Page:A History of Art in Chaldæa & Assyria Vol 2.djvu/252

 2o A History oi- Art in Ciiai.d.f.a and Assyria. themselves his vassals, and to set up his image as a sign of homage rendered and allegiance sworn. But the stone is now too much broken to be of any great interest as a work of art. 1 The artistic masterpiece of this epoch is the bronze lion figured in our Plate XI. It had been suçro-ested that its use was to hold down the cords of a tent or the lower edge of tapestries, a purpose for which the weight of the bronze and the ring fixed in its back make it well suited. This idea had to be abandoned, however, when a whole series of similar figures marked with the name of Sennacherib was found. Their execution was hardly equal to that of the lion we have figured, but their general charac- teristics were the same, and they had rings on their backs. 2 These lions are sixteen in number ; they form a series in which the size of the animal becomes steadily smaller with each example; the largest is a foot long, the smallest hardly more than an inch. The decrease seems to follow a certain rule, but rust has affected them too greatly for it to be easy to base any metrological calcu- lation upon their weight. But all doubt as to their use is removed by the inscriptions in cuneiform and in ancient Aramaic characters with which several of them are engraved. The Aramaic inscrip- tions all begin with the word mine ; then comes a figure indicating the number of mines, or of subdivisions of the mine that the weight represents ; finally, there is the name of some personage, who may perhaps have been a magistrate charged with the regu- lation and verification of weights. ■t> 1 This stele now belongs to the Berlin Museum. It has recently been the subject of an important work by a learned German Assyriologist, Herr Schrader (Die Sargonstele des Berliner Museums, in the Abhandlungen of the Berlin Academy for 1881). He gives a translation of the inscription, with a commentary, showing the date of the stele to be 707, or the fifteenth year of Sargon's reign. 2 These lions are figured by Layard, Monuments, first series, vol. i. p. 128. Their inscriptions are brought together in a single plate in the Discoveries, p. 601. The Aramaic texts will be published in the Corpus inscriptionum Semiticorwn, in the first instalment of the part devoted to Aramaic inscriptions. These lions of Khorsabad and Nimroud may be compared, both for type and use, to the bronze lion found at Abydos, on the Hellespont, in i860. M. de Vogué has made us acquainted with the latter in the pages of the Revue archéologique for January, 1862. His article, which contains a reproduction both of the monument as a whole and of its inscription, and an explanation of the latter, has been reprinted in the Melanges d } aixheologie orientale (8vo. 1868, pp. 179-196). Mr. Norris has published a special study of the weights in the British Museum (On the Assyrian and Babylonia?! Weights, in the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, vol. xvi. P- 215).