Page:A History of Art in Chaldæa & Assyria Vol 2.djvu/101

 Themes of Chald^o-Assyrian Sculpture. 85 with the general idea that led the Chaldaeans to create these mysterious but kindly beings, and to endow them with their mighty frames of stone. 1 These bulls have only been actually found in Assyria, but numerous and precise texts have been deciphered by which their existence at the gateways of Chaldsean temples and palaces has been proved. 2 They are not now to be met with in the country of their origin, because their material was too rare in the lower part of the great basin to escape the attacks of spoilers. Soft or hard, volcanic or calcareous, stone was there precious and difficult to find. Sooner or later such objects as these would be dragged from their ancient sites and broken up to be used anew. If chance had not so willed that the Assyrian palaces were preserved for us by entombment in their own ruins, we should now have known nothing of a type that played a great part in the decoration of Mesopotamian buildings, and, by its originality, made a greal impression upon neighbouring peoples ; or at least we should Fig. 34. — Cone of chalcedony. In the National Library at Paris. Actual size. only know it by reproductions on a very small scale, like those we meet with on the cylinders, or by imitations vastly inferior to the originals, like those of the palaces at Persepolis. Instead of a human head on the body of a beast, we sometimes find the process reversed, but always with an amount of taste and reserve to which we are compelled to render due praise. We may, of course, quote instances in which the head of an eagle is put upon a hum^ body (Vol I. Fig.jV x^tnë snouïdèrTof a man concealed under a fish's scales (Vol. I. Fig. 9, and above, Fig. 34) - 1 The ordinary and principal office of the human-headed bull, was to guard the doors of temples and palaces, but in his rôle of protecting genius, other functions were included Thus, in a bas-relief representing Sargon's campaigns in Phoenicia, ? f, a ,1 SCemS t0 bG WalHng ° n the Sea ' With Anon > 0annes > or Dagon, the fish-god, he presides over the journeys of the ships that bring cargoes of wood from Lebanon (Botta, Monument de M'nive, plate 32). 2 M. Lenormant has collected these texts in his Origines de V Histoire, vol. i P- 115-