in their hands (see Fig. 29). Thus, without any help from the
inscriptions, we may divine from the sculptures alone what strange
contrasts were presented by the Assyrian character--a character at once
sanguinary and voluptuous, brutal and refined, mystical and truculent.

[Illustration: FIG. 29.--Offerings to a god; Alabaster relief. Louvre.
Height 10 feet. Drawn by Saint-Elme Gautier.]

It is not only by what it says, it is by what it leaves untold, by what it
forgets to tell, that art has left us such a sincere account of this
singular nation. The king and his lieutenants, his ministers and household
officers, the veterans who formed the strength of his legions and the young
men from whom their numbers were recruited, did not constitute the whole of
the Assyrian nation. There were also the tillers of the soil, the followers
of those countless trades implied by a civilized society--the peasants,
artisans, and merchants of every kind, who fed, clothed, and equipped the
armies; the men who carried on the useful but modest work without which the
fighting machine must soon have come to a standstill. And yet they are
entirely absent from the sculptures in which the artist seems to have
included everything that to him seemed worthy of interest. We meet them
here and there, but only by accident. They may be descried now and then in
the background of some scene of war, acting as labourers or in some other
humble capacity. Otherwise the sculptor ignored their existence. They were
not soldiers, which was much as to say they were nothing. Can any other
instance be cited of an art so well endowed entirely suppressing what we
should call the civil element of life? Neither do we find women in the
bas-reliefs: that in which the queen of Assurbanipal occurs is quite unique
in its way. Except in scenes representing the capture of a town and the
carrying off of its inhabitants as prisoners of war, females are almost
entirely wanting. On those occasions we sometimes find them carried on
mules or in chariots (see Figs. 30 and 31). In certain bas-reliefs of
Assurbanipal, treating of his campaign against Susa, women are playing the
tambourine and singing the king's praises. But all these are exceptions.
Woman, whose grace and beauty were so keenly felt by the Egyptians, is
almost completely absent from the sculpture of Assyria.

[Illustration: FIG. 30.--Convoy of prisoners. Kouyundjik. From Layard.]

By thus limiting its scope, sculpture c