Page:A History of Art in Chaldæa & Assyria Vol 2.djvu/250

 2i8 A History of Art in Chald^ea and Assyria. family oi the lower country, and, that he might be looked upon as the legitimate ruler of Babylon, joined her name with his in the royal style and title. This hypothesis finds some confirmation in what Herodotus tells us about Semiramis. She was, he says, queen of Babylon five generations before Nitocris, which would be about a century and a half. He adds that she caused the quays of the Eurphrates to be built. 1 This takes us back to rather beyond the middle of the eighth century b.c., that is very near to the date which Assyrian chronology would fix for the reign of Vulush (810 — /8i). As the last representative of the old national dynasty, this Semiramis, associated as she was in the exercise, or at least in the show, of sovereign power both in Assyria and Chaldaea, would not be forgotten by her countrymen, and the population of Babylon would be especially likely to magnify the part she had played. There is nothing fabulous in the tradition as Herodotus gives it, although it may, perhaps, go beyond the truth here and there. Ctesias, however, goes much farther. He brings together and amplifies tales which had already received many additions in the half century that separated him from Herodotus, and he thus creates the type of that Semiramis, the wife of Ninus and the conqueror of all Asia, who so long held an undeserved place in ancient history. 2 The last Calah prince who has left us anything is Tiglath- Pileser II. (745 — 727). We have already described how his palace was destroyed by Esarhaddon, who employed its materials for his own purposes. 3 At the British Museum there are a few fragments which have been recognized by their inscriptions as belonging to his work (Vol. I. Fig. 26) 4 ; they are quite similar to those of his immediate predecessors. With the new dynasty founded by Sargon at the end of the eighth century taste changed fast enough. In those bas-reliefs in the Khorsabad palace which represent that king's campaigns, many details are treated in a spirit very different from that of former days. Trees, for instance, are no longer abstract signs standing for no one kind of vegetation more than another; the 1 Herodotus, i. 184. 2 In repeating this hypothesis we have followed Professor Rawlinson {The Fii ] e Great Moîicirchics, vol. ii. pp. 11 9-1 21); to us it appears worthy of extreme respect. 3 See above, page 40. 4 See also Layard, Monuments, first série?, plates 57-67.