Page:A History of Art in Chaldæa & Assyria Vol 2.djvu/379

 Metal Dishes and Utensils. 341 population of a town or district into their own country. Among the Syrians thus transplanted there must have been artizans, some of whom endeavoured to live by the exercise of their calling and by opening shops in the bazaars of Babylon, Calah, and Nineveh. Clients could be easily gained by selling carved ivories and these engraved cups at prices much smaller than those demanded when the cost of transport from the Phoenician coast had to be defrayed. In one of these two ways it is, then, easy to explain the introduction of these foreign motives into Assyria, where they would give renewed life to a system of ornament whose re- sources were showing signs of exhaustion. This tendency must have become especially pronounced about the time of the Sargonids, when Assyria was the mistress of Phoenicia and invaded the Nile valley more than once. To this period 1 should be most ready to ascribe the majority of the bronze cups ; the landscapes, hunts and processions of wild animals with which many of them are engraved, seem to recall the style and taste of the bas-reliefs of Sennacherib and Assur- banipal rather than the more ancient schools of sculpture. In any case it would be difficult, if not impossible, to dis- tinguish between the vases engraved in Mesopotamia by native workmen and those imported from Phoenicia, or made at Nineveh by workmen who had received their training at Tyre or Byblos. The resemblances between the two are too many and too great. At most we may unite all the platters found in Mesopotamia into a single group, and point out a general distinction between them and those that have been discovered in the Mediterranean basin. The ornament on the Nimroud cups is, on the whole, simpler than on those found in Cyprus and Italy ; the figure plays a less important part in the former, and the compositions are more simple. The Assyrian cups, or, to be more accurate, those found in Assyria, represent the earliest phase of this art, or industry, whichever it should be called. In later years, after the fall of Nineveh, when Phoenicia had the monopoly of the manufacture, she was no longer content with purely decorative designs and small separate pictures. Her bronze-workers multiplied their figures and covered the concentric zones with real subjects, with scenes whose meaning and intention can often be readily grasped. This we shall see when the principal examples