64 SEAL CYLINDERS OF WESTERN ASIA. 
informs his visitor how he can gain the same blessing. He is first cured of his 
disease by bathing in the healing waters; but when, after a long journey, he had 
found and plucked the plant which gives immortality, it was stolen from him by 
a serpent. 
While there can be little doubt that George Smith was right when, in his “Chal- 
dean Genesis,”’ he found Gilgamesh, Eabani, and the monstrous bull figured on 
the olden seals, it may be a question whether the monstrous bull belonged to the 
earlier form of the myth. He may have had his origin, as above suggested, in the 
rude drawing of the bull with which the huntsman contended, the head in front 
view and with such a semi-human face as the unskilled artist could not avoid making. 

For the time of Sargon [., who ruled at Agade, the modern mound of Anbar 
(Ward, “Sippara,”’ Hebraica, January, 1886), we can find the type of Gilgamesh, 
as his features were finally developed, by the magnificent cylinder (fig. 156) in the 
de Clercq collection, of which it is the prime treasure, as it is of all the monuments 
of the early Babylonian art. To be sure, it may be questioned whether this certainly 
represents Gilgamesh, and this subject will come under discussion when we con- 
sider the spouting vase (Chapter xxxvil); nevertheless the drawing is precisely that 
of the hero as he appears on other seals. Here he is on his knees and holds a vase 

from which issue two streams that provide drink for a buffalo. The whole cylinder 
is magnificently cut in a hard siliceous stone and is a piece of art worthy of an early 
Greek period. It suggests what might have been the development of Chaldean 
art if it had not fallen under the deadening influence of utter conventionalism, 
which began with exaggerated bilateral symmetry and ended with mechanical 
figures of gods which never changed. Here we have the face in front view, which 
became the standard type, and the three curls and the full curled beard, such as is 
repeated over and over again to the time of the later Assyrian kings. 
This cylinder is of prime importance not solely for its art, but because it fixes 
the time of the culmination of the art of gem engraving at the period of Sargon L., 
