Page:A History of Art in Chaldæa & Assyria Vol 2.djvu/304

A History of Art in Chai.d.i.a and Assyria. and the plaited robes a Chaldaean cylinder may be at once recognised as dating from these remote ages. Fashions and methods of execution changed as soon as the preponderance of Assyrian royalty was assured. Artists of merit must then have migrated northwards and opened workshops in the cities of the Tigris ; but production was never so great as in the south. Every traveller in those regions notices that there are far more cylinders to be purchased in the bazaars of Bagdad and Bassorah than in those of Mossoul. 1 The glyptic art of Assyria was an exotic, like her sculpture and her architecture. In attempting to define the characteristics of the Assyrian cylinders, and to distinguish them from those of Chaldsea, we may take as points of departure and as types of the new class, a few seals bearing legends that enable us to give them a positive date. FlG. 150. — Archaic Assyrian cylinder. In the Uiiizi, Florence. Thus we may learn from a signet that once belonged to the governor of Calah what the execution of the artists employed by the princes of Elassar and Nimroud was like (Fig. 150). We need not hesitate to assign this cylinder to the first Assyrian monarchy. The workmanship, at once careful and awkward, belongs to a time when all the difficulties of gem engraving had not yet been overcome. In the wings of the genius and the legs of the personage who follows him the management of the instrument used is that of an art still in its infancy. In this seal then we have a valuable example of what we may call The Archaic Assyrian Cylinder. We have already figured several in which the same characteristics appear (Figs. 124, 139, and 140). In the same class we may put a number of cylinders on which scenes of worship are represented with slight variations 1 Botta, Monument de Ninive, vol. v. p. 2. Layard, Discoveries, p. 605.