§ V Ornaments and Cylindrical Seals
The excavations in Chaldæa and Assyria have, down to this day, scarcely furnished us with any ornaments of gold or silver. However, we know from the inscriptions that these metals occupied the first rank, and were abundantly employed in the ornaments of the Ninevites and Babylonians. The tombs of primitive Chaldæa contained bronze bracelets and ear-rings of the simplest form. These are circular rings, sometimes thinner at the two ends, which are both pointed. At Khorsabad Botta found necklaces formed of precious stones pierced with holes, which were spheroidal in form or elongated like olives; these balls of marble, jasper, chalcedony, amethyst, lapis lazuli, were sometimes mixed with cylinders or other seals of conical shape. At Kouyunjik a necklace was discovered, formed of little golden balls alternating with little cylinders of the same metal. A bronze bracelet at the Louvre has lions’ heads at the two extremities.
But we learn more from the bas-reliefs about the taste for ornament among the Assyrians, and about the goldsmiths’ work at Nineveh and Babylon. Kings and genii wear necklaces, ear-rings, diadems, and bracelets. Their forms are always elegant and present great variety. The diadems are circles, perhaps of gold, broader in the middle, and generally decorated with a rosette, in the centre of which a glittering gem was doubtless conspicuous. Deities carried in procession wear high tiaras also surmounted by a rosette, the essential element of which is a precious stone. Bracelets are worn above the elbow and on the fore-arm; these are circular disks, sometimes closed and decorated with rosettes, at other times ending in two lions’, deers’, rams’, or serpents’ heads; some are twisted two or three times round the arm. Among the ornaments which hang from the necklace, the cross, of that form which we call the Maltese cross, must be cited; the same symbol, which reminds us of the Egyptian crux ansata, is also found in the ear-rings (fig. 63).
As for seal-engraving, its abundant examples do not surpass in artistic merit the Chaldæan work which we have already described. Assyrian cylinders, that is to say, those which were especially manufactured at Nineveh, are distinguished from those of Babylon and Chaldæa by a drier and more commercial style of work.51 Inscriptions are rarer, and engraved in Ninevite characters: the myths represented by the engravers are the same as at Babylon, but the figures have a more modern appearance: for instance, the winged bulls with human heads, and the genii with eagle’s beaks and four wings, are copied from the bas-reliefs in the palaces of Khorsabad, Nimroud and Kouyunjik. The Assyrian cylinders of the archaic epoch present the technical characteristics that we have already indicated in Chaldæa: the joints of the limbs are rendered by means of a drill producing small hemispherical holes, and the rest of the body is executed with another instrument which hollowed out parallel lines. These peculiarities are clearly distinguished on a fine cylinder which we give after M. Menant (fig. 115): it represents three figures who seem to sacrifice upon a tripod to the sun, the moon, and the seven planets.
The cylinders of the Sargonid epoch prove a progress parallel to that of Chaldæan glyptics; the traces left by the action of the saw and the drill have disappeared to make room for the modelling of the figures, which sometimes reach a degree of suppleness true to nature. We will cite as examples a cylinder of the De Clercq collection, representing two genii in adoration before the sacred tree (fig. 116), and a cylinder in the British Museum (fig. 117) on which the god Rammanu is seen, armed with a bow and arrows, standing upon a crouching lion and receiving the homage of a pontiff. The two cylinders are very fine: on the first, extreme exactness is to be noticed in the details of the costume, and great delicacy in the features of the two genii. On the second, on the contrary, the forms have a freer and easier pose, and the scene has more life; the palm is remarkable for truth; the ibexes, above all, are absolutely pure in design; the modelling of their thighs and flanks reminds us of the lions on the Chaldæan cylinder which we admired before (see fig. 35); it also reminds us of the famous lioness among the sculptures of Assurbanipal’s palace (fig. 81), which is probably contemporary with it. Assyrian glyptics has produced nothing more highly finished; like sculpture on a larger scale, it excels in the rendering of animal forms.