Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 19.djvu/629

Rh ASSYRIAN. POTTERY 605 about 9 inches by 12, also found at Nimrud, and now in the British Museum, has a picture of the Assyrian king under a fringed canopy giving audience to an officer. The king is followed by an attendant eunuch. In addition to figure-subjects and ornaments, large wall- surfaces were covered with cuneiform inscriptions, having letters about 1J inches high painted in white and yellow on blue or green grounds ; these are executed on large slabs of coarse brown clay, to which a smooth surface, fit for painting, has been given by a thin coating or slip of fine -ground yellowish clay. Large slabs with pendants for ceilings, painted in the same way with very graceful patterns, have been found, all in simple earth colours. Another even more magnificent application of the potter s art to wall-decoration was by the use of coloured enamel pastes, like those described under the pottery of Egypt. These are reliefs modelled by hand, or pressed into clay moulds and then touched up by a modelling tool. The smaller ones, with delicately-executed figures in low relief, are all in paste of one colour blue with sufficient enamel added to the clay to give it a brilliant tint, but not sufficient for complete vitrification. Other fragments exist of life-size or even colossal figures, both in the round and in high relief, worked in pastes of many colours in a kind of mosaic fashion, extremely brilliant and striking in effect. The most remarkable application of pottery in Assyria and Babylonia was its use for literary records. Tablets, cylinders, and polygonal prisms were impressed with cunei form characters in the moist clay, and then baked, thus forming the most imperishable of all kinds of MSS. (cp. BABYLONIA, vol. iii. p. 191). The large inscribed cylinders and prisms were made hollow, and turned on the potter s wheel. The prisms were first moulded in a circular shape, the sides being afterwards made flat by slicing. All are circular inside, and bear distinct ring-like marks, showing the movement of the wheel as they were scooped out by the potter s thumb. The vases and domestic vessels of Assyria may be divided into four classes, (1) plain biscuit clay, undecorated ; (2) biscuit clay with painted decorations ; (3) fine clay stamped with minute reliefs ; (4) clay glazed or enamelled. (1) By far the greater proportion of the pottery belongs to the first class. It is frequently graceful in shape, is well made and baked, and is of a fine close clay, generally light in colour. Fig. 10 FIG. 10. Assyrian biscuit pottery. shows some of the commonest forms. Some specimens have cunei form inscriptions incised with a pointed tool in the same way as the cylinder letters. The coarser clays are usually covered with a fine whitish slip, and a rather rare variety of the pottery is made throughout of a close-grained almost white clay. One sort of pottery, of which very few specimens have been found, has simple patterns incised on the grey body of the vessel ; these patterns were then made conspicuous by being filled in with white clay, a method of inlay like that used in Egypt. (2) Very few examples of the second class are known. Some vases of brown clay, covered with white slip, have rude paintings of human figures, bowmen and other soldiers, executed in brown outline, with rapid and skilful touch. Others have cuneiform inscriptions and geometrical floral patterns painted in silica and lime-white with yellow and brown ochres. They appear to belong to the 9th century B.C. Both the clay body and the earth pigments are quite free from any vitreous gloss in all this class of ware. A few fragments have been found of a coarse brown pottery, decorated with simple patterns in gold leaf, applied after the ware was fired. (3) A very fine sort of Assyrian pottery, of which examples exist dating from the 10th to the 8th century B.C., is made of a close-grained ivory-white clay, or else a hard greyish black clay ; the surface is biscuit, and is ornamented with bands of human figures in relief, soldiers, captives, royal personages, and others, with representa tions of cities, all most minutely executed, the figures scarcely an inch high. Other bands have cuneiform inscriptions, also in deli cate relief. The bands appear to have been formed by rolling a cylinder die or mould over the surface of the clay while soft and moist. The few specimens of this pottery that have been found are mostly in the form of cylindrical drinking-cups. This method of decoration is one largely used in the earliest variety of Etruscan pottery. (4) Glazed and enamelled pottery (see fig. 11) is more FIG. 11. Assyrian glazed and enamelled pottery. abundant ; it consists chiefly of small articles of fine clay, bottles, two-handled jugs, miniature amphorae, and pilgrim - flasks, very carefully made, and apparently articles of luxury. Some are of white clay, covered with a colourless glaze of silicate of soda, rendered more fusible by the addition of oxide of lead. Partly owing to this addition the glaze is generally in a very decom posed state, often presenting the most brilliant iridescent colours. Other examples are coated in a similar way, except that the trans parent glaze is tinted a brilliant blue or green with oxides of copper, very like the blue glaze so much used in Egypt, but usually less hard and bright in colour. A few small specimens have been discovered coated with a white tin enamel. Both the glazed and the enamelled pottery is undecorated by any painting. At Warka (the Chaldaean Erech) a large number of Clay very curious clay coffins were found in cave-tombs stacked coffins, closely one upon another. They are made of coarse clay, and bear outside patterns rudely stamped in blunt relief ; the whole is covered with a plumbo-silicious green glaze. They are about 7 feet long and very peculiar in form ; the body was introduced through an oval opening at the head, over which a similarly glazed clay lid fitted closely. These coffins are probably not earlier than the Sasanian period. Clay coffins of much greater antiquity have been found in Babylonia, but they are of plain biscuit clay. Literature. Layard, various works on Nineveh and Babylon ; Rich, Babylon and Perscpolis ; Loftus, Chaldxa and Siisiana, 1857 ; Oppert, Expedition Scientifiquc en Mesopotamic ; Lepsius, Denk- malcr, part ii. p. 163 ; Botta, Monument de Ninive, 1847-50 ; Place, Kinive ct VAssyric, 1866-69. SECTION IV. PHCENICIAN AND OTHER ARCHAIC CLASSES. The discoveries of recent years have opened out a new Phceni- field in the history of the origin and growth of Hellenic art, cian especially as relating to pottery. Excavations in Cyprus, po ery Rhodes, Thera (Santorin), the plains of Troy, Mycense, Attica, and the coasts of southern Italy have revealed the existence of an abundant class of pottery of great antiquity, a large part of which, in its forms and decora tion, appears to have been due, directly or indirectly, to the Phoenicians. The designs are of a curiously complex character. Purely Assyrian motives, such as the sacred tree with its guardian &quot; cherubs,&quot; are mingled with figures and ornaments peculiar to Egypt; other characteristics which modify and blend these two styles seem due to the Phoenicians themselves ; while, lastly, various local influ ences are shown in the representations of such plants and animals as were commonest in the special place where the pottery happened to be made. Possibly some of the designs, such as the sacred tree of Assyria, might be traced farther back still, to the distant Asiatic home of the Indo- European races ; but any derivation of this kind would, in our present state of knowledge, be purely conjectural.