ASSYRIAN MONUMENTS. 



55 



Had they known of this, a man climbing up a date tree 

 to collect the juice from the cut made at the base of 

 the foliage would have been too tempting a picture for 

 an Assyrian artist to leave unrecorded on the monu- 

 ments. Moreover, the annual mutilations and subsequent 

 disfigurement of the tniiik of the date tree would have 

 been shown somewhere ; while all their date trees, and 

 there are many of them on the monuments, have a 

 straight, clean, and natural stem. We should not, how- 

 ever, place too much weight on such an omission, for 

 they must have climbed trees to collect their dates, and 

 this climbing seems nowhere shown, although other 

 curious performances are common. 



A third form of sacred tree is the pomegranate tree, 

 shown in fig. 24, decorated with horns, reduced in this case 

 to a conventional symbol at the top and bottom of the 

 columnar stem. All the sacred trees of 

 the Assyrian monuments and cylinders 

 appear to be the commonest trees of 

 the land, such as they must have 

 utilized every day, either for their 

 fruit, their wood, or other qualities. 

 This one cannot be mistaken for any- 



FiG. 24. — From Assyrian 



thing but a pomegranate tree. It is Cylinder, Brit. Mus. 



Perrot and Chipiez, 



indigenous in those regions, and on ^°'' "' P' ^'^^' 



the sculptures it is largely represented on stony ground. 



Why they should have raised it to the rank of a sacred 



