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material. Cables, zig-zags, and beads are used to ornament them,
and the whole is a good example of Assyrian taste in little things.

Fig. 228.—Comb. Actual size.


Louvre.
So far we have treated Assyrian metal-work of the ornamental
kind only as it is seen in bronze. Hardly any objects of gold or silver
have, in fact, been discovered in Mesopotamia. And yet it is
impossible that those two metals can have been very rare in the
Nineveh of the Sargonids or the Babylon of Nebuchadnezzar; war
and industry certainly led to considerable accumulations of both. We
must find a reason for their absence in the success with which the
Assyrian tomb has so far avoided discovery. The tomb alone could
offer a safe asylum to such treasures, and preserve them in its
shadows for the inquisitive eyes of modern archæologists. Before
being abandoned to the slow effects of time, the temples and
palaces were pillaged. Here and there, however, in some well
contrived hiding-place or forgotten corner, a few trinkets may have
escaped the eyes of greedy conquerors, or of the later marauders
who sounded the ruins in every direction for the sake of the precious
metals they might contain.
Fig. 229.—Comb. Actual size.
Louvre.
The oldest jewels left to us by these peoples are those found in
the most ancient tombs at Warka. Their forms are simple enough—
bronze bracelets made of a bar tapering rapidly to each end and
beaten with a hammer into a slight oval (Figs. 232, 233). These bars
are sometimes very thick, as our first example shows. The golden
ear-drops from the same tombs (Fig. 234) are made in the same
way.
At Nineveh the art is more advanced. We may form our ideas of it
from the bas-reliefs, where people are shown with jewels about their
arms, their necks, and hanging on their cheeks; and also from a few
original specimens that have escaped the general wreck. In the
foundations of Sargon’s palace, under the massive threshold, were
found too, together with a large number of cylinders, the remains of
necklaces made up of pierced stones, such as carnelian, red and
yellow jasper, brown sardonyx, amethyst, &c., cut into cylinders,
polygons, medallions, and into the shapes of a pear and of an olive
or date-stone (Fig. 235). This use of precious stones was a survival
from the days when pebbles were turned to the same purpose.
Earrings were made in the same fashion (Figs. 236, 237). In one of
the reliefs we see a eunuch wearing a necklace in which double
cones alternate with disks (Fig. 238). The same elements could of
course be used for bracelets or armlets, by shortening the wire on
which they were strung. From an art point of view such a jewel was
quite primitive; all its beauty lay in the rich colours of its separate
stones, among which beads of glass and enamelled earthenware
have also been found.

Figs. 230, 231.—Bronze fork and


spoon; from Smith’s Assyrian
Discoveries.
Kings and other high personages were not content with such
simple adornments. It would seem that princes wore necklaces
made up of separate pieces each of which had an emblematic
signification of its own (Fig. 239), because we find them constantly
reappearing in the reliefs, sometimes around the sovereign’s neck,
sometimes distributed over the field of a stele. In the stele of Samas-
Vul, the king only wears a single ornament on his breast; it is exactly
similar to what we call a Maltese cross (Fig. 116).
Figs. 232, 233.—Bracelets; from Rawlinson.

Fig. 234.—Ear-drop. British


Museum.
Figs. 235–237.—Necklace and
ear-drops. Louvre. Drawn by
Saint-Elme Gautier.
These ornaments must have been of gold and of some
considerable size. The grand vizier, and the king when his tiara is
absent, wear a diadem about their foreheads in which the rosette is
the chief element of the decoration (Vol. I. Figs. 25 and 29). The
queen’s diadem, in the “Feast of Assurbanipal,” is crenellated (Fig.
117), reminding us of that worn by the Greek Cybele. In the same
monuments the wrists of kings and genii are surrounded with
massive bracelets (Vol. I. Figs. 4, 8, 9, 15, 23, 24, 29, &c.). In the
Louvre there is a bronze bracelet of exactly the same type (Fig.
24c).[441] We may see them figured among the objects offered in
tribute in a bas-relief at Nimroud (Fig. 241). From the same reliefs
we gather several examples of ear-pendents (Figs. 242–244). It is
probable that the same models were carried out in gold, silver, or
bronze, according to the rank and fortune of the people for whom
they were made.[442] The forms were not altogether happy.

Fig. 238.—Necklace; from Layard.


And yet the Assyrian workmen could sometimes turn out lighter
and more graceful objects than these. It was, no doubt, when they
laboured for the softer sex that they modified their methods of work.
The figure of a winged genius in which we ventured to recognise a
goddess wears several necklaces, and one of them looks like a
chain with alternately thin and stout members (Fig. 162). Now, at
Kouyundjik, a necklace has been found (Fig. 245) bearing no little
resemblance to the one here copied by the sculptor. It is composed
of slender gold tubes, separated from each other by beads of the
same metal. These beads are alternately ribbed and smooth. The
workmanship is good and very careful.

Fig. 239.—Royal necklace; from


Rawlinson.
That these articles of personal jewelry were made in the country
is proved by the fact that not a few of the moulds used by the
jewellers for the patterns most in favour have been found. They are
small slabs of serpentine or very hard limestone, in one face of
which the desired pattern is cut in intaglio (Figs. 246 and 247).
Wherever the pattern communicates with the outer edge by a small
opening, it may have been used to receive the liquid metal; where no
such gutter exists, the design must have been stamped, the leaves
of metal being placed over the hollow and beaten into it with a
mallet.[443]

Fig. 240.—Bracelet. Diameter 5 inches.


Louvre. Drawn by Saint-Elme Gautier.
It was by this latter process, no doubt, that those buttons which
have been found in such quantities by every one who has explored
the Assyrian palaces, were made. They are sometimes small disks
ornamented with concentric bands (Fig. 248), sometimes lozenges
with beaded edges (Fig. 249). These buttons have sometimes
staples for attachment like ours, but more often they are pierced with
a small hole for the passage of a metal thread. They were thus fixed
on the king’s robes and the harness of his horses. Our Fig. 250,
which is copied from a bas-relief at Kouyundjik, shows how the
leather bands that encircled the necks of the chariot-horses and
supported bells, metal rosettes and coloured tassels, were
decorated.[444]
Fig. 241.—Bracelets; from
Layard.

Fig. 242.—Ear-drop; from


Layard.
Figs. 243, 244.—Ear-drops; from
Layard.

Figs. 248, 249.—Gold buttons.


British Museum.
Fig. 245.—Necklace. British Museum.
The habits and tastes of the Oriental saddler have not changed
since the days of antiquity. We cannot get a better idea of Assyrian
harness than by examining the sets exposed for sale in the present
day in the bazaars of Turkey, Persia, and India. More than once,
when some Kurdish bey rode past him on his Arab, Sir H. Layard felt
as if he had seen a vision from one of the Ninevite reliefs. The
leather stitched with bright coloured threads, the housings of gaudy
wool, the hawk’s bells tinkling round the horse’s neck, were all
survivals from the past. The equipment of a Spanish mule, or the
harness that used to be worn by the waggon teams of Eastern
France within the memory of men not yet old, gives some idea of the
effect produced.
Figs. 246, 247.—Moulds for trinkets; from Layard.

Figs. 248, 249.—Gold buttons. British Museum.


Fig. 250.—Part of the harness of
a chariot-horse.
Personal jewelry and the apparatus of the toilet seem to have
been no less elaborate in the Babylon of Nebuchadnezzar than in
the Nineveh of Sennacherib, but we possess very few objects that
can be surely referred to that period. To the very last years of the
Chaldæan empire, if not to a still later date, must be ascribed two
golden earrings now in the British Museum (Figs. 251 and 252).
They represent a naked child, with long hair and a head much too
large for its body. We are told that they were found in a tomb at
Niffer, with other objects whose Chaldæan character was very
strongly marked. Without this assurance we should be tempted to
think their date no more remote than that of the Seleucidæ.
Among the knobs, or buttons, used so largely by joiners, tailors,
and saddlers, some have been found of ivory and of mother-of-pearl.
The jewellers, too, must have used these substances, which would
give them an opportunity for effective colour harmonies. Thus Layard
mentions an ear-pendent that he found at Kouyundjik, which had two
pearls let into a roll of gold.[445]
Figs. 251, 252.—Ear-pendents. British Museum.
On the other hand no amber has been found in Mesopotamia.
That substance was widely used by the Mediterranean nations as
early as the tenth century before our era, but it does not seem to
have been carried into the interior of Asia. It has been asserted that
one of the cuneiform texts mentions it;[446] that assertion we cannot
dispute, but it is certain that neither in the British Museum nor in the
Louvre, among the countless objects that have been brought from
the Chaldæan and Assyrian ruins to those great store-houses of
ancient art, has the smallest fragment of amber been discovered. If it
ever entered Mesopotamia, how could it have been more fitly used
than in necklaces, to the making of which glass, enamelled
earthenware, and every attractive stone within reach, contributed?
[447]

§ 7. Textiles.

Among people who looked upon nudity as shameful, the robe


and its decorations were of no little importance. Both in Chaldæa
and Assyria it was carried to a great pitch of luxury by the noble and
wealthy. They were not content with fine tissues, with those delicate
and snowy muslins for which the kings of Persia and their wives
were, in later years, to ransack the bazaars of Babylon.[448] They
required their stuffs to be embroidered with rich and graceful
ornament, in which brilliant colour and elegant design should go
hand in hand.[449] The Chaldæans were the first to set this example,
as we know from the most ancient cylinders, from the Tello
monuments and from the stele of Merodach-idin-akhi (Fig. 233). But
it would seem that the Assyrians soon left their teachers behind, and
in any case the bas-reliefs enable us to become far better
acquainted with the costume of the northern people than with that of
their southern neighbours. Helped and tempted by the facilities of a
material that offered but a very slight resistance to his chisel, the
Assyrian sculptor amused himself now by producing a faithful copy
of the royal robes in every detail of their patient embroidery, now by
imitating in the broad thresholds, the intersecting lines, the stars and
garlands woven by the nimble shuttle in the soft substance of the
carpets with which the floors of every divan were covered.
The images on the royal robes must have been entirely
embroidered (Figs. 253 and 254). They cannot have been metal
cuirasses engraved with the point, as we might at the first glance be
tempted to think. In the relief there is no salience suggesting the
attachment of any foreign substance. Neither have we any reason to
believe that work of such intricate delicacy could be carried out in
metal. It was by the needle and on a woollen surface that these
graceful images were built up.
The skill of the Babylonian embroiderers was famous until the
last days of antiquity.[450] During the Roman period their works were
paid for by their weight in gold.[451] Even now the women of every
eastern village cover materials often coarse enough in themselves
with charming works of the same kind. They decorate thus their long
hempen chemises, their aprons and jackets, their scarves, and the
small napkins that are used sometimes as towels and sometimes to
lay on the floor about the low tables on which their food is served.
It is likely that the Assyrian process was embroidery in its strictest
sense. In the modern bazaars of Turkey and Persia table-covers of
applied work may be bought, in which hundreds of little pieces of
cloth have been used to make up a pattern of many colours; but in
the sculptured embroideries the surfaces are cut up by numerous
lines which could hardly have been produced, in the original,
otherwise than by the needle. This, however, is a minor question.
Our attention must be directed to the composition of the pictures and
to the taste which inspired and regulated their arrangement.
Fig. 253.—Embroidery on the upper part of the
king’s mantle; from Layard.
Fig. 254.—Embroidery upon a royal mantle; from Layard.
Fig. 255.—Embroidered pectoral; from Layard.
The principle of the decoration as a whole is almost identical with
that of the bronze platters. A central motive is surrounded by parallel
bands of ornaments in which groups of figures are symmetrically
disposed. Outside this again are narrow borders composed of forms
borrowed chiefly from the vegetable kingdom, such as conventional
flowers and buds, palmettes, and rosettes. The figures are strongly
religious in character; here we find winged genii, like those about the
palace doors, adoring the sacred tree, floating in space, or playing
with lions (see Fig. 253); in another corner the king himself is
introduced, standing between two monitory genii, or in act of homage
to the winged disk and mystic palm.
All these images are skilfully arranged, in compartments bounded
by gracefully curving lines. The designer has understood how to
cover his surface without crowding or confusion, and has shown a
power of invention and a delicate taste that can hardly be surpassed
by any other product of Mesopotamian art. There is no trace of the
heaviness to which we alluded in our section on jewelry.

Fig. 256.—Detail of embroidery; from Layard.


Fig. 257.—Detail of embroidery; from Layard.
Fig. 258.—Detail of embroidery;
from Layard.
The impression made by these compositions as a whole is
intensified when we examine their separate details. The variety of
the combinations employed is very striking. Sometimes the ornament
is entirely linear and vegetable in its origin. Look, for instance, at the
kind of square brooch worn on his breast by one of the winged genii
at Nimroud (Fig. 255). The sacred tree surrounded by a square
frame of rosettes and wavy lines occupies the centre, the palmette
throws out its wide fronds at one end. In another example we find a
human-headed lion, mitred and bearded, struggling with an eagle-
headed genius. On the right of our woodcut (Fig. 256) a bud or
flower like that of the silene inflata, hangs over the band of
embroidery; it is a pendent from the necklace. Sometimes we find
real combined with fictitious animals. In Fig. 257 two griffins have

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