91 
that they had the telescope. Art reached its climax in the reign 
of Assur-bani-pal; and the sculptured work, representing the 
chase and showing the attitudes of wounded animals, proved that 
they had a knowledge of anatomy. 
The Lecturer guided the audience through the various Assyrian 
Galleries and Saloons of the: British Museum, pointed out and 
explained the meanings of the battle scenes on the stones, the 
tablets —the outer envelope having a duplicate of the inner record 
—the winged figures and symbols. In Egypt the great features 
were the tomb and the temple, where the exploits of the kings 
were inscribed ; but in Babylon and Nineveh it was the palace 
where the kings made known their exploits. 
The reason why so many of these palaces have been discovered 
is that every King began to build his own palace, while in Kgypt 
every King began to build a tomb. Sometimes the Assyrian 
King would take away the stones from an ancestor’s palace and 
use them ; sometimes he would erase the inscriptions and put on 
his own ; sometimes he would take the sculptured slab and turn 
the sculpture to the wall, and the artists would sculpture his own 
exploits on the other side. Hach King desired to see his own 
glory and victories represented. The winged man-headed bull 
was a frequent symbol, the meaning of which was conjectured to 
be :—the head, signified intelligence; the body of the animal— 
strength and courage ; the wings—speed, soaring ability. The 
whole was supposed to be a symbol of the King himself, who 
combined all these excellent qualities. The representations on 
some of the slabs showed that captives were put to torture—in 
one figure a hook was being put into a captive’s mouth while a 
spear was gouging out the eyes ; in another, captives were being 
dismembered and their limbs thrown into the river. Many of 
the figures represented submission and offering of presents to the 
King. There were slabs of Sennacherib seated on his throne ; of 
the assaults on cities with arrows and battering-rams ; the return 
of armies with their captives, and the counting of heads after the 
battle. The last diagram illustrated the discovery of the clue to 
the decipherment of the cuneiform, and its descent from a picture 
language clearly discernible in the archaic forms of some of the 
words. 

