distinguished, in Sennacherib's bas-reliefs;
gardens, fields, ponds, reeds, are carefully represented; wild animals
are introduced, as stags, boars, and antelopes; birds fly from tree to
tree, or stand over their nests feeding the young who stretch up to
them; fish disport themselves in the waters; fishermen ply their craft;
boatmen and agricultural laborers pursue their avocations; the scene is,
as it were, photographed, with all its features--the least and the most
important--equally marked, and without any attempt at selection, or any
effort after artistic unity.

In the same spirit of realism Sennacherib chooses for artistic
representation scenes of a commonplace and everyday character. The
trains of attendants who daily enter his palace with game and locusts
for his dinner, and cakes and fruit for his dessert, appear on the walls
of his passages, exactly as they walked through his courts, bearing the
delicacies in which he delighted. Elsewhere he puts before us the entire
process of carving and transporting a colossal bull, from the first
removal of the huge stone in its rough state from the quarry, to its
final elevation on a palace mound as part of the great gateway of a
royal residence. We see the trackers dragging the rough block, supported
on a low flat-bottomed boat, along the course of a river, disposed in
gangs, and working under taskmasters who use their rods upon the
slightest provocation. The whole scene must be represented, and so the
trackers are all there, to the number of three hundred, costumed
according to their nations, and each delineated with as much care as it
he were not the exact image of ninety-nine others. We then observe the
block transferred to land, and carved into the rough semblance of a
bull, in which form it is placed on a rude sledge and conveyed along
level ground by gangs of laborers, arranged nearly as before, to the
foot of the mound at whose top it has to be placed. The construction of
the mound is most elaborately represented. Brickmakers are seen moulding
the bricks at its base, while workmen, with baskets at their backs, full
of earth, bricks, stones, or rubbish, toil up the ascent--for the mound
is already half raised--and empty their burdens out upon the summit. The
bull, still lying on its sledge, is then drawn up an inclined plane to
the top by four gangs of laborers, in the presence of the monarch and
his attendants. After this the carving is completed, and the colossus,