CHAPTER X
Assyria

I. CHRONICLES

Beginnings—Cities—Race—The conquerors—Sennacherib and Esarhaddon—“Sardanapalus”

MEANWHILE, three hundred miles north of Babylon, another civilization had appeared. Forced to maintain a hard military life by the mountain tribes always threatening it on every side, it had in time overcome its assailants, had conquered its parent cities in Elam, Sumeria, Akkad and Babylonia, had mastered Phoenicia and Egypt, and had for two centuries dominated the Near East with brutal power. Sumeria was to Babylonia, and Babylonia to Assyria, what Crete was to Greece, and Greece to Rome: the first created a civilization, the second developed it to its height, the third inherited it, added little to it, protected it, and transmitted it as a dying gift to the encompassing and victorious barbarians. For barbarism is always around civilization, amid it and beneath it, ready to engulf it by arms, or mass migration, or unchecked fertility. Barbarism is like the jungle; it never admits its defeat; it waits patiently for centuries to recover the territory it has lost.

The new state grew about four cities fed by the waters or tributaries of the Tigris: Ashur, which is now Kala’at-Sherghat; Arbela, which is Irbil; Kalakh, which is Nimrud; and Nineveh, which is Kuyunjik—just across the river from oily Mosul. At Ashur prehistoric obsidian flakes and knives have been found, and black pottery with geometric patterns that suggest a central Asian origin;¹ at Tepe Gawra, near the site of Nineveh, a recent expedition unearthed a town which its proud discoverers date back to 3700 B.C., despite its many temples and tombs, its well-carved cylinder seals, its combs and jewelry, and the oldest dice known to history²—a thought for reformers. The god Ashur gave his name to a city (and finally to all Assyria); there the earliest of the nation’s kings had their residence, until its exposure to the heat of the desert and the attacks of the neighboring Babylonians led Ashur’s rulers to build a secondary capital in cooler Nineveh—named also after a god, Nina, the Ishtar of Assyria. Here, in the heyday of Ashurbanipal, 300,000 people lived, and all the western Orient came to pay tribute to the Universal King.

The population was a mixture of Semites from the civilized south (Babylonia and Akkadia) with non-Semitic tribes from the west (probably of Hittite or Mitannian affinity) and Kurdish mountaineers from the Caucasus.³ They took their common language and their arts from Sumeria, but modified them later into an almost undistinguishable similarity to the language and arts of Babylonia.⁴ Their circumstances, however, forbade them to indulge in the effeminate ease of Babylon; from beginning to end they were a race of warriors, mighty in muscle and courage, abounding in proud hair and beard, standing straight, stern and stolid on their monuments, and bestriding with tremendous feet the east-Mediterranean world. Their history is one of kings and slaves, wars and conquests, bloody victories and sudden defeat. The early kings—once mere patesis tributary to the south—took advantage of the Kassite domination of Babylonia to establish their independence; and soon enough one of them decked himself with that title which all the monarchs of Assyria were to display: “King of Universal Reign.” Out of the dull dynasties of these forgotten potentates certain figures emerge whose deeds illuminate the development of their country.*

While Babylonia was still in the darkness of the Kassite era, Shalmaneser I brought the little city-states of the north under one rule, and made Kalakh his capital. But the first great name in Assyrian history is Tiglath-Pileser I. He was a mighty hunter before the Lord: if it is wise to believe monarchs, he slew 120 lions on foot, and 800 from his chariot.⁵ One of his inscriptions—written by a scribe more royalist than the King—tells how he hunted nations as well as animals: “In my fierce valor I marched against the people of Qummuh, conquered their cities, carried off their booty, their goods and their property without reckoning, and burned their cities with fire—destroyed and devastated them. . . . The people of Adansh left their mountains and embraced my feet. I imposed taxes upon them.”⁶ In every direction he led his armies, conquering the Hittites, the Armenians, and forty other nations, capturing Babylon, and frightening Egypt into sending him anxious gifts. (He was particularly mollified by a crocodile.) With the proceeds of his conquests he built temples to the Assyrian gods and goddesses, who, like anxious débutantes, asked no questions about the source of his wealth. Then Babylon revolted, defeated his armies, pillaged his temples, and carried his gods into Babylonian captivity. Tiglath-Pileser died of shame.⁷

His reign was a symbol and summary of all Assyrian history: death and taxes, first for Assyria’s neighbors, then for herself. Ashurnasirpal II conquered a dozen petty states, brought much booty home from the wars, cut out with his own hand the eyes of princely captives, enjoyed his harem, and passed respectably away.⁸ Shalmaneser III carried these conquests as far as Damascus; fought costly battles, killing 16,000 Syrians in one engagement; built temples, levied tribute, and was deposed by his son in a violent revolution.⁹ Sammuramat ruled as queen-mother for three years, and provided a frail historical basis (for this is all that we know of her) for the Greek legend of Semiramis—half goddess and half queen, great general, great engineer and great statesman—so attractively detailed by Diodorus the Sicilian.¹⁰ Tiglath-Pileser III gathered new armies, reconquered Armenia, overran Syria and Babylonia, made vassal cities of Damascus, Samaria and Babylon, extended the rule of Assyria from the Caucasus to Egypt, tired of war, became an excellent administrator, built many temples and palaces, held his empire together with an iron hand, and died peacefully in bed. Sargon II, an officer in the army, made himself king by a Napoleonic coup d’état; led his troops in person, and took in every engagement the most dangerous post;¹¹ defeated Elam and Egypt, reconquered Babylonia, and received the homage of the Jews, the Philistines, even of the Cypriote Greeks; ruled his empire well, encouraged arts and letters, handicrafts and trade, and died in a victorious battle that definitely preserved Assyria from invasion by the wild Cimmerian hordes.

His son Sennacherib put down revolts in the distant provinces adjoining the Persian Gulf, attacked Jerusalem and Egypt without success,* sacked eighty-nine cities and 820 villages, captured 7,200 horses, 11,000 asses, 80,000 oxen, 800,000 sheep, and 208,000 prisoners;¹³ the official historian, on his life, did not understate these figures. Then, irritated by the prejudice of Babylon in favor of freedom, he besieged it, took it, and burned it to the ground; nearly all the inhabitants, young and old, male and female, were put to death, so that mountains of corpses blocked the streets; the temples and palaces were pillaged to the last shekel, and the once omnipotent gods of Babylon were hacked to pieces or carried in bondage to Nineveh: Marduk the god became a menial to Ashur. Such Babylonians as survived did not conclude that Marduk had been overrated; they told themselves—as the captive Jews would tell themselves a century later in that same Babylon—that their god had condescended to be defeated in order to punish his people. With the spoils of his conquests and pillage Sennacherib rebuilt Nineveh, changed the courses of rivers to protect it, reclaimed waste lands with the vigor of countries suffering from an agricultural surplus, and was assassinated by his sons while piously mumbling his prayers.¹⁴

Another son, Esarhaddon, snatched the throne from his blood-stained brothers, invaded Egypt to punish her for supporting Syrian revolts, made her an Assyrian province, amazed western Asia with his long triumphal progress from Memphis to Nineveh, dragging endless booty in his train; established Assyria in unprecedented prosperity as master of the whole Near Eastern world; delighted Babylonia by freeing and honoring its captive gods, and rebuilding its shattered capital; conciliated Elam by feeding its famine-stricken people in an act of international beneficence almost without parallel in the ancient world; and died on the way to suppress a revolt in Egypt, after giving his empire the justest and kindliest rule in its half-barbarous history.

His successor, Ashurbanipal (the Sardanapalus of the Greeks), reaped the fruits of Esarhaddon’s sowing. During his long reign Assyria reached the climax of its wealth and prestige; after him his country, ruined by forty years of intermittent war, fell into exhaustion and decay, and ended its career hardly a decade after Ashurbanipal’s death. A scribe has preserved to us a yearly record of this reign;¹⁵ it is a dull and bloody mess of war after war, siege after siege, starved cities and flayed captives. The scribe represents Ashurbanipal himself as reporting his destruction of Elam:

The severed head of the Elamite king was brought to Ashurbanipal as he feasted with his queen in the palace garden; he had the head raised on a pole in the midst of his guests, and the royal revel went on; later the head was fixed over the gate of Nineveh, and slowly rotted away. The Elamite general, Dananu, was flayed alive, and then was bled like a lamb; his brother had his throat cut, and his body was divided into pieces, which were distributed over the country as souvenirs.¹⁷

It never occurred to Ashurbanipal that he and his men were brutal; these clean-cut penalties were surgical necessities in his attempt to remove rebellions and establish discipline among the heterogeneous and turbulent peoples, from Ethiopia to Armenia, and from Syria to Media, whom his predecessors had subjected to Assyrian rule; it was his obligation to maintain this legacy intact. He boasted of the peace that he had established in his empire, and of the good order that prevailed in its cities; and the boast was not without truth. That he was not merely a conqueror intoxicated with blood he proved by his munificence as a builder and as a patron of letters and the arts. Like some Roman ruler calling to the Greeks, he sent to all his dominions for sculptors and architects to design and adorn new temples and palaces; he commissioned innumerable scribes to secure and copy for him all the classics of Sumerian and Babylonian literature, and gathered these copies in his library at Nineveh, where modern scholarship found them almost intact after twenty-five centuries of time had flowed over them. Like another Frederick, he was as vain of his literary abilities as of his triumphs in war and the chase.¹⁸ Diodorus describes him as a dissolute and bisexual Nero,¹⁹ but in the wealth of documents that have come down to us from this period there is little corroboration for this view. From the composition of literary tablets Ashurbanipal passed with royal confidence—armed only with knife and javelin—to hand-to-hand encounters with lions; if we may credit the reports of his contemporaries he did not hesitate to lead the attack in person, and often dealt with his own hand the decisive blow.²⁰ Little wonder that Byron was fascinated with him, and wove about him a drama half legend and half history, in which all the wealth and power of Assyria came to their height, and broke into universal ruin and royal despair.

II. ASSYRIAN GOVERNMENT

Imperialism—Assyrian war—The conscript gods—Law—Delicacies of penology—Administration—The violence of Oriental monarchies

If we should admit the imperial principle—that it is good, for the sake of spreading law, security, commerce and peace, that many states should be brought, by persuasion or force, under the authority of one government—then we should have to concede to Assyria the distinction of having established in western Asia a larger measure and area of order and prosperity than that region of the earth had ever, to our knowledge, enjoyed before. The government of Ashurbanipal—which ruled Assyria, Babylonia, Armenia, Media, Palestine, Syria, Phoenicia, Sumeria, Elam and Egypt—was without doubt the most extensive administrative organization yet seen in the Mediterranean or Near Eastern world; only Hammurabi and Thutmose III had approached it, and Persia alone would equal it before the coming of Alexander. In some ways it was a liberal empire; its larger cities retained considerable local autonomy, and each nation in it was left its own religion, law and ruler, provided it paid its tribute promptly.²¹ In so loose an organization every weakening of the central power was bound to produce rebellions, or, at the best, a certain tributary negligence, so that the subject states had to be conquered again and again. To avoid these recurrent rebellions Tiglath-Pileser III established the characteristic Assyrian policy of deporting conquered populations to alien habitats, where, mingling with the natives, they might lose their unity and identity, and have less opportunity to rebel. Revolts came nevertheless, and Assyria had to keep herself always ready for war.

The army was therefore the most vital part of the government. Assyria recognized frankly that government is the nationalization of force, and her chief contributions to progress were in the art of war. Chariots, cavalry, infantry and sappers were organized into flexible formations, siege mechanisms were as highly developed as among the Romans, strategy and tactics were well understood.²² Tactics centered about the idea of rapid movement making possible a piecemeal attack—so old is the secret of Napoleon. Iron-working had grown to the point of encasing the warrior with armor to a degree of stiffness rivaling a medieval knight; even the archers and pikemen wore copper or iron helmets, padded loin-cloths, enormous shields, and a leather skirt covered with metal scales. The weapons were arrows, lances, cutlasses, maces, clubs, slings and battleaxes. The nobility fought from chariots in the van of the battle, and the king, in his royal chariot, usually led them in person; generals had not yet learned to die in bed. Ashurnasirpal introduced the use of cavalry as an aid to the chariots, and this innovation proved decisive in many engagements.²³ The principal siege engine was a battering-ram tipped with iron; sometimes it was suspended from a scaffold by ropes, and was swung back to give it forward impetus; sometimes it was run forward on wheels. The besieged fought from the walls with missiles, torches, burning pitch, chains designed to entangle the ram, and gaseous “stink-pots” (as they were called) to befuddle the enemy;²⁴ again the novel is not new. A captured city was usually plundered and burnt to the ground, and its site was deliberately denuded by killing its trees.²⁵ The loyalty of the troops was secured by dividing a large part of the spoils among them; their bravery was ensured by the general rule of the Near East that all captives in war might be enslaved or slain. Soldiers were rewarded for every severed head they brought in from the field, so that the aftermath of a victory generally witnessed the wholesale decapitation of fallen foes.²⁶ Most often the prisoners, who would have consumed much food in a long campaign, and would have constituted a danger and nuisance in the rear, were despatched after the battle; they knelt with their backs to their captors, who beat their heads in with clubs, or cut them off with cutlasses. Scribes stood by to count the number of prisoners taken and killed by each soldier, and apportioned the booty accordingly; the king, if time permitted, presided at the slaughter. The nobles among the defeated were given more special treatment: their ears, noses, hands and feet were sliced off, or they were thrown from high towers, or they and their children were beheaded, or flayed alive, or roasted over a slow fire. No compunction seems to have been felt at this waste of human life; the birth rate would soon make up for it, and meanwhile it relieved the pressure of population upon the means of subsistence.²⁷ Probably it was in part by their reputation for mercy to prisoners of war that Alexander and Caesar undermined the morale of the enemy, and conquered the Mediterranean world.

Next to the army the chief reliance of the monarch was upon the church, and he paid lavishly for the support of the priests. The formal head of the state was by concerted fiction the god Ashur; all pronouncements were in his name, all laws were edicts of his divine will, all taxes were collected for his treasury, all campaigns were fought to furnish him (or, occasionally, another deity) with spoils and glory. The king had himself described as a god, usually an incarnation of Shamash, the sun. The religion of Assyria, like its language, its science and its arts, was imported from Sumeria and Babylonia, with occasional adaptations to the needs of a military state.

The adaptation was most visible in the case of the law, which was distinguished by a martial ruthlessness. Punishment ranged from public exhibition to forced labor, twenty to a hundred lashes, the slitting of nose and ears, castration, pulling out the tongue, gouging out the eyes, impalement, and beheading.²⁸ The laws of Sargon II prescribe such additional delicacies as the drinking of poison, and the burning of the offender’s son or daughter alive on the altar of the god;²⁹ but there is no evidence of these laws being carried out in the last millennium before Christ. Adultery, rape and some forms of theft were considered capital crimes.³⁰ Trial by ordeal was occasionally employed; the accused, sometimes bound in fetters, was flung into the river, and his guilt was left to the arbitrament of the water. In general Assyrian law was less secular and more primitive than the Babylonian Code of Hammurabi, which apparently preceded it in time.*

Local administration, originally by feudal barons, fell in the course of time into the hands of provincial prefects or governors appointed by the king; this form of imperial government was taken over by Persia, and passed on from Persia to Rome. The prefects were expected to collect taxes, to organize the corvée for works which, like irrigation, could not be left to personal initiative; and above all to raise regiments and lead them in the royal campaigns. Meanwhile royal spies (or, as we should say, “intelligence officers”) kept watch on these prefects and their aides, and informed the king concerning the state of the nation.

All in all, the Assyrian government was primarily an instrument of war. For war was often more profitable than peace; it cemented discipline, intensified patriotism, strengthened the royal power, and brought abundant spoils and slaves for the enrichment and service of the capital. Hence Assyrian history is largely a picture of cities sacked and villages or fields laid waste. When Ashurbanipal suppressed the revolt of his brother, Shamash-shum-ukin, and captured Babylon after a long and bitter siege,

The weakness of Oriental monarchies was bound up with this addiction to violence. Not only did the subject provinces repeatedly revolt, but within the royal palace or family itself violence again and again attempted to upset what violence had established and maintained. At or near the end of almost every reign some disturbance broke out over the succession to the throne; the aging monarch saw conspiracies forming around him, and in several cases he was hastened to his end by murder. The nations of the Near East preferred violent uprisings to corrupt elections, and their form of recall was assassination. Some of these wars were doubtless inevitable: barbarians prowled about every frontier, and one reign of weakness would see the Scythians, the Cimmerians, or some other horde, sweeping down upon the wealth of the Assyrian cities. And perhaps we exaggerate the frequency of war and violence in these Oriental states, through the accident that ancient monuments and modern chroniclers have preserved the dramatic record of battles, and ignored the victories of peace. Historians have been prejudiced in favor of bloodshed; they found it, or thought their readers would find it, more interesting than the quiet achievements of the mind. We think war less frequent today because we are conscious of the lucid intervals of peace, while history seems conscious only of the fevered crises of war.

III. ASSYRIAN LIFE

Industry and trade—Marriage and morals—Religion and science—Letters and libraries—The Assyrian ideal of a gentleman

The economic life of Assyria did not differ much from that of Babylonia, for in many ways the two countries were merely the north and south of one civilization. The southern kingdom was more commercial, the northern more agricultural; rich Babylonians were usually merchants, rich Assyrians were most often landed gentry actively supervising great estates, and looking with Roman scorn upon men who made their living by buying cheap and selling dear.³³ Nevertheless the same rivers flooded and nourished the land, the same method of ridges and canals controlled the overflow, the same shadufs raised the water from ever deeper beds to fields sown with the same wheat and barley, millet and sesame.* The same industries supported the life of the towns; the same system of weights and measures governed the exchange of goods; and though Nineveh and her sister capitals were too far north to be great centers of commerce, the wealth brought to them by Assyria’s sovereigns filled them with handicrafts and trade. Metal was mined or imported in new abundance, and towards 700 B.C. iron replaced bronze as the basic metal of industry and armament.³⁵ Metal was cast, glass was blown, textiles were dyed,† earthenware was enameled, and houses were as well equipped in Nineveh as in Europe before the Industrial Revolution.³⁶ During the reign of Sennacherib an aqueduct was built which brought water to Nineveh from thirty miles away; a thousand feet of it, recently discovered,‡ constitute the oldest aqueduct known. Industry and trade were financed in part by private bankers, who charged 25% for loans. Lead, copper, silver and gold served as currency; and about 700 B.C. Sennacherib minted silver into half-shekel pieces—one of our earliest examples of an official coinage.³⁷

The people fell into five classes: patricians or nobles; craftsmen or masterartisans, organized in guilds, and including the professions as well as the trades; the unskilled but free workmen and peasants of town and village; serfs bound to the soil on great estates, in the manner of medieval Europe; and slaves captured in war or attached for debt, compelled to announce their status by pierced ears and shaven head, and performing most of the menial labor everywhere. On a bas-relief of Sennacherib we see supervisee holding the whip over slaves who, in long parallel lines, are drawing a heavy piece of statuary on a wooden sledge.³⁸

Like all military states, Assyria encouraged a high birth rate by its moral code and its laws. Abortion was a capital crime; a woman who secured miscarriage, even a woman who died of attempting it, was to be impaled on a stake.³⁹ Though women rose to considerable power through marriage and intrigue, their position was lower than in Babylonia. Severe penalties were laid upon them for striking their husbands, wives were not allowed to go out in public unveiled, and strict fidelity was exacted of them—though their husbands might have all the concubines they could afford.⁴⁰ Prostitution was accepted as inevitable, and was regulated by the state.^40a The king had a varied harem, whose inmates were condemned to a secluded life of dancing, singing, quarreling, needlework and conspiracy.⁴¹ A cuckolded husband might kill his rival in flagrante delicto, and was held to be within his rights; this is a custom that has survived many codes. For the rest the law of matrimony was as in Babylonia, except that marriage was often by simple purchase, and in many cases the wife lived in her father’s house, visited occasionally by her husband.⁴²

In all departments of Assyrian life we meet with a patriarchal sternness natural to a people that lived by conquest, and in every sense on the border of barbarism. Just as the Romans took thousands of prisoners into lifelong slavery after their victories, and dragged others to the Circus Maximus to be torn to pieces by starving animals, so the Assyrians seemed to find satisfaction—or a necessary tutelage for their sons—in torturing captives, blinding children before the eyes of their parents, flaying men alive, roasting them in kilns, chaining them in cages for the amusement of the populace, and then sending the survivors off to execution.⁴³ Ashurnasirpal tells how “all the chiefs who had revolted I flayed, with their skins I covered the pillar, some in the midst I walled up, others on stakes I impaled, still others I arranged around the pillar on stakes. . . . As for the chieftains and royal officers who had rebelled, I cut off their members.”⁴⁴ Ashurbanipal boasts that “I burned three thousand captives with fire, I left not a single one among them alive to serve as a hostage.”⁴⁵ Another of his inscriptions reads: “These warriors who had sinned against Ashur and had plotted evil against me . . . from their hostile mouths have I torn their tongues, and I have compassed their destruction. As for the others who remained alive, I offered them as a funerary sacrifice; . . . their lacerated members have I given unto the dogs, the swine, the wolves. . . . By accomplishing these deeds I have rejoiced the heart of the great gods.”⁴⁶ Another monarch instructs his artisans to engrave upon the bricks these claims on the admiration of posterity: “My war chariots crush men and beasts. . . . The monuments which I erect are made of human corpses from which I have cut the head and limbs. I cut off the hands of all those whom I capture alive.’”⁴⁷ Reliefs at Nineveh show men being impaled or flayed, or having their tongues torn out; one shows a king gouging out the eyes of prisoners with a lance while he holds their heads conveniently in place with a cord passed through their lips.⁴⁸ As we read such pages we become reconciled to our own mediocrity.

Religion apparently did nothing to mollify this tendency to brutality and violence. It had less influence with the government than in Babylonia, and took its cue from the needs and tastes of the kings. Ashur, the national deity, was a solar god, warlike and merciless to his enemies; his people believed that he took a divine satisfaction in the execution of prisoners before his shrine.⁴⁹ The essential function of Assyrian religion was to train the future citizen to a patriotic docility, and to teach him the art of wheedling favors out of the gods by magic and sacrifice. The only religious texts that survive from Assyria are exorcisms and omens. Long lists of omens have come down to us in which the inevitable results of every manner of event are given, and methods of avoiding them are prescribed.⁵⁰ The world was pictured as crowded with demons, who had to be warded off by charms suspended about the neck, or by long and careful incantations.

In such an atmosphere the only science that flourished was that of war. Assyrian medicine was merely Babylonian medicine; Assyrian astronomy was merely Babylonian astrology—the stars were studied chiefly with a view to divination.⁵¹ We find no evidence of philosophical speculation, no secular attempt to explain the world. Assyrian philologists made lists of plants, probably for the use of medicine, and thereby contributed moderately to establish botany; other scribes made lists of nearly all the objects they had found under the sun, and their attempts to classify these objects ministered slightly to the natural science of the Greeks. From these lists our language has taken, usually through the Greeks, such words as hangar, gypsum, camel, plinth, shekel, rose, ammonia, jasper, cane, cherry, laudanum, naphtha, sesame, hyssop and myrrh.⁵²

The tablets recording the deeds of the kings, though they have the distinction of being at once bloody and dull, must be accorded the honor of being among the oldest extant forms of historiography. They were in the early years mere chronicles, registering royal victories, and admitting of no defeats; they became, in later days, embellished and literary accounts of the important events of the reign. The clearest title of Assyria to a place in a history of civilization was its libraries. That of Ashurbanipal contained 30,000 clay tablets, classified and catalogued, each tablet bearing an easily identifiable tag. Many of them bore the King’s bookmark: “Whoso shall carry off this tablet, . . . may Ashur and Belit overthrow him in wrath . . . and destroy his name and posterity from the land.”⁵³ A large number of the tablets are copies of undated older works, of which earlier forms are being constantly discovered; the avowed purpose of Ashurbanipal’s library was to preserve the literature of Babylonia from oblivion. But only a small number of the tablets would now be classed as literature; the majority of them are official records, astrological and augural observations, oracles, medical prescriptions and reports, exorcisms, hymns, prayers, and genealogies of the kings and the gods.⁵⁴ Among the least dull of the tablets are two in which Ashurbanipal confesses, with quaint insistence, his scandalous delight in books and knowledge:

IV. ASSYRIAN ART

Minor arts—Bas-relief—Statuary—Building—A page from “Sardanapalus”

At last, in the field of art, Assyria equaled her preceptor Babylonia, and in bas-relief surpassed her. Stimulated by the influx of wealth into Ashur, Kalakh and Nineveh, artists and artisans began to produce—for nobles and their ladies, for kings and palaces, for priests and temples–jewels of every description, cast metal as skilfully designed and finely wrought as on the great gates at Balawat, and luxurious furniture of richly carved and costly woods strengthened with metal and inlaid with gold, silver, bronze, or precious stones.⁵⁶ Pottery was poorly developed, and music, like so much else, was merely imported from Babylon; but tempera painting in bright colors under a thin glaze became one of the characteristic arts of Assyria, from which it passed to its perfection in Persia. Painting, as always in the ancient East, was a secondary and dependent art.

In the heyday of Sargon II, Sennacherib, Esarhaddon and Ashurbanipal, and presumably through their lavish patronage, the art of bas-relief created new masterpieces for the British Museum. One of the best examples, however, dates from Ashurnasirpal II; it represents, in chaste alabaster, the good god Marduk overcoming the evil god of chaos, Tiamat.⁵⁷ The human figures in Assyrian reliefs are stiff and coarse and all alike, as if some perfect model had insisted on being reproduced forever; all the men have the same massive heads, the same brush of whiskers, the same stout bellies, the same invisible necks; even the gods are these same Assyrians in very slight disguise. Only now and then do the human figures take on vitality, as in the alabaster relief depicting spirits in adoration before a palmetto tree,⁵⁸ and the fine limestone stele of Shamsi-Adad VII found at Kalakh.⁵⁹ Usually it is the animal reliefs that stir us; never before or since has carving pictured animals so successfully. The panels monotonously repeat scenes of war and the hunt; but the eye never tires of their vigor of action, their flow of motion, and their simple directness of line. It is as if the artist, forbidden to portray his masters realistically or individually, had given all his lore and skill to the animals; he represents them in a profusion of species—lions, horses, asses, goats, dogs, deer, birds, grasshoppers—and in every attitude except rest; too often he shows them in the agony of death; but even then they are the center and life of his picture and his art. The majestic horses of Sargon II on the reliefs at Khorsabad;⁶⁰ the wounded lioness from Sennacherib’s palace at Nineveh;⁶¹ the dying lion in alabaster from the palace of Ashurbanipal;⁶² the lion-hunts of Ashurnasirpal II and Ashurbanipal;⁶³ the resting lioness,⁶⁴ and the lion released from a trap;⁶⁵ the fragment in which a lion and his mate bask in the shade of the trees⁶⁶—these are among the world’s choicest masterpieces in this form of art. The representation of natural objects in the S reliefs is stylized and crude; the forms are heavy, the outlines are hard, the muscles are exaggerated; and there is no other attempt at perspective (than the placing of the distant in the upper half of the picture, on the same scale as the foreground presented below. Gradually, however, the guild of sculptors under Sennacherib learned to offset these defects with a boldly realistic portrayal, a technical finish, and above all a vivid perception of action, which, in the field of animal sculpture, have never been surpassed. Bas-relief was to the Assyrian what sculpture was to the Greek, or painting to the Italians of the Renaissance—a favorite art uniquely expressing the national ideal of form and character.

We cannot say as much for Assyrian sculpture. The carvers of Nineveh and Kalakh seem to have preferred relief to work in the round; very little full sculpture has come down to us from the ruins, and none of it is of a high order. The animals are full of power and majesty, as if conscious of not only physical but moral superiority to man—like the bulls that guarded the gateway at Khorsabad;⁶⁷ the human or divine figures are primitively coarse and heavy, adorned but undistinguished, erect but dead. An exception might be made for the massive statue of Ashurnasirpal II now in the British Museum; through all its heavy lines one sees a man every inch a king: royal sceptre firmly grasped, thick lips set with determination, eyes cruel and alert, a bull-like neck boding short shrift for enemies and falsifiers of tax-reports, and two gigantic feet full poised on the back of the world.

We must not take too seriously our judgments of this sculpture; very likely the Assyrians idolized knotted muscles and short necks, and would have looked with martial scorn upon our almost feminine slenderness, or the smooth, voluptuous grace of Praxiteles’ Hermes and the Apollo Belvedere. As for Assyrian architecture, how can we estimate its excellence when nothing remains of it but ruins almost level with the sand, and serving chiefly as a hook upon which brave archeologists may hang their imaginative “restorations”? Like Babylonian and recent American architecture, the Assyrian aimed not at beauty but at grandeur, and sought it by mass design. Following the traditions of Mesopotamian art, Assyrian architecture adopted brick as its basic material, but went its own way by facing it more lavishly with stone. It inherited the arch and the vault from the south, developed them, and made some experiments in columns which led the way to the caryatids and the voluted “Ionic” capitals of the Persians and the Greeks.⁶⁸ The palaces squatted over great areas of ground, and were wisely limited to two or three stories in height;⁶⁹ ordinarily they were designed as a series of halls and chambers enclosing a quiet and shaded court. The portals of the royal residences were guarded with monstrous stone animals, the entrance hall was lined with historical reliefs and statuary, the floors were paved with alabaster slabs, the walls were hung with costly tapestries, or paneled with precious woods, and bordered with elegant mouldings; the roofs were reinforced with masive beams, sometimes covered with leaf of silver or gold, and the ceilings were often painted with representations of natural scenery.⁷⁰

The six mightiest warriors of Assyria were also its greatest builders. Tiglath-Pileser I rebuilt in stone the temples of Ashur, and left word about one of them that he had “made its interior brilliant like the vault of heaven, decorated its walls like the splendor of the rising stars, and made it superb with shining brightness.”⁷¹ The later emperors gave generously to the temples, but, like Solomon, they preferred their palaces. Ashurnasirpal II built at Kalakh an immense edifice of stone-faced brick, ornamented with reliefs praising piety and war. Nearby, at Balawat, Rassam found the ruins of another structure, from which he rescued two bronze gates of magnificent workmanship.⁷² Sargon II commemorated himself by raising a spacious palace at Dur-Sharrukin (i.e., Fort Sargon, on the site of the modern Khorsabad); its gateway was flanked by winged bulls, its walls were decorated with reliefs and shining tiles, its vast rooms were equipped with delicately carved furniture, and were adorned with imposing statuary. From every victory Sargon brought more slaves to work on this construction, and more marble, lapis lazuli, bronze, silver and gold to beautify it. Around it he set a group of temples, and in the rear he offered to the god a ziggurat of seven stories, topped with silver and gold. Sennacherib raised at Nineveh a royal mansion called “The Incomparable,” surpassing in size all other palaces of antiquity;⁷³ its walls and floors sparkled with precious metals, woods, and stones; its tiles vied in their brilliance with the luminaries of day and night; the metal-workers cast for it gigantic lions and oxen of copper, and the sculptors carved for it winged bulls of limestone and alabaster, and lined its walls with pastoral symphonies in bas-relief. Esarhaddon continued the rebuilding and enlargement of Nineveh, and excelled all his predecessors in the grandeur of his edifices and the luxuriousness of their equipment; a dozen provinces provided him with materials and men; new ideas for columns and decorations came to him during his sojourn in Egypt; and when at last his palaces and temples were complete they were filled with the artistic booty and conceptions of the whole Near Eastern world.⁷⁴

The worst commentary on Assyrian architecture lies in the fact that within sixty years after Esarhaddon had finished his palace it was crumbling into ruins.⁷⁵ Ashurbanipal tells us how he rebuilt it; as we read his inscription the centuries fade, and we see dimly into the heart of the King:

V. ASSYRIA PASSES

The last days of a king—Sources of Assyrian decay—The fall of Nineveh

Nevertheless the “Great King, the mighty King, the King of the World, the King of Assyria” complained in his old age of the misfortunes that had come to his lot. The last tablet bequeathed us by his wedge raises again the questions of Ecclesiastes and Job:

We do not know how Ashurbanipal died; the story dramatized by Byron—that he set fire to his own palace and perished in the flames—rests on the authority of the marvel-loving Ctesias,⁷⁹ and may be merely legend. His death was in any case a symbol and an omen; soon Assyria too was to die, and from causes of which Ashurbanipal had been a part. For the economic vitality of Assyria had been derived too rashly from abroad; it depended upon profitable conquests bringing in riches and trade; at any moment it could be ended with a decisive defeat. Gradually the qualities of body and character that had helped to make the Assyrian armies invincible were weakened by the very victories that they won; in each victory it was the strongest and bravest who died, while the infirm and cautious survived to multiply their kind; it was a dysgenic process that perhaps made for civilization by weeding out the more brutal types, but undermined the biological basis upon which Assyria had risen to power. The extent of her conquests had helped to weaken her; not only had they depopulated her fields to feed insatiate Mars, but they had brought into Assyria, as captives, millions of destitute aliens who bred with the fertility of the hopeless, destroyed all national unity of character and blood, and became by their growing numbers a hostile and disintegrating force in the very midst of the conquerors. More and more the army itself was filled by these men of other lands, while semi-barbarous marauders harassed every border, and exhausted the resources of the country in an endless defense of its unnatural frontiers.

Ashurbanipal died in 626 B.C. Fourteen years later an army of Babylonians under Nabopolassar united with an army of Medes under Cyaxares and a horde of Scythians from the Caucasus, and with amazing ease and swiftness captured the citadels of the north. Nineveh was laid waste as ruthlessly and completely as her kings had once ravaged Susa and Babylon; the city was put to the torch, the population was slaughtered or enslaved, and the palace so recently built by Ashurbanipal was sacked and destroyed. At one blow Assyria disappeared from history. Nothing remained of her except certain tactics and weapons of war, certain voluted capitals of semi-“Ionic” columns, and certain methods of provincial administration that passed down to Persia, Macedon and Rome. The Near East remembered her for a while as a merciless unifier of a dozen lesser states; and the Jews recalled Nineveh vengefully as “the bloody city, full of lies and robbery.”⁸⁰ In a little while all but the mightiest of the Great Kings were forgotten, and all their royal palaces were in ruins under the drifting sands. Two hundred years after its capture, Xenophon’s Ten Thousand marched over the mounds that had been Nineveh, and never suspected that these were the site of the ancient metropolis that had ruled half the world. Not a stone remained visible of all the temples with which Assyria’s pious warriors had sought to beautify their greatest capital. Even Ashur, the everlasting god, was dead.