OF the smaller relics of Babylonian and Assyrian antiquity there are none so numerous or so pregnant with interest as the engraved seals which kings and commoners of all periods alike possessed. The universality of their usage in later times is attested by Herodotus (I, 195), who tells us that in his day everyone in Babylonia carried a seal as well as a walking-stick, while abundant evidence of their general use in early times is afforded by the vast quantity of seals discovered in the course of the excavations.

The seal, important as it is in our own day, was an even more indispensable convenience of civilized society in primitive times, and was probably one of the first inventions that owed their origins directly to the mutual recognition of private rights of ownership. The purpose which it first of all served was of course the same as that which it serves with us to-day, though the sealing of the mud plaster covering of a jar of wine, of the string of a registered parcel, or the flap of a paper envelope, in no way prevents the thief from robbing the contents in any of these cases, yet it renders it impossible for such a theft to be perpetrated without detection, detection not indeed necessarily of the thief, but of the deed itself, and that after all is the essential preliminary to the successful establishment of any suit at law. Its use in primitive times was, however, far more extensive, for, as Newberry well puts it,130 “what locks and keys are to us, seals were to the people of the Old World.” If a man left his house for the day, and no occupant remained to keep watch, he probably secured himself and his goods so far as possible by sticking plasters of mud on the door and impressing his seal upon them in such a manner as to make it impossible to enter the house without breaking the seal; at all events Dr. Ward informs us131 that he saw in a Khan at Hillah, near Babylon, a door of a room containing goods belonging to a merchant who was away from home, carefully sealed up with pats of clay on which the impress of the merchant’s seal had been duly fixed, thereby rendering access to the house dependent on the bursting of the seals, and in the conservative East the customs of to-day are not merely those of yesterday, but generally represent the traditional usage of hundreds, sometimes thousands of years. A few such sealed pats of clay, some of which formed stoppers of jars, have been found, but the principal object for which the cylinder-seal was used, was the authentication of deeds, documents and letters.

The seals employed by the Babylonians and Assyrians differed from those generally employed elsewhere, in shape as well as in the motifs of the engravings. They assumed the form of cylinders or rollers, through the centre of which a single or double piece of wire was inserted, the wire being generally made of copper, though sometimes of gold and silver, while later on, iron also occurs. At one end the wire was clamped, while at the other it was twisted into a loop (cf. Fig. 48, A) through which a piece of thread or twine was passed by means of which the seal could be slung round the owner’s neck, or carried on his wrist, the wire at the same time facilitating the process of rolling the cylinder on the moist clay.

The tablet (K. 382) seen in Fig. 48, B, is a good example of a clay tablet bearing the impress of a cylinder-seal. The tablet, which measures 4-1/8 inches by 2-5/8 inches, contains the terms of a contract. The impression itself shows us a mythological four-winged being, such as is seen so often on Assyrian bas-reliefs. In either hand he holds a bird by the leg. The cylinders by the side of the tablet are reproduced to actual size; A, C, and D (Brit. Mus. Nos. 89319, 89538, 101974) illustrate the divergence of size which the Babylonian cylinder-seals exhibit, (C) being an unusually large specimen, and (D) an exceptionally small example, the vast majority of seals occupying an intermediate position between these two extremes; in (A) we have a cylinder in which the metal handle is still preserved.

The existence of the same kind of seal in Egypt as early as the time of the first dynasty has been used as an argument in support of the theory that the primitive civilizations of Egypt and Babylonia were to some extent interdependent. It is true that cylinder-seals could only be of use where clay was employed as a writing-material, but there is no direct evidence that the practice of using clay for either writing or building purposes was borrowed from Babylonia, while the similarity in shape of early Babylonian and Egyptian mace-heads is an even more uncertain argument whereon to base an otherwise unsupported theory.

The materials used in the manufacture of cylinder-seals were many and various. The earliest known material is shell, but the most frequently occurring is hÆmatite. Among other materials used may be mentioned serpentine, marble, quartz crystal, chalcedony, carnelian, agate, jasper, syenite, jade, obsidian, onyx, limestone, schist, mother of emerald, and amethyst. A few flint cylinders have been recovered, but this material was evidently but seldom employed, while glass is of even rarer occurrence, and metal is unknown. The process by which the required device was engraved upon the cylinder depended upon the material of which the latter was made. The softer materials employed in earlier times, such as shell, marble or serpentine, were possibly engraved with tools made of flint, but the harder stones would require an implement made of some more stubborn material. Ward is of opinion that either emery or a certain stone called corundum was used for the purpose. The latter was employed at a very early period in Egypt and in later times in Greece. The earliest seals appear to have been entirely made by hand, the practice of drilling by means of a bowstring not being introduced till a later period. Within the confines of a single chapter it will of course be quite impossible to review all the innumerable types of cylinder-seals used by the Babylonians and Assyrians of different ages, and we can therefore only single out one or two examples of some of the more interesting classes as being fairly representative of the periods to which they belong.

The most ancient seals are generally made of white marble, or shell, and sometimes also of lapis lazuli and serpentine. It is impossible to assign a definite or even an approximate date to the vast majority of cylinder-seals recovered from the ruined mounds of Mesopotamia, as most of them belonged to individuals otherwise unknown, but fortunately a number of seals have been brought to light which belong either to kings or officials whose date can be independently computed, and which therefore give us an illustration of the proficiency to which the art of engraving had been brought at the particular period in which the owners of the seals lived, and a comparison of the style of art exhibited on the otherwise undateable seals with those whose age has thus been fixed, makes it possible for us to assign them with some degree of certainty to the period to which they belong in the history of the art of seal-engraving.

The interest of these small relics of the past is of course centred in the scenes depicted, which are very various, and which throw a flood of light upon the mythology, and elucidate many legendary uncertainties in the theological and religious conceptions of the Babylonians and Assyrians. Where a comparison with royal or official cylinder-seals of certain date is not feasible, the similarity between the style of art exhibited on the particular seal in question and that to which some sculptures of ancient patesis or kings conform afford us the necessary clue, while lastly, when both of these tests fail, if the seal bears an inscription, the character of the writing often enables us to place it in its right class.

One of the earliest Babylonian rulers whose seals have been recovered is Lugal-anda, patesi or priest-king of Lagash, and the immediate predecessor of Urukagina, the last king of the first dynasty of Lagash. An impression of one of the seals of Lugal-anda is reproduced in Fig. 49. Part of the seal is divided into two registers, in the uppermost of which we see the eagle with outspread wings clutching two lions, which together formed the heraldic arms of the city of Lagash. It is noticeable that the lions are treated with the same freedom as on the little block of Dudu (cf. Fig. 27) the contemporary of Entemena, one of Lugal-anda’s predecessors. Here as in the little block referred to, the lions are treated in a very spirited manner, and in contrast to earlier representations of the device, the lions are gnawing at the wings of their captivator. On the right of the city-arms there is an inscription written in very archaic characters. In the lower register we have two human-headed bulls, a stag, a bearded hero resembling Izdubar, or Gilgamesh as portrayed on other early cylinder-seals, and another figure who is passing his left arm round the stag’s neck and holding one of the fore-paws of the stag in his right hand. Unlike the bearded hero, who is similarly engaged in grasping the fore-paw of one of the human-headed bulls, he is clean-shaven, while his hair is represented by four tongue-shaped projections. On the left of the two registers there is the body and the lower part of the face of a large human-headed bull, while on the right are two lions, one of whom is seen burying his teeth into the neck of a composite creature, half man and half beast. It will be at once obvious that this cylinder-seal of the early Sumerian period, presupposes an indefinite period of artistic development in the practice of engraving.

In the very early seals the scene is of course far less composite and the workmanship infinitely more crude; we frequently find the same eagle-motif, but the animals which he claws are usually goats, bulls, or ibexes, as seen in Fig. 50, the lions only being introduced at a later date. Here we have a very primitive seal in which we see the eagle grasping two ibexes by the horns, while a hero is grasping the same two animals by the leg. Hero, eagle and ibexes are represented in a highly archaic and crude fashion, though in the symmetrically outspread wings of the eagle we seem to have a foreshadowing of the conventionalism of later days. The ibexes have their hind quarters raised in the air, while the eagle grasps them by the horns, the seat of their strength actually as well as symbolically. The seal itself is both thicker and shorter than usual, and has only one register.

But the simplicity which usually characterizes the cylinder-seals of the earliest period sometimes gives place to an altogether overwhelming complexity, as in the seal represented in Fig. 51. The two registers into which the field of the cylinder is divided encroach on each other in so inordinate a manner that it requires a careful inspection to see that there are two registers. The eagle is the central figure in the upper register, his claws reaching out on the one hand towards a lion attacked by a vulture, on the other towards a lion who appears to be attacking a reversed ibex. Below, a huntsman occupies the commanding position; he is clad in the short Sumerian skirt, the fringe of which is archaically represented by a series of tags, which recall the fragmentary sculptures of the prehistoric period of Lagash (cf. Fig. 25, C), and he is surrounded by a crowd of lions and antelopes. This seal is clearly the offspring of a more developed art than that reproduced in Fig. 50, but this notwithstanding, it is essentially archaic in character, and belongs to the early Sumerian period.

One of the most popular designs for cylinder seals in early Sumerian times is that of one or two seated deities, sometimes accompanied by the eagle. A very archaic example of this class is reproduced in Fig. 52. The two seated beings are certainly gods, in spite of their being clean shaven and having the same faintly suggested features as the figure in the middle. It will be observed that the fringe of the short Sumerian skirt of one of the deities and also of the worshipper is represented by a series of pointed tags as in Fig. 51.

In Fig. 53 we again have two seated gods, but this time they have a large bowl between them, from which they seem to be drinking by means of tubes. They are apparently seated on camp-stools, while before one of them is a sacred tree. Their dress consists in a long robe, which covers one arm while leaving the other exposed and free, and reaches down to the ankle, the bottom of it being decorated with a fringe, and the body of it by a branch-shaped design.

Sometimes, again, we have a representation of a god seated in a boat as seen in Fig. 54. It is impossible to say who the god is, though his divine character is clearly demonstrated by the horned cap. From the emergence of branches, or what may be flames of fire and streams of water from his shoulders, it seems a fair assumption on the part of Dr. Ward that the god is none other than Shamash, the sun-god. The boat is being propelled through the river or canal by two oarsmen, who, together with the god, are standing in the boat. The two men have different head-gears, but all three are clad solely in the old Sumerian skirt. Reeds to the height of the occupants of the boat are growing in the water, and a very primitively executed wild-boar is haunting this quaintly depicted marsh. Both bow and stern of the boat are similarly shaped, and are curved upwards to a great height. If the god be Shamash, it seems probable that here, as elsewhere, he is represented as traversing the heavens in his bark.

Another series of archaic cylinder-seals is concerned with the heroic feats of Gilgamesh and Ea-bani, two mythological beings whose conquests over bulls and lions won for them a reputation and a fame which lasted right down to the latter days of Assyrian history. We have an impression of one of the most primitive of the Gilgamesh seals in Fig. 55. The hero stands between two bisons, one of which is being attacked by a lion and the other by a leopard, while the inhuman and semi-bestial Ea-bani is attacking the lion from behind. The occurrence of the spotted leopard is specially noteworthy, as it hardly ever occurs on later cylinders, while the presence of bisons which only haunt the highlands is an additional archaic touch, and is a further indication of the antiquity of this seal, which must have been engraved at a time when the recollection of his mountain origin was still fresh in the Sumerian’s mind, for in the later period of Babylonian art, the bison gives place to the swamp-loving buffalo. All the details of the seal betray the same primitive characteristics, and, as usual, there is no inscription.

We have already seen one royal seal-impression, and we have in Fig. 56 the seal of a later but far more famous Babylonian king, Shar-GÂni-sharri, king of Agade. In the reign of Shar-GÂni-sharri and his son NarÂm-Sin, Babylonian art reached her climax,—the crudeness of the earlier work had passed away, while there is as yet no trace of the conventionalism of later days, and freedom is the keynote of her success. The scene is an oft-recurring one: a hero who to all appearance is Gilgamesh is kneeling on one knee, and holds in his hands a vase, from the overflowing streams of which the buffalo seeks to quench his thirst. The seal is engraved with vigour and precision, the boldness of which is only exceeded by the natural effect produced. Both hero and animal are treated with a freedom and fidelity seldom if ever surpassed in Oriental art, while the strength of the picture lies in the artist’s genius, and is in no way dependent on the subject, which does not lend itself to anything particularly striking or effective.

In Fig. 57 we have the impression of another seal in which Gilgamesh and Ea-bani are the prominent actors. Ea-bani is engaged with a lion, but his comrade is fighting with a massive horned-buffalo. This seal belongs to the time of Shar-GÂni-sharri and NarÂm-Sin, kings of Agade, its date being fixed alike by the style of art and the purport of the brief inscription, which contains the name of the owner, Bingani-Sharali, king of Agade and the son of NarÂm-Sin. This seal, now in the British Museum, was discovered at Cyprus.132 The movements of Gilgamesh and Ea-bani are portrayed in a life-like manner, though the action of Ea-bani’s left arm is somewhat awkward and ungraceful. The same may be said of the overpowered and ill-designed buffalo, and also of the antelope beneath the inscription, but the lion is decidedly conventional, a fact possibly due to the ubiquity of his presence on the cylinder-seals and monuments of the earliest Sumerian times, from which one may perhaps infer that the perpetual reproduction of the same animal, has in time worn off the freshness with which the artist at first approached his subject. But the Gilgamesh seals probably reach their climax in that reproduced in Fig. 58. The hero is engaged in mortal combat with a lion, whom he is endeavouring to throw. Gilgamesh is represented full-face and with the various peculiarities which appear to have been proper to his unique person—the long, curly beard, the equally long hair parted in the centre with the three characteristic ringlets on either side, and the body entirely naked but for a narrow girdle. The action is concentrated and focussed into a point—there are no conflicting persons, animals, or even objects in the scene to draw away or divide the attention of the spectator, and the animation with which the subject is treated is ample justification for the isolated and exclusive position that it here holds.

Another group of Babylonian seals belonging to different periods show the dramatic conquest of the deity over the winged dragon. One of the earliest, best preserved, and most instructive examples of these, is a shell cylinder preserved in the Metropolitan Museum, New York, also published by Ward133 (cf. Fig. 59). The dragon has the wings and hind part of an eagle, while his fore-legs and head are those of a lion; between the wings upon his back stands a nude goddess brandishing lightning in either hand. The dragon is harnessed to a four-wheeled chariot, the front part of which is higher than the back, while a god of disproportionate size is driving the chariot and flourishing a whip in his left hand. The lion-headed dragon is apparently vomiting, and his action recalls that of one of the expiring lions on the bas-reliefs of Ashur-bani-pal. It may, however, be meant to represent the ejection of venom, though if this is the case it has not been very happily rendered. Before this group of supernaturals, stands the worshipper who is in the act of presenting an offering of uncertain character upon an altar.

But sometimes gods and heroes are found side by side on the same seal, as is the case on the seal reproduced in Fig. 60. The horn-capped and seated deity is Shamash, the Sun-god, from whose shoulders rays of light proceed, while from his lap issue streams of living water. Fig. 60. Fig. 60. The god is clad in a long mantle hung from the right shoulder, while the left arm and shoulder are left bare, and he is seated on a three or four-legged stool. Before him is a crescent, and behind him is a star mounted on a kind of stand, while in his presence a typical scene is being enacted; two heroes are laying low a lion—one of them has his left foot on the lion’s head and is grasping the tail of the upturned beast with his left hand, while he is about to drive a knife into its rear quarters with his right. The other hero is holding himself in readiness with a little hatchet; his head-gear differs from that of his comrade in being spiked, but in all other respects the two are alike. This seal is made of pink marble, and is now preserved in the Metropolitan Museum, New York. One class of deities was intimately associated with the serpent, and a god’s body is sometimes represented as being formed of a Fig. 61. Fig. 61. serpent coil, as is the case in the cylinder-seal reproduced in Fig. 61. The god in this case is sitting opposite to a goddess who is likewise seated, and holds a shallow cup in her hand; above her arm is the crescent, and behind her is the mounted star as in Fig. 60. The star as here represented is identical with the early Sumerian ideogram and determinative for god, and, doubtless has that signification here. The goddess has a long robe reaching down to the ankles, but her left arm and shoulder are free, as in the case of the god in Fig. 60. Her seat consists in a kind of camp-stool, a form of support which the genius of the Babylonian seems to have invented at a very early date. The serpent-bodied and human-bearded god holds a branch in his hand, the precise significance of which is not very clear, but the prominent place occupied by the sacred tree in Babylonian and Assyrian mythology justifies the assumption that here as elsewhere it has some symbolical meaning. Behind the god is a five-barred gate, which must be intended to suggest the difficulty of access to the divine presence, or else the necessity of an introduction thereto. Unless the gate were opened either by the god himself, or by some intermediary being of divine or quasi-divine character, the worshipper was presumably unable to gain admittance.

As we have already seen, the cylinder-seals frequently present us with the pictorial aspect of a legend already known from the literature. One of the most famous legends of the Babylonians was that which told of Etana’s courageous but bootless attempt to ascend to heaven on the wings of an eagle. Higher and higher soared the eagle, till at last heaven’s portals were in sight, but the goal, for some reason not indicated, was never reached, and both Etana and his living aeroplane were dashed to the ground. We have an illustration of this bold flight on some of the seal-cylinders in the British Museum, an impression of one of which is given in Fig. 62. Etana is seated on the eagle, who is bearing his burden aloft in the sight of an admiring and upward-gazing dog. On the right a shepherd clad in a long garment—his right shoulder being exposed as usual—is driving a horned sheep and two goats towards a primitive looking fence: both Etana and the shepherd wear beards and long hair, while the latter carries a staff in his left hand. In the background is a naked but likewise bearded individual, who is seated beside a large amphora with the contents of which he appears to be entirely preoccupied; he is presumably performing culinary operations of some kind.

The scene on other Babylonian seals is that of a god attacking a humanly conceived enemy; this class comprises cylinder-seals belonging to the archaic period as Fig. 62. Fig. 62. well as those of later date. The impression of one such archaic seal is reproduced in Fig. 63. In the centre we have the god, mounted on a bull, his left hand raised, his right hand grasping a weapon or a whip; he is trampling on a prostrate and suppliant foe, whose figure is sketched in the roughest and crudest conceivable manner. As Ward says, this seal must date from the time when the horse was unknown, or at all events not used in battle. On the right side of the impression, the god is engaged on foot with an enemy who appears to be armed with a weapon shaped like a boomerang, such as that with which the Fig. 63. Fig. 63. god Nin-girsu is armed on the Vulture Stele. The god holds in his right hand a weapon of uncertain character, while between the two and facing the god is a diminutive worshipper whose hand is raised—doubtless in token of submission—towards his divine lord. On the left the god is stabbing a human-headed bull with a dagger, while from the god’s back, rays, or what appear to be rays, are emitted.

By the time of Gudea, patesi of Lagash, and Ur-Engur and Dungi, kings of Ur, we find a marked change in the artistic merits of the seal-engraver’s products. Speaking generally, they are executed with far greater care, and with a wealth of precision entirely absent in most of the earlier intaglios, but what they gain in care and detailed attention, they lose in the conventionalism to which that care and attention have given birth. We have here no rough sketch of a born artist, but the elaborated painting of a copyist. In Fig. 64 we have an impression of one of Gudea’s cylinder-seals. The god, who is probably Nin-girsu or Ea,134 is seated on a box-like throne: he holds a vase in either hand, from each of which issue two streams which pour their contents into three vases resting on the ground, these in turn becoming themselves the generators of living springs of water. Fig. 64. Fig. 64. Facing the god is an intermediary deity who is supporting one of the vases with his left hand, and leading the worshipper, probably Gudea himself, with his right. From the shoulders of the intermediary emanate two serpents, the head of the near one exactly resembling the strange reptiles on the vase of the same patesi (cf. Fig. 90). The identification of the intermediary deity with Ningish-zida is rendered highly probable by Gudea’s allusion to this god in one of his inscriptions, where in his description of the manner in which he was introduced to his supreme god, Nin-girsu, he expressly states that “Nin-gish-zi-da, his god, held him by the hand.”

Fig. 65.