Page:A History of Art in Chaldæa & Assyria Vol 1.djvu/154

134 A HISTORY OF ART ix CIIALIXKA AND ASSYRIA. bottom, it must in either case have caused damage requiring continual watchfulness and frequent repairs. If this watchfulness were remitted for an instant, some of the external burnt and enamelled bricks might become detached and leave a gap through which the water could penetrate to the soft core within, and set up a process of disintegration which would become more actively mischievous with every year that passed. The present appearance of these ruins is thus, to a great extent, to be explained. Travellers in the country agree in describing them as irregular mounds, deeply seamed by the rains ; and the sides against which the storms and waterspouts that devastate Mesopotamia would chiefly spend their force are those on which the damage is most conspicuous (see Fig. 37). Even in antique times these buildings had suffered greatly. In Egypt, when the supreme power had passed, after one of those periods of decay that were by no means infrequent in her long career, into the hands of an energetic race of princes like those of the eighteenth or twenty-sixth dynasties, all traces of damage clone to the public monuments by neglect or violence were rapidly effaced. The pyramids could take care of themselves. They had seen the plains at their feet covered again and again with hordes of barbarians, and yet had lost not an inch of their height or a stone of their polished cuirass. Even in the temples the setting up of a few fallen columns, the reworking of a few bas-reliefs, the restoration of a painting here and there, was all that was necessary to bring back their former splendour. In Chaldaja the work undertaken by Nabopolassar and his dynasty was far more arduous. He had to rebuild nearly all the civil and religious buildings from their foundations, to under- o o * take, as we know from more than one text, a general recon- struction. 1 A new Babylon was reared from the ground. Little of her former monuments remained but their foundations and materials. Temples richer than the first rose upon the lofty mounds, and, for the sake of speed, were often built of the old bricks, upon which appeared the names of forgotten kings. Nothing was neglected, no expense was spared by which the solidity of the new buildings could be increased, and yet, five or six centuries afterwards, nothing was left but ruins. Herodotus 1 See LENORMANT, 'Histoire Ancienne, vol. ii. pp. 228 and 233. Translations of several texts in which these restorations are spoken of are here given.