Page:A History of Art in Chaldæa & Assyria Vol 2.djvu/432

 394 A History of Art in Ciiald.ra and Assyria. measuring themselves with nature, and who shirked her difficulties by draping- their figures. But before thus bringing the two methods and the two ways of looking at form into opposition, we ought perhaps to have pointed out a difference in which this inequality is foreshadowed. In all the monarchies of the East the great monuments were anonymous, or, at least, if a name was given in the official texts it was not that of the artist who con- ceived them, but of the king under whom they were created. It is not till we arrive at Greece that we find public opinion placing the work of art and its author so high that the latter feels himself justified in signing his own creation. But although this practice was not inaugurated in Egypt, numerous inscriptions bear witness to the high rank held in Egyptian society by the artists to whom the king confided the construction and decoration of his buildings. 1 These men were not only well paid ; they received honours which they are careful to record, and their fame was spread over the whole valley of the Nile. In the cuneiform texts we have so far failed to discover the name of a single architect or sculptor, and it does not appear that a reason for the omission is to be sought in the peculiar conditions of Chaldaeo-Assyrian epigraphy. Al- though Babylon and Nineveh have not left us thousands of epitaphs like those rescued from the sands of Egypt, we possess many private contracts and agreements in which information similar to that afforded in other countries by the sepulchral steles is to be found. Neither there nor elsewhere do we find a trace of anything corresponding to the conspicuous rank held under the Theban princes of the eighteenth and nineteenth dynasties, by a Semnat, a Bakhenkhonsou, or any other of the royal architects whose names have been handed down to us in the texts. It is unlikely that this difference will vanish when more texts have been translated. The inequality in the position of the two artists is readily explained by the unequal development of the two arts. Egyptian architecture is learned and skilful after a fashion quite distinct from that of Mesopotamia. It is not content, like the latter, to spread itself out laterally and to heap up huge masses of earth, to be afterwards clothed in thin robes of enamelled faience, of painted and sculptured alabaster. In spite of their rich decora- 1 Art in Ancient Egypt, vol. ii. pp. 176-179.