Page:Discovery and Decipherment of the Trilingual Cuneiform Inscriptions.djvu/93

 magnificent views of the sculpture on the Great Portal of the Hall of the Hundred Columns and the drawing of the Tombs overhanging the Platform. The sculptured staircase is drawn upon an immense scale. It fills two plates, one opening out in length equal to twelve pages of the book, and the other to five or six pages. The execution is admirable as a work of art, and as such it has perhaps never been surpassed. In point of fidelity to the subject it may not be more in error than many of its successors. At that period the sculptures were no doubt in a more perfect condition than they since became after a lapse of a century or two, and Chardin describes them as being in his day 'still so complete and so sharply defined that the work appears to have only just come from the sculptors' hands.' The plates are no doubt far from reaching photographic accuracy; but this objection applies, if not equally, to the later drawings of Porter and Flandin. When we look at the general view of the platform and observe the remarkable precision with which the various ruins are marked upon it, we are surprised to find the description in the text so complicated and confused. The pencil of the artist seems to have followed with perfect clearness the relation to each other of the various parts of the ruins; but in Chardin's account of them, from the point where he leaves the Columnar Edifice, we become lost in his description of a perfect maze of apparently isolated structures. When we advance from ' the marvellous temple choir,' as he calls that edifice, and proceed to follow his 'straight line,' we can only very dimly recognise where we are going. It is not, indeed, till we arrive at the Tombs that we once more recover consciousness of our position. While nothing can be learned of the general disposition of the