Page:A History of Art in Chaldæa & Assyria Vol 1.djvu/385

 THE CHALDEAN TOMB. 363 that, at the time of Ctesias, and perhaps a little later, the remains of a great staged-tower were to be seen among the ruins of Nineveh. The popular imagination had dubbed this the tomb of Ninus, just as one of the great heaps of debris that now mark the site is called the tomb of Jonah. All that has hitherto been recovered in the way of Mesopotamia!! tomb architecture is of little importance so far as beauty is con- cerned, and we may perhaps be blamed for dwelling upon these remains at such length in a history of art. But we had our reasons for endeavouring to reunite and interpret the scanty facts by which some light is thrown on the subject. Of all the creations of man, his tomb is that, perhaps, which enables us to penetrate farthest into his inner self; there is no work of his hands into which he puts more of his true soul, in which he speaks more naively and with a more complete acknowledgment of his real beliefs and the bases of his hopes. To pass over the Chaldsean tomb in silence because it is a mediocre work of art would be to turn a blind eye to the whole of one side of the life of a great people, a people whose role in the development of the ancient civilization was such as to demand that we should leave no stone unturned to make ourselves masters of their every thought.