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Even the Sphinxes are rather Assyrian than Egyptian in character; and exhibit the recurved wings, which are never found in the valley of the Nile. In almost all the forms employed there is a modification of the original type, sufficient to show that the Phoenician artist did not care merely to reproduce.
For Assyrian mouldings are even poorer than those of Egypt. The softness of crude brick, the brittle hardness of burnt brick, are neither of them well disposed towards those delicate curves by which a skilful architect contrives to break the sameness of a façade, and to give the play of light and shadow which make up the beauty of a Greek or Florentine cornice.
The human face, as represented in Assyrian sculptures, is a higher type of face than even the Greek: it is noble and princely; the Egyptian faces are broad, flat, and clumsy. If Egypt gave birth to Greece, with her beautiful arts, then truly this immense, clumsy roc's egg hatched a miraculous nest of loves and graces.
The Assyrian arms were then turned against a neighboring district, the country of the Comani. The Comani, though Assyrian subjects, had lent assistance to the people of Musr, and it was to punish this insolence that Tiglath-Pileser resolved to invade their territory.
In every Assyrian palace we may see that the king, its builder, had a double object in view, the glorification of the gods, and the transmission to posterity of his own image and the memory of his reign. To these ends the architect called in the sculptor, under whose hands the rudely dressed slabs took the historic forms with which we are familiar.
Here stood Pitru, formerly a Hatti town and, perhaps, the Biblical Pethor, situated beside the Sajur on some site not yet identified, but probably near the outfall of the stream. It received an Assyrian name in Shalmaneser's sixth year, and was used afterwards as a base for all his operations in Syria.
A beard and whiskers were worn, the former sometimes long and pendent, like the Assyrian, but more often clustering around the chin in short close curls. Simplicity of manners prevailed during this period.
Side by side with that multiplication of false deities went the almost entire neglect of the worship of Jehovah, until at last, as his reign advanced and he floundered deeper into his troubles, the Temple was spoiled, everything in it that could be laid hands upon was sent to the melting-pot, to pay the Assyrian tribute; and then the doors were shut, the lamps extinguished, the fire quenched on the cold altars, and the silent Temple left to the bats and the Shekinah; for God still abode in the deserted house.
Lemuel, according to the Hebrew text, which is mistranslated in the Authorised Version, ruled over Massa, and Massa, the Mash of Genesis, is described in the Assyrian inscriptions as that part of northern Arabia which spread eastward from Edom. The Hebrew of Palestine doubtless included it in the country of "the children of the East."
Either Egyptian artificers captives probably may have wrought the bowls after Assyrian models, and have accidentally varied the common forms, more or less, in the direction which was natural to them from old habits; or Assyrian artificers, acquainted with the art of Egypt, and anxious to improve their own from it, may have consciously adopted certain details from the rival country.
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