyundjikupon which reports as to the condition of the heavens are recorded for theguidance of the king, [482] but there is nothing in these so far as theyhave been deciphered to show that the observations were taken from thesummit of a _zigguratt_. It is, however, very probable that the astronomersavailed themselves of such a height above the plain in order to escape fromfloating vapours and to gain a wider horizon. The platform of the Khorsabadtower must have had a superficial extent of about 180 square yards. Theremay have been a chapel or tabernacle in the centre, and yet plenty of spacefor the astrologers to do their work at their ease. We do not wish to deny, therefore, that this tower and other monuments of the same kind may havebeen used as observatories, but we believe that in Assyria, as in Chaldæa, their primary object was a religious one--that they were raised so farabove the dwellings of man, even of the king himself, in order to do honourto the gods whose sanctuaries were to crown their summits. [483] NOTES: [471] See _Les Fouilles de Chaldée_ in the _Revue archéologique_ forNovember, 1881. M. De Sarzec refers us in his paper to a plan which has notyet been laid before the Academy. We regret very much that its publicationshould have been so long delayed, as we have been prevented from making asmuch use as we should have wished of M. De Sarzec's architecturaldiscoveries. [472] The clearest and most precise information upon the topography ofBabylon is to be found in Professor RAWLINSON's essay on that subject inthe second volume of his translation of HERODOTUS (p. 570, in the thirdedition). [473] In making his calculations, Professor RAWLINSON has certainlyforgotten to take into account the pier or section of wall that stillstands upright upon the surface of the mound (OPPERT, _Expéditionscientifique_, vol. I. Pp. 260, _et seq. _). It is clearly shown in ourfigure--Sir Henry LAYARD leaves us in no doubt on this score: "TheBirs-Nimroud rises to a height of 198 feet, and has on its summit a compactmass of brickwork thirty-seven feet high by twenty-eight broad, the wholebeing thus 235 feet in perpendicular height, " _Discoveries_, p. 495. LAYARDsays, however, that the dimensions here given were taken from RICH, as hehad no time to take measurements during his hurried visit. ED. [474] _Discoveries_, p. 495. [475] We take these details from Professor RAWLINSON's essay on thetopography of Babylon. [476] XENOPHON, _Anabasis_, iii, 4, 9. [477] LAYARD, _Discoveries_, pp. 126-128, and map 2. [478] At Kaleh Shergat, where the site of an important, but as yetunidentified Assyrian city has been recognized, there is a conical mound, recalling in its general aspect the Nimroud tower, which must contain allthat is left of a _zigguratt_; but no deep excavations have yet been madein it (LAYARD, _Nineveh_, vol. Ii. P. 61). [479] PLACE, _Ninive_, vol. I. Pp. 147-148, and plates 36-37. [480] See above, pp. 272-274. [481] We have already mentioned the size of its steps; see page 192. Thegradient for the first stage was about one in twenty. In the upper stagesit must have been far steeper, as the circumference of the stages was muchless, while their height remained the same. It never became very abrupthowever, as supposing that the original number of stories was seven, thegradient would not be more than about one in fourteen close to the summit. [482] LENORMANT, _Histoire ancienne_, vol. Ii. P. 200 (3rd edition). [483] The position occupied by this staged tower in the plan of the royalpalace at Khorsabad suggests that perhaps neither of the two explanationsof its purpose here alluded to is the true one. It is placed immediatelyoutside the Harem wall--and as to the identity of the Harem there can be nodoubt--in such a way that any one ascending it must have had anuninterrupted view into the numerous courts of the women's apartments. Sucha possibility seems inconsistent with the numerous precautions taken tosecure the privacy of that part of the palace (see Vol. II. Chapter I. §2). Perhaps the real solution of the difficulty is to be found in asuggestion made, but only to be cast aside, by Mr. FERGUSSON, that thisKhorsabad _zigguratt_ was, in fact, a private oratory for the exclusive useof Sargon himself (_History of Architecture_, vol. I. P. 173). --ED. § 3. --_Subordinate Types of the Temple. _ Side by side with these pyramidal temples the Assyrians seem to have placedothers of a less ambitious kind, dedicated, no doubt, to deities of thesecond rank. The great staged towers, whose height and mass implied aneffort that could not be often repeated, were devoted to the worship of thegreat national gods. Botta believed that he had discovered a temple of thissmaller kind in the building from which we borrowed the example of anAssyrian moulding reproduced in our Figs. 98 and 99. This edifice isremarkable, not only for its cornice, but also because it is built oflimestone and decorated with sculptures carved from slabs of basalt, theonly things of the kind that have been discovered in the Khorsabad ruins. The general arrangements are unlike those of any other part of the palace. Unfortunately the building is in a very bad condition. Even its plan canonly be restored in part. Thomas is inclined to see in it rather a throneroom, or divan, as it would be called in the modern East, than a temple. The few bas-reliefs which may be certainly recognized as having belonged toit are not religious in their character; they represent hunting scenes, battles and prisoners bringing tribute. Although Thomas's restoration is, as he himself confesses, entirely conjectural, we have no serious motivefor pronouncing the building to have been a temple. [484] [Illustration: FIG. 188. --Plan of a small temple at Nimroud; from Layard. ] [Illustration: FIG. 189. --Plan of a small temple at Nimroud; from Layard. ] On the other hand, Layard seems to have had good reasons for recognizingsmall temples in the structures he cleared near the great staged tower atNimroud. [485] The more important of the two was actually touching thattower (Fig. 188). The character of the building is at once betrayed by thenature of its sculptures, which are religious rather thanhistorical--figures of gods and genii, scenes of adoration and mystictheology. And it was not without a purpose that it was put into closejuxtaposition with a _zigguratt_, an arrangement that proves it to haveformed a part of a collection of buildings consecrated, by the prince whosedwelling covered the rest of the platform, to the gods in whose protectionhe placed his trust. The second and smaller temple stands about thirtyyards to the east on the very edge of the artificial mound (Fig. 189). Analtar with three feet carved in the shape of lion's paws was found in frontof the entrance. [486] There were no bas-reliefs: the decorations werecarried out in paint. The number of rooms was less, but their generalarrangement was similar to that of the larger building. The chief featureof both was a large hall (_e_ in the first plan, _c_ in the second) with asquare niche at one of its extremities (_f_ in the first plan, _d_ in thesecond). This niche was paved with a single slab of alabaster, ofconsiderable size and covered upon both faces with a long inscriptiondescribing in detail the reign of the prince by whom the temple wasconsecrated. In the larger of the two buildings the slab in question wastwenty-three feet four inches long and seventeen feet eight inches wide;its thickness was twelve inches. Upon it stood, in all probability, thestatue of the god. The niche must, in fact, have been the _secos_, orsanctuary properly speaking. The large oblong hall was the _naos_ or_cella_. In the larger temple its length was forty-six feet seven inches. It was preceded by a _pronaos_ or vestibule (Fig. 188, _c_). We have noevidence as to the purpose of the chamber marked _g_ in our plan. It has adirect entrance of its own from the outside (_h_). The small temple israther less complicated. Two doorways (_b_ and _f_) lead immediately intothe principal hall or naos. A small chamber (_e_) behind the sanctuary was, perhaps, a kind of storeroom or sacristy. It should be noticed that in thelittle temple the doors into the naos were so placed that the image in thesanctuary could not be seen from without. [487] In both buildings the doorswere flanked by winged lions or bulls, like those of the royal palaces. Thewalls of the larger temple were decorated with glazed bricks. [Illustration: FIG. 190. --Temple with triangular pediment; from Botta. ] These temples of the second class lent themselves to a great variety offorms. Some of them had their façades crowned by a triangular pediment, like those of the Greek temples (Fig. 190). It is true that the Khorsabadrelief whence we copy this peculiar arrangement deals with the capture ofan Armenian city, Mousasir, called in the narrative of Sargon's conquests"the dwelling of the god Haldia, "[488] whose temple must be here figured bythe sculptor. Must we believe that the artist has given his temple a formunfamiliar to himself in deference to the accounts of those who had takenpart in the campaign? Is it not more probable that he copied some modelwhich would be recognized by every spectator as that of a temple, from itsfrequent occurrence in the neighbourhood of the very palace on whosedecoration he was at work? We are inclined to say yes to the latterquestion. But even if we look upon this relief as a faithful sketch from anArmenian temple we shall still believe that it reproduces a type notunknown to Assyrian art. Everything combines to prove that the inhabitantsof the mountainous countries situated to the east and north of Assyria hadno original and well-marked civilization of their own during any part ofthe period with which we are now concerned. Just as Ethiopia borrowedeverything from Egypt, so the Medes and Armenians drew both their arts andtheir written character from Chaldæa, by way of Assyria. All the objectsfound in the neighbourhood of Lake Van are purely Assyrian in character, and no question is raised as to the fitness of their place in our museumsside by side with objects from Nimroud and Khorsabad. It is, however, oflittle importance whether the temple shown in our woodcut was or was notcopied from nature; if there were such buildings in Armenia it was becausesimilar ones had previously existed in Assyria, from which the architectsof the semi-barbarous people, who were in turn the enemies, the vassals andthe subjects of the Ninevite monarchs, had borrowed their leading features. Moreover, we find one of the most characteristic features of Assyrianarchitecture occurring in this Armenian monument. The entrance is flankedby lions similar to those which guard the temples at Nimroud. [489] Theother features of the composition are quite new to us. In front of thetemple two large vases are supported on tripods, of bronze no doubt. Theycontained the water required for purifications; we shall encounter themagain in Syria. They remind us of the "molten sea" of Solomon's temple. Thetemple stands upon a high plinth, to which access must have been given bysteps omitted by the sculptor. At each side of the door stands alance-headed pole, indicating, perhaps, that the temple was dedicated to agod of war. In front of these lances stand two people in attitudes ofadoration; statues, perhaps, or figures in relief. The façade is formed ofpilasters divided horizontally by narrow bands; upon these pilasters, andon the wall between them, hang shields or targets, that accord well withthe lances flanking the entrance. From two of the pilasters on the left ofthe doorway lions' heads and shoulders seem to issue; these, too, may betaken as symbolical of the bellicose disposition of the god to whom thebuilding was dedicated. The pediment with which the façade is crowned israther low in its proportions. Its tympanum is filled with a kind ofreticulated ornament made up of small lozenges or meshes. There is nothingto throw light upon the internal arrangements, but by the aid of thiscarved sketch the façade may be easily restored, save, of course, in thematter of size, at which we can only guess. The type is chiefly interesting on account of its analogy with the Greektemple. We have already drawn attention to similar points of likeness inthe small buildings in which the column plays such an important part (Figs. 41 and 42). We have seen that some of those little structures resemble theEgyptian temples, others the Greek temple _in antis_. [490] For the sake ofcompleteness we may also mention the pavilion we find so often in theChaldæan monuments (Fig. 79). It is crowned with the horned mitre we areaccustomed to see upon the heads of the winged bulls. Our interest has beenawakened in these little chapels chiefly on account of the decorative formsof which they afford such early examples. It is not to them that we mustlook for the distinctive features of Mesopotamian temple architecture. These we must find in the _staged tower_ or _zigguratt_. Why is it that thewhole of those monuments, with the single exception of the so-called_Observatory_ of Khorsabad, are now mere heaps of formless dust, fulfillingto the letter the biblical prophecies as to the fate of Nineveh andBabylon? One traveller tells us how when he approached the Birs-Nimroud hesaw wolves stretched upon its slopes and basking in the sun. Before theywould lazily rise and make up their minds to decamp, the Arabs of hisescort had to ride forward shouting and shaking their lances. NOTES: [484] See PLACE, _Ninive_, vol. I. Pp. 149-151, and vol. Ii. Pp. 6-7, and36-42. This building is at the western angle of the area occupied by theKhorsabad ruins (vol. Iii. Plate 3). The restoration will be found in theplate numbered 37 _bis_. [485] _Discoveries_, &c. , pp. 348-357, 359-362; and _Monuments_, &c. , second series, plate 5. [486] This is now in the British Museum. --ED. [487] The doors are so arranged that in neither temple can the naos be seenby one standing outside the building. --ED. [488] This expedition took place in the eighth year of Sargon's reign. Thepassage in which the chief events are recounted, will be found in the longand important inscription translated by M. OPPERT, under the title:_Annales de Sargon_ (PLACE, _Ninive_, vol. Ii. P. 313). [489] The sculptor has only introduced one; the other he has left for theimagination of the spectator to fill in. [490] Page 142. § 4. --_Comparison between the Chaldæan Temple and that of Egypt. _ Although the ancients called them both by the same name, there are morepoints of difference than of resemblance between the Egyptian pyramids andthe staged towers of Chaldæa. On the borders of the Nile we have the truepyramid, the solid which bears that name in geometry. In Mesopotamia wehave a series of rectangular prisms placed one upon the other. At adistance the gradual diminution of their size may give a pyramidalappearance to the mass of which they form a part, but their walls arevertical. Finally the contrast between the purposes of the two buildings isstill greater. The Egyptian pyramid is a tomb; its enormous mass is no morethan a monstrous development of the stone envelope to which the sarcophaguswas committed. No means were provided for reaching the summit, and itsheight had, so to speak, no _raison d'être_ or practical utility. In spiteof all the art lavished upon it a pyramid was hardly a building in theproper sense of the word--it was a mere heap of building materials. It was quite otherwise with the _zigguratt_, whose terminal platformsupported a richly-decorated sanctuary. Astronomers could make use of itfor observing the heavens under better conditions than were possible below;chapels were also cut in the flanks of its lower stages, so that aconvenient means of approach to every story from top to bottom wasabsolutely required. This necessity brought in its train the variedarrangements of ramp and terrace of which we have endeavoured to give anidea in our restorations. If we give rein to our imagination and allow itfor a moment to restore their crenellated parapets to the ramps andterraces; if we set up the resting-places, rebuild the chapels andpavilions and replace the statues; if we cover the sanctuary with itsvesture of bronze and gold, and the whole edifice with the surfacedecoration to which the sun of Mesopotamia gave its fullest value, we shallthen understand how far superior, as an architectonic conception, theChaldæan _zigguratt_ was to the Egyptian pyramid. With its smooth and nakedface the latter was in some degree an inorganic mass, as lifeless as thecorpse it crushed with its preposterous weight. The division of the formerinto stages had a latent rhythm that was strongly attractive; the eyefollowed with no little pleasure the winding slope which, by its easygradient, seemed to invite the traveller to mount to the lofty summit, where, in the extent and beauty of the view he would find so rich a rewardfor the gentle fatigues of the ascent. But we must not forget that the _zigguratt_ was a temple, and that it is tothe temples of Thebes that we must compare it. In such a comparison Egyptregains all its superiority. How cold and poor a show the towers of Chaldæaand Assyria make beside the colonnades of the Ramesseum, of Luxor, ofKarnak! In the one case the only possible varieties are those caused bychanges in the position and proportions of the stages, in the slope andarrangement of the ramps. In the other, what infinite combinations ofcourts, pylons, and porticoes, what an ever changing play of light, shadow, and form among the groves of pictured columns! What a contrast between theAssyrian sanctuaries lighted only from the door and by the yellow glare oftorches, and the mysterious twilight of the Egyptian halls, where the deepshadows were broken here and there by some wandering ray of sunshineshooting downwards from holes contrived in the solid roof, and making somebrilliant picture of Ptah or Amen stand out against the surrounding gloom. But the Chaldæans might, perhaps would, have equalled the Egyptians hadtheir country been as rich in stone as the Nile valley; their taste andinstinct for grandeur was no less, and the religious sentiment was aslively and exalted with the worshippers of Assur and Marduk as with thoseof Osiris and Amen-Ra. The inferiority of their religious architecture wasdue to the natural formation of their country, which restricted them almostentirely to the use of a fictile material. [Illustration] END OF VOL. I. LONDON: R. CLAY, SONS, AND TAYLOR, BREAD STREET HILL, E. C.