Conventions of Ciiald.eo-Assyrian Sculpture.
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which Assyria owed its power and fortune was created. The beard may then have become, as the moustache used to be with us, a sign of the military caste. We never find soldiers or their officers without it ; 1 but their hair and beards are shorter than those of the king and his ministers (Fig. 66) ; they do not fall upon the chest and shoulders in several rows of curls carefully arranged. 2 In the reliefs the amplitude and length of the beard are always a sign of the highest rank. The temples, the forehead, and the nape of the neck were lost under this abundant hair, while the beard covered all below the cheek-bones and the tiara the top of the head. Beyond the nose Fig. 66. — Assyrian soldier; from the Louvre. Height of slab 2 feet. and eyes there was hardly anything left by which one individual could be distinguished from another. Now the Assyrian race 1 An almost unique exception to this rule occurs in those bas-reliefs in the British Museum which represent the great hunts of Assurbanipal. We there see a company of beardless individuals marching, bare-headed, dressed in a short tunic and armed with lance and buckler. But this is an apparent rather than a real exception. The chase is not war. These men are not soldiers, but attendants on the hunt, an inferior kind of shikarrie. In the battle pieces we sometimes see the eunuchs attached to the king's person fighting at his elbow. 2 We have no reason to believe that the Egyptian fashion of wearing wigs obtained in Assyria (Layard, Nineveh, vol. ii. pp. 327, 378). Herodotus tells us that in his time the Chaldaeans wore long hair (i. 195). VOL. II. T
