Page:A History of Art in Chaldæa & Assyria Vol 1.djvu/288

 266 A HISTORY OF ART IN CIIALDJCA AND ASSYRIA. many points, in the halls and passages of the outbuildings and in the courtyards adjoining the city gates for instance. 1 There the stones are only smoothed down, and their obvious purpose is merely to protect the crude brick within. The purely architectural origin of this system of casing is thus clearly shown. But the presence of these slabs set upright against the wall offered a temptation to the ambitious architect that he was not likely to resist. The limestone and alabaster of which they were composed afforded both a kindly surface for the chisel, and a certain guarantee of duration for the forms it struck out. In every Assyrian palace we may see that the king, its builder, had a double object in view, the glorification of the gods, and the transmission to posterity of his own image and the memory of his reign. To these ends the architect called in the sculptor, under whose hands the rudely dressed slabs took the historic forms with which we are familiar. Of all parts of the palace the doorways were most exposed to injury from the shocks of traffic, and we find their more solid plinths surmounted by higher and thicker slabs than are to be found elsewhere. These slabs are carved with the images of protecting divinities. Huge winged and man-headed bulls (Plate X) 2 or lions (Fig. 114), the speaking symbols of force and thought, met the approaching visitor. Sometimes a lion, reproducing with singular energy the features of the real beast, was substituted for the human-headed variety (Plate VIII). 3 These guardians of the gate always had the front part of their bodies salient in some decree from the general line of the wall. o o The head and breast, at least, were outside the arch. Right and 1 PLACE, Ninive, vol. ii. pp. 68-70. 2 This character of a tutelary divinity that we attribute to the winged bull is indicated in the clearest manner in the cuneiform texts : " In this pala'ce," says Esarhaddon, "the sedi and lamassi (the Assyrian names for these colossi) are propitious, are the guardians of my royal promenade and the rejoicers of my heart, may they ever watch over the palace and never quit its walls." And again : " I caused doors to be made in cypress, which has a good smell, and I had them adorned with gold and silver and fixed in the doorways. Right and left of those doorways I caused sedi and lamassi of stone to be set up, they are placed there to repulse the wicked." (ST. GUYARD, Bulletin de la Religion assyrienne, in z Revue de I* Histoire des Religions, vol. i. p. 43, note.) 3 PLACE, Ninive, vol. iii. plate 21.