Page:A History of Art in Chaldæa & Assyria Vol 1.djvu/84

 6 4 A HISTORY OF ART IN CHALD.EA AND ASSYRIA. was not only the inferior genii that were represented in such singular fashion. When, by the development of religion, the capricious and unruly multitude of spirits had been placed under the supremacy of a small number of superior beings, these, whom we may call the sovereign gods, were often figured with the heads of lions or eagles (see Fig. 8). Before any of these images had been found we already knew from Berosus what the deity was like by whom the first germs of art and letters had been sown upon the earth. "He had the whole body of a fish, but beneath his fish's head he had another head [that of a man], while human feet appeared below his fish's tail. He had also the voice of a man, and his images are yet to be found." 1 More than one sculptural type has been found answering to this description (see Fig. 9). Why did art, in creating divine types, give such prominence to features borrowed from the lower animals ? Was it impelled by mere inability to distinguish, by varieties of feature, form and attitude, between the different gods created by the imagination ? Or must we look upon the attribution to this or that deity, of forms borrowed from the bull, the lion, or the eagle, as a deliberate act of symbolism, meant to suggest that the gods in question had the qualities of the animals of which their persons were partly made up ? In order to arrive at a just conclusion we must, of course, take account both of the resistance of the material and of the facilities which a transparent system of allegory would give to the artist in the working out of his thought ; we must also admit perhaps that the national intelligence had been prepared to look for and admire such combinations. It may have been predisposed towards them by the habits of admiration for the patient strength of the draught-ox and the destructive vigour of the eagle and the lion contracted during a long series of years. Both historical analogy and the examination of sculptured types 1 BEROSUS, fragment i. 3, in the Fragment a Historicum Gracorum of CH. MiiLLER, vol. ii. p. 496. FIG. 9. Anou or Dagon. Nimroud. I.ayard, Dis- coveries, p. 350.