Page:An Elementary History of Art.djvu/208

 178 Assyrian Sculpture. obelisk of marble about six feet high — engraved with ten lines of the cuneiform character, and sculptured with twenty bas-reliefs, representing the offering of tribute to the king by conquered races — which was discovered near Kalah-Shergat. It is hoped that this obelisk may aid in the thorough deciphering of the cuneiform* character, as the Rosetta stone, also preserved in the British Museum, did of the hieroglyphic. The Louvre contains many extremely fine specimens of Assyrian sculpture, the principal being the four colossal winged bulls at the entrance of the palace of Khorsabad, already described (Fig. 10). The Assyrian man-bull, like the Egyptian sphinx, was the symbol of wisdom and strength combined. Assyrian gems, many of which may be seen at the British Museum, are of great value. The earliest are of serpentine, and are of a cylindrical shape ; those of later date are of agate, jasper, quartz, or syenite, either cylin- drical in form or oval; they are engraved with figures of the gods and the names of the owner in the cuneiform character. and the Assyrian. The letters are shaped like arrows, wedges, or nails. The meaning of many of the signs has been discovered by Niebuhr, Grotefend, Rask, Lassen, Burnouf, Rawlinson, Hincks, Oppert, Menaut, and others ; but much still remains to be done before the numerous in- scriptions in the cuneiform character can be fully deciphered. Fig. 74.— Statue of a Priest. In the British Museum.
 * There are three kinds of cuneiform writing : the Persian, the Median,