uted;
the inefficient workmen on whom Tiglath-pileser and Shalmaneser had been
obliged to rely had been eliminated in course of time, and many of the
sculptures which adorned the palace at Khorsabad display a purity of
design and boldness of execution comparable to that of the best Egyptian
art. The composition still shows traces of Chaldaean stiffness, and
the exaggerated drawing of the muscles produces an occasionally
unpleasing-heaviness of outline, but none the less the work as a whole
constitutes one of the richest and most ingenious schemes of decoration
ever devised, which, while its colouring was still perfect, must have
equalled in splendour the great triumphal battle-scenes at Ibsambul or
Medinet-Habu. Sennacherib found ready to his hand a body of well-trained
artists, whose number had considerably increased during the reign of
Sargon, and he profited by the experience which they had acquired and
the talent that many of them had developed. What immediately strikes the
spectator in the series of pictures produced under his auspices, is the
great skill with which his artists covered the whole surface at their
disposal without overcrowding it. They no longer treated their subject,
whether it were a warlike expedition, a hunting excursion, a sacrificial
scene, or an episode of domestic life, as a simple juxtaposition of
groups of almost equal importance ranged at the same elevation along
the walls, the subject of each bas-relief being complete in itself and
without any necessary connection with its neighbour. They now selected
two or three principal incidents from the subjects proposed to them for
representation, and round these they grouped such of the less important
episodes as lent themselves best to picturesque treatment, and scattered
sparingly over the rest of the field the minor accessories which seemed
suitable to indicate more precisely the scene of the action. Under the
auspices of this later school, Assyrian foot-soldiers are no longer
depicted attacking the barbarians of Media or Elam on backgrounds of
smooth stone, where no line marks the various levels, and where the
remoter figures appear to be walking in the air without anything to
support them. If the battle represented took place on a wooded slope
crowned by a stronghold on the summit of the hill, the artist, in order
to give an impression of the surroundings, covered his background with
guilloche patterns by which to represent the rugged surface o