Page:A History of Art in Chaldæa & Assyria Vol 2.djvu/224

194 A History of Art in Chald.ka and Assyria. canephorus inscribed with the name of the king Kourdourmapouk (Fig. 53"), and the stele of Merodach-Idin-Akhi (Fig. 63), The canephorus must have been the oldest of these objects. Its head is entirely shaven and in its attitude it resembles the bronzes of Gudea (Vol. I. Fig. 147). We are induced to bring down the tablet nearer to our own day because the individuals shown in it wear both beard and lone hair. These are not confined to the god himself and the two divine personages who support the disk placed on the altar and representing the sun ; they are common to the three figures advancing in an attitude of worship. The first appears to be a priest. Among other interesting details we may point out, under the throne of Shamas, the two strong-limbed deities whom Assyriologists call Izdubar and Hea-bani, and, in Shamas's right hand, the staff with a ring attached that is found elsewhere than in Mesopotamia. The draperies of the god and those of the third worshipper are arranged in the crimped folds of which we have spoken above. Here art is fairly advanced. Putting on one side the convention which allows the deity to be made much taller than mortals, the proportions of the figures are good, their attitudes well understood and expressive. The work- manship of the stele of Merodach-Idin-Akhi is far inferior to that of the Sippara tablet. It belongs to a series of monuments in which, as we shall explain farther on, the workmanship is, as a rule, very mediocre. We shall also mention a few fragmentary statues of very hard stone which have been seen by travellers in Chaldaea, 1 and a few remains of the same kind that are now in the British Museum ; but of the first we have only short and vague descriptions, while, among the second, there is not a piece ] Loftus {Travels, p. 116), describes a statue of black granite that he found at Hammam in lower Chaldaea. So far as we can tell from his short description, it must bear no slight resemblance to the Tello statues. The right shoulder was bare and had an inscription engraved upon it. The rest of the figure was clothed, and the hands were crossed upon the knees. The head was missing. At Warka the same traveller saw a bas-relief representing a man striking an animal ; it was of basalt and was broken into several pieces. Among the objects acquired in 1877 by the British Museum, I find mentioned " a fragment of black granite or basalt, which seems to belong to a statue of Hammourabi, king of Babylon about 1,500 years before our era." {Account of the Income and Expenditure of the British Museum for 1878.) Is not this the broken statue which now figures in the gallery under the name of Gudea? At the first moment the inscription may not have been readily deciphered; the summary report presented to Parliament seems, indeed, to name Hammourabi with some hesitation.