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It seems indeed an atavism, a return to modes of feeling that created the monuments of other ages, of barbarous and forgotten times. Well did Berlioz term his work "Babylonian and Ninevitish"! Certainly it is like nothing so much as the cruel and ponderous bulks, the sheer, vast tombs and ramparts and terraces of Khorsabad and Nimroud, bare and oppressive under the sun of Assyria.
This tower was previously hidden under a mass of débris, which gave it a conical form like that at Nimroud. Botta had already noticed its existence, but he failed to guess its real character, which, indeed, was only divined by Place when his explorations were far advanced. The external ramp, with its pavement of burnt brick and its crenellated parapet, was also found.
All the objects found in the neighbourhood of Lake Van are purely Assyrian in character, and no question is raised as to the fitness of their place in our museums side by side with objects from Nimroud and Khorsabad.
Its four faces are adorned with reliefs and with a running commentary engraved with extreme care. Genius in the attitude of adoration. From the North-west Palace at Nimroud. Louvre. Shalmaneser was an intrepid man of war. The inscriptions on his obelisk recall the events of thirty-one campaigns waged against the neighbouring peoples under the leadership of the king himself.
They were so numerous, especially in the palace of Assurnazirpal at Nimroud, that we cannot believe them all to have come off small and movable pieces of furniture. We are confirmed in this idea by the fact that none of these ivories are unique or isolated works of art.
There is a difference between such fragments as this and the glazed tiles of the Khorsabad gates. In the latter the enamelled edges of several bricks were required to make a single figure. In the bricks from Nimroud on the other hand, whole figures are painted on their surface, and in fact a single brick had several figures upon it which were, therefore, on a much smaller scale.
The anthropomorphism of the Chaldees was franker than that of the Egyptians, and so far the art of Chaldæa was an advance upon that of Egypt, although it was excelled by the latter in executive qualities. The method to which it had committed itself, the diligent and passionate study of the human figure, was the royal road to all excellence in the plastic arts. Statue of Nebo; from Nimroud.
And before Layard removed a basketful of the earth that covered the palace of Shalmaneser at Nimroud, had not the Frenchman Botta disclosed the friezes and sphinxes of Sargon at Khorsabad; and in these late years is it not the Frenchman De Sarzec who has brought from Telloh to the Louvre the statues of Chaldean kings that lived almost five thousand years ago?
The earliest of the Assyrian palaces were those built in Assur, which dated probably from the nineteenth century before the Christian era; but the seat of royalty was at an early period transferred from Assur to Calah, the site of which is marked by the great mounds of Nimroud at the junction of the greater Lab and the Tigris. Mr.
To illustrate this fact, let us take the black obelisk of Shalmaneser II., found by Layard at Nimroud. It is a column of basalt seven feet high and about two feet wide at the base, from which it narrows slightly, until near the top it is reduced by three steps.
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