Page:A History of Art in Chaldæa & Assyria Vol 2.djvu/227

Chaldean Sculpture. 197 we call her Istar or Anahit this goddess seems to have enjoyed a very lasting popularity in the whole region of which Meso- potamia forms the centre. The art of Chaldaea survived itself, so to speak, and reappeared after the fall of the national in- dependence, just as the art of Egypt had a renewal of life under the Ptolemies and the Roman emperors. It is to these centuries that we should ascribe a limestone head found by M. de Sarzec at Tello (Fig. 109). In its execution there is none of the firm- ness and feeling for nature that is so conspicuous in the monu- ments from the three periods that we have endeavoured to establish. Fjg. 109. — Head ; from Tello. Actual size. Louvre. It is mainly to the second Chaldee empire that a whole series of monuments belongs whose characteristics constitute them a class apart ; 1 we mean those tablets, generally of some very hard p. 379). Those brought by him to London are quite similar to the statuette in the Louvre that we have chosen for reproduction (Heuzey, Catalogue, p. 32). 1 In the case of the Caillou Michaux, this has been clearly established by M. Oppert {Expédition scientifique, vol. i. pp. 253, 254). He remarks that the be- trothed of the person who had caused the stone to be cut, is spoken of as a " native of the town of Sargon ;" so that the stone must be later than the end of the eighth century, b.c. And all the monuments belonging to this class bear such a strong mutual resemblance, that their dates cannot be very widely separated. They are reproduced on a large scale, both texts and figures, in the Cuneiform inscriptions of Western Asia, vol. hi. plates 41-45, and vol. iv. plates 41-43. We have reproduced two, in vol. i. fig. 10, and above, fig. 43.