Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 3.djvu/205

] Carmania. He probably died before the end of Cyrus's reign ; at all events, when Babylon tried to recover its independence during the troubles that followed the death of Cambyses, it was under impostors who claimed to be &quot; Nebuchadnezzar, the son of Nabu-nahid.&quot;

Art, Science, and Literature.—Although in art, as in other things, Assyria was but the pupil and imitator of Babylonia, there was yet a marked difference between its development in the two countries, due partly to natural causes. While the Assyrians had stone in abundance, the Babylonians were obliged to import it from a distance. Brick-clay, on the contrary, lay ready at hand, and architecture among them, consequently, took the forms imposed upon it by the use of bricks instead of stone. Where the Assyrians employed sculptured alabaster to ornament their buildings, the Babylonians contented themselves with enamelled bricks and painted plaster. It is a curious proof of the servile dependence of the northern upon the southern kingdom in artistic matters, that the Assyrians continued to make large use of brick up to the downfall of the empire, in spite of the accessibility of stone and the rapid decay of their palaces caused by the employment of the more fragile material. Still, although Assyrian art clung thus unaccountably to the building materials of another country, it did not dispense with its native stone altogether; and speaking broadly, we may say that the architecture of Nineveh is characterised by the use of stone in contradistinction to the brickwork of Babylonia. Sculpture was naturally developed by the one, just as painting was by the other ; and the ornamentation which could be lavished on the exterior in Assyria had to be confined to the interior in Chaldea. Another distinction between the art of the two monarchies arose from the character of their respective populations. Babylonia was essentially a religious country, and its art, therefore, was primarily religious. Nearly all the great edifices, whose ruins still attract the traveller, were temples, and the inscriptions we possess of the Babylonian princes relate almost wholly to the worship of the gods. In Assyria, on the other hand, the temple was but an appendage of the palace, the king among &quot; these Romans of Asia/ as Prof. Rawlinsou calls them, being the central object of reverence. While the Chaldean temple, with its huge masses of brickwork, rose stage upon stage, each tier smaller than the lower, differently coloured, and surmounted at the top by a chamber which served at once as a shrine and an observatory, the Assyrian palace was erected upon a mound of rubble, with open courts and imposing entrances, though never more than one or two stories high. Closely connected with this difference in the religious feelings of the two nations was the greater care and attention paid to burial in Babylonia. As yet not a single tomb lias been found in Assyria, while sepulchral remains abound in Chaldea. The vast necropolis of Erech astonishes us by the number of its graves, and the potters of Babylonia were largely employed in making clay coffins. The character of Assyrian art being thus secular, and that of Babylonia sacred and sepulchral, necessarily led to a different application and development of it in the two countries. We must regard Assyrian art as parallel with later Babylonian, both having branched off from Accadian. In Assyrian we may trace two or even three periods of development; but our want of materials makes it impossible to do this in the case of later Babylonian. Among neither people, however, did art altogether escape from the swathing-bands of its nursery, although it was never crystallised as in ancient Egypt. The oldest monuments of Accad already display it in all its forms, rude and rudimentary though they may be. The terraced temples of Ur, Erech, and other places, mount back to the earliest times of Chaldean history, and we find them already adorned with enamelled bricks, which were first coloured, then glazed, and finally baked in the fire. Terra-cotta cones of various hues, imbedded in plaster, were used for external ornamentation, and at Warka (Erech) coloured half-columns are employed for the same purpose, an ornamentation which recurs in Sargon s palace at Khorsabad, and was the germ of the many kinds of pillars met with in Assyria. The internal walls of the shrine were bright with paint and bronze and gilding; but the brilliant colouring of the Chaldeans was not reproduced in the northern monarchy where more sombre tints were preferred. The huge structures themselves, of burnt and unburnt brick, were supported by buttresses, and the rain was carried off by elaborately-constructed drains, some of which afford us the earliest examples of the arch. A leaden pipe for the same object was found by Mr Loftus at Mugheir (Ur). Stone, on account of its scarcity, was highly prized, and used only for sculpture and carving. Fragments of the statue of an Accadian king have been brought from Hammam, and a portrait of Merodach-iddin-akhi, the successful opponent of Tiglath-Pileser I. (1120 B.C.), is cut in low relief on a stone now in the British Museum. Like all other Babylonian stone relics, they are of small size, and of hard black granite, and the royal portrait is interesting not only as being one of the few specimens we possess of Babylonian sculpture, but as showing the marked contrast of the Babylonian face to the typically Jewish features of the Assyrians. If larger stones were rare, however, the same cannot be said of smaller ones, which were used as signets and talismans. These were always incised, and though the figures are frequently rude, and still more often grotesque, they are always clearly cut and vigorous. Indeed, it is clear that emery must have been used for the purpose, while many of the carvings are so minute as to suggest the employment of a magnifying-glass. This, however, seems to be out of the question at so early a date as that to which many of the gems belong, although a crystal lens was discovered by Mr Layard at Nimrud. The design on the signet-cylinder of the earliest king of Ur of whom we have any knowledge is of a high order of merit. Next to gem-cutting, pottery was carried to considerable perfection by the Accadians. Some of their vases and lamps exhibit great beauty of form, and bear evidence of the potter's wheel; though the large majority are made by the hand, and extremely rude. Spirited bas-reliefs in terra-cotta, however, have been exhumed at Senkereh, and some small terra-cotta figures may also be assigned to this early period. Metallurgy was more backward. Stone implements were still in use, although weapons and ornaments of bronze and copper are met with in abundance ; and even iron was not unknown. Bronze bowk occur in almost every tomb, sometimes wrought with considerable skill. Metallurgic art, however, attained its highest point in the manufacture of gold objects like ear-rings and fillets. The latter may be compared with the gold head-dresses found by Dr Schliemann in the Troad. This backward state of metallurgy is somewhat remarkable when we consider the skill displayed in the making of textile fabrics. The oldest gems portray the most richly embroidered robes, and it is probable that the muslins and carpets for which Babylonia was afterwards so famous were already a branch of industry. Art in Assyria developed chiefly, as has been said, on the side of architecture and sculpture. Its first period is best represented by the reign of Assur-nats ir-pal, in whose palaces we obtain excellent illustrations of its excellencies and defects. The period is characterised by a simplicity and vigour which shows itself in the bas-reliefs, where the 