III Minor Sculpture and the Industrial Arts
The Chaldæans could work in bronze as skilfully as in stone. M. de Sarzec has collected some bronze figures which, compared with other monuments already secured, allow us to fix some precise landmarks in the gradual development of the art of casting and chiselling metals in Chaldæa. A certain statuette of a man or woman (fig. 23) may be considered the most rudimentary attempt.21 It has simply the shape of a cylindrical stem, the upper part of which is furnished with two arms and a human head like the xoana of the Greeks. This head, surmounted by small horns, is strangely barbarous; it recalls the art of the men of the bronze age and the most rustic of the Cypriote terra-cottas. Progress is manifest in other bronzes—separated, perhaps, from the former by several hundred years. These are statuettes which, instead of being fixed on a base, end in a reversed and much elongated cone, which must have served to plunge them into a soft matter such as mortar. One represents a recumbent bull, the other (fig. 24) a kneeling man holding in his hands the base of the cone; he is bearded and covered with the tiara with several pairs of horns, reserved for gods and genii. A third, lastly, is a woman carrying a basket on her head, whose body has remarkably the appearance of an elongated ingot. This canephoros, whose female form is only indicated by the breasts and the width of the hips, leads us naturally to speak of another canephoros (fig. 25), found at Afaj on the Euphrates, bearing the name of the king Kudurmapuk (B.C. 2000). It may be seen by this statuette that the art of working in bronze followed closely the progress of sculpture in stone. Though the head and arms are still the work of half-trained artists, the head is very remarkable; the arch of the eyebrows and the eyes are treated as in the large diorite statues; the hair is completely shaved. The same characters are observed in a remarkable figure of a bearded priest, wearing a tiara of moderate height, dressed in a long tunic with flounced fringes.22 Here is a mutilated statuette from Tello (fig. 26); it is a god standing on a crouching lion; the head of the roaring beast has a ferocious and natural expression, but the god’s robe is cylindrical, without amplitude and without modelling, and the artist has tried in vain to conceal this stiffness, which betrays his impotence, by engraving the fringes and rosettes of the drapery. Remark that the long hairs of the lion are treated like the woollen shag of the priest’s cap which we examined just now (fig. 15). The animal has very small wings; his forelegs are those of a bull, his hind-legs end in lion’s claws; the study of nature here is perfect, but in those conventional lines which are meant to express the swell of the muscles, we feel the tendency to exaggeration and trivial rudeness which we remarked in the statues.
In one of the smaller mounds at Tello, M. de Sarzec discovered a fragment of a large bronze statue. “It was,” he says, “a life-sized bull’s horn, of bronze plating mounted on a wooden frame, but the wood was carbonised by the action of fire.”2324 He had also found a sword, which was stolen and destroyed by an Arab. But we can cite another weapon of the same kind in the possession of Colonel Hanbury; the blade, curved like a scythe, and triangular, bears a votive inscription in the name of the Assyrian king Rammannirari, the son of Pudil (B.C. 1300). The curious peculiarity of this weapon is that on one of its surfaces a small recumbent deer is to be seen engraved, and this is the maker’s mark: from this time onward the jealousy of craftsmen comes into play and declares itself by the same measures as in our day.
Surprising as the phenomenon is at first sight, Chaldæan pottery was far from following the progress of sculpture. The excavations of Tello have enriched the museum of the Louvre with five hundred terra-cotta cones, bearing the name of Gudea and Ur-Bau, but these are only industrial products, without artistic character, and belonging to the brick manufacture. The necropoles of Warka and Mugheir, where we might have expected to meet with works of art, as in the tombs of Greece or Etruria, have only furnished coarse vases which bear witness to the complete inferiority of pottery among the Chaldæo-Assyrians. They are all singularly barbarous and rustic, whether they come from the archaic tombs of Warka and Mugheir, or issue from the ruins of the palaces where, nevertheless, the art of sculpture soars and displays itself in its perfect development. Assyrian pottery, even that of the best epoch, resembles, sometimes so much as to be mistaken for it, the most archaic pottery of Greece proper and the Islands of the Ægean. But here it is only the beginning of art, the first effort of the potter who before long will fashion masterpieces; there, on the contrary, these vulgar kitchen receptacles form the whole art, and represent at once the start and the finish.
This neglect of ceramics by the Chaldæo-Assyrian artists results from geological and climatic causes analogous to those which, as we shall see, developed sculpture in bas-relief to the detriment of sculpture in the round. It is especially owing to the bad quality of the clay in Mesopotamia, which, though quite fit to be turned into square bricks, has not a fine enough grain for the purpose of fashioning from it the fragile frame of a broad crater, or of a slim amphora, and still less for the purpose of lending itself to all the details of face and drapery in graceful and slender figurines like those of Tanagra, Cyme, or Myrina.
The cohesion of the Mesopotamian clay is so imperfect that the Babylonian terra-cottas which have come down to us crumble almost at the first touch, in spite of the process of baking to which they have been subjected. It is observed that, to give some consistency to the body of the vases and to prevent cracks, the potter has been obliged to mix the clayey paste with chopped straw. It was impossible then to make the sides thin, or to fashion them with art; consequently it would not have been natural to decorate with rich and careful painting vases which could only be heavy and coarse. It was enough to trace out geometrical designs, bands of colour, ovals, symmetrical festoons round the neck of the amphoræ; nothing in this sort of decoration has been borrowed from the animal or vegetable world or from history, of which the artist could, however, make so wonderful a use in the decoration of metal vases, or of knicknacks in ivory, wood, or stone.
The Chaldæan terra-cotta figurines, however coarse they may be, are not entirely divested of interest for the history of art and mythology, and M. Heuzey has been able to appreciate them with delicacy from this point of view.25
The statuettes collected in great quantities by Loftus, at Warka, are of solid clay, and were manufactured in a mould in one piece; the back is flat and modelled with the hand. The clay is of a greenish grey, or sometimes brown; it is well baked and very hard. The attitude of these grotesque little figures offers singularly striking analogies to the terra-cotta figurines of the first Egyptian dynasty; they are men in long robes, with their beards cut in the Assyrian fashion, women dressed in tight tunics and wearing falling head-dresses like the Egyptian figurines; their hands are clasped on their breast in the religious attitude which we know already from the Tello statues. It is, however, very difficult to give the precise date of these figurines, which, perhaps, for the most part, are not anterior to the time of Nebuchadnezzar. Besides, we shall return to them later on. It is enough for the moment to observe how little varied and meagre was the theme worked out by the Chaldæan modellers in clay, at a time when sculpture and the other arts were nevertheless already most flourishing.
The monuments which we have just reviewed allow us to appreciate the degree of prosperity and perfection attained side by side with the higher branches of art by various industries in Chaldæa, such as tapestry, weaving, and the embroidery of stuffs. The stela of Marduk-nadin-akhi, for example (fig. 22), bears witness to the wonderful skill of the women of the royal hareem, or of the men employed in the workshop, whence issued that robe with golden fringe, covered with elegant designs and precious stones set in the web of the tissue, that tiara adorned with feathers and wide-open daisies, those sandals, the broad lozenge-shaped stitches of which can be counted.
M. Heuzey26 has demonstrated that the stuff called kaunakes (καυνἁκης) by the Greeks, who gave this name to a Babylonian garment, goes back at least as far as the epoch of Gudea. The representation of this woollen tissue shows several series of tufts arranged in rows one above the other; the principle of the manufacture of the kaunakes is the same as that of plush or velvet, only the woollen pile is longer and arranged less closely. This sort of material, invented by the Chaldæans, continued to be made by the Assyrians and Persians; in this way the Greeks came to know it, and Aristophanes speaks of it in his comedy of the Wasps. Garments made of kaunakes are frequently met with on the Chaldæan monuments, especially on the cylinders, where they have been mistaken for robes of a gathered and gauffered material. They are worn both by women and by men, as is proved by the bearded personage whom we reproduced above (fig. 20), and a female statuette in alabaster which shows all the characteristics of Chaldæan art contemporary with the monuments of Tello (fig. 28).
The tablet of the god Samas (fig. 29), found at Abu-Habbah (Sepharvaim), and dated in the reign of the Babylonian king Nabupal-iddin (B.C. 850), shows together the two principal Chaldæan garments—that made of kaunakes, and that of a plain material, open in front, which we shall often meet with again in Assyria. Moreover, this bas-relief, if it is closely studied, throws a remarkable light on the different industries in wood, iron, stone and wearing material. The tabernacle in which the god Samas is seated on his throne seems to be an iron niche, the upper part being curved to imitate a shallow vault; in the front of the shrine there are small pillars of wood or iron; the stem is covered with scales in imitation of the trunk of the palm-tree, and made, no doubt, of plates of metal laid over it; for base and capital there are volutes something like the Ionic capital. The solar disk, the symbol of the god, is supported by cords held in the hands of two genii, who seem to play a purely ornamental and decorative part. The throne of the god, and the table on which the radiated disk is placed, are elegantly sculptured pieces of furniture, and reveal a civilisation which strives after the highest refinement in its luxuries.
As for ornaments of precious metal, none have yet been found in Chaldæa, though we know that from the most distant ages gold and silver flowed into Babylon and the towns of Chaldæa as well as into Egypt. The goldsmith’s art must have been on a par with that of the seal-engraver, the monuments of which are so numerous, as we shall now see. To these branches of art belongs a small head in steatite, carved in the round and forming the gem of the Tello collection; better than anything else, this head, treated in so realistic and, at the same time, so highly finished a manner, brings us into contact, so to speak, with the brilliant superiority of the Chaldæan artist when he devotes himself to these secondary forms of art, which at the present day require the use of the magnifying-glass, and in which we are at a loss whether to admire most the patience of the artist, the steadiness of his hand, or the delicacy of his talent.