There is less modelling in the figures which adorn the upper part of the _Caillou Michaux_; the relief upon it is dry and flat, and the drawing affects a hieratic stiffness which would suggest an epoch of decadence, or at least a time when Chaldæan art was arrested in its upward march. This monument, dated in the reign of Marduk-nadin-akhi, King of Babylon about B.C. 1120, was perhaps a stone rolled down by the waters of the river, which was made into a sacred object; the cuneiform inscription contains the donation of a landed estate, settled as a dowry.[20] The curious figures, under the protection of which this contract is placed, show us, as they do in many cylinders, that at this epoch Chaldæan mythology was turned to profit by the artists, who knew how to unite human to animal forms without falling into monstrosity or deformity, and to give symbolical figures to the stars and to the invisible genii conceived by their wild imagination. The drawing of these strange figures is not unskilful; they inspire terror without degenerating into the caricature and grotesque forms which mark the images of the gods among barbarous peoples. Chaldæan art is as learned as the secrets of its mythology are complicated. Examine, for instance, this winged goat [Illustration: Fig. 21.--The _Caillou Michaux_ (Cabinet des Médailles).] [Illustration: Fig. 22.--Stela of Maduk-nadin-akhi (British Museum).] lying before an altar; the angular outlines of its horns are rendered with truth, the muscles of its legs, perhaps badly placed anatomically, are analysed in their smallest details, and the movement of this animal, which is making an effort to rise, is very natural, though lacking in life and suppleness. We shall recognise the same characters of dryness and rudeness in the black basalt stela of the same king, Marduk-nadin-akhi. Here, as in the _Caillou Michaux_, the relief is flat, nothing supple, graceful, or amiable; the Chaldæan genius cannot smile. Of those ample garments of the Oriental, those draperies with which the Greek artist will be able to produce so powerful an effect, the Chaldæan artist is satisfied with scratching in outline, so to speak, the folds and fringes; he makes heavy embroidered copes of them, like those of Catholic priests. But, in compensation, he looks at these embroideries through a magnifying glass, and excels in analysing and reproducing the richness of the tissue, the innumerable and complicated forms of the design. We can henceforth foresee that the sculptor, losing sight of synthesis so as to place his ideal exclusively in the infinitely little, will never rid himself of the narrow formula in which he so early imprisoned his talent. All his figures in statuary or in the bas-reliefs, so highly finished in detail, show as a whole a hieratic and conventional stiffness, which will unhappily descend as a heritage to the Assyrian artist. [Illustration: Fig. 23.--Chaldæan statuette in bronze (Louvre).]