Page 121 - The Art & Architecture of the Ancient Orient_Neat

PART ONE: MESOPOTAMIA
figures more carefully; there arc many more possibilities, and since the narration of
vents is Ins business, there will be a tendency to increase the verisimilitude of the repre­
sentations by rendering more elaborately the interrelations of the figures in space. Plate
94B presents a border case where the intentions of the artist remain obscure. We sec a
conquered and deserted city. A battering-ram is left against the walls; the population arc
compelled to seek out the new habitat which the conqueror has assigned to them. They
leave in ox-carts; their animals are driven off by the Assyrians. Two scribes, under the
dictation of an officer, catalogue the spoil. There is a certain spaciousness in the design,
and it has been thought34 that the sloping line which can be reconstructed under the
hoofs of the animals suggests an elementary rendering of perspective. It is uncertain
whether this particular effect was intended. An artist bold enough to draw without
groundlinc and wishing to render the irregular conglomeration of animals which form a
flock, might well draw them as they appear in our plate without second thoughts. An­
other relief from this reign (Plate 94A) shows part of a procession of unarmed men mov-
ing in some ceremony. Perhaps they clap their hands in accompaniment to music. They
are followed by a figure attired in a lion mask from which a cloak (bearing rows of
tassels, it appears) falls down over his back and sides. The man holds a whip, and possibly
impersonates some demon of disease. Whatever its precise meaning (and the texts do
not throw light on this ceremony), the design shows that the Assyrians had not lost the
typical Mesopotamian gift of embodying fear and terror convincingly in monstrous
apparitions.
Tiglathpilesar III also built, in all probability, two palaces in Syria.35 One of these, at
Til Barsip, contained wall paintings instead of reliefs. All the usual subjects - war, hunt­
ing, submission of enemies, winged genii - appear; the paintings are the equivalent of
reliefs, but rather clumsy provincial works, lacking the richness of plasticity without
displaying the directness attainable in brushwork. Purely decorative wall-paintings were
well preserved too; the scheme of plate 95 was found with bulls, winged genii, or goats
flanking a circular or square ornament. The same design was used in the north-west
palace of Nimrud.36 The arrangement of such patterns consisted of a number of hori­
zontal bands, as in Sargon’s throne-room at Khorsabad (Plate 95; Figure 37; room VII
in Figure 30), where the dado at the foot of the walls was formed of carved stone ortho­
stats. The dominant colours of the painted bands are bright blue and red, with white and
black as secondary colours. The effect is garish, but if the light entered only through the
three monumental doorways (Figure 31) it may have been sufficiently subdued to reduce
the gaudiness and give the painting depth and sparkle. The stele-like design above the
decorative bands may have been distinctive of the throne room. In the restoration it
shows an open space above the figures because the plaster has been lost; it was certainly
not a blank, but displayed divine symbols (cf. Plate 116). This panel was not placed in
the middle of the wall, but opposite the main doorway.37
The representational paintings of Tiglathpilesar IE resemble both pamtmgs and reliefs
from the palace of Sargon II at Khorsabad. The characteristic profile of the figures m
C rcron’s relief (Plate 96) repeats the painted outlines of the Til Barsip faces, le re
from Tiglathpilesar’s palace at Nimrud (Plate 94a) also clearly resembles the Khorsabad

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