6 PEOCEEDINGS OF THE NATIONAL MUSEUM ' vol. 69 



agriculture are more frequently represented, while scenes from war 

 and the chase are comparatively numerous and are almost exclusively 

 confined to Assyrian and Persian products. From the seals we ob- 

 tain an insight into the manner in which the peoples of the ancient 

 Near East represented their gods and goddesses. The rich symbolism 

 of the cult also finds illustration in the various designs, and the 

 current myths and popular tales are revealed to us in a most graphic 

 manner. They thus supply an invaluable source of information as 

 to the earliest religious ideas and history of the Babylonians and 

 of the peoples that drew their culture from them. Many of the 

 subjects engraved on seals meet us again on the sculptured walls of 

 the temples and palaces of Babylonia and Assyria, and it may be 

 that the seal impressions suggested the idea of decoration on bas- 

 reliefs; on the other hand, the repertory of the sculptor may not 

 have been without influence on the seal engraver. 



A large number of cylinder seals of the earliest periods show a 

 contest with wild beasts — lions, bulls, ibexes, gazelles, antelopes, 

 combining symbolism with realism. No two are exactly alike.- These 

 scenes are closely allied with or derived from the episode of the ex- 

 ploits of the great hero, Gilgamesh (formerly called Gishtubar) 

 and his companion, Enkidu (formerly Eabani). Gilgamesh is the 

 central figure of the great Babylonian epic Avhich has been termed 

 the " Nimrod Epic," because the hero has been considered to have 

 been the prototype of Nimrod the " mighty hunter before the Lord " 

 mentioned in Genesis x, 10. He is described in the Epic as being 

 two-thirds god and one-third man, a strong and valiant hero, ready 

 for a fight, while his friend, Enkidu, is depicted with the upper part 

 of a man and the lower of a bull, with a horned headgear, indicating 

 his divine nature. These two heroes frequently appear in combat 

 with wild animals, Gilgamesh usually engaging a wild bull, Enkidu, 

 a lion. This episode of the epic is depicted on the seals in numerous 

 variations. The battle scenes are sometimes merely adjuncts, to 

 fill out space, to a religious or ritual scene, representing a suppliant 

 being led up by a priest or by his tutelary deity to one of the great 

 gods sitting on a throne (pis. 1 and 2).^^ 



Another theme, not found on early Babylonian cylinders, but 

 frequent in the Assyrian period, is the fight between the god Marduk 



" O. Weber, Daemouenbeschwoerung, p. 35, surmises that the scenes of the conflict of a 

 god or liero with some monster liad an anuilctic significance, inasmuch as they deal with 

 the overcoming of a hostile power, and so indicating that the patron or tutelary deity 

 was always ready to fight against the attacks of a hostile demon. Also the scenes repre- 

 senting a worshiper led to a god may be those in which a priest leads a sick person to 

 the deity to free him from the demon who caused the disease. And in his Altorientalische 

 Siegelbilder, p. 79, he would ascribe to these conflicts a cosmic import ; the origin of the 

 ■world, he says, is conceived by the oriental as a battle between the gods and primitive 

 forces which assume the form of animals, so that the conqueror of the animal represents 

 the triumph of the creator of the world over the chaos. 



