§ III Wood and Ivory
No people of antiquity carried as far as the Chaldæo-Assyrians their taste for elegant furniture, which is as delicately sculptured among them as the most precious bronze utensils. We shall never know, doubtless, except through the testimony of literature, what that carved wood-work was, and what those ceilings of cedar were, to which the prophets of Israel allude with such jealous enthusiasm, and which the kings boast of having had executed, speaking to us in their inscriptions of palaces in which “the gates are of ebony, with fittings of silver plating and polished iron, the pillars of cypress-wood, the posts of cedar carved by skilful craftsmen, and coated with plates of wrought metal.” But the bas-reliefs place before our eyes wooden furniture in which the superiority of the Assyrian genius is conspicuous, and which reveal to us a people gorged with wealth, among whom luxury in furniture holds an important place. The animal and vegetable kingdoms are turned to profit by the craftsmen with astonishing skill in the decoration of the tables, stools, beds, tripods, umbrellas and fly-flaps. At every opportunity lions’ heads and claws, goats, panthers and bulls occur, fancifully arranged, but always in perfect harmony and excellent taste; flowers, festoons, undulating and interlacing lines, rosettes and geometrical figures are all found in endless variety and in perfect equilibrium; nowhere has such work been better done, neither in Egypt nor in Greece.
The bas-relief (fig. 77), which represents Assurbanipal drinking with one of his wives, shows us some of the furniture of a royal palace. The prince reclines upon a divan, the queen sitting upon a chair, with a stool under her feet; before them is a table. Are not the sculptured couch, the table with its feet carved in the form of lions’ claws, and the chair, lavishly decorated with sculpture and ivory ornaments, as rich and as skilful in workmanship as any such objects to be found in European drawing-rooms? Another bas-relief (fig. 108) shows a tent erected in the open plain during a military expedition; it is simply the stables, as it seems. Notice the elegance of the wooden pillars, the shafts of which are decorated with geometrical designs, and terminate in floral ornaments on which slender kids, ready to spring, are poised. Wood formed the framework of these chairs, coffers, and shrines, but disappeared more or less completely under the bronze or gold plating, the incrustations of ivory, coloured glass, lapis lazuli, and brilliant stones, or, lastly, the embroidered rugs and the carpets. In the camp before Lachish, Sennacherib sits upon a throne, the sides of which are composed of three rows of figures, raising their arms to sustain the bars of the chair.
Wood was the essential part of the structure of the chariots, the wheels of which have spokes turned in the lathe, and the body of which is of woven wicker-work, while the pole, describing a graceful curve, ends in an elegant horse’s head or in the head of a deer, a bull, a lion or a swan. The very weapons, lances, daggers and bows have shafts, hilts, and handles carved into figures of animals, crouching, sleeping, springing or folded in two, similar to the figures drawn and carved by the mediæval decorators.
These objects, however, are not always of wood; oftenest, perhaps, they are of bone or ivory, as it is proved by the ivory tablets and the toilette articles, such as combs and pins, which the excavations have brought to light.48
But side by side with these knick-knacks in the Ninevite style, there are others which, though found in Mesopotamia, seem to be of foreign origin. Witness to this is borne by an ivory plaque found at Nimroud, which was certainly part of the incrustation of a piece of furniture (fig. 111). The relief is clear, the work highly finished; the figure, which holds in its hand a large lotus-stalk, has woolly hair like an Ethiopian, and bears the Egyptian Uræus on its brow. Another tablet from Nimroud represents the head of a woman, whose hair is arranged in Egyptian fashion. She is enclosed in a frame which resembles a window with a balustrade, the capitals of which, original in style, seem to have been coloured. An ivory statuette of the goddess Istar, found at Nimroud, has the same heavy coiffure in successive rolls, and resting upon the shoulders; here we have again the Egyptian style with an exaggerated naturalism proper only to the Phœnicians. We may conclude that these ivories were fashioned, like the bronze dishes, in the workshops of Phœnicia. Thence caravans transported all these small objects as far as Nineveh; we know that the merchants of Tyre and Sidon had numerous stores in the very heart of Mesopotamia. Phœnician commerce was the great vehicle by which Egyptian and Assyrian art was carried abroad.