Page:A History of Art in Chaldæa & Assyria Vol 2.djvu/441

Additions and Corrections. 403 Bagdad, near the village of Sheikhan. This district forms a part of the Persian province of Kirmanchah {Journal of the GeograpJiical Society, vol. ix. p. 31). The relief occurs, it seems, on the high road between Babylon and Ecbatana, in the defile which is now called Tak-i-Girrah, one of the passes leading up through Mount Zagros to the plateau of Iran. There is a sketch of the relief from the pencil of Sir H. Rawlinson in the Five Great Monarchies of his brother (vol. iii. p. 7). The king stands with his foot on the body of a conquered enemy. An individual, probably the royal general, presents two kneeling captives, who are held by a cord attached to rings put through their noses. More captives with ropes about their necks are carved on the kind of plinth upon which the main group is supported. The whole picture is about two feet wide and five high. Near it there is an apparently unfinished inscription in Babylonish cuneiform characters. The Chaldaean origin of the work is confirmed by the flounces on the general's robe. In the same neighbourhood there are ruins which appear to date from a very early period. Fig. 262. — Fragment of a Chaldaean statuette. Louvre. P. 219. — We have here omitted to draw attention to one of the differences between the art of the Sargonids and that of the preceding dynasty. In the figures from Tello and in the bas-reliefs of the time of Assurnazirpal the sculptor has left the eyeballs smooth (Plate VII. ; Vol. I. Fig. 15 ; Vol. II, Figs. 43, 64, 113). In the sculptures of the time of Sargon and his successors, on the other hand, the cornea is indicated in the figures both of men and animals, by a clearly traced circle (Vol. I, Figs. 22 and 25 ; Vol. II. Fig. 118 and Plate X.). It was, no doubt, the desire to give a more lifelike expression to the physiognomy that led the artist thus to modify his proceeding. There are a few figures in which the desire for imitative truth is pushed even farther. In a bas-relief in the Louvre there is an eagle- headed deity in which not only the cornea but the pupil also is marked by a smaller circle within the first. See the De V Expression des Yeux dans la Statuaire of Doctor DEBROU {Correspondant, April ioth, 1883). His special knowledge has enabled him to make more than one remark upon the representation of the eye in ancient and modern sculpture, to which writers upon art would do well to pay attention.