Page:A History of Art in Chaldæa & Assyria Vol 1.djvu/132

 I 12 A HISTORY OF ART IN CIIALD/KA AND ASSYRIA. certain bas-reliefs of Assurbanipal, 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 Assyria. By thus limiting its scope, sculpture condemned itself to much repetition and to a uniformity not far removed from sameness ; but its very silences are eloquent upon the inhuman originality of a system to which Assyria owed both the splendour of her rnilitary 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 Fio. 31. Convoy of prisoners. Kouyundjik. From Lnynrcl. such wide gaps, once broken, nothing remained of the true Assyria but the ignorant masses of a second-class state to whom a change of masters had little meaning, and a few vast buildings doomed soon to disappear under their own ruins. When we have completed our examination of Assyrian 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 Nabopolassar 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 pro- nounced. Eager for knowledge as they were, they passed over the