Page:A History of Art in Chaldæa & Assyria Vol 1.djvu/344

 ;22 A HISTORY OF ART IN CIIALD/EA AND ASSYRIA. thought, and it is, perhaps, fair to suppose that they turned to the practice of the arts those intellects which they had cultivated above their fellows. Architecture especially requires something more than manual skill, practice, and natural genius. When it is carried so far as it was in Chaldoea it demands a certain amount of science, and the priests who by right of their intellectual superiority held such an important place in the state, may well have contrived to gain a monopoly as architects to the king. In their persons alone would the scientific knowledge required for such work be combined with the power to accomplish those sacred rites which gave to the commencement of a new building the character of a contract between man and his deitv. 9. Mechanical Resources. The Chaldaeans and Assyrians were never called upon to trans- port such enormous masses as some of the Egyptian monoliths, such as the obelisks and the two great colossi at Thebes. But the stone bulls that decorated the palaces of Nineveh were no light weight, and it was not without difficulty that the modern explorers succeeded in conveying them to the borders of the Tigris and loading them on the rafts upon which they began their long journeys to Paris and London. In moving such objects from place to place the Assyrians, like the Egyptians, had no secret beyond that of patience, and the unflinching use of human aims and shoulders in unstinted number. 1 We know this from monu- ments in which the details of the operation are figured even more clearly and with more pictorial power than in the bas-relief at El- Bercheh, which has served to make us acquainted with the methods employed in taking an Egyptian colossus from the quarry to its site. In Mesopotamia, as in Egypt, there were water-ways that could be used at any season for the transport of heavy masses. Quarries were made as near the banks of the Euphrates and Tigris as possible, and when a stone monster had to be carried to a town situated at some distance from both those rivers the canals by which the country was intersected in every direction supplied their 1 As to the simplicity of Egyptian engineering, see the History of Art in Ancient Egypt, vol. ii. p. 72, and fig. 43.