Part 27 (1/2)
In another Nimroud bas-relief we find a still greater variety of processes used upon a single work (Fig. 156). The picture shows the king enthroned in the centre of a fortified city which he has just captured. Prisoners are being brought before him; his victorious troops have erected their tents in the city itself. Beside these tents three houses of unequal size represent the dwellings of the conquered. The _enceinte_ with its towers is projected on the soil in the fas.h.i.+on above noticed; a longitudinal section lays bare the interiors of the tents and shows us the soldiers at their various occupations. As for the houses, they are represented by their princ.i.p.al facades, which are drawn in elevation.
[Ill.u.s.tration: FIG. 157.--Plan and elevation of a fortified city; from Layard.]
When he had to deal with more complicated images, as in the reliefs at Kouyundjik representing the conquests and expeditions of a.s.surbanipal, the artist modified his processes at will so as to combine in the narrow s.p.a.ce at his disposal all the information that he thought fit to give. See for instance the relief in which the a.s.syrians celebrate their capture of Madaktu, an important city of Susiana, by a sort of triumph (Fig. 157).
The town itself, with its towered walls and its suburbs in which every house is sheltered by a date tree, is figured in the centre. At the top and sides the walls are projected outwards from the city; at the bottom they are thrown inwards in order, no doubt, to leave room for the tops of the date trees. Moreover, the sculptor had to find room for a large building on the right of his fortification. This is, apparently, the palace of the king. Guarded by a barbican and surrounded by trees it rises upon its artificial mound some little distance in front of the city. The artist also wished to show that palace and city were protected by a winding river teeming with fish, into which fell a narrower stream in the neighbourhood of the palace. If he had projected the walls of the palace and its barbican in the same way as those of the other buildings he would either have had to encroach upon his streams and to hide their junction or to divert their course. In order to avoid this he made use of several points of view, and laid his two chief structures on the ground in such a fas.h.i.+on that they form an oblique angle with the rest of the buildings. The result thus obtained looks strange to us, but it fulfilled his purpose; it gave a clear idea of how the various buildings were situated with respect to each other and it reproduced with fidelity the topographical features of the conquered country.
The chief desire of the sculptor was to be understood. That governing thought can nowhere be more clearly traced than in one of the reliefs dealing with the exploits of Sennacherib.[417] Here he had to explain that in order to penetrate into a mountainous country like Armenia, the king had been compelled to follow the bed of a torrent between high wooded banks. In the middle of the picture we see the king in his chariot, followed by hors.e.m.e.n and foot soldiers marching in the water. Towards the summit of the relief, the heights that overhang the stream are represented by the usual network. But how to represent the wooded mountains on this side of the water? The artist has readily solved the question, according to his lights, by showing the near mountains and their trees upside down, a solution which is quite on all fours, in principle, with the plans above described. The hills are projected on each side of the line made by the torrent, so that it runs along their bases, as it does in fact; but in this case the topsy-turviness of the trees and hills has a very startling effect. The intentions of the artist, however, are perfectly obvious; his process is childish, but it is quite clear.
None of these plans or pictures have, any more than those of Egypt, a scale by 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, are always taller than the houses and towers. This will be seen still more clearly in the figure we reproduce from the Balawat gates (Fig. 158). It represents a fortress besieged by Shalmaneser II., three people stand upon the roof of the building; if we restore their lower limbs we shall see that their height is equal to that of the castle itself.[418]
[Ill.u.s.tration: FIG. 158.--Fortress with its defenders; from the Balawat gates.]
This short examination of the spirit and principles of a.s.syrian figuration was necessary in order to prevent embarra.s.sment and doubt in speaking of the architectural designs and other things of the same kind that we may find reproduced in the bas-reliefs. Unless we had thoroughly understood the system of which the sculptors made use, we should have been unable to base our restorations upon their works in any important degree; and, besides, if there be one touchstone more sure than another by which we may determine the 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 of bodies and the distances of various planes. In this matter Chaldaea and a.s.syria remained, like Egypt, in the infancy of art. They were even excelled by the Egyptians, who showed more taste and continuity in the management of their processes than their Eastern rivals. Nothing so absurd is to be found in the sculptures of the Nile valley as these hills and trees turned upside down, and we shall presently see that a like superiority is shown in the way figures are brought together in the bas-reliefs. In our second volume on Egyptian art we drew attention to some Theban sculptures in which a vague suspicion of the true laws of perspective seemed to be struggling to light. The attempt to apply them to the composition of certain groups was real, though timid. Nothing of the kind is to be found in a.s.syrian sculpture. The Mesopotamian artist never seems for a moment to have doubted the virtues of his own method, a method which consisted in placing the numerous figures, whose position in a s.p.a.ce of more or less depth he wished to suggest, one above another on the field of 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 images put before him.
NOTES:
[415] _Art in Ancient Egypt_, vol. ii. chapter i. -- 1.
[416] M. J. HALeVY disputes this reading of the word. As we are unable to discuss the question, we must refer our readers to his observations (_Les Monuments Chaldeens et la Question de Sumir et d'Accad_) in the _Comptes rendus de l'Academie des Inscriptions_, 1882, p. 107. M. Halevy believes it should be read as the name of the prince Nabou or Nebo. The question is only of secondary importance, but M. Halevy enlarges its scope by reopening the whole matter of debate between himself and M. Oppert as to the true character of what a.s.syriologists call the Sumerian language and written character. The _Comptes rendus_ only gives a summary of the paper. The same volume contains a _resume_ of M. Oppert's reply (1882, p. 123: _Inscriptions de Gudea_, et seq).
[417] LAYARD, _Discoveries_, p. 341.
[418] The same disproportion between men and buildings is to be found in many other reliefs (see figs. 39, 43, and 60).
[Ill.u.s.tration]
CHAPTER III.
FUNERARY ARCHITECTURE.
-- 1.--_Chaldaean and a.s.syrian Notions as to a Future Life._
Of the remains that have come down to us from ancient Egypt the oldest, the most important in some respects, and beyond dispute the most numerous, are the sepulchres. Of the two lives of the Egyptian, that of which we know the most is his posthumous life--the life he led in the shadows of that carefully-hidden subterranean dwelling that he called his ”good abode.”
While in every other country bodies after a few years are nothing but a few handfuls 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 the desert sand and from hollows in the sand itself. They rise accompanied by long inscriptions that speak for them, and make us sharers in their joys and sorrows, in their religious beliefs and in the promises in which they placed their hopes when their eyes were about to close for ever. A peculiarity of which Egypt offers the only instance is thus explained. The house of the Memphite citizen and the palace of the king himself, can only now be restored by hints culled from the reliefs and inscriptions--hints which sometimes lend themselves to more than one interpretation, while the tombs of Egypt are known to us in every detail of structure and arrangement. In more than one instance they have come down to us with their equipment of epitaphs and inscribed prayers, of pictures carved and painted on the walls and all the luxury of their sepulchral furniture, exactly in fact as they were left when their doors were shut upon their silent tenants so many centuries ago.[419]
We are far indeed from being able to say this of a.s.syria and Chaldaea. In those countries it is the palace, the habitation of the sovereign, that has survived in the best condition, and from it we may imagine what the houses of private people were like; but we know hardly anything of their tombs.
Chaldaean tombs have been discovered in these latter years, but they are anonymous and mute. We do not possess a single funerary inscription dating from the days when the two nations who divided Mesopotamia between them were still their own masters. The arrangements of the nameless tombs in lower Chaldaea are extremely simple and their furnis.h.i.+ng very poor, if we compare them with the sepulchres in the Egyptian cemeteries. As for a.s.syrian burying-places, none have yet been discovered. Tombs have certainly been found at Nimroud, at Kouyundjik, at Khorsabad, and in all the mounds in the neighbourhood of Mossoul, but never among or below the a.s.syrian remains. They are always in the ma.s.s of earth and various _debris_ that has acc.u.mulated over the ruins of the a.s.syrian palaces, which is enough to show that they date from a time posterior to the fall of the Mesopotamian Empires. Any doubts that may have lingered on this point have been removed by the character of the objects found, which are never older than the Seleucidae or the Parthians, and sometimes date even from the Roman epoch.[420]
What then did the a.s.syrians do with their dead? No one has attacked this question more vigorously than Sir Henry Layard. In his attempt to answer it he explored the whole district of Mossoul, but without result; he pointed out the interest of the inquiry to all his collaborators, he talked about it to the more intelligent among his workmen, and promised a reward to whoever should first show him an a.s.syrian grave. He found nothing, however, and neither Loftus, Place, nor Ra.s.sam have been more successful. Neither texts nor monuments help us to fill up the gap. The excavations of M. de Sarzec have indeed brought to light the fragments of an a.s.syrian stele in which a funerary scene is represented, but unfortunately its meaning is by no means clear.[421] I cannot point to an a.s.syrian relief in which the same theme is treated. Among so many battle pictures we do not find a single scene a.n.a.logous to those so often repeated in the pictures and sculptures of Greece. The death and burial of an a.s.syrian warrior gave a theme to no a.s.syrian sculptor. It would appear that the national pride revolted from any confession that a.s.syrians could be killed like other men. All the corpses in the countless battlefields are those of enemies, who are sometimes mutilated and beheaded.[422]
These despised bodies were left to rot where they fell, and to feed the crows and vultures;[423] but it is impossible to believe that the a.s.syrians paid no honours to the bodies of their princes, their n.o.bles, and their relations, and some texts recently discovered make distinct allusions to funerary rites.[424] We can hardly agree to the suggestions of M. Place, who asks whether it is not possible that the a.s.syrians committed their corpses to the river, like the modern Hindoos, or to birds of prey, like the Guebres.[425] Usages so entirely out of harmony with the customs of other ancient nations would certainly have been noticed by contemporary writers, either Greek or Hebrew. In any case some allusion to them would survive in a.s.syrian literature, but no hint of the kind is to be found.
But after we have rejected those hypotheses the question is no nearer to solution than before; we are still confronted by the remarkable fact that the a.s.syrians so managed to hide their dead that no trace of them has ever been discovered. A conjecture offered by Loftus is the most inviting.[426]
He reminds us that although cemeteries are entirely absent from a.s.syria, Chaldaea is full of them. Between Niffer and Mugheir each mound is a necropolis. The a.s.syrians knew that Chaldaea was the birthplace of their race and they looked upon it as a sacred territory. We find the Ninevite kings, even when they were hardest upon their rebellious subjects in the south, holding it as a point of honour to preserve and restore the temples of Babylon and to wors.h.i.+p there in royal pomp. Perhaps the a.s.syrians, or rather those among them who could afford the expenses of the journey, had their dead transferred to the graveyards of Lower Chaldaea. The latter country, or, at least, a certain portion of it, would thus be a kind of holy-land where those Semites whose earliest traditions were connected with its soil would think themselves a.s.sured of a more tranquil repose and of protection from more benignant deities. The soil of a.s.syria itself would receive none but the corpses of those slaves and paupers who, counting for nothing in their lives, would be buried when dead in the first convenient corner, without epitaph or sepulchral furnis.h.i.+ng.
This hypothesis would explain two things that need explanation--the absence from a.s.syria of such tombs as are found in every other country of the Ancient World, and the great size of the Chaldaean cemeteries. Both Loftus and Taylor received the same impression, that the a.s.semblages of coffins, still huge in spite of the numbers that have been destroyed during the last twenty centuries, can never have been due entirely to the second and third rate cities in whose neighbourhood they occur. Piled one upon another they form mounds covering wide s.p.a.ces of ground, and so high that they may be seen for many miles across the plain.[427] This district must have been the common cemetery of Chaldaea and perhaps of a.s.syria; the dead of Babylon must have been conveyed there. Is it too much to suppose that by means of rivers and ca.n.a.ls those of Nineveh may have been taken there too? Was it not in exactly that fas.h.i.+on that mummies were carried by thousands from one end of the Nile valley to the other, to the places where they had to rejoin there ancestors?[428]