new feature into relievos by trying to combine landscape and natural
objects with the great historical
Flg' 25' compositions, — were perfectly
aware of the differences in the
national types also. The two prisoners
at the feet of king A ssar -
ak b a l HI, are evidently not Assyrians,
one of them [26] being a
Shemite, the other [27] an inhabitant
of the table-lands of Armenia,
if not a Kurd. Sir Henry
Rawlinson deems them Susians.
Still nobler than E s sarh a d d o n
is the S ar d a n a pa l it s [ 2 8 ] (6 3 5 b .
c.) of the British Museum, a truly
magnificent prince, the father of
the king under whom Nineveh
was destroyed, and who, in the
Greek histories, is mentioned
under the same name. His
monuments, lately discovered, E9SARH ADDON. ’ "
Fig. 26. Fig. 27.
Shemite P risoner, (Inedited). Kurdish P risoner, (Inedited).
and brought to England by Mr. Bassam, are so exquisitely modelled,
and executed with such a highly-developed sense of beauty,
that we must rank them among the best relics of ancient art. The
peculiar hair-dress of the king seems to have served as a model to
the Lycian sculptor of the Harpy monument of Xanthus, in the
Br. M.; and it is remarkable that the female head [29] of an archaic
coin of Yelia, in Italy, shows the same arrangement of the hair. Velia
was a colony from Phocsea, in Ionia, whose high-minded citizens
preferred abandoning their country, rather than to live under the
sway of the conqueror Croesus. They carried the traditions of
Fig. 28. Fig. 29.
S ilver Coin from Velia, (PulszJcy coll.)
Asiatic art into Italy, at a time
when Hellas could not yet
boast of eminence in sculpture.
But although the hair-dress
of the Yelian female closely
resembles and may he traced
S ard an ap alus. back to Assyrian models, which
are about two centuries older,
still the cast of the features is not the same. It is, as might he expected,
thoroughly Greek. Whilst, as a remarkable instance of the
constancy of national types, the likeness between the modern Chaldeans
(Nestorians) and the old Assyrians is unmistakable. To illustrate
this properly, we give, side hy side, sketches of a Chaldean merchant
of Mosul, and a head from one of the Nineveh sculptures.140
Fig. 30. Fig. 81.
Modern Chaldee. Ancient Assyrian.
Babylon, of whose art hut few remains have as yet been dis-
Vo Illustrated, London News, May 24, 1856.