Читать книгу Manual of Oriental Antiquities - Babelon Ernest Charles François - Страница 9

Table of Contents

The discoveries of M. de Sarzec at Tello, and those of other explorers in Chaldæa, allow us to go back almost to the origin of sculpture in Western Asia. Our museums possess, in fact, bas-reliefs and statues belonging to a rudimentary stage of art, the remote age of which is still attested by the archaic inscriptions which accompany them, and these most ancient

Fig. 9.—Bas-relief from Tello (Louvre).

monuments are followed, as in the case of Egypt and Greece, by other statues and bas-reliefs which, descending a chronological scale across the ages, represent the graduated phases of artistic progress in Chaldæa before the Ninevite supremacy was imposed upon this country. Among the fragments of sculpture at Tello, that which M. Heuzey considers most primitive, and which should be placed at the head of the productions of oriental sculpture, is a bas-relief of greyish limestone, 10 in. broad and 5 in. high. Four figures alone remain of the complicated scene which decorated this stone panel. One of them is seated, with the profile turned to the left; it is a beardless man rather than a woman, and his face is half covered by an exaggerated eye seen from the front as in children’s drawings. His hair consists of two long tresses falling to his shoulders, and almost to be mistaken for the lappets of the high tiara with which he is crowned. This tiara seems to be adorned with two bulls’ horns. The bust is draped with a large shawl which leaves the right shoulder bare. The hand, raised to a level with the face, looks like a simple fork; it holds a cup, as if the scene represented a libation, and in fact we still see a part of the deity to whom the offering is directed. On the right a bearded man with square shoulders, crowned with a low cap, dressed in a large robe without folds, holds in his right hand a sort of club, with which he seems to deliver a blow upon the head of his companion, whom he seizes by the hand. It will be seen that the explanation of this picture is exceedingly doubtful; but looking from the point of view of the history of art, we must recognise in it without hesitation a fragment which comes down from remote antiquity. The relief is low, the outline of the figures is timid and uncertain, the details are disproportioned, as if the rude chisel which carved them had been held in the unskilful hands of a child; the design is full of elementary mistakes, though limestone is soft and easily worked.

Fig. 10. Bas-relief from Tello (Louvre).

A more advanced art marks the fragment of a bas-relief which M. Heuzey called “the Eagle and Lion Tablet,” and which is dated by an inscription mentioning the king Ur-Nina (B.C. 2500). An eagle is seen here with outspread wings standing upon a lion. The sculpture is equally flat and without modelling, but the graceful outline of the figures is clearly chiselled, and with a surer hand; the extremities of the wing feathers of the eagle are indented, the body of the lion is remarkably correct in outline, except the head, which still remains barbarous.

A third stage of Chaldæan sculpture may be represented by the “Vulture Stela,” on which the names of two kings have been read, one of whom is the son of Ur-Nina. The three fragments of this limestone stela are carved on both sides. On one of them a flock of vultures carry away human remains in their flight—heads, hands, and arms. The human heads denote an art which has left the gropings of childhood behind: they are entirely shaved, the nose is always aquiline, the eye of an exaggerated size and triangular. The vultures, more rudely drawn, are nevertheless well characterised by their long curved beak and their claws of exaggerated length; the markings of the feathers and wings are brought out. On another fragment of the same stela it seems that we witness the construction of a sepulchral tumulus.

Fig. 11.—The Vulture Stela (Louvre).

Fig. 12.—The Vulture Stela (Louvre).

Men dressed in a short tunic, fringed, and tightened at the waist, carry on their heads wicker baskets, probably containing earth to cover the pile of corpses heaped one upon the other in symmetrical and alternate rows. The third piece of the same monument seems to represent a scene of carnage. As for the back of the stela, it is less ornamented; however, on one of the fragments (fig. 13), a pole surmounted by an eagle with outspread wings is seen, and then a large human head, incomplete but highly interesting; it exhibits, from an anatomical point of view, the same character as the smaller heads which we have just considered; but its head-dress is a most curious feature,—a sort of tiara decorated with bulls’ horns. “By an archaic conventionality,” observes M. Heuzey, “these two horns are seen in profile, curved forwards and backwards; but in reality they were attached to the sides of the cap.... The cap is also surmounted by a crest of four large feathers, in the middle of which rises a cone decorated with a quaint head also crowned by a crescent; this little decorative head, drawn in full face, has an exceedingly long and broad nose without any sign of a mouth, so that it may be doubted whether it be the head of a man or of an animal.”[17] The same tiara is found with unimportant modifications on Assyrian cylinders and bas-reliefs, in which it forms the head-dress of deities or pontiffs. The artistic superiority of the bas-reliefs of the Vulture Stela over the monuments quoted previously is abundantly evident, and already allows us a foretaste of the sober and vigorous art revealed to us by the large statues found in the palace of Gudea.