Page:A History of Art in Chaldæa & Assyria Vol 1.djvu/360

 338 A HISTORY OF ART IN CHALD^A AND ASSYRIA. the Assyrians paid no honours to the bodies of their princes, their nobles, and their relations, and some texts recently discovered make distinct allusions to funerary rites. 1 We can hardly agree to the suggestions of M. Place, who asks whether it is not possible that the Assyrians committed their corpses to the river, like the modern Hindoos, or to birds of prey, like the Guebres. 2 Usages so entirely out of harmony with the customs of other ancient nations would certainly have been noticed by contemporary writers, either Greek or Hebrew. In any case some allusion to them would survive in Assyrian literature, but no hint of the kind is to be found. But after we have rejected those hypotheses the question is no nearer to solution than before ; we are still confronted by the remarkable fact that the Assyrians so managed to hide their dead that no trace of them has ever been discovered. A conjecture offered by Loftus is the most inviting. 3 He reminds us that although cemeteries are entirely absent from Assyria, Chaldaea is full of them. Between Niffar and Mugheir each mound is a necropolis. The Assyrians knew that Chaldaea was the birthplace of their race and they looked upon it as a sacred territory. We find the Ninevite kings, even when they were hardest upon their rebellious subjects in the south, holding it as a point of honour to preserve and restore the temples of Babylon and to worship there in royal pomp. Perhaps the Assyrians, or rather those among them who could afford the expenses of the journey, had their dead transferred to the graveyards of Lower Chaldaea. The latter country, or, at least, a certain portion of it, would thus be a kind of holy-land where those Semites whose earliest traditions were connected with its soil would think themselves assured of a more tranquil repose and of protection from more benignant deities. The soil of Assyria itself would receive none but the corpses of those slaves and paupers who, counting for nothing in their lives, the combatants (LAYARD, Monuments, ist series, plates 18, 22, 26, &c). We may also refer to the curious monument from Tell-loh, in which vultures carrying off human heads and limbs in the clouds are represented. For an engraving of it see our chapter on Chaldeean sculpture. 1 See an article published by M. J. HALF.VY in the Revue archcologique, vol. xliv. p. 44, under the title : L Immortalite de I'Ame chez les Peuples scmitiques. - PLACE, Ninive, vol. ii. p. 184. 3 LOFTUS, Travels and Researches, pp. 198, 199.