Page:A History of Art in Chaldæa & Assyria Vol 1.djvu/341

 ORIENTATION AND FOUNDATION CEREMONIES. 319 In the palace of Assurnazirpal at Nimroud, Sir Henry Layard found some alabaster tablets with inscriptions on both their faces hidden behind the colossal lions at one of the doorways. 1 The British Museum also possesses a series of small figures found at Nimroud but in a comparatively modern building, the palace of Esarhaddon. They have each two pairs of wings, one pair raised, the other depressed. They had been strewn in the sand under the threshold of one of the doors. It was at Khorsabad, however, that the observations were made which have most clearly shown the importance attached to this ceremony of consecration. M. Oppert tells us that during the summer of 1854, " M. Place disinterred from the foundations of FIG. 149. Terra-cotta cone. Height 6 inches. Louvre. Khorsabad a stone case in which were five inscriptions on five different materials, gold, silver, antimony, copper and lead. Of these five tablets he brought away four. The leaden one was too heavy to be carried off at once, and it was despatched to Bassorah on the rafts with the bulk of the collection, whose fate it shared." The other four tablets are in the Louvre. Their text is almost indentical. M. Oppert gives a translation of it. 2 According to his rendering, the inscriptionin which the king speaks through- out in the first person ends with this imprecation : " May the great lord Assur destroy from the face of this country the name 1 LAYARD, Nineveh, vol. i. p. 115, and vol. ii. p. 91. 2 OPPERT, Expedition en Mesopotamie, >^ol. ii. pp. 343-351.