§ 3. _The Principal Conventions of Chaldæo-Assyrian Sculpture._ The art of Mesopotamia, like that of Egypt, had its conventions, some of which were peculiar to itself, while others are common to all nations that have arrived at sovereign power and maturity of knowledge. Like all those who attempt plastic figuration by the light of nature, the artists of Mesopotamia began with profiles. In speaking of Egyptian sculpture we had occasion to show how this method of representation is always followed by first beginners,[143] as it is the simplest and easiest of all. The Chaldæo-Assyrian artists, unlike those of Egypt and Greece, were unaccustomed to the nude, and were therefore without the incentive it supplies to fight against nature and to make her live in all her variety of aspect, a variety which work in the round is alone able to grasp without the aid of convention. One consequence of this is that almost exclusive love of the bas-relief in which Mesopotamian art is unlike that of any other people. In its very beginning it seems to have made a vigorous and promising effort to rise to the production of statues in the round, but discouragement appears to have rapidly followed, and in later years but a very few attempts, and those attended with no great success, were made. The salience of figures was increased or diminished according to their place and the part they played, but the idea of detaching them altogether from the background and giving them an independent existence of their own, was soon abandoned. Under the first Chaldæan empire, real statues, round which we can walk, were modelled (see Plates VI. and VII.). In several of these, although the forms are not so round as in nature, the back is as carefully treated as the front. On the other hand, the few Assyrian statues that have come down to us are all too thin from front to back, while their backs are hardly more than roughly-dressed stone. You feel at once that they were made to stand against a wall, and you think of children and of those whose limbs are so infirm that they cannot stand without support. Before such things, we are far enough, not only from the grace, vitality, and freedom of the Greeks, but even from the proud repose of the Egyptian colossi. Although our figures show, of course, only the front view, this impression is very striking in the statues of Nebo (Vol. I. Fig. 15) and Assurnazirpal (Fig. 60), which have migrated from Nimroud to the British Museum. The latter was found by Layard at the entrance of one of the temples whose plans we have given (Vol. I. Fig. 189). It is cut from a very hard and close-grained limestone, and stands upon a pedestal that is nothing but another block of the same material. We have been compelled, in order to keep our figure sufficiently large, to reduce this block to the dimensions of a shallow plinth. In reality it is a cube thirty-one inches high and twenty-one and three-quarter inches wide.[144] [Illustration: PLATE VI