Discoveries Among the Ruins of Nineveh and BabylonLayard, Austen Henry
History
Discoveries Among the Ruins of Nineveh and Babylon
Layard, Austen Henry
Babylon (Extinct city); Middle East -- Description and travel; Nineveh (Extinct city); Scientific expeditions
The bas-reliefs, which had once ornamented the second chamber, had been
still more completely destroyed. A few fragments proved that they had
recorded the wars of the Assyrians with a maritime people, whose overthrow
was represented on more than one sculptured wall in the palace, and who
may probably be identified with some nation on the Phoenician coast
conquered by Sennacherib, and mentioned in his great inscriptions. Their
galleys, rowed by double banks of oarsmen, and the high conical head-dress
of their women, have already been described.[101] On the best preserved
slab was the interior of a fortified camp, amidst mountains. Within the
walls were tents whose owners were engaged in various domestic
occupations, cooking in pots placed on stones over the fire, receiving the
blood of a slaughtered sheep in a jar, and making ready the couches.
Warriors were seated before a table, with their shields hung to the
tent-pole above them.
To the south of the palace, but part of the same great building, though
somewhat removed from the new excavations, and adjoining those formerly
carried on, an additional chamber had been opened, in which several
bas-reliefs of considerable interest had been discovered.
Its principal entrance, facing the west, was formed by a pair of colossal
human-headed lions, carved in coarse limestone, so much injured that even
the inscriptions on the lower part of them were nearly illegible.
Unfortunately the bas-reliefs were equally mutilated, four slabs only
retaining any traces of sculpture. One of them represented Assyrian
warriors leading captives, who differed in costume from any other
conquered people hitherto found on the walls of the palaces. Their
head-dress consisted of high feathers, forming a kind of tiara like that
of an Indian chief, and they wore a robe confined at the waist, by an
ornamented girdle. Some of them carried an object resembling a torch.
Amongst the enemies of the Egyptians represented on their monuments is a
tribe similarly attired. Their name has been read Tokkari, and they have
been identified with an Asiatic nation. We have seen that in the
inscriptions on the bulls, the Tokkari are mentioned amongst the people
conquered by Sennacherib[102], and it is highly probable that the captives
in the bas-reliefs I am describing belonged to them. Unfortunately no
epigraph, or vestige of an inscription, remained on the sculptures
themselves, to enable us to identify them.
[Illustration: A captive (of the Tokkari?) Kouyunjik.]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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