CHAPTER VIII. 
THE WINGED DRAGON SUBDUED. 
It is by a bare conventionality that the name of dragon is applied to the com- 
posite creature which, in the early Chaldean art, a god or goddess either rides or 
drives. Perhaps the most instructive and characteristic example is to be seen in 
fig. 127, from a shell cylinder of great age and happily quite well preserved. Here 
we see the “dragon” harnessed to a four-wheeled chariot on which a deity rides, 
while a nude goddess stands on the dragon’s back, between its wings. Before them 
stands a worshiper presenting an offering for the altar. The dragon has the head 
and forelegs of a lion, the wings and the hind legs of an eagle, and lifts a broad, 
feathered tail. He is, then, half lion and half eagle. He differs from the lion-headed 
“eagle of Lagash” in that he is a quadruped and not a biped. The shape of the 
chariot, higher in front than behind, strikingly resembles that of the chariot in which 
a goddess rides in certain Syrian cylinders (figs. 976-983). The dragon holds his 
head down in a dejected attitude; his tongue is forked, but it looks more as if he 
were vomiting, though this is hardly the meaning. It is more likely meant to repre- 
sent the ejection of venom. Nergal is described in a hymn, translated by Pinches 

(P. S. B. A., xxvii, p. 214), as “Dragon supreme pouring venom.” But in 
Gudea, Cylinder A, 26; 24, 25, as translated by Thureau-Dangin, “Sumerischen 
und Akkadischen Ko6nigsinschriften,” p. 119, we read, “a monster, a dragon, with 
tongue hanging out.’’ The god in the chariot brandishes a whip and the nude 
goddess carries a sheaf of weapons, apparently representing lightnings, in each 
hand. 
A figure in the Berlin Museum (fig. 128) has a similar chariot, but only a single 
deity. It is again a four-wheeled chariot drawn by the winged dragon, but the god 
has no weapons, simply holds the reins; and we do not see the usual tongue of 
the dragon. In both chariots the wheels have no spokes, but seem to be solid blocks. 
We can not but ask what was the animal which was actually driven with such a 
wagon, whether the ass or the ox. 
The British Museum has one of a different type, but equally giving us the 
dragon (fig. 129), of green serpentine. Here the god rides on the back of the monster, 
while a worshiper stands behind him. In front is a bull which Gilgamesh (profile) 
is stabbing with a dirk. Above stands a goddess with extended arms, from which 
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