VII. ARTISTS

The lesser arts—Music—Fainting—Sculpture—Bas-reliefs Architecture

The story of Gilgamesh is almost the only example by which we may judge the literary art of Babylon. That a keen esthetic sense, if not a profound creative spirit, survived to some degree the Babylonian absorption in commercial life, epicurean recreation and compensatory piety, may be seen in the chance relics of the minor arts. Patiently glazed tiles, glittering stones, finely wrought bronze, iron, silver and gold, delicate embroideries, soft rugs and richly dyed robes, luxurious tapestries, pedestaled tables, beds and chairs¹⁴¹—these lent grace, if not dignity or final worth, to Babylonian civilization. Jewelry abounded in quantity, but missed the subtle artistry of Egypt; it went in for a display of yellow metal, and thought it artistic to make entire statues of gold.¹⁴² There were many musical instruments—flutes, psalteries, harps, bagpipes, lyres, drums, horns, reed-pipes, trumpets, cymbals and tambourines. Orchestras played and singers sang, individually and chorally, in temples and palaces, and at the feasts of the well-to-do.¹⁴³

Painting was purely subsidiary; it decorated walls and statuary, but made no attempt to become an independent art.¹⁴⁴ We do not find among Babylonian ruins the distemper paintings that glorified the Egyptian tombs, or such frescoes as adorned the palaces of Crete. Babylonian sculpture remained similarly undeveloped, and was apparently stiffened into an early death by conventions derived from Sumeria and enforced by the priests: all the faces portrayed are one face, all the kings have the same thick and muscular frame, all the captives are cast in one mould. Very little Babylonian statuary survives, and that without excuse. The bas-reliefs are better, but they too are stereotyped and crude; a great gulf separates them from the mobile vigor of the reliefs that the Egyptians had carved a thousand years before; they reach sublimity only when they depict animals possessed of the silent dignity of nature, or enraged by the cruelty of men.¹⁴⁵

Babylonian architecture is safe from judgment now, for hardly any of its remains rise to more than a few feet above the sands; and there are no carved or painted representations among the relics to show us clearly the form and structure of palaces and temples. Houses were built of dried mud, or, among the rich, of brick; they seldom knew windows, and their doors opened not upon the narrow street but upon an interior court shaded from the sun. Tradition describes the better dwellings as rising to three or four stories in height.¹⁴⁶ The temple was raised upon foundations level with the roofs of the houses whose life it was to dominate; usually it was an enormous square of tiled masonry, built, like the houses, around a court; in this court most of the religious ceremonies were performed. Near the temple, in most cases, rose a ziggurat (literally “a high place”)—a tower of superimposed and diminishing cubical stories surrounded by external stairs. Its uses were partly religious, as a lofty shrine for the god, partly astronomic, as an observatory from which the priests could watch the all-revealing stars. The great ziggurat at Borsippa was called “The Stages of the Seven Spheres”; each story was dedicated to one of the seven planets known to Babylonia, and bore a symbolic color. The lowest was black, as the color of Saturn; the next above;← was white, as the color of Venus; the next was purple, for Jupiter; the fourth blue, for Mercury; the fifth scarlet, for Mars; the sixth silver, for the moon; the seventh gold, for the sun. These spheres and stars, beginning at the top, designated the days of the week.¹⁴⁷

There was not much art in this architecture, so far as we can vision it now; it was a mass of straight lines seeking the glory of size. Here and there among the ruins are vaults and arches—forms derived from Sumeria, negligently used, and unconscious of their destiny. Decoration, interior and exterior, was almost confined to enameling some of the brick surfaces with bright glazes of yellow, blue, white and red, with occasional tiled figures of animals or plants. The use of vitrified glaze, not merely to beautify, but to protect the masonry from sun and rain, was at least as old as Naram-sin, and was to continue in Mesopotamia down to Moslem days. In this way ceramics, though seldom producing rememberable pottery, became the most characteristic art of the ancient Near East. Despite such aid, Babylonian architecture remained a heavy and prosaic thing, condemned to mediocrity by the material it used. The temples rose rapidly out of the earth which slave labor turned so readily into brick and cementing pitch; they did not require centuries for their erection, like the monumental structures of Egypt or medieval Europe. But they decayed almost as quickly as they rose; fifty years of neglect reduced them to the dust from which they had been made.¹⁴⁸ The very cheapness of brick corrupted Babylonian design; with such materials it was easy to achieve size, difficult to compass beauty. Brick does not lend itself to sublimity, and sublimity is the soul of architecture.