Page:A History of Art in Chaldæa & Assyria Vol 1.djvu/115

 THE PEOPLE AND GOVERNMENT. 95 fishermen of the Persian Gulf who lived entirely, according to Herodotus, upon dried fish ground to powder and made into a kind of cake. 1 The naive, picturesque, and anecdotic illustrations of common life, which are so plentiful in Egypt, are almost completely wanting to the art of Chaldoea. On the other hand, we find, as we might have expected from what we know of Chaldsean society, continual traces of the sacerdotal spirit, and of the great part played by the king with the help and under the tutelage of the priesthood. Upon the walls of palaces, temples, and towns, on the statuettes of bronze and terracotta which were buried under the thresholds of buildings and placed as votive offerings in the temples, upon cylinders and engraved stones, we find only complex and varied emblems, fantastic and symbolic forms, attitudes suggestive of worship and sacrifice (Figs. 20 and 21), images of gods, goddesses, and secondary genii, princes f Fir. 20. Cl.alda.-an Cylinder. FIG. 21. Chaldfean Cylinder; from the British Museum."' surrounded with royal pomp and offering their homage to the deity. Hence a certain poverty and monotony and the want of recuperative power inseparable from an absorbed contemplation of sacred types and of a transcendental world. Assyrian society was different in many respects from that of Chaldsea. The same gods, no doubt, were adored in both countries, and their worship involved a highly-placed priesthood ; but at Nineveh the royal power rested on the army, and the 1 HERODOTUS, i. 200. A similar article of food is in extensive use at the present day in the western islands of Scotland, and upon other distant coasts where the soil is poor. ED. 2 Upon the subject of this cylinder, in which George Smith wished to recognise a representation of Adam and Eve tempted by the serpent, see M. JOACHIM MENANT'S paper entitled, La Bible et les Cylindres Chald'eens (Paris, 1880, Maisorneuve, 8vo). M. Menant makes short work of this forced interpretation and of several similar delusions which were beginning to win some acceptance.