sculptors than from those
of Egypt. Except in the sphinxes and in two or three less important types
the Egyptians, as our readers will remember, crowned a human body with the
head of a snake, a lion, or a crocodile, an ibis or a hawk, and sometimes
of a clumsy beast like the hippopotamus,[108] and their figures are
dominated and characterized by the heads thus given to them. At Babylon and
Nineveh the case is reversed. Animals' heads are only found, as a rule,
upon the shoulders of those figures which are looked upon by common consent
as genii rather than gods. In the latter a contrary arrangement prevails.
They may have, like Dagon, a fish's tail hanging down their backs, or, like
the colossal guardians of the king's palace, the body and limbs of a lion
or bull with the wings of an eagle, but the head is that of a man and the
sculptor has given it all the beauty he could compass. To this, we believe,
there is but one exception--the eagle-headed god to whom Assyriologists
have assigned the name of Nisroch. He seems to have occupied a high place
among the Mesopotamian divinities (Fig. 8).

But the difference between the two systems does not end here. There are a
few deities, such as Ptah, Osiris, and Amen, to whom the Egyptians gave a
human form in its simple entirety; but even in such cases it was not
reproduced in its native elegance and nobility. The extremities of Ptah and
Osiris were enveloped in a kind of sheath, which made their figures look
more like mummies than beings with the power of life and motion. It was
not so in Chaldaea, as we shall see if we examine the procedure of the
Mesopotamian artist when he had to figure the greater gods, those in whom
the highest efforts of mental abstraction found concrete expression. Take,
for instance, Nebo, the god of intelligence and prophecy, and Istar, the
personification of the earth's fertility, of its power of creation and
destruction and its inexhaustible energy. Nebo stands upright, his head
covered with a horned tiara: his ample beard is gathered into three rows of
close curls: he wears a long robe falling straight to the ground (Fig. 16).
As for Istar, she is a young woman, nude, large-hipped, and pressing her
breasts with her hands (Fig. 15). The awkwardness and rudeness which to
some extent characterizes these figures is due to the inexperience of the
artist; his intentions were good, but his skill was hardly equal to giving
them full effect. His Nebo was meant t