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Updated: June 22, 2025
Under the reserves thus laid down we may, then, devote ourselves to the study of the Ninevite sculptures that fill the museums of London and Paris; we may consider them the strongest and most original creations of Assyrian art. Fragment of a bas-relief in alabaster. Louvre. Height 23 inches.
Probably it appeared to the subjects of Assyria, who had been accustomed to a monarch holding his court alternately at Nineveh and at Babylon, that the new power was merely a continuation of the old, and the monarch a legitimate successor of the old line of Ninevite kings. Of the reign of Nabopolassar the information which has come down to us is scanty.
The men who cut those granite lions in the Egyptian room of the British Museum, and who carved the calm faces of those Ninevite kings, knew much more, both of lions and kings, than they chose to express.
This imitation appears all the more probable as in the paintings of Theban tombs dating from a much more remote period than the oldest Ninevite remains, the pattern with its alternate bud and flower is complete. The Assyrians borrowed their motive from Egypt, but they gave it more than Egyptian perfection. They gave it the definitive shapes that even Greece did not disdain to copy.
In the long and burning summers of Mesopotamia the inhabitants freely exchanged light for coolness. With few and narrow openings and thick walls the temperature of their dwellings could be kept far lower than that of the torrid atmosphere without. Thus we find in the Ninevite palaces outer walls of from fifteen to five-and-twenty feet in thickness.
Has it not been related of the little Jew babe sucking at its mother's breast in Jerusalem, that this innocent, long after the Captivity, would start convulsively, relinquishing its feast, and indulging in the purest. Hebrew lamentation of the most tenacious of races, at the passing sound of a Babylonian or a Ninevite voice?
But such were the moral and social evils of the times succeeding the Ninevite invasion that Isaiah saw that retribution would come sooner or later, unless the nation repented and a radical reform should take place. He saw the people stricken with judicial blindness; so he clothed himself in sackcloth and cried aloud, with fervid eloquence, upon the people to repent.
The first day dawned in Egypt and Assyria, and its works lie buried in the tombs of prehistoric Pharaohs and Ninevite kings. The second day the sun rose on the shores of many-isled Greece, and shed its rays over Etruria and Rome, and ere it set, temples and palaces were flooded with beauty. The gods had taken human form, and were come to dwell with men.
The subjection may have been maintained for a little less than a century; but about that time we find evidence that the yoke of Assyria had been shaken off, and that the Babylonian monarchs, who have Semitic names, and are probably Assyrians by descent, had become hostile to the Ninevite kings, and were engaged in frequent wars with them.
Only, take care you aren't flying high at sunset. There was a little Ninevite boy I heard of once. He was one of King Sennacherib's sons, and a traveller brought him a Psammead. He used to keep it in a box of sand on the palace terrace. It was a dreadful degradation for one of us, of course; still the boy was the Assyrian King's son. And one day he wished for wings and got them.
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