Western Asia: Babylonia^ Assyria, and Chaldea J J Within, as a dado along the lower portion of the walls of Sculpture corridors and halls, are hundreds of yards of reliefs ^ cut in ala- baster, displaying the brave deeds of the Emperor in campaign and hunting field (Figs. 44, 45). The human figures are monot- onously alike, hard and cold, but those of wild beasts are some- times splendid in the abandon of animal ferocity which they display. The tiger w^as in the blood of the Assyrian and it here comes out in the work of his chisel. There was no art of portraiture in statue form as in Egypt, To be sure, these great works were largely executed by foreign Assyrian labor, for the emperors were obliged to depend not a little on f^m abroad foreign skill both in art and industries. With one exception all the patterns of their decorative art came from Egypt, and the finer work of their palace adornment and their furniture in ebony and ivory clearly betray Egyptian origin. The art of glazing the colored brick for the palace front, and all work in glass likewise, had been borrowed from Egypt (Fig. 48). Sen- nacherib frankly confesses that his craftsmen were very unskilled in making large bronze casts needed for his palace in Nineveh, and boasts that he himself personally overcame the difficulties. It is in this ability to use foreign resources that we must rec- ognize one of the greatest traits of the Assyrian emperors. Thus Sennacherib tells us that he had in his palace "a portal made after the model of a Hittite palace." In the great gardens which he laid out along the river above Palace and below Nineveh he planted unknown trees and strange plants ^^^ ^"^ from all quarters of his great empire. Among them were cotton Earliest trees,^ of which he says, " The trees that bore wool they clipped and they carded it for garments." In this enterprise of an Assyrian king we thus see appearing for the first time in civili- zation the cotton which now furnishes so large a part of our own national wealth. Nor was such insight as the king showed 1 A further example of such relief sculpture of the Assyrians shows us Assyrian horsemen hunting. See the headpiece of Chapter III (p. 56). 2 This cotton tree was doubtless related to the lower-growing cotton plant of our Southern states.
