Professional Documents
Culture Documents
O Livro Da História 1st Edition Vários Autores Rafael Longo Full Chapter Download PDF
O Livro Da História 1st Edition Vários Autores Rafael Longo Full Chapter Download PDF
O Livro Da História 1st Edition Vários Autores Rafael Longo Full Chapter Download PDF
https://ebookstep.com/product/o-livro-da-literatura-1st-edition-
varios-autores/
https://ebookstep.com/product/o-livro-da-ciencia-1st-edition-
varios-autores/
https://ebookstep.com/product/o-livro-das-religioes-1st-edition-
varios-autores/
https://ebookstep.com/product/o-grande-livro-dos-gatos-1st-
edition-varios-autores/
O Livro da Mitologia 1st Edition Philip Wilkinson
https://ebookstep.com/product/o-livro-da-mitologia-1st-edition-
philip-wilkinson/
https://ebookstep.com/product/o-misterio-da-casa-incendiada-1st-
edition-rafael-weschenfelder/
https://ebookstep.com/product/o-misterio-da-casa-incendiada-1st-
edition-rafael-weschenfelder-2/
https://ebookstep.com/product/o-grande-livro-da-macrobiotica-
francisco-varatojo/
https://ebookstep.com/product/o-campo-da-morte-1st-edition-
rafael-marques-de-morais/
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
nothing produced by the sculptors, painters, and ornamentists who
were employed on the decoration of those great buildings which
even the Jewish prophets could not help admiring, while they abused
the princes who built them and the gods to whom they were
consecrated. The earliest Greek travellers, such as Herodotus and
Ctesias, only saw the ruins of these magnificent structures and of
their rich adornment of enamels, frescoes, and sculptured figures;
and yet how great was their wonder! We can hardly reflect without
emotion upon what we have lost in great works in stone and metal
carried out in the style of which certain fragments from Tello and a
few terra-cotta statuettes give us some faint idea.[230]
Fig. 117.—Two fragments from the Balawat gates. British Museum. Drawn by
Saint-Elme Gautier.
We should have been willing, had it been possible, to make
further extracts from this curious series of reliefs; to have shown,
here naked prisoners defiling under the eyes of the conqueror, there
Assyrian archers shooting at the heaped-up heads of their slain
enemies. But we have perforce been content with giving, by a few
carefully chosen examples, a fair idea of the work that intervened
between the sculptors of Assurnazirpal and those of the Sargonids.
It is probable that the scheme of this vast composition was due to
a single mind; from one end to the other there is an obvious similarity
of thought and style. But several different hands must have been
employed upon its execution, which is far from being of equal merit
throughout. It is on examining the original that we are struck by these
inequalities. Thus, in some of the long rows of captives the handling
is timid and without meaning, while in others it has all the firmness
and decision of the best among the alabaster or limestone reliefs;
the muscular forms, the action of the calf and knee, are well
understood and frankly reproduced. The passages we have chosen
for illustration are among the best in this respect. Taking them all in
all these bronze reliefs are among the works that do most honour to
Assyrian art.
The only monument that has come down to us from the reign of
Vulush III., the successor of Samas-vul, is a statue, or rather a pair
of statues, of Nebo; the better of the two is reproduced in Fig. 15 of
our first volume. These sacred images are of very slight merit from
an art point of view; we should hardly have referred to them but for
their votive inscriptions. From these we learn that they were
consecrated in the Temple of Nebo by the prefect of Calah in order
to bespeak the protection of that god for the king. But the latter is not
named alone; the faithful subject says that he offers these idols “for
his master Vulush and his mistress Sammouramit.”
In this latter name it is difficult not to recognize the Semiramis of
the Greeks, and we are led to ask ourselves whether the queen of
Vulush may not have afforded a prototype for that legendary
princess. This association of a female name with that of the king is
almost without parallel either in Chaldæa or Assyria. In royal
documents, as well as in those of a more private character, there is
no more mention of the royal wives than if they did not exist. Only
one explanation can be given of the apparent anomaly, and that is
that Sammouramit, for reasons that may be easily guessed, enjoyed
a quite exceptional position. It was in those days that, from one reign
to another, the princes of Calah attempted to complete the
subjugation of Chaldæa. It may have happened that in order to put
an end to a state of never-ending rebellion, Vulush married the
heiress of some powerful and popular family of the lower country,
and, that he might be looked upon as the legitimate ruler of Babylon,
joined her name with his in the royal style and title. This hypothesis
finds some confirmation in what Herodotus tells us about Semiramis.
She was, he says, queen of Babylon five generations before Nitocris,
which would be about a century and a half. He adds that she caused
the quays of the Euphrates to be built.[242] This takes us back to
rather beyond the middle of the eighth century b.c., that is very near
to the date which Assyrian chronology would fix for the reign of
Vulush (810–781). As the last representative of the old national
dynasty, this Semiramis, associated as she was in the exercise, or at
least in the show, of sovereign power both in Assyria and Chaldæa,
would not be forgotten by her countrymen, and the population of
Babylon would be especially likely to magnify the part she had
played. There is nothing fabulous in the tradition as Herodotus gives
it, although it may, perhaps, go beyond the truth here and there.
Ctesias, however, goes much farther. He brings together and
amplifies tales which had already received many additions in the half
century that separated him from Herodotus, and he thus creates the
type of that Semiramis, the wife of Ninus and the conqueror of all
Asia, who so long held an undeserved place in ancient history.[243]
The last Calah prince who has left us anything is Tiglath-Pileser
II. (745–727). We have already described how his palace was
destroyed by Esarhaddon, who employed its materials for his own
purposes.[244] At the British Museum there are a few fragments
which have been recognized by their inscriptions as belonging to his
work (Vol. I. Fig. 26)[245]; they are quite similar to those of his
immediate predecessors.
With the new dynasty founded by Sargon at the end of the eighth
century taste changed fast enough. In those bas-reliefs in the
Khorsabad palace which represent that king’s campaigns, many
details are treated in a spirit very different from that of former days.
Trees, for instance, are no longer abstract signs standing for no one
kind of vegetation more than another; the sculptor begins to notice
their distinguishing features and to give their proper physiognomy to
the different countries overrun by the Assyrians. But these landscape
backgrounds are not to be found in all the bas-reliefs of Khorsabad.
[246]
The art of Sargon was an art of transition. While on the one hand
it endeavoured to open up new ground, on the other it travelled on
the old ways and followed many of the ancient errors; it had a
marked predilection for figures larger than nature, and bas-reliefs
treating of royal pageants and processions remind us by the
simplicity of their conception of those of Assurnazirpal. We have
already given many fragments (Vol I. Figs. 22–24, and 29), and now
we give another, a vizier and a eunuch standing before the king in
the characteristic attitude of respect (Fig. 118). The inscription which
cut the figures of Assurnazirpal so awkwardly in two has
disappeared; the proportions have gained in slenderness, and the
muscular development, though still strongly marked, has lost some
of its exaggeration. All this shows progress, and yet on the whole the
Louvre relief is less happy in its effect than the best of the Nimroud
sculptures in the British Museum. The execution is neither so firm
nor so frank; the relief is much higher and the modelling a little heavy
and bulbous in consequence. This result may also be caused to
some extent by the nature of the material, which is a softer alabaster
than was employed, so far as we know, in any other part of Assyria.
At Nimroud a fine limestone was chiefly used.
We shall be contented with mentioning the stele of Sargon, found
near Larnaca, in Cyprus, in 1845. It is most important as an historical
monument; it proves that, as a sequel to his Syrian conquests, the
terror of Sargon’s name was so widespread that even the inhabitants
of the islands thought it prudent to declare themselves his vassals,
and to set up his image as a sign of homage rendered and
allegiance sworn. But the stone is now too much broken to be of any
great interest as a work of art.[247]
The artistic masterpiece of this epoch is the bronze lion figured in
our Plate XI. It had been suggested that its use was to hold down the
cords of a tent or the lower edge of tapestries, a purpose for which
the weight of the bronze and the ring fixed in its back make it well
suited. This idea had to be abandoned, however, when a whole
series of similar figures marked with the name of Sennacherib was
found. Their execution was hardly equal to that of the lion we have
figured, but their general characteristics were the same, and they
had rings on their backs.[248]
These lions are sixteen in number; they form a series in which
the size of the animal becomes steadily smaller with each example;
the largest is a foot long, the smallest hardly more than an inch. The
decrease seems to follow a certain rule, but rust has affected them
too greatly for it to be easy to base any metrological calculation upon
their weight. But all doubt as to their use is removed by the
inscriptions in cuneiform and in ancient Aramaic characters with
which several of them are engraved. The Aramaic inscriptions all
begin with the word mine; then comes a figure indicating the number
of mines, or of subdivisions of the mine that the weight represents;
finally, there is the name of some personage, who may perhaps have
been a magistrate charged with the regulation and verification of
weights.
Fig. 118.—Bas-relief from Khorsabad. Height 9 feet 5
inches. Louvre.
With the accession of Sennacherib, a sensible change comes
over the aspect of the reliefs. What until now has been the exception
becomes the rule. On almost every slab we find a complex and
carefully treated landscape background. The artist is not satisfied
with indicating the differences between conifers, cypresses, and
pines (Vol. I. Figs, 41–43), palms (ib. Figs. 30 and 34; and above,