an excess, appear to have been designed with greater spirit and
freedom. Animal and human forms are sometimes intermixed in them; and
while it cannot be denied that they are rude and coarse, it must be
allowed, on the other hand, that they possess plenty of vigor. M. Botta
has engraved several specimens, including two which have the hind legs
and tail of a bull, with a human neck and arms, the head bearing the
usual horned cap.

[Illustration: PLATE 64]

Small figures of animals in terra cotta have also been found. They
consist chiefly of dogs and ducks. A representation of each has been
given in the chapter on the productions of Assyria. The dogs discovered
are made of a coarse clay, and seem to have been originally painted.
They are not wanting in spirit; but it detracts from their merit that
the limbs are merely in relief, the whole space below the belly of the
animal being filled up with a mass of clay for the sake of greater
strength. The ducks are of a fine yellow material, and represent the
bird asleep, with its head lying along its back.

Of all the Assyrian works of art which have come down to us, by far the
most important are the bas-reliefs. It is here especially, if not
solely, that we can trace progress in style; and it is here alone that
we see the real artistic genius of the people. What sculpture in its
full form, or in the slightly modified form of very high relief, was to
the Greeks, what painting has been to modern European nations since the
time of Cimabue, that low relief was to the Assyrians--the practical
mode in which artistic power found vent among them. They used it for
almost every purpose to which mimetic art is applicable; to express
their religious feelings and ideas, to glorify their kings, to hand down
to posterity the nation's history and its deeds of prowess, to depict
home scenes and domestic occupations, to represent landscape and
architecture, to imitate animal and vegetable forms, even to illustrate
the mechanical methods which they employed in the construction of those
vast architectural works of which the reliefs were the principal
ornamentation. It is not too much to say that we know the Assyrians, not
merely artistically, but historically and ethnologically, _chiefly_
through their bas reliefs, which seem to represent to us almost the
entire life of the people.

The reliefs may be divided under five principal heads:--1, War scenes,
including battles, sieges, devastations of