THE domain which we are about to traverse in this little work embraces all the civilisations of the ancient East except that of Egypt. It includes the ChaldÆans, the Assyrians, the Persians before Alexander, the Hittites of Syria, Cappadocia, and Asia Minor, the Jews, the Phoenicians, and even Cyprus, ending with the Carthaginians and their colonies. So vast a field, which, in the monumental work of MM. G. Perrot and C. Chipiez, occupies four volumes, can only be explored here in a summary manner, and the author claims no more than to have written a modest abridgment. It must not be supposed, however, in spite of the diversity and remoteness from one another of the peoples that we have just enumerated, that the subject lacks cohesion and unity. If the reader will have the goodness to follow us to the conclusion, he will be, on the contrary, struck by the perfect homogeneity of the book and the connection of all its parts. The picture, so to speak, contains many figures, but all concur in a common action, and the spectator grasps, at the first glance, the harmony of the composition.

For, in these old Eastern civilisations which held sway over the world before Greece and Rome, only two streams of artistic influence are really to be traced—that which rises in Egypt and that which issues from Assyria. Often they took a parallel course, side by side, sharing like brothers the empire of the arts; sometimes they opposed or obstinately excluded one another; or else they joined forces, mingled closely with one another, and united their original capacities in a common fund. But if these varying conditions produced in certain countries a local and indigenous art which is neither purely Egyptian nor purely Assyrian, we can always decompose its elements and make a chemical analysis of it, so to speak; and, when we have restored to Egypt that which properly belongs to her, and to Assyria all that has been borrowed from her, we perceive that nothing remains at the bottom of the crucible. Thus it may be said that, properly speaking, there is no Persian art, or Hittite art, or Jewish art, or Phoenician or Carthaginian art; everywhere we find the forms of Egypt or those of Assyria grouped, mixed, perhaps altered, in proportions which vary according to time, environment, and political conditions.

Leaving Egypt on one side, it is the Asiatic, or, more strictly, the ChaldÆo-Assyrian stream that we have undertaken to study exclusively. We see it at its source, almost on the site of that Garden of Eden where Genesis and the ChaldÆan legends place the ancestors of mankind; we follow it into Assyria, and observe its progress and transformations. Before long it overflows and passes on all sides beyond the limits of the basin of the Tigris and Euphrates; on one side, in Persia, it invades the palaces of Susa and Persepolis; on the other side, among the Hittites, the AramÆan populations of Syria, and the Jews, it spreads and divides into many rivulets, until it arrives at the frontier of Egypt and the heart of Asia Minor. Far from losing itself in the waves of the Mediterranean, it reaches all the shores of that great lake, Cyprus, Sicily, Africa, Spain; even passing beyond the Pillars of Hercules.

It seemed to us, then, that it would be a work of interest to draw a picture of ChaldÆo-Assyrian art not only in its native country where it develops at its ease, but in its many ramifications among the neighbouring nations where it comes into collision with its rival and is interpreted by foreigners, until the day when Greece snatches the torch of the arts from the failing hand of the East. This Asiatic art, as we shall see, has no cause to be ashamed by the side of the Egyptian art. ChaldÆa possesses a genius as spontaneous as that of Egypt, and the valley of the Euphrates is not less fertile than that of the Nile. The ambitions of her architects and sculptors were as high and noble as those of the artists who flourished at the court of the Pharaohs, and the staged towers were the equals of the Pyramids. Both nations pursued an ideal which contains a part of the truth, for in making a building colossal and imposing by its size, they thought that they attained to supreme greatness and perfection. The Greeks, through their greater refinement, did not fall into these excesses. But who will ever be able to say how much the powerful originality of the Hellenic genius borrowed from the imperfect models furnished by Egypt and Assyria? Who will ever be able to define with clearness and precision the kind of influence which ChaldÆo-Assyrian art, in particular, imported by the ships of Phoenicia into all maritime countries, had on the origin of art in that younger civilisation of which Athens was the centre?

The ancient peoples of Asia, which form a compact group from the point of view of the history and development of the arts, are also akin in the complete destruction which has overtaken their architectural monuments. As if by a providential chastisement, from the table-land of Iran to the Pillars of Hercules, at Susa, at Babylon, at Nineveh, as at Jerusalem, Tyre, Carthage, and Gades, nothing is left of those temples, palaces, and towers which threw a challenge in the face of Heaven, and which wore out so many generations of slaves in the building of them. While the Pyramids still rise opposite to the Parthenon, and our astonishment is still excited by the imposing ruins of Egypt, Greece and Rome, nothing remains of the grand monuments which were the pride of the capitals of Asia. Everywhere we have to dig into the bowels of the earth and uncover the base of crumbled walls. Everything is reduced to dust like the image with the feet of clay, and a shroud of ashes covers that world the material culture of which is to be brought to life again, as far as possible, in the following pages.

In the first English edition, M. Babelon’s work was somewhat enlarged, and occasionally revised by the translator—Mr. B.T.A. Evetts, then of the Department of Egyptian and Assyrian Antiquities, British Museum. In the present edition will be found a new chapter by the author on the recent finds at Susa.

A.S.G.