Page:A History of Art in Chaldæa & Assyria Vol 2.djvu/257

Assyrian Sculpture. 225 therefore to the diminution of their scale. No fleures like those that occupy the whole heights of the slabs at Nimroud and Khorsabad have been found in the palace of wSennacherib. In the latter a slab is sometimes cut up into seven or eight horizontal divisions. 1 The same landscape, the same people, the same action is continued from one division to another over the whole side of a room. The subjects were not apportioned by slabs, but by horizontal bands ; whence we may conclude that the limestone or alabaster was chiselled in place and not in the sculptor's studio. We have not engraved one of these reliefs in its entirety ; with its half-dozen compartments one above another and its hundred or hundred and fifty figures, it would have been necessary to reduce the latter to such a degree that they could only be seen properly with a magnifying glass. The originals themselves, or the large plates given by Layard in his Monuments, must be consulted before the dangers of this mode of proceeding can be appreciated. The confusion to which we have pointed as one of the cardinal defects of Assyrian sculpture, is nowhere more conspicuous than in the battle pictures from Sennacherib's palace. It is, however, only to be found in the historical subjects. When the sculptor has to deal with religious scenes he returns to the simplicity of composi- tion and the dignity of pose that we noticed in the reliefs of Assurnazirpal. This may be seen in the figures carved on the rock of Bavian by the orders of Sennacherib. The village which has given its name to this monument lies about five and thirty miles north-north- east of Mossoul, at the foot of the first Kurdistan hills and at the mouth of a narrow and picturesque valley, through which flows the rapid and noisy Gomel on its way to the ancient Bumados, the modern Ghazir, which in its turn flows southwards into the Zab. The sculptures consist of several separate groups cut on one of the lofty walls of the ravine. Some are accompanied by inscriptions, but the latter speak of canals cut by the king for the irrigation of his country and of military expeditions, and do not explain why such elaborate sculptures should have been carried out in a solitary gorge, through which no important road can ever have passed. 2 1 See Layard, Monuments, second series, plates 47-49, &c. 2 These sculptures were discovered and described for the first time by M. Rouet, the VOL. IL G G