Part 21 (1/2)
[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 palisade origin of the a.s.syrian battlements in what is, perhaps, rather too summary a fas.h.i.+on. The fact is that the great majority of the crenellated buildings in the reliefs have triangular battlements, while the theory that they are merely a hasty way of representing the stepped crenellations is to some extent discredited by their frequent occurrence side by side with the latter on the same relief. The Balawat gates, for instance, contain some nine 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 city by a.s.surn.a.z.irpal (10 to 15 in the Kouyundjik gallery at the British Museum), there are examples of both forms, and in more than one instance the triangular battlements are decorated with lines and rosettes--similar in principle to those shown above in fig. 106--that can hardly be reconciled with the notion that their form is the result of haste on the part of the artist. In the a.s.syrian Bas.e.m.e.nt Room in the British Museum there is an interesting bas-relief representing a.s.syrian soldiers busy with the demolition of a fortified wall, probably of some city just taken. The air is thick with the materials thrown down from its summit, among them a great number of planks or beams, which seem to suggest that timber was freely employed in the upper works of an a.s.syrian wall. If this was so, the pointed battlements in the reliefs may very well represent those in which timber was used, and the stepped ones their brick imitations. Both forms were used as decorations in places where no real battlements could have existed, as, for instance, on the tent of Sennacherib, in the well-known bas-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 British Museum. It was found in front of the temple of the War G.o.d, Nimroud.--ED.
[321] Upon some other monuments brought from the same place by Mr. Hormuzd Ra.s.sam, and also exhibited in the Nimroud central saloon, we may read by the side of Rammanu-nirari's name that of his spouse Sammuramat, who seems to have been a.s.sociated with him in the government, and to have been the recipient of particular honours. The name of this princess has caused some to recognize in her the fabulous Semiramis of the Greek writers. In consequence of facts that have escaped us she may well have furnished the first 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 marvellous state of preservation, the British Museum possesses three other objects of the same kind. Two of these were made for a.s.surn.a.z.irpal; the third, the most ancient of all, dates from the time of Tiglath Pileser I.; unhappily only fragments of it remain.
[324] See also BOTTA, _Monument de Ninive_, vol. i. plate 64. We here find an 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 is governed by construction. To take only one example, and that from an art we have already studied, the Egyptian temple was entirely of stone, and its decoration formed a part of the very substance of what we may call the flesh and blood of the edifice. The elements of that rich and brilliant decoration are furnished by those mouldings which make up in vigour what they lack in variety, by the slight relief or the hardly perceptible intaglio of the shadowless figures cut by the sculptor in stone, and covered by the painter with the liveliest colours. This sumptuous decoration, covering every external and internal surface, may no more be detached from it than the skin of an animal may be detached from its muscles. The union is even more intimate in this case, the adherence more complete. So long as the Egyptian walls remain standing, the blocks of limestone, sandstone, or granite of which they are composed, can never be entirely freed from the images, that is, from the expression of the thoughts, cut upon them by the men of forty centuries ago.
In a.s.syria the case was different. There buildings were of brick, each unit being in the vast majority of cases a repet.i.tion of its neighbour. In very few instances were the bricks of special shapes, and the buildings in which they were used could only be decorated by attached ornament, similar in principle to the mats and hangings we spread over the floors and walls that we wish to hide. This result they obtained in one of two ways; they either cased their walls in stone, an expensive and laborious process, or they covered them with a decoration of many colours.
As soon as stone came into use, it must have offered an irresistible temptation to the chisel of the sculptor and the ornamentist; and so we nearly always find it decorated with carvings. Sometimes, as in the lintel and thresholds described above (Figs. 95 and 96), the motives are purely ornamental. Elsewhere, in the gates of the a.s.syrian palaces, and in the plinths of the walls that surround their courts and halls, we find both figures in the round and in low relief. In a future chapter we shall attempt 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 by sculpture in the general system of decoration.
In Chaldaea sculpture must have played a very feeble part in the _ensemble_ of a building, stone was too costly in consequence of the distance it had to be carried. From the ruins of Chaldaea no colossi, like those which flanked the entrances of the Ninevite palaces, none of those long inscriptions upon alabaster slabs which have been of such value for the student of a.s.syrian history, have been brought. This latter material and all the facilities it offered to the sculptor was apparently entirely neglected by the Chaldaeans. In Lower Mesopotamia the hard volcanic rocks were chiefly used. They were preferred, no doubt, for their durability, but they were little fitted for the execution of figures of any size, and especially was it impossible to think of using them for such historic bas-reliefs as those upon which the a.s.syrians marshalled hundreds, or rather thousands, of busy figures. Chaldaean doorways may, however, have been sometimes flanked with lions and bulls,[326] we are indeed tempted to a.s.sign to such a position one monument which has been described by travellers, namely, the lion both Rich and Layard saw half buried in the huge ruin at Babylon called the _Kasr_.[327] It is larger than life. It stands 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. The workmans.h.i.+p is rough; so too, perhaps, is that of the basalt lion seen by Loftus at Abou-Sharein. This latter is about fifty-four inches high and its original place may very well have been before one of the doorways of the building.[328]
Of all animal forms, that of the lion was the first to afford materials for decorative composition of any value, and even after all the centuries that have pa.s.sed, the lion has not lost his vogue in the East. We might, if we chose, multiply examples of this persistence, but we shall be content with quoting one. In the centre of Asia Minor, at the village of Angora, in which I pa.s.sed three months of the year 1861, I encountered these lions at every turn. A short distance off, in the village of Kalaba, there was a fountain of Turkish construction in which a lion, quite similar in style to those of a.s.syria, had been inserted.[329] In the court of a mosque there was a lion in the round, a remarkable work by some Graeco-Roman sculptor.[330] There and in other towns of Asia Minor, lions from the Seljukian period are by no means rare, and even now they are made in considerable numbers. After the labours of the day we sometimes pa.s.sed the evenings in the villas of the rich Greek merchants, which were nearly all on 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 the house, and in the centre of a large paved and trellised court, there were fountains, sometimes ornamented with considerable taste, in which, on great occasions, a slender jet of water would give coolness to the air. The angles of nearly every one of these fountains were marked with small white marble lions, heavy and awkward in shape, but nevertheless considered at Angora to be the last word of art. They are imported from Constantinople together with the basins of the fountains.
In spite of all this, however, some doubts may be felt as to the destination of the lions found among the Chaldaean ruins. The only monument there discovered which seems to have certainly belonged to an architectural decoration is one found by Sir Henry Layard in his too soon interrupted explorations in the Kasr. It is a fragment of a limestone slab from the casing of a facade (Fig. 113). The upper parts of two male figures support a broken entablature beneath which the name of some divinity is cut.[331]
The chief interest of this fragment lies in the further evidence it affords of a close connection between the arts of Chaldaea and those of Babylon.
There is nothing either in the costume or features of these individuals that may not be found in a.s.syria. The tiara with its plumes and rosettes, the crimped hair and beard, the baton with its large hilt, are all common to both countries, while the latter object is to be found on the rocks of Bavian and as far north as the sculptures of Cappadocia.
[Ill.u.s.tration: FIG. 113.--Fragment from Babylon. British Museum. Height 11 inches, width 9 inches.]
A study of those reliefs in which nothing but purely ornamental motives are treated, leads us to exactly the same conclusion. Take for instance the great bronze threshold from Borsippa, of which we have already spoken; the rosettes placed at intervals along its tread are identical with those encountered in such numbers in a.s.syria.
In the extreme rarity of stone in his part of the world the Chaldaean architect seems to have practically reserved it for isolated statues, for votive bas-reliefs, for objects of an iconic or religious character, but nevertheless, we have sufficient evidence to prove that such decorative sculpture as found a place in the Chaldaean buildings, did not sensibly differ from that to which a.s.syria has accustomed us.
From all that we have said as to the distribution of stone, it will be understood that we must turn to a.s.syria to obtain a clear idea of the measures by which buildings of crude brick were rendered more sightly by ornament in the harder material. We can hardly imagine an a.s.syrian palace without those series of bas-reliefs which now line the walls of our museums much in the same fas.h.i.+on as they covered those of Sargon's and Sennacherib's palaces, and yet it is unlikely that in the beginning the a.s.syrian palaces had these carved walls. The casing of stone and alabaster must have been originally employed for more utilitarian purposes--to hide the grey and friable material within, to protect it from damage, and to offer a surface to the eye which should at least be inoffensive. The upper parts of the walls would be covered with a coat of stucco, which could be renewed whenever necessary, but for the lower part, for all that was within reach of the crowds that frequented the public halls of the seraglio, who pa.s.sed through its gates or those of the city itself, some more efficient protection would be required. The constructor was thus led to encase the lower parts of his walls in a cuira.s.s of stone imposed upon their brick cores. The slabs of which he made use for this purpose varied between three and ten feet in height, and between six and fifteen in width. Their average thickness was about eight inches.
The way in which these slabs were fixed is hardly worthy of such clever builders, and, in fact, the a.s.syrians seem to have never succeeded in mastering the difficulties inherent in the a.s.sociation of two heterogeneous materials. The slabs were of gypsum or limestone, the wall of pise, materials which are not to be easily combined. The a.s.syrians contented themselves with simply placing the one against the other. No trace of any tie is to be found. A ”tooth” has been given to the inner faces of the slabs by seaming them in every direction with the chisel, and, perhaps, some plastic substance may at the last moment have been introduced between them and the soft clay, but no trace of any other contrivance for keeping the two materials together has been found. After the general ma.s.s of the building--its clay walls and vaults--were complete, a different cla.s.s of workmen 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 a condition to adapt itself to the roughnesses of the alabaster slabs. The liquid clay, like that of an earthenware ”body,” wets and softens the surface of the brick while it enters into every hollow of the stone and so allies the one with the other. We recommend this conjecture to those who may undertake any future excavation in a.s.syria. It lies with them to confirm or refute it.
However this may have been, the constructor made use of more than one method of giving greater solidity to his walls as a whole. His slabs were not only let into each other at the angles, in some chambers there were squared angle pieces of a diameter great enough to allow them to sink more deeply into the crude brick behind, and thus to offer steady points of support in each corner. Finally the separate slabs were held together at the top by leaden dovetails like the metal clamps used to attach coping stones to each other.