Page 96 - The Art & Architecture of the Ancient Orient_Neat

THE BEGINNINGS OF ASSYRIAN ART
corporatcd in the ‘aedicula’ in which the Hittite kings wrote their names (Plate 130B).
The immense prestige of Egyptian kingship supplied a pattern which the rulers of
western Asia followed in so far as the national conceptions of royalty allowed it, and
Assur was pre-eminently the protector of the king and country of Assyria, and could be
regarded by Asiatics on whom the dogmatic precision of Egyptian theology was lost
quivalent of Horus. But it is also possible to conceive that the god derived his
as an c
peculiar appearance from an a ge-old native tradition; perhaps the two factors worked
together in the shaping of Assyrian iconography. We have met the lion-headed eagle
Imdugud (Plate 27A; Figures 13 and 16) as a personification of the storm clouds which
bring rain, and, therefore, as an aspect or manifestation of such gods as Ningirsu, who
were also leaders in war. Assur can be considered the Assyrian form of the Sumerian
divinity, worshipped under many names from the oldest times. And the view that the
feathered body of Assur replaced Imdugud becomes even more probable, if we observe
that Imdugud is not found on Assyrian monuments, and yet was known in the first
millennium, as an ornament on bronzes from Luristan (p. 212 and Figure 107 below).
Once again the complex origins of Assyrian art present a problem which cannot as yet
be solved.
The few surviving works from the reign of Tukulti-Ninurta I illustrate the distinctive
Assyrian attitude, not only in religious but also in secular art. Scenes of warfare included
a leisurely procession of chariots in which the king does not dominate the scene but ap­
pears with his soldiers among all the details of an actual campaign. This is a common
subject. An altar,7 a companion piece to plate 73b, shows the king between two
figures holding the sun symbol; and on its base (where the altar of the plate has an in­
scription) it shows the Assyrian chariotry advancing through mountainous country. The
same subject appears on a glazed orthostat, and on a panel built up from polychrome
glazed bricks,8 all from the palace of Tukulti-Ninurta I. This technique was used at
Babylon to great effect in later times (Plates 122 and 188b) but it was first developed in
Assyria on the basis of technical knowledge derived from the west. Glazing of beads and
small objects had been practised throughout the Near East from the fourth millennium
B.C., but with greater skill in Egypt than elsewhere, especially during the Middle King­
dom (about 2000 b.c.). When, at the time of the Hyksos invasion and the related popu­
lar movements, the established frontiers were ruptured, the practice of decorating large
objects with multicoloured glazes spread to Crete, Rhodes, Cyprus, Syria, and Assyria,
hi Part Two of this volume we shall discuss the effect of this diffusion of a new technique
in the peripheral regions; it is peculiar to the Assyrians that they applied it to architec­
tural decoration. Certain themes, too, spread through the various countries of the Near
East during, or immediately after, the great invasions of the eighteenth century b.c.
wo of these became standard motifs of Assyrian art; they made their first appearance
Ri t c mural paintings (Plate 74) with which Tukulti-Ninurta I decorated the palace in
t ic residential city, Kar Tukulti-Ninurta, which he built two miles upstream from Assur.9
ey a so occur on royal seals of the fourteenth and thirteenth centuries (Figure 24c).
nC 0 tlese moti£s is an elaborate and highly artificial ‘sacred tree’,10 the other is the
griffin. 1 Both were unknown in Mesopotamia before the north had endured

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