Page:A History of Art in Chaldæa & Assyria Vol 2.djvu/316

 284 A History of Art in Ciialixea and Assyria. and interested by force passing from repose into action, by force putting forth all its energies in contempt of danger and in spite of the most determined resistance. The temperaments of the two nations were, then, vastly different, and by the time their mutual relations became close and continuous, each had thought too much, had worked too much, and created too much for itself to be in any great danger of losing its originality under the influence of the other. Moreover, the two civilizations never penetrated within one another. Their moments of contact were short and superficial. Under the great Theban conquerors of the eighteenth dynasty, the Egyptian armies advanced to the Euphrates, and the princes of Mesopo- tamia may, for a time, have recognized the suzerainty of the Pharaohs ; this is proved to some extent by the numerous scarabs engraved with the name of Thothmes III., which have been found in the valley of the Khabour, 1 but after the nineteenth dynasty their hold upon these distant conquests must have been lost. Their access to them was barred by the Khetas, in Syria, and, a few centuries later, it was the Sargonids who invaded Egypt and admired its monuments so much that they carried some of them away, such as the lion found at Bagdad. It bears the oval of a Pharaoh who is believed to be one of the shepherd kings. 2 In the interval the importation of objects of luxury, which was carried on through the Phoenicians, had introduced a few foreign motives into the repertory of the Assyrian artists, such as the crouching sphinx and the lotus flower ; the winged globe may also be Egyptian ; but these borrowings never go beyond details ; even if they were far more numerous than they are, they would not deprive the sculpture of the Mesopotamian Semites of its right to be considered an independent and autonomous form of art, whose merits and defects are to be explained by the inborn genius of the race, by its manner and beliefs, by the natural conditions of its home, and the qualities of the different materials employed. 3 1 Layard, Discoveries, p. 281. A scarab of Amenophis III. has also been found. Layard also tells us that he found several scarabaei of Egyptian manufacture, while excavating at Nimroud, and others were brought to him which had been found in different parts of Mesopotamia. 2 Account of the income and expenditure of the British Museum for 1878. 3 In a recently published work (Kritik des /EgyptiscJwi Ornaments, archdologische