The Historians' History of the World 01

The study of a country’s art is interesting, primarily of course purely as a study in the expression of beauty or in the portraiture of national types and ideals. The study should not, however, stop here, but one should consider also the effect each school has had upon the evolution of the world-art. This phase of Assyrian art has been examined by the Editor in a paper called “The Influence of Modern Research on the Scope of World History,” a Prefatory Essay to Vol. III of the New Volumes of the Ninth Edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica, from which a quotation may be permitted here.a

Whoever would see the story of the evolution of Greek art illustrated, should go to the British Museum and pass from the Egyptian hall, with its grotesque colossi, to the Assyrian rooms, with their marvellous bas-reliefs, and then on to the Elgin marbles from the Parthenon. In particular, the art treasures of the Assyrian collection should demand the closest scrutiny. In the Nineveh gallery, for example, where one finds collections of strange Assyrian books, the walls are flanked everywhere with bas-reliefs that come from some buried palace that once stored the literary treasures.

Battle in a Marsh in Southern Mesopotamia

(Layard)

It appears that the kings of that far-off time and land were connoisseurs of art as well as patrons of literature; and the art treasures of their palaces certainly form the most striking, if not the most important, part of the mementoes they have left to us. The more closely these figures in low relief are examined, the more wonderful they will seem. They take the place of the Egyptian carvings in the round; and if they are less striking to first view than the great sarcophagi, the grotesque gods, and colossal animal forms of that people, they will prove infinitely more expressive and incomparably more artistic on closer inspection. For these flat sculptures depict, not alone gods and sacerdotal scenes, but everyday affairs and the events of Assyrian history. The bas-relief was clearly the focal point of Assyrian art. Even the great bulls and lions that guarded the palace entrances were only partially detached from their background, and a frescoed statue of King Asshurnazirpal shows the same tendency. The full rounded statue was not indeed unknown to them, as several examples testify; but their real forte lay in mural decoration in low relief. And the particular walls on which the artists mainly expended their skill, if we may judge from what the ruins have revealed to us, were not the walls of temples, but the palaces of kings. It is quite clear that these great conquerors of antiquity were very human, very like their successors of after times. They loved to have their heroic deeds, real or alleged, heralded to the world, and recalled incessantly to their own memories. So one finds whole histories epitomised on these walls—wars, conquests, victories; the storming of cities, the slaughter of the enemy, the leading of captives, and bringing of tribute by subject people—everything, in short, but Assyrian reverses; the court artist, true to his colours then as now, never made the mistake of depicting those.