[Illustration:  PLATE 131]

In several instances we find bands of three musicians.  In one case all three play the lyre.  The musicians here are certainly captives, whom the Assyrians have borne off front their own country.  It has been thought that their physiognomy is Jewish, and that the lyre which they bear in their hands may represent that “kind of harp” which the children of the later captivity hung up upon the willows when they wept by the rivers of Babylon.  There are no sufficient grounds, however, for this identification.  The lyre may be pronounced foreign, since it is unlike any other specimen; but its ornamentation with an animal head is sufficient to show that it is not Jewish.  And the Jewish kinnor was rather a harp than a lyre, and had certainly more than four strings.  Still, the employment of captives as musicians is interesting, though we cannot say that the captives are Jews.  It shows us that the Assyrians, like the later Babylonians, were in the habit of “requiring” music from their prisoners, who, when transported into a “strange land,” had to entertain their masters with their native melodies.

Another band of three exhibits to us a harper, a player on the lyre, and a player on the double pipe.  A third shows a harper, a player on the lyre, and a musician whose instrument is uncertain.  In this latter case it is quite possible that there may originally have been more musicians than three, for the sculpture is imperfect, terminating in the middle of a figure.

Bands of four performers are about as common as bands of three.  On an obelisk belonging to the time of Asshur-izir-pal we see a band composed of two cymbal-players and two performers on the lyre.  A slab of Sennacherib’s exhibits four harpers arranged in two pairs, all playing with the plectrum on the antique harp.  Another of the same date, which is incomplete, shows us a tambourine-player, a cymbal-player, a player on the nondescript instrument which has been called a sort of rattle, and another whose instrument cannot be distinguished.  In a sculpture of a later period, which is represented above, we see a band of four, composed of a tambourine-player, two players on two different sorts of lyres, and a cymbal-player.

It is not often that we find representations of bands containing more than four performers.  On the sculptures hitherto discovered there seem to be only three instances where this number was exceeded.  A bas-relief of Sennacherib’s showed five players, of whom two had tambourines; two, harps of the antique pattern; and one, cymbals.  Another, belonging to the time of his grandson, exhibited a band of seven, three of whom played upon harps of the later fashion, two on the double pipe, one on the guitar, and one on the long drum with the conical bottom.  Finally, we have the remarkable scene represented in the illustration, a work of the sane date, where no fewer than twenty-six performers are seen uniting their efforts.  Of