Page:A History of Art in Chaldæa & Assyria Vol 2.djvu/373

Metal Dishes and Utensils. 335 winged griffin, followed by the same animals attacked by lions and making fourteen figures in all ; in the third zone fourteen heavy-crested bulls follow one another round the dish. All these animals are among those most constantly treated by the Assyrian sculptor ; their shapes and motions are as well under- stood and as well rendered as in the bas-reliefs. The bulls especially are grandly designed. Moreover, the idea of em- ploying all these animals for the adornment of such a surface is entirely in the spirit of Assyrian decoration. We shall meet with it again in the shields from Van ; we figure the best preserved of the latter on page 347. It would be easy to give more examples, either from Layard or from our own catalogue of these objects, of the purely Assyrian style on the one hand, or of that in which the influence of Egyptian models is so clearly shown, on the other. It is enough, however, that we have proved that these little monu- ments may be divided into two clearly marked classes. Did the two groups thus constituted share the same origin ? Did they both come from the same birth-place ? Further discoveries may enable us to answer this question with certainty, and even now we may try to pave the way to its solution. There would be no difficulty if these bronze vessels bore cuneiform inscriptions, especially if the latter formed a part of the decorative composition, as in the palace reliefs, and were cut by the same hand. But this, so far as we know at present, was never the case. In some fragments of pottery we have found cuneiform characters (Fig. 185), and the name of Sargon has even been read on a glass phial (Fig. 190), but — and we cannot help feeling some surprise at the fact — none of these objects of a material far more precious bear a trace of the Mesopotamian form of writing. I do not know that a single wedge has been discovered upon them. A certain number of them are inscribed, but inscribed without exception with those letters which Phoenicia is supposed to have evolved out of the cursive writing of Egypt. 1 They were not introduced with any idea of enriching the design, as they always occur on the blank side of the vessel. They are close to the edge, and their 1 Inscriptions of this kind have been found on five or six of the bronze platters in the British Museum. They are about to be printed in the Corpus Inscriptionum Scmiticarum, part ii. ïnscriptiones Aramœa, vol. i.