These lions are sixteen in number; they form a series in which the size of the animal becomes steadily smaller with each example; the largest is a foot long, the smallest hardly more than an inch. The decrease seems to follow a certain rule, but rust has affected them too greatly for it to be easy to base any metrological calculation upon their weight. But all doubt as to their use is removed by the inscriptions in cuneiform and in ancient Aramaic characters with which several of them are engraved. The Aramaic inscriptions all begin with the word _mine_; then comes a figure indicating the number of _mines_, or of subdivisions of the _mine_ that the weight represents; finally, there is the name of some personage, who may perhaps have been a magistrate charged with the regulation and verification of weights. [Illustration: FIG. 118.--Bas-relief from Khorsabad. Height 9 feet 5 inches. Louvre.] With the accession of Sennacherib, a sensible change comes over the aspect of the reliefs. What until now has been the exception becomes the rule. On almost every slab we find a complex and carefully treated landscape background. The artist is not satisfied with indicating the differences between conifers, cypresses, and pines (Vol. I. Figs, 41–43), palms (_ib._ Figs. 30 and 34; and above, Fig. 21), the vine (Fig. 47), and the tall reeds and grasses of the marsh (Fig. 119) are also imitated.[249] [Illustration: FIG. 119.--Marsh vegetation; from Layard.] We feel that the sculptor wished to reproduce all those subordinate features of nature by which his eye was amused on the Assyrian plains; he seems almost to have taken photographs from nature, and then to have transferred them to the palace walls by the aid of his patient chisel. Look, for instance, at the reliefs in which the process of building Sennacherib’s palace is narrated. The sculptor is not content with retracing, in a spirit of uncompromising reality, all the operations implied by so great an undertaking; he gives backgrounds to his pictures in which he introduces, on a smaller scale, many details that have nothing to do with the main subject of the relief. Thus we find a passage in which men are shown carting timber, and another in which they are dragging a winged bull, both surmounted by a grove of cypresses, while still higher on the slab, and, therefore, in the intention of the sculptor, on a more distant horizon, we see a river, upon which boatmen propel their clumsy vessels, and fishermen, astride on inflated skins, drift with the stream, while fishes nibble at their baited lines.[250]