[Illustration:  071.jpg GLAZED TILE FROM PALACE OF CALAH]

     Drawn by Boudier, after Layard.

Their pictures produce an impression of awkwardness, confusion and heaviness, but the detail is so minute and the animation so great that the attention of the spectator is forcibly arrested; these uncouth beings impress us with the sense of their self-reliance and their confidence in their master, as we watch them brandishing their weapons or hurrying to the attack, and see the shock of battle and the death-blows given and received.  The human-headed bulls, standing on guard at the gates, exhibit the calm and pensive dignity befitting creatures conscious of their strength, while the lions passant who sometimes replace them, snarl and show their teeth with an almost alarming ferocity.

[Illustration:  072.jpg LION FROM ASSUR-NAZIR-PAL’S PALACE]

     Drawn by Boudier, from a photograph of the sculpture in the
     British Museum.

The statues of men and gods, as a rule, are lacking in originality.  The heavy robes which drape them from head to foot give them the appearance of cylinders tied in at the centre and slightly flattened towards the top.  The head surmounting this shapeless bundle is the only life-like part, and even the lower half of this is rendered heavy by the hair and beard, whose tightly curled tresses lie in stiff rows one above the other.  The upper part of the face which alone is visible is correctly drawn; the expression is of rather a commonplace type of nobility—­respectable but self-sufficient.  The features—­eyes, forehead, nose, mouth—­are all those of Assur-nazir-pal; the hair is arranged in the fashion he affected, and the robe is embroidered with his jewels; but amid all this we miss the keen intelligence always present in Egyptian sculpture, whether under the royal head-dress of Cheops or in the expectant eyes of the sitting scribe:  the Assyrian sculptor could copy the general outline of his model fairly well, but could not infuse soul into the face of the conqueror, whose “countenance beamed above the destruction around him.”

The water of the Tigris being muddy, and unpleasant to the taste, and the wells at Calah so charged with lime and bitumen as to render them unwholesome, Assur-nazir-pal supplied the city with water from the neighbouring Zab.* An abundant stream was diverted from this river at the spot now called Negub, and conveyed at first by a tunnel excavated in the rock, and thence by an open canal to the foot of the great terrace:  at this point the flow of the water was regulated by dams, and the surplus was utilised for irrigation** purposes by means of openings cut in the banks.

     * The presence of bitumen in the waters of Calah is due to
     the hot springs which rise in the bed of the brook Shor-
     derreh.