[Illustration: Fig. 25.--Canephoros of Kudurmapuk (Louvre).] In one of the smaller mounds at Tello, M. de Sarzec discovered a fragment of a large bronze statue. “It was,” he says, “a life-sized bull’s horn, of bronze plating mounted on a wooden frame, but the wood was carbonised by the action of fire.”[23][24] He had also found a sword, which was stolen and destroyed by an Arab. But we can cite another weapon of the same kind in the possession of Colonel Hanbury; the blade, curved like a scythe, and triangular, bears a votive inscription in the name of the Assyrian king Rammannirari, the son of Pudil (B.C. 1300). The curious peculiarity of this weapon is that on one of its surfaces a small recumbent deer is to be seen engraved, and this is the maker’s mark: from this time onward the jealousy of craftsmen comes into play and declares itself by the same measures as in our day. [Illustration: Fig. 26.--Chaldæan statuette in bronze (Louvre).] Surprising as the phenomenon is at first sight, Chaldæan pottery was far from following the progress of sculpture. The excavations of Tello have enriched the museum of the Louvre with five hundred terra-cotta cones, bearing the name of Gudea and Ur-Bau, but these are only industrial products, without artistic character, and belonging to the brick manufacture. The necropoles of Warka and Mugheir, where we might have expected to meet with works of art, as in the tombs of Greece or Etruria, have only furnished coarse vases which bear witness to the complete inferiority of pottery among the Chaldæo-Assyrians. They are all singularly barbarous and rustic, whether they come from the archaic tombs of Warka and Mugheir, or issue from the ruins of the palaces where, nevertheless, the art of sculpture soars and displays itself in its perfect development. Assyrian pottery, even that of the best epoch, resembles, sometimes so much as to be mistaken for it, the most archaic pottery of Greece proper and the Islands of the Ægean. But here it is only the beginning of art, the first effort of the potter who before long will fashion masterpieces; there, on the contrary, these vulgar kitchen receptacles form the whole art, and represent at once the start and the finish. This neglect of ceramics by the Chaldæo-Assyrian artists results from geological and climatic causes analogous to those which, as we shall see, developed sculpture in bas-relief to the detriment of sculpture in the round. It is especially owing to the bad quality of the clay in Mesopotamia, which, though quite fit to be turned into square bricks, has not a fine enough grain for the purpose of fashioning from it the fragile frame of a broad crater, or of a slim amphora, and still less for the purpose of lending itself to all the details of face and drapery in graceful and slender figurines like those of Tanagra, Cyme, or Myrina.