Chapter III — Assyrian Sculpture and Painting
§ I Statues, Stelæ, and Obelisks
The brilliant period of Chaldæan statuary, which reached the apogee of its development in the monuments of Tello, came to an end with the fall of the petty principalities which flourished in Lower Mesopotamia before the Ninevite supremacy. Chaldæan statuary did not emigrate to Assyria with the other arts, or rather the Assyrians disdained to receive it. The principal cause which prevented this art from developing among the Ninevites was the nearness of the alabaster quarries, and the absence of marble, diorite, porphyry and other kinds of stone which allow of being carved in the round. Alabaster can only be hewn in thin, flat pieces, which, for this reason, lend themselves admirably to be carved in bas-relief, but are unsuitable for statuary. An alabaster statue of ordinary human proportions would be extremely fragile, and would run the risk of crumbling away in flakes, at any rate in the thinnest parts, such as the feet and hands. On the other hand, the abundance of alabaster in the neighbourhood of Nineveh caused the Assyrians to dispense with the importation from distant countries, at great cost, of blocks of diorite and porphyry like those which the Chaldæans, who possessed neither alabaster nor any other stone, were obliged to procure at any price. At least we must admit that up to the present time the excavations in Assyria have scarcely yielded to our curiosity anything that can enable us to assert that statuary flourished in Northern Mesopotamia. On the contrary, the few Assyrian statues that have come down to us prove the poverty and neglected condition of this branch of sculpture. The principal objects that can be cited are two statues of the god Nebo at the British Museum, a statue of the King Assur-nasir-pal (B.C. 882-857), and two other figures of priests which took the place of Caryatids at Khorsabad.
The statue of Assur-nasir-pal represents this king dressed in a long robe without folds and devoid of ornament, which almost gives him the appearance of a cylindrical Terminus. His beard and hair lie close to his head and neck, and in each part it is evident that the artist, through want of skill or on account of the difficulties he felt in dealing with the block which he had to fashion, did not dare to attribute to the limbs a suppleness and ease that would have damaged their solidity, nor to give to the beard and the delicate parts of his work a finish which would have run the risk of splitting the stone.
The fringes of the robe are only indicated by slight strokes of the burin; the arms are united to the bust, and so are the sceptre and the crook which the monarch holds in his hands.
The Atlantes found in front of the enamelled walls of the hareem at Khorsabad seem to have been employed in the structure as true columns; on their head-dress they support a square plinth which bears witness to their architectural function; their figures are of more than human stature. From the sacred vase which they press reverently to their breast, and which we have already seen in Chaldæa, flow four streams, which recall the four rivers of Paradise in Genesis; two of these liquid jets fall directly upon their feet, while the two others, rising over their shoulders, fall down their back to their feet in slightly undulating bands.36
The scenes upon the bas-reliefs in the interior of the palace chambers sometimes represent processions in which deities, standing or seated, are carried upon litters by priests or slaves (fig. 114): so there were statues at Nineveh. It is doubtful, however, whether these discoveries give any other impression of Assyrian statuary than that which we have described.
Instead of statues, the Assyrians often erected stelæ and obelisks—a kind of monument which holds, so to speak, the middle place between statues and bas-reliefs. Among the stelæ the most finished type is that of King Samsi-Rammanu III. (B.C. 822—809). It is a monolith of slightly trapezoidal form, rounded in the upper part. The sides are covered with a cuneiform inscription which relates year by year the military exploits of the prince. On the anterior surface, surrounded by a border which forms a frame, the king, in high relief and seen in profile, stands in adoration before the planetary symbols. It is clear at the first glance that the artist has been bolder than he would have been in dealing with a statue in the round. The feet and arms are freer and not held so closely to the figure; far from treating the details of the costume roughly, he takes pleasure, on the contrary, in laying exaggerated stress upon them.
In the British Museum are small stelæ of a later date, bearing figures of Assur-bani-pal (B.C. 668-666). They show the king holding a basket upon his head, in the same attitude as the early Canephorœ of Chaldæa (see above, p. 37, fig. 25).
Assyrian obelisks, which have nothing in common with the gigantic Egyptian monoliths to which this name is given, are, like the stelæ, large boundary stones set up in honour of the exploits of some prince, sometimes on the very field of battle, or on the ruins of a conquered town. The most complete and best preserved of these monuments is the obelisk of Shalmaneser III. (B.C. 857-822) found at Nimroud. This is a monolith scarcely more than 6½ feet high; it is a square pillar, slightly pyramidal in form. The upper part is arranged in steps which recede from one another on all sides; the summit forms a platform, and has nothing to surmount it: perhaps a statuette of the king or his favourite deity formerly stood there. The four faces of the obelisk are covered with inscriptions and bas-reliefs arranged in rows one above the other. The lower part, which is entirely bare, must have been buried up to a certain point in the ground.
As we see, the stelæ and obelisks, which take the place of statues, are in a technical point of view derived from the bas-reliefs. If any Assyrian statues are brought us by future discoveries, they will always be few in number, and poor and timid in style; there is nothing among them to be compared to the Chaldæan statues, and above all nothing to be placed side by side with the innumerable Egyptian statues, the style of which sometimes almost attains to the perfection of Greek art; Assyria also was destined to approach this ideal, but only in bas-relief.
Such was the logical consequence of the natural difference of the environments in which the empires of Egypt and Assyria, those two poles around which the whole of the ancient East gravitates, were evolved. On the banks of the Nile, stone suited for sculpture exists in profusion, and as there was abundant material in the hands of the artist, he was able to devote himself to incessant experiments, essays and trials, which, progressively repeated from generation to generation, only stopped at the threshold of Greek art. In Mesopotamia there was little or no stone to carve; it was only rarely and at great expense that precious blocks were brought with much trouble from a long distance, and these were too dear and too scarce to allow of numerous experiments.