Page:A History of Art in Chaldæa & Assyria Vol 2.djvu/233

Assyrian Sculpture. § 6. Assyrian Sculpture. Assyrian sculpture is far from leading us into the remote cen- turies from which some of the Chaldaean works must date. It had no period of infancy or childish effort. The Semites of the north were the pupils of their southern brothers, from whom they obtained an art already mature. The oldest known Assyrian monument dates from the reign of Tiglath-Pileser I., or about the end of the twelfth century b.c. ; it is a bas-relief chiselled upon a rock near the sources of the Tigris, about fifty miles north of Diarbekir and near the village of Korkhar. It represents the king standing upright, his right hand extended and his left holding a sceptre ; at present, however, we only know it by the very poor sketch given by Professor Rawlinson. 1 It is almost the only monument extant from the time when the capital of the monarchy was on the site now known as Kaleh-Shergat. One other may be named, the female torso in the British Museum, to which we have already referred ; 2 on it the name of Assurbilkala, who succeeded Tiglath-Pileser I., may be read. The monumental history of Assyria really begins two centuries later, with the great buildings erected by Assurnazirpal at Calah (Nimroud), his favourite residence. Assyrian art then reached a level that, speaking generally, it never surpassed. In the following centuries it innovated, it became more complex and certainly more refined, but it produced nothing essentially nobler than certain Nimroud bas-reliefs, in which the king is seated among his great officers or before his gods, and always in the attitude of prayer and sacrifice. We have already given several examples of these reliefs (Vol. I. Fig. 4, and above, Figs. 15 and 64); we may here add one more (Fig. 113). Leaning on his bow with his left hand, the king, richly dressed, lifts in his right the patera whose contents he is about to pour as a libation to the deity. Facing him stands a gigantic eunuch, who waves over his master's head one of those fly-flappers that, with the parasol, have always been among the insignia of Oriental royalty (see Plate X.). These figures are rather short in their proportions, and the 1 The Five Great Monarchies, &c, vol. ii. p. 79. 2 See a?ite.