Part 8 (1/2)
[Ill.u.s.tration: FIG. 24.--The suite of Sargon, _continued_. Bas-relief from Khorsabad. Alabaster. Height 97 inches. Drawn by Saint-Elme Gautier.]
All these military officers and administrators, these priests of the different G.o.ds, 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, the caprice of the sovereign would lead him to raise a man from the lowest ranks to the highest dignities of the state. The _regime_ of a.s.syria may be described in the words applied to that of Russia, it was despotism tempered with a.s.sa.s.sination. ”And it came to pa.s.s, as he (Sennacherib) was wors.h.i.+pping in the house of Nisroch his G.o.d, that Adrammelech and Sharezer his sons smote him with the sword: and they escaped into the land of Armenia. And Esarhaddon his son reigned in his stead.”[123] Sennacherib's father, Sargon, perished in the same fas.h.i.+on.
These murders were, perhaps, the revenge for some outrage or punishment imprudently 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 heir from succeeding his father. Sennacherib replaced Sargon, and Esarhaddon Sennacherib. The a.s.syrian supremacy was only supported by the constant presence, at the head of the army, of a king ready for every eventuality; a few weeks of anarchy or interregnum would have thrown the whole empire into confusion; the royal power was the keystone of the arch, the element upon which depended the stability of a colossal edifice subjected to various strains. In such a society, art could hardly have had a mission other than the glorification of a power without limit and without control--a power to which alone the a.s.syrians had to look for a continuance of their dearly-won supremacy. The architect, the sculptor, and the painter, exhausted the resources of their arts, the one in building a palace for the prince on a high mound raised to dominate the surrounding plain, the others in decorating it when built and multiplying the images of its almost divine inhabitant. The exploits of the sovereign, his great and never-ending achievements as a conqueror and destroyer of monsters, as pontif of a.s.sur and the founder of palaces and cities--such are the themes to which a.s.syrian sculpture devoted itself for many centuries, taking them up and varying them in countless ways, and that, apparently, without any fear that he for whom the whole work was intended would ever grow weary of the repet.i.tion.
Such themes presuppose the actual occurrence of the events represented and the artists' realization either from personal observation or from descriptions. This gives rise to a very sensible difference between Chaldaean sculpture and that of a.s.syria, so far at least as the latter is to be studied in the decorations of a palace. In those characteristics and qualities of execution which permit of a definition, the style is no doubt the same as in Chaldaea. The artists of Babylon and those of Nineveh were pupils in one school--they saw nature with the same eyes; the same features interested and attracted the attention of both; they had the same prejudices and the same conventions. The symbols and combinations of forms we have noticed as proper to Chaldaean art are here also; scenes of invocation to G.o.ds and genii; ornamental groups and motives. An instance of the latter is to be found in the rich embroidery with which the robes of the a.s.syrian kings are covered.[124] Finally, we must remember that all a.s.syrian art was not included in the adornment of the palace. Before a complete and definite judgment can be formed upon it the monuments of religious and industrial art should be pa.s.sed under review, but, unhappily, no temple interior, and a very small number of objects of domestic luxury and daily use, have come down to us. These gaps are to be regretted, but we must not forget that the bas-reliefs were ordered by the king, that the thousands of figures they contain were introduced for the sake of giving _eclat_ to the power, the valour, and the genius of the sovereign, and that the best artists of which a.s.syria could boast were doubtless entrusted with their execution. Under the reserves thus laid down we may, then, devote ourselves to the study of the Ninevite sculptures that fill the museums of London and Paris; we may consider them the strongest and most original creations of a.s.syrian art.
[Ill.u.s.tration: 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 of Shalmaneser and Sargon, of Sennacherib and a.s.surbanipal, were covered, confines itself mainly to marches, combats, and sieves, it is more _realistic_ than the sculpture of Chaldaea, a country that had done less, especially upon fields of battle, but had invented more and done more thinking than its bellicose rival. We owe no small debt of grat.i.tude to the swordsmen of a.s.syria, in spite of the blood they shed and the horrible cruelties they committed and delighted in seeing commemorated in the figured histories of their reigns. The works entrusted to their artists have left us precious doc.u.ments and the elements for a restoration of a vanished world. Philologists may take their time over the decipherment of the texts inscribed on the reliefs, but the great people of prey who, for at least four centuries, pillaged all Asia without themselves becoming softened by the possession of so much acc.u.mulated wealth, live, henceforward, in the long series of pictures recovered for the world by Layard and Botta. The stern conquerors reappear, armed, helmeted, and cuira.s.sed, as they pa.s.sed before the trembling nations thirty centuries ago. They are short of stature, but vigorous and st.u.r.dy, with an exceptional muscular development. They were, no doubt, prepared for their military duties from infancy by some system of gymnastic exercises, such as have been practised by other nations of soldiers. Their noses are high and hooked, their eyes large, their features as a whole strongly Semitic (see Fig. 25).
[Ill.u.s.tration: FIG. 26.--Bas-relief of Tiglath Pileser II.; from Nimroud.
British Museum. Height 44 inches. Drawn by Saint-Elme Gautier.]
[Ill.u.s.tration: FIG. 27.--Feast of a.s.surbanipal; from Kouyundjik. British Museum. Height 20-3/4 inches. No. 1, The servants of the feast.]
[Ill.u.s.tration: FIG. 28.--Feast of a.s.surbanipal, _continued_. No. 2, The king and queen at table. Drawn by Saint-Elme Gautier.]
The moral character of the people is shown with no less clearness. The ferocity they preserved amid all the luxurious appliances of their civilization is commemorated. Atrocities of every kind find a place in the reliefs. Among the prisoners of war the most fortunate are those led by a cord pa.s.sed through their lips. Others are mutilated, crucified, flayed alive. Tiglath Pileser II. is shown to us besieging a city, before whose walls he has impaled three prisoners taken from the defenders (see Fig.
26). Elsewhere we find scribes counting over heaps of heads before paying the price for them.[125] When these had come from the shoulders of important enemies they were carried in procession and treasured as honourable trophies. In one relief we find a.s.surbanipal, after his return to Nineveh from the subjugation of the southern rebels, lying upon a luxurious couch in the garden of his harem and sharing a sumptuous meal with a favoured wife. Birds are singing in the trees, an attendant touches the harp, flowers and palms fill the background, while a head, the head of the Elamite king, whom a.s.surbanipal conquered and captured in his last campaign, hangs from a tree near the right[126] of the scene (see Figs. 27 and 28). The princes who took pleasure in these horrors were scrupulous in their piety. We find numberless representations of them in att.i.tudes of profound respect before their G.o.ds, and sometimes they bring victims and libations in their hands (see Fig. 29). Thus, without any help from the inscriptions, we may divine from the sculptures alone what strange contrasts were presented by the a.s.syrian character--a character at once sanguinary and voluptuous, brutal and refined, mystical and truculent.
[Ill.u.s.tration: FIG. 29.--Offerings to a G.o.d; 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 it forgets to tell, that art has left us such a sincere account of this singular nation. The king and his lieutenants, his ministers and household officers, the veterans who formed the strength of his legions and the young men from whom their numbers were recruited, did not const.i.tute the whole of the a.s.syrian nation. There were also the tillers of the soil, the followers of those countless trades implied by a civilized society--the peasants, artisans, and merchants of every kind, who fed, clothed, and equipped the armies; the men who carried on the useful but modest work without which the fighting machine must soon have come to a standstill. And yet they are entirely absent from the sculptures in which the artist seems to have included everything that to him seemed worthy of interest. We meet them here and there, but only by accident. They may be descried now and then in the background of some scene of war, acting as labourers or in some other humble capacity. Otherwise the sculptor ignored their existence. They were not soldiers, which was much as to say they were nothing. Can any other instance be cited of an art so well endowed entirely suppressing what we should call the civil element of life? Neither do we find women in the bas-reliefs: that in which the queen of a.s.surbanipal occurs is quite unique in its way. Except in scenes representing the capture of a town and the carrying off of its inhabitants as prisoners of war, females are almost entirely wanting. On those occasions we sometimes find them carried on mules or in chariots (see Figs. 30 and 31). In certain bas-reliefs of a.s.surbanipal, treating of his campaign against Susa, women are playing the tambourine and singing the king's praises. But all these are exceptions.
Woman, whose grace and beauty were so keenly felt by the Egyptians, is almost completely absent from the sculpture of a.s.syria.
[Ill.u.s.tration: FIG. 30.--Convoy of prisoners. Kouyundjik. From Layard.]
By thus limiting its scope, sculpture condemned itself to much repet.i.tion and to a uniformity not far removed from sameness; but its very silences are eloquent upon the inhuman originality of a system to which a.s.syria owed both 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 made such wide gaps, once broken, nothing remained of the true a.s.syria but the ignorant ma.s.ses of a second-cla.s.s state to whom a change of masters had little meaning, and a few vast buildings doomed soon to disappear under their own ruins.
[Ill.u.s.tration: FIG. 31.--Convoy of prisoners. Kouyundjik. From Layard.]
When we have completed our examination of a.s.syrian sculpture, so rich in some respects, so poor in others, we shall understand the rapidity with which silence and oblivion overtook so much glory and power; we shall understand how some two centuries after the victory of Nabopola.s.sar and the final triumph of Babylon and her allies, Xenophon and his Greeks could mount the Tigris and gaze upon the still formidable walls of the deserted cities of Mespila and Larissa without even hearing the name of Nineveh p.r.o.nounced. Eager for knowledge as they were, they pa.s.sed over the ground without suspecting that the dust thrown up by their feet had once been a city famous and feared over all Asia, and that the capital of an empire hardly less great than that of the Artaxerxes whom they had faced at Cunaxa, 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.