ASSYRIAN MONUMENTS. 123 



the head of date foliage, the whole being supported 

 by the usual horns, and represented in a much more 

 conventional form than many other date trees. What, 

 however, seems to carry more conviction than anything 

 else, that the ' anthemion ' was derived from the date 

 head and horns, is a tree on a cylinder shown in 

 fig. 54^, from Lajard's ' Culte Mithra.' There is this 

 tree, a figure of an adult holding a boy by the hand, 

 and a player on a musical instrument, the whole much 

 better engraved than most others. The tree cannot be 

 meant for any other than a date tree, of which so 

 many are represented realistically on cylinders, such as 

 those shown in fig. 53. It consists of a head of seven 

 leaves, supported by two horns, two bunches of dates 

 lower down, and two other horns at the base, with a 

 bunch of dates on each side — a conventional thing, but 

 too near the real to be mistaken. Its character may be 

 due to degradation, owing to hardness of the cylinder 

 stone. 



When once we become convinced that horns in 

 general, and the horns of the bull, the ram, the ibex, 

 and the antelope in particular, must have played a 

 prominent part in the superstitions and myths of the 

 Assyrians, and that they must have used them, as 

 they do now in the South of Europe, affixed to objects 

 and places from which they wished to keep off the 

 injuries of any evil-eyed individual, we also see that 



