52 SEAL CYLINDERS OF WESTERN ASIA. 
and Zirbanit, his wife, but that they have to do with the earlier deities of a differ- 
ent name but a similar réle, either the elder Enlil of Nippur and his wife Belit, 
who, however, is confused with both Ishtar and Zirbanit, or even Ea and his wife 
Damkina. The representations of the deities with their arms do not very well 
harmonize with the usual description of Ea and Damkina, but we may recall that 
Damkina was also identified or confused with Belit, and that it was the rise of 
Nippur and Babylon that consigned Ea back to the watery domain; and that orig- 
inally he was a fighting deity, the warrior of the gods. Some of these cylinders 
may go back to the time of the supremacy of Ea, and yet we must admit that, 
excluding Marduk as too late, the attributions better agree with those allowed to 
Enlil than those allowed to Ea. It is more likely to be Ea who rides on a sea monster 
in fig. 106, which may represent the earliest form of the myth. 
The dragon itself is very peculiar. He, or she, is not fighting or fleeing, but 
is evidently subdued. His whole attitude is that of an unwilling victim of superior 
might. The head hangs low and the tongue protrudes, unless he is represented 
as vomiting. M. Heuzey suggests (“Catalogue des Antiq. Chald.,” p. 404) that 
the dragon is belching flames. I am not certain that such is the case. The dragon 
is referred to in the texts as spitting poison (Bollenriicher, ““Gebete und Hymnen 
an Nergal,” p. 19); and on Gudea’s cylinder with his “tongue hanging out.” We 
seem to have here a version of the myth varying from that which has come down 
to us in the literary sources, one in which the dragon, male or female, Apsu or 
Tiamat, or Tiamat and Kingu, was not slain, but was subdued and driven in 
triumph. ‘The attitude of the dragon forbids us to suppose that the god is riding 
to conflict, before his victory. As to the question that arises in reference to the 
chariot in figs. 127, 128, and the animal which might draw a chariot at this early 
time, before the horse would appear to have been known in southern Babylonia, 
the reader is referred to figs. 108, 119. he Assyrian cylinders which show the 
conflict of Bel and the Dragon (Chapter xxxv1) show a smaller dragon as compan- 
ion, which might be thought of as Kingu. But these older cylinders give two of 
equal size, and one, indeed, fig. 1294, offers us six dragons, as if the god and goddess 
had conquered a host of enemies. It was a myth of later times in the East that 
dragons drew the chariot of the sun. (See “Dialogue of Timothy and Aquila,” 
“Anecdota Oxoniensia,” also M. R. James in London Guardian, March 15, 1899.) 
I have reserved the later Assyrian representations of the fight between Bel Mar- 
duk and the dragon for consideration in Chapter xxxvi. With the dragon as thus 
represented in the earliest and the later times, should also be compared the figures 
of a dragon fighting and apparently conquering a man, as seen in Chapter xXxIx. 
For the earlier discussions of this design the reader is referred to Proc. Am. Or. 
Soc., 1889; Am. Journal of Archeology, 1890, p. 291; 1b1d., 1898, p. 160; Hebraica, 
xiv, 2; Am. Journal Semitic Studies, January, 1898. 
It may be noted that in the study of the dragon we must not be confused by 
the Omoroka of the Greek writers. Prof. J. H. Wright has shown in Zeitsch. fiir 
Assyr., X, pp. 71-74, that O0MOPOKA is simply ‘0 MOP4OKA, t.e., Marduk. 
In Zeitschrift fiir Assyriologie, October, 1904, p. 133, [hureau-Dangin says 
that Lakhamu is an early name for the dragon. 
