his head, his sword at his side, and an attendant holding the royal parasol over him.  It is not quite clear whether he himself does more than witness the chase.  The game is in the main pursued and brought to the ground by horsemen without royal insignia, and is then passed over into a further compartment—­the extreme one towards the left, where it is properly arranged and placed upon camels for conveyance to the royal palace.  During the whole proceeding a band of twenty-six musicians, some of whom occupy an elevated platform, delights with a “concord of sweet sounds” the assembled sportsmen.

[Illustration:  PLATE XLIII.]

On the opposite, or left-hand, side of the recess, is represented a boar-hunt. [PLATE XLIV.] Here again, elephants, twelve in number, drive the game into an enclosure without exit.  Within this space nearly a hundred boars and pigs may be counted.  The ground being marshy, the monarch occupies a boat in the centre, and from this transfixes the game with his arrows.  No one else takes part in the sport, unless it be the riders on a troop of five elephants, represented in the lower middle portion of the tablet.  When the pigs fall, they are carried into a second enclosure, that on the right, where they are upturned, disembowelled, and placed across the backs of elephants, which convey them to the abode of the monarch.  Once more, the scene is enlivened by music.  Two bands of harpers occupy boats on either side of that which carries the king, while another harper sits with him in the boat from which he delivers his arrows.  In the water about the boats are seen reeds, ducks, and numerous fishes.  The oars by which the boats are propelled have a singular resemblance to those which are represented in some of the earliest Assyrian sculptures.  Two other features must also be noticed.  Near the top of the tablet, towards the left, five figures standing in a boat seem to be clapping their hands in order to drive the pigs towards the monarch; while in the right centre of the picture there is another boat, more highly ornamented than the rest, in which we seem to have a second representation of the king, differing from the first only in the fact that his arrow has flown, and that he is in the act of taking another arrow from an attendant In this second representation the king’s head is surrounded by a nimbus or “glory.”  Altogether there are in this tablet more than seventy-five human and nearly 150 animal forms.  In the other, the human forms are about seventy, and the animal ones about a hundred.

[Illustration:  PLATE XLIV.]

The merit of the two reliefs above described, which would require to be engraved on a large scale, in order that justice should be done to them, consists in the spirit and truth of the animal forms, elephants, camels, stags, boars, horses, and in the life and movement of the whole picture.  The rush of the pigs, the bounds of the stags and hinds, the heavy march of the elephants, the ungainly movements of the