Page:A History of Art in Chaldæa & Assyria Vol 2.djvu/185

On the Representations of Animals. 155 Elsewhere we find the lion cautiously emerging from a stoutly- built timber cage (Fig. J&). He has been captured in a net or snare and shut up in this narrow prison until the day of some great hunt. 1 When that arrives the door is raised at a given signal by a man perched on the top of the cage and protected by a timber grating. In spite of this defence the service would Fig. 77. — Lion and lioness in a park. British Museum. hardly be free from danger but that the lion is too pleased to find himself at liberty to look behind him. 2 1 On the subject of these great hunts and their arrangements, see Rawlinson, The Five Great Monarchies, vol. i. pp. 505-512. The custom is still kept up in Eastern countries, and their personnel is pretty much the same as it was in antiquity. See Chardin, Voyage en Perse (Langles' edition), vol. iii. p. 399 ; and Rousselet, JO Inde des Rajahs, pp. 202, 464, 468. 2 These caged lions are only found in the bas-reliefs of Assurbanipal. The number of lions killed between the eleventh and seventh centuries b.c. must have been something extraordinary. Tiglath-Pileser I. boasts in one of his inscriptions of having done eight hundred lions to death. In time they must have become rare in Assyria. They must then have been brought from Chaldapa or Susiana, where they have always been more abundant, and transported to the north in carts, cages and all, there to afford sport for the king. In our day lions are hardly to be found higher up the Tigris than Bagdad ; but on the Euphrates they occur much farther north, as far as Bir and all over the valley of the Khabour (Layard, Nineveh, vol. ii. p. 48). They are most numerous in the marshes of the lower Euphrates, where they were hunted in boats by the kings of Assyria (Rawlinson, The Five Great Monarchies, vol. i. pp. 361 and 508). Most of the lions of Mesopotamia have very little mane, but a few have been encountered here and there in which that feature is largely developed. These seem to have been chosen as models by the Assyrian artists.