Page:A History of Art in Chaldæa & Assyria Vol 2.djvu/108

 90 A History of Art in Ciiai.d.fa and Assyria. have made her beautiful if he had known how. She is shown naked, against the general custom of an art that everywhere else hid the human body under ample draperies. This nudity must have been intended to suggest those feminine charms by which desire is awakened and life preserved on the world. Fig. 37. — Carrying the gods. From the palace of Sennacherib; from Layard. The supreme gods, the Bels or Lords, were treated in the same way when all the majesty of their station had to be suggested. Each of these had his domicile in one of the principal sanctuaries of Chaldaea and Syria. At Sippara it was Samas, or the sun personified (Vol. I., Fig. 71) ; upon the seal of Ourkam (Vol. I., Fig. 3), upon another cylinder on which there are many curious Fig. 38. — Istar and the sacrificing priest. Fig. 39. — Istar between two personages. Plague Museum. and inexplicable details (Fig. 17), and upon a last monument of the same kind which dates from the early centuries of Chaldsean civilization (Fig. 40), it is a Bel whose name escapes us ; 1 but in 1 Chabouillet (Catalogue general des Camées de la Bibliothèque nationale, No. 754) proposes to recognize in the scene here represented the offering of his nightly- spouse to Bel in-his temple at Babylon (Herodotus, i. 181). M. Lenormant agrees with this interpretation {Essai de commentaire des Frag7nents de Bérose, p. 374). Menant, on the other hand, thinks it as little justified as that which finds the early scenes of Genesis — the temptation of Eve, and the eating of the forbidden fruit — reproduced upon the cylinders (Remarques sur un cylindre du Musée Britannique, in the Comptes rendus de V Académie des Inscriptio?is, 1879, pp. 270- 286).