Percy S. P. Handcock

“PAINTING” in the ordinary sense of the word to-day, was an art never practised by the dwellers in Mesopotamia: like all Orientals both the Babylonians and Assyrians were fond of gay colours, and they gratified their taste for such in various ways, but as a rule no attempt was made to faithfully represent the objects of nature through the medium of the brush and the employment of colours alone, and the colours which they used on their sculptured reliefs, their stuccoed walls, or their enamelled bricks, were very frequently entirely impossible from the naturalistic standpoint. Thus the lion of brilliant yellow hue (cf. frontispiece), the commonest of all pictorial representations in Babylonia, has no counterpart whatever in real life; the effect is pleasing, it catches the eye, it awakens a sense of appreciation in the spectator, but this is due to the general cheerfulness of the colours themselves, certainly not to their fidelity to nature.

The lion itself bears no comparison with the Babylonian lion represented in Fig. 46. The action is the same in either case—both lions are proceeding with sure and deliberate step, roaring as they go, but there is a vast difference between the artistic merits of each. The Assyrian lion is not indeed entirely lifeless, but it lacks the freedom and spontaneity which characterize the highest forms of art; the body is also somewhat heavy and clumsy compared with the lion of Ishtar’s Gate.

The colours chiefly employed in Babylonian and Assyrian paintings are blue, yellow and white, while green, red and black are of comparatively rare occurrence. The background of the picture is generally a shade of royal blue, the figures, usually animals, being of a brilliant yellow. In Babylonia, the demand for colours in architectural decoration was naturally more pressing than in Assyria, for in the latter country, where alabaster and limestone were easily procurable, the adornment of the interiors of buildings fell to the sculptor, but in the southern country the dearth of stone at once precluded the possibility of covering the walls even of the palaces with the sculptured bas-reliefs so dear to the heart of apparently all Assyrian monarchs. Thus it was that colour was largely made to take the place of sculpture in Babylonian decoration, the sculptor’s chisel being exchanged for the painter’s brush, though in Assyria sometimes the art of the sculptor and painter were both invoked to beautify the walls of the king’s palace, for in some of the halls in the royal residence of Sargon at Khorsabad the sculptured reliefs on the lower part of the walls were painted;121 while Layard, after describing some of the wall-reliefs found in the north-west palace at NimrÛd, says:122 “On all these figures paint could be faintly distinguished, particularly on the hair, beard, eyes and sandals,” which rather suggests that the earlier Assyrian sculptures were only partially coloured. Some of the sculptured bas-reliefs from Ashur-na?ir-pal’s palace at NimrÛd still bear traces of colour, the sandals of many of the figures even now showing the faded red and black paint which at one time covered the soles and upper parts of the sandals respectively, while in one case Ashur-na?ir-pal’s bow still retains traces of red paint. At Khorsabad, on the other hand, colour was used more generally, the raiment and head-gear of the king as well as the harness of the horses, the chariots and the trees, being all painted. Layard says that he was unable to ascertain whether the ground as well as the figures, or parts of the figures, were coloured, but Flandin, in regard to the wall-reliefs at Khorsabad, informs us that he could trace a tint of yellow ochre on all parts not otherwise coloured, while the upper parts of the walls upon which the sculptor had lavished none of his art, were often decorated with frescoes.

But walls plastered with stucco also commanded the attention of the painter as well as those lined with stone bas-reliefs, and Layard discovered the remains of paintings on stucco at NimrÛd, specifically in the upper chambers on the west side of the mound, the rooms of which were constructed of crude bricks coated with plaster and elaborately painted.123 Most of these paintings do not aspire to anything more than designs, simple or complex as the case may be. In one fresco two bulls are portrayed facing each other; their bodies are white, the ground from which the bulls are carefully delineated by a pronounced black outline, being yellow, while dark blue plays a leading part in the purely decorative accessories at the top of the fresco. Other evidence of the extensive use of paint for the ornamentation of interior walls, was forthcoming in the discovery on the floor of a chamber in the north-west palace of NimrÛd, of “considerable remains of painted plaster still adhering to the sun-dried bricks, which had fallen in masses from the upper part of the wall. The colours, particularly the blues and reds, were as brilliant and vivid when the earth was removed from them, as they could have been when first used. On exposure to the air they faded rapidly. The designs were elegant and elaborate. It was found almost impossible to preserve any portion of these ornaments, the earth crumbling to pieces when any attempt was made to raise it.”124

The exteriors of buildings were also sometimes decorated with colour, a notable example being the ziggurat at Khorsabad of which three complete stages together with a part of the fourth were found still remaining. The lowest stage was painted white, the second black, the third red, and the fourth white; doubtless the remaining stages were also painted, the colours being emblematic of the seven planets, as in the case of the traditional temple of Belus at Babylon.

The best example of the Babylonian painter’s art is afforded by the city of Babylon itself. As early as the sixties, the French excavators, Fresnel and Oppert, had collected a large number of single-coloured and multi-coloured fragments of relief bricks. The coating of colour, which was always applied to the narrow sides of the bricks, was sometimes from one to two millimetres thick. Unfortunately this valuable collection was lost, but the statements of the explorers are corroborated by the description of a Babylonian palace wall, contained in the works of Diodorus the historian (circ. 44 B.C.) where he refers to “all manner of shapes of animals on rough bricks with colouring very like that of nature”; and he goes on to say that on the towers and walls were “representations of all kinds of animals, and as far as colouring and shape went, well done. The whole represented a hunt, where everything was full of animals of all kinds, and in size more than four yards. In this was also represented Semiramis, on horseback, in the act of throwing the spear after a panther, and a short distance off her husband, Ninus, stabbing a lion with a lance.”125 Nebuchadnezzar himself further alludes to the pictures of wild oxen and colossal serpents, which he caused to be portrayed on blue enamelled bricks as decorations for the gates. Most of the glazed and coloured tiles found at Babylon resemble coloured bas-reliefs, the figures of the animals standing out in relief on a blue background generally, though sometimes the ground is green. The brick-enameller’s art reaches its climax in the Lion-frieze which adorned the Procession Street of Marduk, at Babylon. One of these clay bas-relief lions is seen in Fig. 46.126 The ground is dark blue, the monotony of which is varied by the introduction of yellow stripes and the white rosettes already so familiar from the enamelled bricks of Khorsabad. The lion itself, the proportions of which are excellent, stands out in white alabaster clay, and the whole work is more perfect in technique than the Persian lion frieze at the Louvre, which it in some ways resembles. What detracts from the artistic merit of the latter is the disproportion which the body bears to the fore-part and head, both of them being too small, but the Babylonian lion is almost entirely free from this defect. The discovery of the Ishtar Gate at Babylon added another bounteous supply of material for the study of Babylonian painting: here too the coloured representations on the enamelled bricks were in relief. The walls of the gate were found preserved to a height of thirty-nine feet, the whole of the wall being covered with animals, principally bulls and dragons, of which there were at least eleven rows.

Fig. 46.—Enamelled brick relief from Babylon. (After Andrae.)

In Fig. 47, A, we have a black and white reproduction of one of the clay relief bulls which adorned the gate of Ishtar at Babylon. The bull is in the act of walking, and exhibits both grace and dignity in his movements, the slightness of his frame only serving to intensify the agility with which he seems to advance. The proportions are excellent and contrast very favourably with the Assyrian bull from NimrÛd (cf. Fig. 47, B). The latter is hard and conventional, while the posture—in itself a sufficiently natural one—is here rendered in a most wooden and inanimate fashion. The body of the animal is white, but the painter has attempted to make his subject stand out upon its pale yellow background, by edging it with an artificial outline of black. When the bull was coloured blue and thrown on to a white background this device was of course unnecessary (cf. Layard. Ser. I, Pl. 87.) The blue bull here alluded to belongs to the same species as the white one reproduced in Fig. 47, B, and is in the same kneeling position, but he is furnished with the wings of an eagle. It will be observed that in the Babylonian bull, as also in both the Assyrian bulls, the artist has evaded the difficulty of drawing the two horns in perspective by portraying only one, the other being theoretically concealed from view by the horn near the spectator.

But the palace of Nebuchadnezzar itself contained a large number of these coloured reliefs, many pieces of the glazed tiles of which they were composed having been found by Koldewey. The fragments recovered, number literally thousands, and Koldewey says that apparently when the bricks were stolen by later builders, the glazed portions were knocked off in order to make them more useful for the common purposes for which they were destined, and we to-day are the beneficiaries of that lack of appreciation. Amongst the animals portrayed on the palace and temple walls may be mentioned the bull, a mythical monster compounded of “parts of a bird of prey,” scorpions, serpents, panthers and steers, as well as the ubiquitous lion, while some of the fragments recovered show parts of the human body, and birds are also sometimes encountered. The lions form the most interesting study: there are two main types, (1) lions walking to the left, with white skins and yellow manes; and (2) lions walking to the right (a) with white skins and yellow manes, and (b) yellow skins and green manes; while there is a third type characterized by lions running to right or left. Sometimes the tail is portrayed standing out straight behind, sometimes it assumes a curved and less rigid form. Great difficulty has been experienced in fitting the various fragments together, but the assiduous efforts of the Germans have not been without success.

The process by which these coloured clay reliefs are supposed to have been made is as follows: a layer or slab of plastic clay of a fair size was taken, and on this surface the complete picture was modelled in relief, the process thus far being the same as that employed in the ordinary stone bas-reliefs, except that a chisel was in requisition there while here the hands would suffice, though it seems probable that moulds were at all events made for some of the lions, many of which are apparently entirely uniform. However that may be, the slab of clay now bearing in relief the figure determined, is supposed to have been cut up into rectangular blocks of the same size as the ordinary bricks, each rectangle being marked, with a view to simplifying the task of fitting each into its right place in the picture; after this, each piece was painted with a coat of coloured varnish, and then thoroughly baked in the oven—the thoroughness of the baking is attested by the hardness of the enamel—after which the various parts were fitted together. In the same way at NimrÛd, Layard found a large number of enamelled bricks, bearing the figures of animals and flowers as well as cuneiform characters, lying promiscuously upon the floor of the entrance passages to the palace, upon the unpainted backs of which rude designs, chiefly consisting of men and animals, were drawn in black ink or paint, “and marks having the appearance of numbers.” The marks alluded to must have presumably served the purpose of guiding the builder in his attempt to reconstruct the picture on the wall.

Coloured clay reliefs were not however the only species of pictorial representation adopted in the embellishment of the city of Babylon, or the palace of Babylon’s most illustrious king. On the southern side of the ?asr, a large number of beautifully glazed tiles stamped with Nebuchadnezzar’s inscription and adorned with flowers, twigs, and in one case part of a human figure—some fourteen inches high—were discovered, together with many sculptured stones bearing similar designs, the workmanship of which however was more perfect than that of the tiles. The latter have a flat surface, but they resemble the relief tiles in general technique. Many other glazed bricks were found on the eastern side of the ?asr, painted with various designs and displaying great delicacy—on one of them a human figure is portrayed, clad in a rich garment and holding what appears to be a spear in his left hand—these however Koldewey assigns to the Persian period.

But colour was further employed, as the handmaid of humbler forms of architectural decoration in Babylonia as well as in the northern country. Thus at Nippur, the walls of many of the rooms were stuccoed with a plaster consisting of mud and straw, and were coloured, the colours used being apparently always solid. The ruins of Nin-makh’s temple at Babylon, excavated by the Deutsche Orient-Gesellschaft, similarly showed the remains of white decorations on its walls; while colour played no insignificant part in the decoration of the famous cone-wall at the Wuswas mound of Erech, the cones of which were coloured red or black and then arranged in a variety of geometrical patterns upon a wall consisting of mud and straw.

As we have already seen, enamelled bricks were used for the purposes of architectural decoration in Assyria as well as in Babylonia, though the enamel used is generally inferior in quality, and is more thinly applied, in consequence of which it does not adhere so well to the clay, and it fades sooner. To Place and Botta we are indebted for the finest and largest specimens of the Assyrian enameller’s art as yet discovered. The principal gateways of DÛr-SharrukÎn (Khorsabad) (the town built by Sargon, 722-705 B.C.), which are formed of arches resting on the backs of projecting winged bulls, seem to have been the object of the painter’s peculiar attention. These arches were decorated with a semicircle of enamelled bricks (cf. Pl. XXX), the enamel being laid upon one edge of the bricks, the average length of which is about three and a half inches. The ground is blue and the composite winged figures are yellow, while a line of green edges the lower part of the head-gear. The rosettes which form a supplemental decoration are white. These figures which extend over the entire round of the arch are all uniform: they are engaged in some act of worship, or in the performance of some religious ceremony, and at once recall the scenes depicted on the palace wall reliefs, with which they are practically identical. In contradistinction to the method usually employed in Babylonia, these coloured representations are not in relief, the colour being applied to the flat surface of the bricks, the only exception being the central bosses of the rosettes which are slightly raised. Another good example of coloured tile-work was found on a plinth in the doorway of what Place regarded as the harem in Sargon’s palace. The plinth in question is twenty-three feet long and over three feet high. The figures portrayed are the king, standing on one side of the plinth with bare head, while on the other side he wears the usual head-gear, a lion, a bull, an eagle, a tree and a plough, all done in yellow on a blue background, the borders of the whole plinth being decorated with the inevitable rosettes. The leaves of the tree are green, a colour apparently somewhat seldom used by the enamellers of Mesopotamia. Another painted fragment from Khorsabad, interesting for the extreme brilliancy of its colouring (cf. Place, Nineve, Pl. 32), is reproduced in Pl. XXXI. The faces of the two human beings are white, the background being green; the frieze at the top is yellow, the circular decorations consisting of an inner circle of green or yellow, while the outer circle is composed of trapezoidal figures of red and white in the case of those with a green inner circle, and red and green in those with yellow centres, arranged in either case alternately.

Layard also succeeded in recovering many glazed and coloured bricks from NimrÛd (Calah) of even greater interest as regards the composition of the scenes depicted than as regards the colours used, which in their present state in no way compare with those from Khorsabad in brilliancy. The most interesting of these (cf. Pl. XXXI) is one in which the king, followed by the chief eunuch, is seen receiving his chief officer,127 a scene so often portrayed on the Assyrian bas-reliefs. Above his head there is a “kind of fringed pavilion” and the sole remaining sign of a cuneiform inscription, while beneath him is a spiral design seen more frequently on the so-called Hittite works of art, though it is also found as a decorative accessory on some of the earliest sculptures in Babylonia (cf. Fig. 27). The predominating colours are black and yellow: the hair and beard of the king and his followers, their sandals, as well as the circular balls found within each link of the spiral chain are black, the background is light yellow, the dress of the various figures being of a deeper shade of yellow, and the royal head-dress white. As Layard says: “This is an unique specimen of an entire Assyrian painting.”

Of the remainder, the most interesting are briefly described by Layard in Discoveries, pp. 166 and 167, and illustrated in colours in his Monuments, Series II, Pls. 53-55. One of these (Pl. 54, 7) contains a picture of four hairless and clean-shaven captives, whose four necks are bound together by means of a rope, the end of which is held by the prisoner in front. Two of the prisoners wear white loin-cloths, while the other two are clad in long white shirts opening in front. As regards the colours, the ground is a pale blue, and the figures are yellow. Another fragment of great interest is that reproduced in Monuments, Pl. 54, 12, on which are portrayed two horses, an Assyrian warrior, and a man holding a dagger. The latter, who is naked with the exception of a blue loin-cloth, has apparently been wounded or killed in battle. The background here is olive-green, while the horses are blue. On another glazed tile (Pl. 54, 13), we see a picture of Assyrian cavalry, again on a ground of olive-green, but in this case the horses are yellow, while the trappings are blue. One of these painted bricks (Pl. 53, 1) presents us with a picture of a blue fish on a yellow background; the scales of the fish however are coloured white, while on the same tile there is a man transfixed by two arrows and girded with a white loin-cloth. On another fragment (Pl. 53, 3), a chariot to which horses are yoked is being dragged over a naked figure, whose neck has been pierced by an arrow. A fillet to which is attached a feather, encircles the man’s head. The horses are blue, their trappings being white, and the wheels of the chariot are yellow. Below are seen the heads together with a portion of the shields of two Assyrian soldiers. The helmets are yellow, but the faces are “merely outlined in white on the olive-green ground,” while the shields are blue, but are edged with alternate squares of yellow and blue. All these belong to the same period, but another fragment was found by Layard (Pl. 53, 6) which appears to be of earlier date: the background is yellow, but the outline is black instead of white, while the figures, the heads of which have been destroyed, are dressed in the same way as the tribute-bearers bringing a monkey and other offerings to Ashur-na?ir-pal, as portrayed on bas-reliefs which were taken from the same building. The outer mantle is blue, the inner being yellow, and the fringes white.

But pottery was also sometimes decorated with colours; thus Captain Cros, De Sarzec’s successor at TellÔ, discovered black pottery with incised lines filled in with white paste on this site, a style of pottery well known in Egypt and elsewhere, but not hitherto found in Babylonia. At Nippur on the other hand pottery painted with green and yellow stripes was found, while other vases decorated with black and white discs were also brought to light.

Glazed brick
(cf. Place, “Ninive,” Pl. 32)

Painted pottery has been similarly found in Assyria: at NimrÛd Sir Henry Layard’s men discovered various fragments of pottery which apparently belonged to the covers of jars; they were decorated with the spiral design, also honeysuckles, cones and tulips, in black on a pale yellow ground. Prehistoric pottery has moreover been found in the course of the recent excavations at Ashur, the clay vessels in question being decorated with red and black geometrical designs. Clay slipper-shaped coffins were also sometimes coloured; many of the sarcophagi discovered at Nippur were covered with a blue glaze, but they belonged apparently to the Parthian period. Glazed sarcophagi were likewise found at Warka (i.e. the ancient Erech) as well as at the city of Babylon, though they also were the products of a late period. Various other terra-cotta objects were not infrequently coated with a vitreous glaze, the colour of the enamel being usually blue or green. Colour was not only used in Babylonia however for decorating buildings, pots and figures, but also apparently for the adornment of the human body, for the German excavations at FÂra revealed the presence of alabaster colour-dishes in the graves, traces of the colour in some cases still remaining. The colours are black, yellow, light green and light red. According to the analysis of the colours of the Babylonian bricks conducted by Sir Henry De la Becke and Dr. Percy, quoted by Layard,128 “the yellow is an antimoniate of lead, from which tin has also been extracted, called Naples yellow, supposed to be comparatively a modern discovery, though also used by the Egyptians. The white is an enamel or glaze of oxide of tin, an invention attributed to the Arabs of Northern Africa in the eighth or ninth century. The blue glaze is a copper, contains no cobalt, but some lead; a curious fact, as this mineral was not added as a colouring material, but to facilitate the fusion of the glaze, to which use, it was believed, lead had only been turned in comparatively modern times. The red is a sub-oxide of copper.”