READING HALL

THE DOORS OF WISDOM

THE ASSYRIAN EMPIRE. TABLE OF CONTENTS

CHAPTER XV

ORIENTAL ART OF THE SAITE PERIOD

I

ARCHAISM IN EGYPTIAN ART

THE decline of the Egyptian civilization under the XXth Dynasty saw also a decline in the arts. Architecture became heavy and lumpy, the pillars of temple-courts resembled rows of sausages and the inscriptions on their architraves became disproportionately large. It was an epoch of bad taste. Decoration was vulgarized by the lavish use of gold, which while beautiful when combined with other materials and as the vehicle of coloured stones, is coarse and ugly in itself, and in mass is unbearable. The representations of the human figure became as monotonously alike as those of an Assyrian relief. And the type they perpetuate is an inane and degenerate one.

Under the XXIst Dynasty there was something of a revival of taste. The ushabti figures, for instance, which under the XXth Dynasty had in some cases degenerated into shapeless blocks of calcite rudely scrawled in green and black paint, were now made of a very deep and brilliant blue faience, not so delicate as that of the XVIIIth and XIXth Dynasties and glassier than that of the XIIth, on which the inscription was painted in an equally brilliant black glaze. But the coffins of the time preserve the bad taste of the preceding dynasty, with their yellow-varnished decoration in low gesso relief designed to give the appearance of gold. A new style of wrapping the mummies now comes in. Also, in the vignettes and writing of the funerary papyri we notice a new tendency to comparative smallness and greater neatness. In architecture we see no new tendencies as yet. The Tanites, to a much greater extent the Bubastites, built largely (and no doubt heavily) in the Delta: the work of Osorkon II survives to some extent, and is well known. It presents no outstanding features of interest. And the chapel of Osiris Hikzet at Thebes, built by Osorkon III is uninteresting. Under the Bubastites the level of the arts falls distinctly. There is still some charm left in the work of the priest-kings, but under the XXIInd Dynasty it is absent. This, though not the worst, was the dullest and least inspired period of Egyptian art. The temple reliefs are mere clichés of those of the Ramessids: sculpture in the round is expressionless and without originality or distinction; the smaller arts reach their nadir. 

Yet there was a new spirit beginning to blow through the choked and dusty ways of art. It is first observable in small art under the Ethiopians, but its influence does not become apparent in sculpture until the beginning of the XXVIth Dynasty, when it became the fashion. Its characteristic was conscious archaism. We have already mentioned it in dealing with the history of the Saite period. This was a new tendency in art, previously unprecedented, and typical of a degenerate age. In the strong old days men often admired the works of their predecessors but never so much as actually to imitate them. The taste of the IVth Dynasty would never have appealed in this way to the men of the XVIIIth, still less to those of the XIXth or XXth Dynasties. Their taste may have been bad towards the end, but it was at least a natural development. They would simply have shrugged their shoulders at the work of the Old Kingdom as ‘Gothic,’ and would certainly never have thought of reviving its style.

The art of the XIXth and XXth Dynasties was of course Theban, and the Bubastite of the XXIInd Dynasty inherited the Theban style and spirit. But in the eighth century the new archaizing spirit grew up, most probably at Memphis. There, where the remains of the more ancient dynasties dominated the necropolis-fields of Sakkarah and Gizeh, the art of the Pyramid­builders must always have been regarded with more understanding than in the south, where it always had been comparatively little represented, and had in any case been overlaid by the works of the Theban dynasties. At Memphis, however, nobody could ignore the work of the early kings, which on every hand chal­lenged comparison with that of the XIXth Dynasty monarchs (no doubt the best represented at Memphis of the later style) and of their inferior imitators, the Bubastites.

It was natural that when, in the eighth century, the kingdom was once more virtually divided, and the prestige of Bubastis as well as of Thebes had sunk to a low ebb, and the local dynasts of the Delta looked to a leader of their own country from Sais and Memphis, that a Memphite school of art should have arisen, characterized by an archaistic imitation of the early styles. This new style was soon adopted in the south, at any rate in small objects of art, as we find scarabs of Kashta, Amonirdis, Shabaka and Taharka decorated with spirals imitated from those of the XIIth Dynasty. It is interesting to note that here the style of the XIIth Dynasty had to be followed, as there were no contemporary scarabs of the Pyramid-builders to be imitated. But a certain mixture of Old Kingdom and Middle Kingdom styles is to be noted in this imitating archaistic art, as was natural. We have seen much the same thing in the early days of our own revival of ‘Gothic.’

In the reign of Psamatik I the archaizing style became quite fashionable, and we see tombs decorated with reliefs of country life, trains of servants representing estates bearing the products for the delectation of the dead man in the underworld, and so forth, in almost slavish imitation of the tomb reliefs of the IVth to VIth Dynasties. This ancient style was considered peculiarly appropriate to the great tombs which the chief men of the realm now began to build for themselves, and already in the time of Psamatik we find that this fashion has reached Thebes. In the Asasif, the flat ground between the tomb-hill of Sheikh ‘Abd el-Kurnah and the village of Kurnah, and immediately in front of the cliff-cirque and temples of Der el-Bahri, rise the dilapidated crude-brick pylons, with arched gateways, of the tomb-enclosures of Mentumehet and Pediamonopet. The first was the prince of Thebes at the time of the Assyrian invasions, whom we have met already. In his tomb we find scenes of offering-bringers that were copied from the walls of the funerary temple of Queen Hatshepsut at Der el-Bahri, close by, which themselves had probably been copied from the Xlth Dynasty pyramid-temple of king Mentuhotep. The second was an important priestly official. His tomb, excavated in the rock beneath, is enormous in size and in the number of its chambers, many of which were sculptured with scenes in the new archaizing style. The outer wall of its enclosure, to which the arch-pylon belongs, is built with deeply recessed panels of the false-door type, which strangely resemble those of the great First Dynasty tomb at Nakada.

A third tomb close by, quite recently discovered by the American excavators, working for the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art, is an admirable example of the type. It was built for a certain Pebasa (‘The Leopard’), chief-steward of the Divine Adoratrix Nitocris, daughter of Psammetichus I, who nominally ruled Thebes from 654 till her death seventy years later, in the reign of Apries. The date of the tomb is probably about 620. It is much smaller, of course, than Pediamonopet’s, but has its subterranean antechamber and hypostyle hall, and its court of offerings open to the sky above in the inner court of the enclosure. The walls of the underground chamber are decorated with archaizing sculptures which betray their modernity; for underneath the imitation of the Old Kingdom models we still see the Theban style, the inheritance of the XVIIIth Dynasty. A fourth tomb, that of Nesisepek, mayor of Thebes and vizier at the same period, has an entrance like that of the XIth Dynasty tombs nearby, and sculptures equally imitated from those of the Old Kingdom.

A fifth tomb close by, that of Aba, also steward of the ‘Adoratrix’ Nitocris, ‘is interesting because certain scenes on its walls were copied from those in the tomb of a namesake of his who lived far back in the days of the VIth Dynasty, at Der el-Gebrawi between Manfalut and Asyut.... It has occasionally been possible to restore scenes in the older tomb at Der el-Gebrawi by the copies in the Theban tombs. These copies are sometimes very accurate, at others they might be described as adaptations, occasionally modernized.’ This is one of the best examples of deliberate Saite imitation. The old style of tomb-relief was so much admired that we see it reproduced in miniature in wood­carving or ivory, or on small amulets of glazed steatite. A fine example in the second material is a box of carved and tinted ivory shown in the Burlington Club exhibition of Egyptian art in 1922. There is no doubt whatever as to the Saite date of this box, yet the miniature reliefs have all the feeling of Old Kingdom work, and it has been remarked that the well-known Saite simper, which so often betrays the late date of archaistic works of this period, is totally absent from the faces of the figures. But this simper is really characteristic of later, not earlier Saite work, and is most apparent under the Ptolemies. It is probable that this remarkable box is to be attributed to the seventh century. It is no doubt a mark of archaism to find funerary reliefs rather senselessly imitated on a box that was probably not intended for any funerary use whatever. This is perhaps a sign of bad taste, which is not seldom apparent in a period of artificialism in art, such as this. We see the same inappropriateness in small amulets, such as one in the British Museum which bears on it a miniature relief of a great man, the owner of a tomb, seated stick in hand, in the style of the IVth Dynasty, and of course contemplating, instead of his flocks and herds—vacancy.

Saite art was in fact often very precious, and went with the preciosity characteristic of the time in other respects, such as the titulature of the great men, in which an affected archaism was rampant. The archaistic fashion persisted till the early Ptolemaic period, as we see in the reliefs of the tomb of the Hermopolite high-priest Petosiris at Derut, near Eshmunen. These reliefs are extraordinarily interesting as exhibiting not only the continued vigour of the archaistic spirit, but also the influence of Greek art, and the combination of the foreign influence with the two native currents of inspiration, the traditionally developed and the consciously archaistic. The Greek touches in costume and the tournure of the figures are of the highest interest to observe. Reliefs of tombs such as those of Zanefer and Psamatikneferseshemu, mentioned by Maspero in his Art in Egypt, are hardly to be dated as late as he would have put them, and cannot in any case be later than the early part of the fourth century BC: indeed, that of Psamatik-Nefer-Seshemu may well belong to the fifth. In them we see the archaistic style of tomb-decoration midway between the work of the seventh century that we have described at Thebes, and that of the third, in the reign of Ptolemy Soter, at Derut.

II

SAITE PORTRAITURE, SMALL ART, ETC

It must not be supposed that the whole current of Egyptian art had been turned into the archaistic channel. The traditional style survived, modified by archaistic influences, or at least purified by them from the more conspicuous vulgarisms into which it had fallen from the XXth to the XXIInd Dynasty. It was probably at Thebes more than anywhere else that the old imperial style survived, except in such matters as tomb-decoration, in which the archaizing of Memphis prevailed. This is chiefly noticeable in architecture, in which the old models were generally followed; but in temples we find a new fashion of dedicating huge monolithic shrines (naoi), that are characteristic of the Saite period. Conservatism is also seen in the case of small statuary. The well-known alabaster statuette of the high-priestess Amonirdis at Cairo is a case in point. Many variations on this theme are known in our museums, especially in bronze: one in the British Museum was found at Camirus in Rhodes with other Egyptian objects of the Saite period from Naucratis. The statue of the later high-priestess Ankhnes-Neferibre (temp. Amasis) is a heavy and clumsy example of the survival of the Ramessid tradition. It is obvious that Old or even Middle Kingdom models could not be found for every statue or relief.

The typical wig and wing-sleeved garments of the XVIIIth—XXth Dynasties were not often represented now, though we know that the latter were generally worn. Fashion decreed that statues should have the ancient costume of the simple waistcloth, which nobody of rank really wore. Sometimes, as in the remarkable statue No. 1682 of the British Museum, which is frankly archaistic from top to toe, not only the ancient kilt but also the ancient ‘bobbed’ wig of short curls characteristic of the Vth Dynasty is uncompromisingly represented. No Saite Egyptians really went about like this. We know what they really looked like from the amusing caricatures of the Greek vase-painters which we see in the early sixth century, as on an Ionian hydria found at Caere in Italy, and now in Vienna, which depicts the conflict of Heracles with the legendary Egyptian king Busiris and his followers—a theme repeated in the kylix by Epiktetos in the British Museum, executed nearly a century later. Here the Egyptian retainers have the kilt, now confined to the common people, but Busiris and his courtiers wear the long gauffred white linen robe that they had actually worn since the time of the XVIIIth Dynasty, and their heads are clean-shaven.

It is evident from the later Saite statues that many Egyptians (not merely the priests or those holding priestly offices) did go about without wigs more than was formerly the custom, but usually we find the less severely archaizing figures with a round wig falling behind the ears which was evidently a really existing fashion of coiffure at the time, since we know it at no earlier period. It is, however, often combined with the archaic and obsolete kilt in a way which exactly resembles our late XVIIth and early XVIIIth century representations of Englishmen or Frenchmen or Austrians as ancient Romans, but with long perukes. What was really worn with the round wig or shaven poll was the long linen robe. Under the Ptolemies and Romans we find a fringed and dagged robe represented, passing over the left shoulder and leaving the right bare almost in the fashion of a toga. This no doubt represents the real dress of the Ptolemaic grandees, as modified to some extent by Greek in­fluence. The dress of the women shows no notable change till Roman times.

A remarkable characteristic of Saite art is the revival of portraiture, which may also be regarded as a result of the archaistic movement. It is noticeable, as in the portrait statues of Mentumehet, at the end of the Ethiopian period, and no doubt marks a reaction against the characterless representations common under the Ramessids and Bubastites, and a return to the painstaking portraiture of the IVth and Vth Dynasties. Some of the Saite heads are remarkable for their obvious truth, and this fidelity was maintained under the Sebennytites down to the beginning of the Ptolemaic period. The study of these heads and their comparison with the ancient portraits is very instructive, and one can draw interesting conclusions from them as to how far foreign infiltration had modified the Egyptian type during more than two thousand years.

At the same time, when the portrait of the individual was not insisted upon, or when the sculptor was incapable of reproducing it, a conventional type grew up which becomes commoner towards the end of the period, in which the face has the fixed smile or simper we have already mentioned. It is not previously met with, and is characteristic of the late sixth to fourth centuries; it be­came fixed under the Ptolemies, and only disappeared with the dry, hard Romano-Egyptian style. This smile we see in egyptizing Cypriote Greek sculpture of the sixth century B.C., and it is possible that it was a feature borrowed from the work of the Greek sculptors and vase-painters of the time, which would be well known not only from that of the Cypriotes but also from that of Greece itself at Naucratis. The court of Necho, Apries, and Amasis at the neighbouring Sais was certainly not unac­quainted with ‘archaic’ Greek art. In Cyprus, in return, the Egyptian round wig and conventional waistcloth appear as the garment of smiling Greek figures.

Another characteristic of Saite art is the meticulous care evinced in the cutting of hieroglyphs and small figures in hollow relief. It is often ‘finikin’ and this refined attention to detail is specially noticeable under the Sebennytites. At the same time the wonderful accuracy with which the hardest stones, such as green and black basalt, specially in vogue at this period, were carved is equally noticeable, and forbids any undue depreciation of the work of these sculptors. They did fine work in the cutting of hieroglyphs in these adamantine materials which would have astonished the XVIIIth and XIXth Dynasty sculptors with their soft limestone and comparatively easily-worked granite. The huge stone sarcophagi of the time are specially notable, and were imitated by the Phoenicians, as is that of Eshmunazar in the Louvre. Even huger sarcophagi were made for the mummified Apis-bulls in the Serapeum at Memphis, discovered by Mariette in 1850. These are of granite, average 13 feet in length and weigh 65 tons each. Stone vases were often made in imitation of those of the earliest dynasties, and in the British Museum there are ancient vases of the First Dynasty with Saite inscriptions.

Among the objects of funerary art that had no ancient repre­sentatives and so could not be treated in accurate archaistic fashion were the shawabti or ushabti figures; the little ‘answerers’ who accompanied the dead man to the tomb to answer for him if he should be called upon to work in the next world. There were no ushabtis before the XIIth Dynasty to copy; but the Saites managed to differentiate theirs in somewhat archaistic fashion from those of the XVIIIth and XIXth Dynasties by giving them the high plinth at the back and the pedestal under the feet that had been very characteristic of the Old Kingdom sculpture and was imitated now by the Saite statuaries. They also dropped the fashion inaugurated under the XVIIIth Dynasty of representing the ushabti in the ordinary costume of civil life (which had existed side by side with the usual representation as a mummy), and returned to the sole use of the mummiform type, with the addition of the long plaited beard of a god, appropriate to Osiris, with whom the deceased was identified. At the end of the XXVIth Dynasty and under the Sebennytites they also gave the ushabti a heavy curved wig that had been characteristic of women and goddesses under the Middle Kingdom.

The material of which these figures were made was usually faience; and here also we see a return to ancient fashion in the colour of the glaze, which, instead of the deep and brilliant blue in vogue (with variations of shade) from the XIIth to the XXIst Dynasties, was now of the pale blue characteristic of the faience of the Old Kingdom. The use of this pale blue faience, the blue of turquoise rather than of lapis, is equally characteristic of the Saite period in faience and in the coloured frit or homogeneous composition now in vogue for such figures and amulets, scarabs, vases, and other small ceramic objects. A characteristic form of vase was the ‘pilgrim-bottle,’ often with good wishes for the New Year incised upon it, and evidently used commonly as a gift. Other common forms were the situla and the alabastron, the first really a metal form, and the second a stone form. At Naucratis we find that factories of Egyptian and Graeco-Egyptian objects of these materials must have existed, whose products were exported to Camirus in Rhodes and to other Greek centres even as far as the colonies of the Black Sea, where they seem to have been popular. And in Phoenicia the same faience was also imitated in egyptizing objects that were exported to Tharros in Sardinia and other western trading-colonies.

This pale blue, sometimes pale green, Saite ceramic, with an occasional inlay of darker blue, is usually fine and delicate, and often extremely beautiful. And perhaps the finest of all Egyptian glaze-work of the more delicate kind was produced under Nekhthorehbet, the last Sebennytite king of the fourth century, in the remarkable polychrome faience hieroglyphs for inlay, now (1925) in the Carnarvon Collection.

The fine style survived, though with a thicker and glassier glaze and in a peculiar grey-blue colour, almost like that of Chinese celadon-ware, under the Ptolemies. Under the Persians the commoner glaze had already coarsened, and we find ushabtis covered with a sugary glass film like thin ice, pale blue except for the wig which is dark blue. This coarse, often crazed sugary glaze became the typical Egyptian glaze of the Roman period, with its deep greens, blues and yellows, and its novel green effect produced by glazing blue over yellow, which was the ancestor of the glaze ware of Fostat, of Persia and of China.

In glass we find the alabastron form characteristic of pottery at this time reproduced in the variegated bottles made not only in Egypt, but all over the east Mediterranean world, descendants of the art of the XVIIIth Dynasty glassmakers. At the same time, coloured pictorial glass made of rods lightly fused together to form a miniature picture came into vogue, and characterized the Sebennytite, Ptolemaic and Roman periods.

The ordinary pottery, other than that of faience, was crude and uninteresting. In woodwork the ordinary ‘Empire’ models seem to have been still generally followed. Jewellery and work in the precious metals have the delicacy but not the beauty that might have been expected: here the splendid examples of the XIIth Dynasty, for instance, do not seem to have been known, and work followed traditional non-archaizing lines. The same may be said of bronze-work, which was, however, massive and good, if undistinguished.

III

INTERCOURSE WITH THE MEDITERRANEAN LANDS

We have more than once referred above to the question of mutual influence of Greek and Egyptian art at this time, and to the factory of egyptizing objects at Naucratis. There can be little doubt that the regular commercial connection with Egypt established by the Milesians in the eighth century BC must have caused a certain rapprochement between the artists of the two countries, though naturally it was the inquisitive Greek who was the more eager of the two to learn from the other. The Egyptian, who was now (like the Chinese) in the full tide of that pompous ad­miration of his own antiquity, which we see so well exemplified in Herodotus’s piromis story, would patronize the Greek, who would learn something from him at first trustingly and admiringly, but very soon with his tongue in his cheek. No doubt the Greek tales of Samian and other artists who went to Egypt in the seventh century, and learnt technical processes of art there, are founded on fact. But they are exaggerated, in that they imply that the Greeks were entirely ignorant before they went to Egypt, and that they obtained all their knowledge there. In contradiction to this it is evident, not only that, besides Egypt, other countries such as Phoenicia and Syria may also claim to have helped to teach the new Greece, but also that the Greeks themselves (or at any rate those of Ionia, of whom alone we are talking) possessed a vigorous artistic tradition, which, in the present writer’s opinion, they had inherited from the Mycenaean ancestors of the Ionians in continental Greece. And it is to this tradition that Ionian art owed its distinctive character, whatever extraneous elements from Egypt or Syria may have contributed in greater or less degree to its making.

To Egypt the revival of improved methods of casting bronze may have been due. In sculpture we may trace some influence of the archaistic Saite statues on the archaic so-called ‘Apollos’ (really portraits of athletic prizewinners) of Greece; and, in return, we may think it probable that the late Saite smile or simper was a rather unintelligent Egyptian imitation of the naturally naif smile of the ingenuous Greek archaic figures. In gem-cutting, always a Greek speciality, we note the taking-over by the Greeks of the Egyptian scarab, which, shortly to disappear in its own home, was to obtain a new lease of life in a slightly altered form in Greece and Italy. An Egyptian creation that struck the imagination of the Greeks at the time was the dancing figure of the god Bes, probably derived originally from the Mesopotamian region and the Sumerian figures of the demon Lakhamu or of Enkidu (Eabani), the half-animal companion of the hero Gishdubar. Bes was very popular under the XXVIth Dynasty in small figures of faience and other materials, and he seems undoubtedly to have been the original of the Satyr or ‘Silen’ of the Greek vase-painters.

Otherwise, the vase-painters we meet at Naucratis and Daphnae do not seem to have owed much to the Egyptians, and it is probable that none of their vases was made or painted in Egypt, but all were imported from Greece. When they had to illustrate an Egyptian legend they knew what the Egyptians were like, as we see from an early sixth century Ionian vase-illustration of the legend of Heracles and Busiris, but did not feel inclined to imitate any Egyptian style in their pictures. Their products were not specially intended for the Egyptian market, but were to be used by Greeks. And though the Ionian master Amasis, who painted vases at Athens towards the end of the sixth centuiy, had an Egyptian name (which probably means that he was a Samian, a subject of Polycrates the friend of king Amasis, or else was a Naucratite by birth), there is nothing of Egypt in his art. His name is in itself proof of the interest that the Greeks took in Egypt, but the caricature of the Busiris-hydria shows that they were under no illusions as to the personal characteristics of the Egyptians of their time.

IV

ART OF PHOENICIA AND SYRIA

The Egyptian and Graeco-Egyptian faience objects that were manufactured at Naucratis and exported to Camirus and much farther afield have already been mentioned. They have been commonly regarded as of Phoenician manufacture, but we now know their real place of origin. A typical Naucratite faience figure of a man was found at Sparta during the excavation there by the British School at Athens. Objects of this type have been found, as might have been expected from their place of origin, in the Black Sea colonies of Miletus, at Olbia, Panticapaeum and Tyras. Among vases of this faience the small Greek vase known as the aryballos is specially noticeable: in Egyptian faience it was now exported to Greece, while its Greek painted original came to Egypt, and was used by the Egyptians much as the Mycenaean false-necked vase or Bugelkanne had been centuries before.

But though the Camirus faience was not of Phoenician origin, much imitation of Egyptian objects of art was produced by the Phoenicians and exported westwards to Greece and Italy. The acid test of genuine Phoenician art, as distinguishing it from the north Syrian, is, apparently, apart from its greater clumsiness, its conscious and careful eclecticism, its use of scenes and motives directly, though badly, imitated from Egyptian, Assyrian, Syro-Hittite, or other Oriental arts side by side on the same object with occasional reminiscences of Minoan art, derived, no doubt, from Cyprus and perhaps Cilicia. We see this trait on some of the famous bronze bowls from Nimrud in Assyria, from Cyprus, Olympia, Delphi and the Idaean Cave in Crete, on the silver bowls exported to Italy and found, for instance, in the tombs at Caere, Praeneste and Salerno, and in the recently discovered treasure of Aliseda in Spain. Shields for export, such as those found in Crete at Palaikastro and in the Idaean Cave, were decorated in the same way. These bowls, which date from the ninth century BC at Nimrud to the seventh at Caere and Praeneste, were ultimately imitated from the finely embossed and engraved Egyptian bowls of the XVIIIth Dynasty, a thousand years before. They are easily distinguishable from these by the purity of their designs, as also is the Saite Egyptian metal work contemporary with the Phoenician bowls, which are always of mixed style, and sometimes bear Phoenician inscriptions.

This eclecticism is a constant trait in the decoration of all objects on which varied representations were possible. Otherwise we simply have heavy and clumsy reproductions, often reminding us of bad modern forgeries, chiefly of Egyptian objects, and designs. These appealed more to the Phoenicians than did the rival style of Assyria, probably on account of the age-long mari­time and political connection between Egypt and Phoenicia. Bad egyptizing art was, in fact, endemic in Phoenicia. We see its close influence nearer home in Cyprus, although the population of that island was overwhelmingly Greek or indigenous, and only one city, Citium, was at this time really Phoenician. Other cities, such as Amathus, though now Greek, apparently had Phoenician names, and were originally Phoenician foundations from which either the indigenous Cyprians or the Greeks had driven away the Sidonian colonists. In Cyprus, however, in the sixth century we see also the direct Egyptian influence due to political domina­tion, as has already been mentioned. The Cypriote artists adopted Egyptian designs with more success than did the Phoenicians.

The Phoenico-Egyptian objects found in the west can be distinguished, even when in faience, from the Graeco-Egyptian by characteristic differences of style. There is about them, as in all Phoenician work that we know, a clumsiness which we do not see in the Naucratite products. Very characteristic specimens are the tridacna shells with incised decoration found in Greece, and at Naucratis, and also with the wonderful collection of ivories discovered by Layard in the north-west palace at Nimrud in Assyria, which themselves are often distinctly Phoenician in style. In these shells and ivories Egyptian motives are imitated more than any others. Some of them may be more than a century older than the oldest Graeco-Egyptian objects, and belong to the ninth century, but many are probably later. A few bear Phoenician inscriptions. One of the finest is a remarkably good imitation in high relief of an Egyptian statuette of the Amonirdis type.

With them may be seen in the British Museum ivories of a different type, the products of fine artists who seem almost too good to be Phoenician: too original, not sufficiently eclectic. They have even been taken to be Ionian, though this is impossible for chronological reasons. The undercut carving of these ivories is often marvellous in technique, and some of them were inlaid with lapis and coloured glass as well as gilt or tinted. The hawk-headed Minoan gryphon (which perhaps came originally from Egypt at the time of the XIIth Dynasty) constantly appears on them, as he did on the older Cilician (?) ivory mirror-handles from Cyprus, which bridge the gap, so far as this motive is concerned, between Crete and Nimrud. This work has been assigned, by one authority, to the artists of northern Syria, who were in touch with Egypt, Mesopotamia and Phoenicia, and had inherited Hittite traditions and the Minoan memories of the older artists who carved the ivories of Enkomi in Cyprus. The latter, in the present writer’s opinion, were probably natives of the Cilician region, and inheritors of a portion of the Minoan art-tradition that came from the Aegean to Cyprus in the fifteenth century BC. So far as Mesopotamia is concerned there is, too, in this style, according to Poulsen, much of that of the fine late-Sumerian work of the Gudea period, which no doubt influenced Syrian and probably influenced Minoan art. But there is little of the more conventional Semitic-Babylonian spirit to be seen, and nothing particularly Assyrian except motives that Assyria probably borrowed from Syria. In return we cannot doubt that this north Syrian art of the ninth century—if it was Syrian: Poulsen would seem to consider it Phoenician of an older and finer type—greatly influenced early Ionian art. And we see the influence in the figures of tinted ivory, the work ‘of the Maeonians,’ found by Hogarth at Ephesus, and dated by him to the end of the eighth century. Does the Greek caryatid, too, come from this part of the world? The idea went east to Assyria.

Yet a third style is to be seen in others of the Nimrud ivories, which, like some of the bronze bowls from the same place, need not be ascribed to any but native Assyrian artists. The incised and relief reproduction of Assyrian scenes of kings, gods and heroes, and no others, without any eclecticism or obvious Phoenician imitation, are too faithful, and at the same time too good to be the work of Phoenician or other imitators: they are as Assyrian as the great palace-reliefs, or the bronze-reliefs of the palace-gates found at Balawat, which probably belonged originally to Calah (Nimrud), or the embossed Urartian shields from Toprak Kaleh near Van.

The three styles are no doubt more or less contemporaneous, and we perceive how Mesopotamian and Egyptian art influenced the Syrian (?) as well as the later or inferior undoubtedly Phoenician work in these ivories. We also see from the north Syrian relief-sculpture of the time, inferior as it was to the ivory-carving in every way, how the Mesopotamian tradition influenced this region. The majority of the sculptures of Zenjirli and Sakjegeuzi are Aramaean of the ninth and eighth centuries, only a few of the oldest being describable even as Syro-Hittite; while those of Carchemish, which date from the eleventh to the ninth century, are distinct instances of this Syro-Hittite style, in which beneath the Assyrianizing surface we see the native spirit of the old Hittite art we knew at Boghaz Keui, Euyuk, and Yasili Kaia, still differentiating them from mere imitations of Mesopotamian work. In fact, it is a moot question whether the inspiration of the first Assyrian rock-reliefs of the time of Tiglath- pileser I (1100 b.c.) and the great reliefs of the ninth century at Nimrud was not at least partly derived from the Syro-Hittite art-centre, purely Mesopotamian though their style and subject are.

V

ART OF ASSYRIA AND BABYLONIA

So far as we yet know, great relief-sculpture of the sort found at Nimrud was not Babylonian in origin; Babylonia was a stoneless land, and although the Babylonians from the beginning made statues and relief stelae of isolated blocks of stone imported for the purpose, they are not likely to have originated the custom of sculpturing numberless great slabs of stone with interminable scenes of religion, war and the chase for the decoration of the walls of palace-corridors and chambers; although the recent discoveries at el-Obeid near Ur have shown that they did so use high-relief decoration in metal at the earliest period. Either the Assyrians invented the idea of their great reliefs themselves, or they borrowed it from their Syrian or Hittite neighbours. And the second alternative is at least as probable as the first. Perhaps the fact that the later Syro-Hittite sculpture was strongly influenced by that of Assyria, while we cannot see any influence of the pure Hittite style of Anatolia in the reliefs of Nimrud, or until the rock-reliefs of Bavian and Malatia (temp. Sennacherib), where we see Assyrian gods standing on animals in the Hittite fashion, may incline the balance in favour of Assyrian invention. On the other hand, the Assyrians, the Syrians and the Hittites may, more or less simultaneously, have adopted the idea of stone­relief panels from Egypt in the Ramessid period. In any case, the Assyrians were not merely great warriors: they were also great artists, as is exemplified by the reliefs of Nimrud, Kuyunjik and Khorsabad, and the gates of Balawat, imitating the stone­reliefs in skilfully-beaten bronze. Indeed, one wonders again whether possibly the toreutic relief in bronze, derived from Babylonia, is not really the parent of the stone-relief, and whether the school of Assyrian sculptors did not derive from the metal-workers.

That is as it may be. Their representations are of course Babylonian in character, like their whole civilization, but their own originality is none the less manifest. The great reliefs of the ninth century, set up by Ashur-Nasir-Pal at Nimrud, are splendid precursors of those of the seventh executed under Sennacherib and Ashurbanipal at Nineveh. The epic strength of Ashur-Nasir-Pal’s work, the wonderful beauty, in spite of the Mesopotamian conventions, of Ashurbanipal’s, is a striking contrast to the degeneracy of Egyptian art in Bubastite times and its futile, recherché archaism under the Saites. What Egyptian artist of the ninth century could have carved Ashur-Nasir-Pal’s roaring lion­colossus from Nimrud, what Egyptian in the seventh could have produced Ashurbanipal’s wonderful chariot-horses and dying lions in relief, or the relief of the hunting of the wild horses?

Yet, the fact remains that the Saite Egyptians give us the real portraits of their men as they actually were in life, whereas there is hardly a single characterized portrait of an individual in the whole of Assyrian art. Everybody seems exactly alike, gods, kings and men. Accordingly, we have to recognize that each system of art had its own fine moments: each its failures. Still, what would we not give for real portraits of the Assyrian kings, instead of the monotonous regiments of curled and bearded figures with big noses, high tiaras and large earrings? What would not Assyrian art have been could the Assyrians have thrown off the trammels of their convention in respect to human beings and shown us men as lifelike and true as their animals? The truth and care of their reliefs of men engaged in war show they could have done it; but here too every face is exactly alike. Realism stopped short with the figures of gods and men: they could only be represented with faces of the type that convention had already fixed as the ideal. The Saite and Assyrian arts, though contemporaneous for a time, were not on the same plane of development: Assyrian art is more comparable to that of Ramessid Egypt, though it is better. Like that, it is a great and imperial art: Saite art was merely precious and pretty.

The relief sculpture of Assyria, like that of the Hittites, was in plain relief: the Egyptian style of sunk relief or cavo-rilievo was never adopted by them or by anybody else. In Saite Egypt itself it was still used, but was probably regarded as rather old- fashioned, being characteristic of the Ramessid and Bubastite periods. Under the Ptolemies even the carving of the hieroglyphs, which under the Saites were usually incised, was carried out in relief with unfortunate results in the coarse yellow sandstone generally used from the fourth century onwards: only the fine white lime­stone of the XIIth and XVIIIth Dynasties and of Seti I at Abydos, or sometimes very finely worked granite, could be used for hieroglyphs in relief. The Hittites had either incised their hiero­glyphs or cut them in relief on their rough dark stone; the Assyrian cuneiform was always incised: no attempt at rendering cuneiform in relief is known. Statues in the round or half-round with plinths like those of Egypt were, apparently, less usual in Assyria than they had been in old Babylonia: the attention of the sculptors was almost wholly given to their splendid reliefs in the local alabastrine marble of Assyria.

Coloured tempera-painting with a covering of thin glaze was used by the Assyrian with beautiful results, as the specimens from Kuyunjik and Ashur (Kalat Sherkat) show. The painting is minute, delicate and tasteful, while the line is masterly, and the design is good and strong. That is to say, it is of the same characteristic type as the reliefs, and very different from either the broader style of Egyptian distemper painting, or the slap-dash and unequal true fresco of the Minoans. Coloured glaze was also used, on a large scale and with great effect, in architecture on bricks as well as for pottery. This art was also a Babylonian speciality, as the Ishtar-gate of Nebuchadrezzar at Babylon shows, with its lions and sirrushes, or dragons of Marduk, in enamelled bricks. The art probably came to Babylon from Ashur, which per­haps had borrowed it from Egypt, the original home of glass and glaze. It was the direct ancestor of the Persian art of glazed brick­work which we see in the Frieze of the Archers at Persepolis.

Assyrian art died down soon after it had put forth its finest flower. But its tradition lived in that of Persia, at Bisitun (Behistun), and at Persepolis; it influenced the art of Caucasia and of Scythia, even ultimately Siberia and China.

Of Babylonian art as distinct from that of Assyria little can be said at this time, except that the seal-cylinders of the period are characteristic in style, and that some have suspected in them a mood of archaism resembling and possibly imitated from that of Egypt. Of course it is not meant that the Babylonians imitated Egyptian work, à la phénicienne; their archaism would be their own. But, as a matter of fact, there is little trace of such a movement, in art at least. One interesting fact is that with the conquest of Alexander the native art of Babylonia, in contrast to that of Egypt, seems suddenly to be extinguished, and supplanted by that of Greece, or rather by the very decadent form of the latter that the Seleucids supplied. In Egypt, on the other hand, all the old art went on under the Ptolemies and Romans in merely an increasing degeneration: though a mixed art existed side by side with the classical, the old art did not die till its conqueror was ready for death too, and the stern puritans and ‘athletes’ of Christianity slew it on the altar on which Hypatia and the learning and beauty of Greece were also slain. Yet many a pagan idea survived in Coptic art.

On the other hand, in Babylonia the native art disappears, is wiped out already under the Seleucids, and only a bastard Greek style exists until the revival of native culture under the Sassanians. Why this was so, why a fine old tradition was thus suddenly extinguished, we do not know. One would have thought that the Babylonians had as much power of patriotic resistance to foreign ideals as the Egyptians. Yet, perhaps they had not, and perhaps they now thought more of their book-keeping than of their nationality. It was not until the native revival in Persia after the end of the Hellenized Parthian rule that men took new inspiration from the Assyrian-inspired sculptures of Persepolis; and when Shahpur treads down Valerian at Naksh-i-Rustam, the art of his sculptor owes as much to the tradition of Assyria as to that of Hellenism and of Rome.

CHAPTER XVI

THE TOPOGRAPHY OF JERUSALEM