Page:A History of Art in Chaldæa & Assyria Vol 1.djvu/233

 Tin-: COLUMN. 2 1 1 trellis work with which the bed of the relief is covered is significant of a mountainous country. The palace rises on the banks of a river, which is indicated by the sinuous lines in the right lower corner. The buildings themselves which are dominated here and there by the round tops of trees, planted, we may suppose, in the inner courts stand upon mounds at various heights above the plain. The lowest of these look like isolated structures, such as the advanced works of a fortress. Next comes a line of towers, and then the artificial hill crowned by the palace properly speaking. The facade of the latter is flanked by tall and salient towers, across whose summits runs the open gallery to which we have referred. 1 This is supported by numerous columns which must by their general arrangement and spacing, have been of wood. The gallery consisted, in all probability, of a platform upheld by trunks of trees, either squared or left in the rough and surmounted by capitals sheathed in beaten bronze. The volute is here quite simple in shape ; elsewhere we find it doubled, as it were, so that four volutes occur between the astragali and the abacus (Figs. 42 and 77). 2 In other examples, again, it is elongated upwards until it takes a shape differing but little from the acanthus leaves of the Corinthian capital (Fig. /8). 3 This volute is found all over Assyria and Chaldoea. It decorates the angles of the small temple represented on the stone known as Lord Aberdeen's Black Stone (Fig. 79). It occurs also on many of the ivories, but these, perhaps, are for the most part Phoenician. But in any case the Assyrians made constant use of it in the decoration of their furniture. In an ivory plaque, of which the British Museum possesses several examples, we find a man standing and grasping a lotus stern in his left hand (Fig. 80). This stem 1 The profiles of the capitals in this gallery led Sir H. LAYARD to speak of "small pillars with capitals in the form of the Ionic volute" (Discoreries, p. n 9 )(?). 2 A similar arrangement of volutes may be found on the rough columns engraved upon one of the ivory plaques found at Nimroud (LAYARD, Monuments, &c., first series, plate 88, fig. 3). 3 We reproduce this capital from RAWLINSON'S Five Great Monarchies (vol. i. p. '333) ; but we should have liked to be able to refer either to the relief in which it occurs, or to the original design which must have been made in the case of those slabs which had to be left at Nineveh. We have succeeded in finding neither the relief nor the drawing, so that we cannot guarantee the fidelity of the