Page:A History of Art in Chaldæa & Assyria Vol 2.djvu/380

 342 A History of Art in Citald.t.a and Assyria. oi this kind of art come under review in our chapters upon Phoenicia. 3 Meanwhile, we shall not attempt to establish distinctions that are nearly always open to contest ; they would, besides, require an amount of minute detail which would here be quite out of place. To give but one example of the evidence which might lead to at least plausible conclusions, we might see pure Assyrian workmanship in the cup figured below (Fig. 218), 2 where moun- tains, trees, and animals stand up in slight relief, both hammer and burin having been used to produce the desired result. Among these animals we find a bear, which must have been a much more familiar object to the Assyrians living below the mountain-chains of Armenia and Kurdistan than to the dwellers upon the Syrian Fig. 218. — Bronze cup. British Museum. coast. In the inscribed records of their great hunts, the kings of Assyria often mention the bear. 3 Nothing that can be compared to these wooded hills peopled by wild beasts is to be found on the cups from Cyprus or Italy. I may say the same of another cup on which animals of various species are packed so closely together that they recall the engravings on some of the cylinders (see Fig. 149). 4 1 See on this subject an ingenious and learned paper to which we shall more than once have occasion to refer, namely, M. Clermont-Ganneau's Etude d Archéologie orientale, V Imagerie phénicienne et la Mythologie iconologique chez les Grecs. First part: La Coupe phénicienne de Paleslrina (1880, 8vo, 8 plates). 2 Layard, Monuments, second series, plate 66. • ; Houghton, On the Mammalia of Assyrian Sculptures, p. 382. 4 Layard, Monuments, second series, plate 67.