Page:A History of Art in Chaldæa & Assyria Vol 2.djvu/256

224 A History of Art in Ciiald^ea and Assyria. Neither boatmen nor fishermen have anything to do with the building of the great edifice that occupies so many minds and arms within a stone's throw of where they labour. They are in- troduced merely to amuse the eye of the spectator by the faithful representation of life ; a passage of what we call genre has crept into an historical picture. Elsewhere it is landscape proper that is thus introduced. One of the slabs of this same series ends in a row of precipitous heights covered with cypresses, vines, fig and pomegranate trees, and a sort of dwarf palm or chamœrops} They thought no doubt that the spectators of such pictures would be delighted to have the shadowy freshness of the orchards that bordered the Tigris, the variety of their foliage and the abundant fruit under which their branches bent to the ground, thus recalled to their minds. The group of houses that we have figured for the sake of their domed roofs, forms a part of one of these landscape backgrounds (Vol. I. Fig. 43). 2 We might multiply examples if we chose. There is hardly a relief from Sennacherib's palace in which some of those details which excite curiosity by their anecdotic and picturesque character are not introduced. 3 We find evidence of the same propensity in the decoration of the long, inclined passage that led from the summit of the mound down to the banks of the Tigris. There the sculptor has represented what must have actually taken place in the passage every day ; on the one hand grooms leading their horses to water, on the other servants carrying up meat, fruit, and drink for the service of the royal table and for the army of officers and dependants of every kind that found lodging in the palace. 4 This active desire to imitate reality as faithfully as possible had another consequence. It led to the multiplation of figures, and 1 Layard, Monuments, second series, plates 14, 15. 2 Layard, Monuments, second series, plate 17. '"' Sennacherib caused his sculptors to celebrate the campaign in which he subdued the peoples of Lower Chaldaea. Like the Arab of to-day, they took refuge when pursued among the marshes in the neighbourhood of the Persian Gulf (Layard, Monuments, second series, plate 25). The light, flat-bottomed boats, with their sharp prows, are shown pushing through the reeds, and bending them down into the water to clear a passage. 4 The slabs taken from this corridor are now in the Kouyundjik Gallery of the British Museum, and numbered from 37 to 43. See also Layard's Monuments, second series, plates 7-9.