Page:A History of Art in Chaldæa & Assyria Vol 1.djvu/144

 124 A HISTORY OF ART IN CHALD.-EA AND ASSYRIA. ceilings and doors of her sumptuous palaces. 1 The employment, however, of these excellent woods must always have been rare and exceptional. Moreover, other habits had become confirmed. When these new resources were put at the disposition of architecture, the art was too old and too closely wedded to its traditional methods to accept their aid. In the use of wood, as in that of brick, Assyria neglected to make the best of the advantages assured to her by her situation and her .natural products. If Chald?ea was ill-provided with stone and timber, she had every facility for procuring the useful and precious metals. They were not, of course, to be found in her alluvial plains, but metals are easy of transport, especially to a country whose commerce has the command of navigable highways. The in- dustrial centres in which they are manufactured are often separated by great distances from the regions where they are won from the earth. But to procure the more indispensable among them the dwellers upon the Tigris and Euphrates had no great distance to cover. The southern slopes of Zagros, three or four clays' journey from Nineveh, furnished iron, copper, lead, and silver in abundance. Mines are still worked in Kurdistan, or, at least, have been worked in very recent times, which supply these metals in abundance. The traces of abandoned workings may be recognized even by the hasty 1 As to the employment in Assyria of cedar from the Lebanon, see FRANCOIS LENORMANT, Histoire Ancienne, vol. ii. p. 191, and an inscription of Sennacherib, translated by OPPERT, Les Sargonides, pp. 52, 53. Its use in Babylon is proved by several passages of the great text known as the Inscription of London, in which Nebuchadnezzar recounts the great works he had caused to be carried out in his capital (LENORMANT, Histoire, vol. ii. pp. 228 and 233). We find this phrase among others, " I used in the chamber of oracles the largest of the trees transported from the summits of Lebanon." LAYARD (Discoveries, pp. 356 7) tells us that one evening during the Nimroud excavations, his labourers lighted a fire to dry themselves after a storm, which they fed with timbers taken from the ruins. The smell of burning cedar, a perfume which so many Greek and Latin poets have praised (urit odoratam nocturna in lumina cedrum, VIRGIL, sEneid, vii. 13), apprised him of what was going on. In the British Museum (Nimroud Gallery, Case A), fragments of recovered joists may be seen. They are in such good preservation that they might be shaped and polished anew, so as to again bring out the markings and the fine dark-yellow tone which contributed not a little to make the wood so precious. It was sought both for its agreeable appearance and its known solidity ; and experience has proved that the popular opinion which declared it incorruptible had some foundation.