Page:A History of Art in Chaldæa & Assyria Vol 1.djvu/284

 262 A HISTORY OF ART IN CHALD^EA AND ASSYRIA. Loftus at Abou-Shareyn. This latter is about fifty-four inches high and its original place may very well have been before one of the doorways of the building. 1 Of all animal forms, that of the lion was the first to afford materials for decorative composition of any value, and even after all the centuries that have passed, the lion has not lost his vogue in the East. We might, if we chose, multiply examples of this persistence, but we shall be content with quoting one. In the centre of Asia Minor, at the village of Angora, in which I passed three months of the year 1861, I encountered these lions at every turn. A short distance off, in the village of Kalaba, there was a fountain of Turkish construction in which a lion, quite similar in style to those of Assyria, had been inserted. 2 In the court of a mosque there was a lion in the round, a remarkable work by some Grseco-Roman sculptor. 3 There and in other towns of Asia Minor, lions from the Seljukian period are by no means rare, and even now they are made in considerable numbers. After the labours of the day we sometimes passed the evenings in the villas of the rich Greek merchants, which were nearly all on the east of the town. Most of these houses were of recent construction, and were filled with mirrors, fine carpets, and engravings. In front of the house, and in the centre of a large paved and trellised court, there were fountains, sometimes ornamented with consider- able taste, in which, on great occasions, a slender jet of water would give coolness to the air. The angles of nearly every one of these fountains were marked with small white marble lions, heavy and awkward in shape, but nevertheless considered at Angora to be the last word of art. They are imported from Constantinople together with the basins of the fountains. In spite of all this, however, some doubts may be felt as to the destination of the lions found among the Chaldsean ruins. The only monument there discovered which seems to have certainly 1 LOFTUS says nothing of this lion in those Travels and Researches which we have so often quoted. It was, perhaps, on a later occasion that he found it. We came upon it in a collection of original sketches and manuscript notes (Drawings in Babylonia by W. K. Loftus and H. Churchill] in the custody of the keeper of Oriental antiquities at the British Museum. We have to express our acknow- ledgments to Dr. Birch for permission to make use of this valuable collection. 2 PERROT, GUILLAUME ET DELBET, Exploration archeologique de la Galatie, vol. ii. pi. 32. 3 Exploration archeologique^ vol. ii. pi. 1 1.