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Now the sculpture upon the alabaster slabs with which the palace walls of Shalmaneser and Sargon, of Sennacherib and Assurbanipal, were covered, confines itself mainly to marches, combats, and sieves, it is more realistic than the sculpture of Chaldæa, a country that had done less, especially upon fields of battle, but had invented more and done more thinking than its bellicose rival.
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.
M. Halévy has translated an Assyrian text, whose meaning he thus epitomizes: "What becomes of the individual deposited in a tomb? A curious passage in one of the 'books' from the library of Assurbanipal answers this question, indirectly, indeed, but without any ambiguity. If well treated by the children of the defunct, he becomes their protector; if not, their evil genius and scourge.
When he had to deal with more complicated images, as in the reliefs at Kouyundjik representing the conquests and expeditions of Assurbanipal, the artist modified his processes at will so as to combine in the narrow space at his disposal all the information that he thought fit to give.
On a tablet recovered from the library of Assurbanipal it is written: "The seventh day is a fast day, a lucky day, a sabbatuv" literally, a day of rest for the heart. In Aralû that day never ceased; the dead there, buried, Herodotos said, in honey, were unresurrectably dead, dead to the earth, dead to the Silver Sky.
His robe dazzled, and the close sleeves were fastened over his knuckles with bracelets of precious stones. In one hand he held a sceptre, in the other a chart. “I,” he cried—“I am Assurbanipal; the progeny of Assur and of Baaltis, son of the great king Riduti, whom the lord of crowns, in days remote prophesying in his name, raised to the kingdom, and in the womb of his mother created to rule.
Next came a war with Elam, ending in its subjection to Assyria, for the first time in history. But with success. Assurbanipal grew arrogant in his attitude to his brother, the King of Babylon, and a fratricidal war resulted in the defeat and death of Shamash-shumukin and the capture of the rival capital.
It is now called the Central Palace at Nimroud. The palace occupied the whole of the south-western angle of the mound. The chief of these is George SMITH, who, in his History of Assurbanipal, has brought together and commented upon the different texts from which we learn the facts of this brilliant reign. The early death of this young scholar can never be too much regretted.
Assurbanipal was cruel in victory and indefatigable in the chase. Judging from his bas-reliefs he was as proud of the lions he killed by hundreds in his hunts, as of the men massacred by thousands in his wars and military promenades, or of the captives driven before him, like herds of helpless cattle, from one end of Asia to the other.
Both plan and decoration show evidence of haste and disquiet. The act of sovereignty had to be done, but all certainty of the morrow had vanished. From the moment in which Assyrian sculpture touched its highest point in the reign of Assurbanipal, the material resources of the kingdom and the supply of skilled workmen had slowly but constantly diminished.
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