Page:A History of Art in Chaldæa & Assyria Vol 2.djvu/210

 i8o A History of Art in Ciiald.ka and Assyria. economy of the composition. It was made to commemorate some military expedition in which the prince who reigned at Sirtella was successful. We do not know whether the fight itself was represented or not, but we have before our eyes the consequences of victory. One picture shows the insults inflicted upon the lifeless bodies of the hated enemy ; two more celebrate the care taken by the victors of their dead and the honours rendered to their memory ; finally the march of the successful army is portrayed. We have here, then, a well thought-out combina- tion, a serious effort to seize and figure the different moments in a complicated action. The execution is, however, of singular awkwardness. The first halting experiments of the Chaldaean Fig. 95. — Fragment of a stele ; from Tello. About one-third of the original size. Louvre. Drawn by Saint-El me Gautier. chisel, what we may call the primitive art of Chaldaea, is preserved for us in the fragments of this great stele. 1 A second and still more curious group of monuments is com- posed of eight statues of different sizes with inscriptions of Gudea, and of a ninth on which occurs a name read Ourbaou by some and Likbagas by others. 2 It is the smallest of all those exhibited 1 It has been thought that the inscriptions contain proof, that, during the period, to which this primitive art belongs, Sirtella was the capital of a small independent kingdom, while the title of Gudea (patési, or governor) would seem to show that in his time it formed part of a larger state. Gudea can only have been a great feudatory ; his position must have been similar to the nome princes in Egypt. Heuzey, in the Comptes rendus de V Académie des Inscriptions for 18 August, 1882. 2 A tenth statue of Gudea, very much mutilated, is not yet exhibited. There is also the lower part of a small seated statue, without inscription.