ARCHAIC CYLINDERS: CONTESTS WITH WILD BEASTS. 45 
is so easily worn or decomposed that not many of them have come down to us in 
good condition through these six thousand years. One of those which have thus 
suffered by the dissolving away of the calcareous material is the aragonite cylinder 
shown in fig. 117. Here both registers display such contests of animals and hunters, 
a number of the ibexes being reversed. These reversed ibexes or goats are apt to 
be very puzzling on soft cylinders that are badly worn so as to show little more than 
eae 
116 





the cross lines. An unusual Pace aha: Fig RRO in the Berlin Museum, fig. 118, admirably 
preserved, either of undecayed shell or white marble (it is difficult to distinguish 
them always on inspection), has, as is occasionally the case, the two registers not 
separated by lines, but encroaching on each other. It is also cut very deep. In 
the upper register we have the eagle of Lagash with his claws directed on one side 
toward a prostrate bull, on whose body a vulture is feeding, and on the other toward 
iw z= 
a lion which attacks a reversed ibex. In the lower register the hunter is in the midst 
of a number of lions and antelopes. The vacant spaces in the design we observe 
carefully filled with a scorpion and a star. The representation of the vulture feeding 
on a dead body is one that is found in the earlier sculptures from Tello. 
Another yet more unusual, but unfortunately ill-preserved, cylinder is shown 
in fig. 119. The drawing is decidedly archaic and the registers, as in the last case, 
are not separated but encroach on each other. The lower register shows the fight- 
ing of men and animals in the usual way. What is remarkable is that the upper 
register gives us not only a space for an effaced inscription, but also a four-wheeled 
