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This lintel has been fixed over the south doorway into the Kouyundjik Gallery of the British Museum. When examined in place, the running ornament in the hollow of the cornice will be easily recognized in spite of the mutilation of its upper edge as made up of a modified form of the palmette motive, which had its origin in the fan-shaped head of the date palm.
Layard did not conduct his excavations like an architect, and he fails to give us such information as we have in the case of Khorsabad, but he tells us that the chambers in question formed the upper part of a sort of tower projecting from one angle of the façade. In the building represented on the Kouyundjik relief, the gallery is also upheld by the main wall, and stands upon its summit.
In spite of the labour expended upon the carving and putting in place of these huge figures, they are extremely numerous, hardly less so, indeed, than the Osiride piers of Egypt. In the palace of Sargon at Khorsabad, twenty-six pairs have been counted; in that of Sennacherib at Kouyundjik, there were ten upon a single façade.
This building is now known as Kouyundjik, from the name of the village perched upon the mound within which the buildings of Sennacherib were hidden.
He appears also to have been a patron of literature and the arts. It was under his auspices that the collection of inscribed terra-cotta tablettes was made in the palace at Kouyundjik, of which so many fragments have now been recovered. He ordered the transcription of several ancient texts which had been first cut, many centuries before, at Ur of the Chaldees.
The closed petals of the one the open ones of the other and the divisions of the calix are indicated in a fashion that happily combines truth with convention. Fragment of a threshold; from Khorsabad. Louvre. Door ornament; from Kouyundjik. The painter also made use of this motive.
We shall encounter this type again when we come to speak of Cappadocia. Demons; from the palace of Assurbanipal at Kouyundjik. British Museum. This belief in spirits is the second phase that the primitive religion, which we studied in Egypt under the name of fetishism or animism, has to pass through. In the beginning mere existence is confounded with life.
There was a moment when the great Semitic Empire founded by the Sargonides touched even the Ægæan, for Gyges, king of Lydia, finding himself menaced by the Cimmerians, did homage to Assurbanipal, and sued for help against those foes to all civilization. Assurbanipal at the chase. Kouyundjik. British Museum. Like their ancestors, these great soldiers were also great builders.
In the only palace that has been completely excavated, that of Sargon at Khorsabad, everything is built of brick. Layard alone speaks of a stone-built chamber in the palace of Sennacherib at Kouyundjik, but he gives no details.
Woman, whose grace and beauty were so keenly felt by the Egyptians, is almost completely absent from the sculpture of Assyria. Convoy of prisoners. Kouyundjik.
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