ARCHAIC CYLINDERS: A DEITY IN A BOAT. 41 
Unfortunately, the four following cylinders that show us the human-headed 
boat are, with one exception, badly worn. ‘Three of them are of shell, and all very 
archaic. ‘They make it plain that the boat was represented at times as having the 
human form at the prow, as if it were half man, rather than having a figure-head of 
the human shape. An illustration of this is seen in fig. 105, where it is not easy to 
see what the boat carries, if boat it be and not rather a monster with the tail of a fish 
or serpent. Indeed itis both. While it is a boat and carries passengers, as we shall 
see on another cylinder, fig. 108, there apparently a seated figure, the living boat is yet 
a composite creature possibly related to the man-fish, Oannes according to Heuzey, 
which occasionally appears in cylinders of a later agtedl He seems in fig. 105 to be 
A Se NS Lip 
eg fae 
iN E 
pursuing a bull, eA with a whip or very likely using an oar. May we not, 
however, suppose that we have here a representation of the monster Apsu (Apason), 
who represented the original chaos in the primitive form of the myth, under which 
the contest was between Ea and Apsu (with Mummu), a myth which, transferred 
to Nippur, became a contest of Enlil and Tiamat, and later, at Babylon, of Marduk 
and Tiamat. This change consists in making the original male Apsu into a female 
Tiamat. The lower register shows a man of an archaic type and three goats. 
Two similar examples of such a composite man-boat or man-fish we find in 
the de Clercq collection. In fig. 106 the upper register gives us the eagle of Lagash 
seizing two crouched animals, bulls or ibexes, while the lower register shows the 
boat with a human prow, within which is at least one figure. ‘The human portion 
iy 
: 
_ 



holds in his hands a three-forked branch, which might perhaps be considered the 
trident of a sea-god. A similar three-forked object is seen in the hand of the god 
on the Dungi cylinder (fig. 31). The animal he may be pursuing is lost in the 
disintegration of the material, although a human figure is preserved. Yet another 
design much like it is seen in fig. 107. We have here the same human-prowed 
boat or man-fish, although it is not certain what passengers are carried. But we 
have the same three-forked object carried in the creature’s hand and the animal 
