28 SEAL CYLINDERS OF WESTERN ASIA. 
12. Yet another cylinder impression on a tablet belonging to me and containing 
the name of Dungi, fig. 52. Here two female figures present the worshiper to the 
deity. 
= In fig. 52a we have the design on a tablet dated in the reign of Gimil-Sin, of 
Ur. Here the type is a usual one, except that a lion is on the god’s seat and another 
lion lifts a standard behind him. For further discussion of this seal see fig. 3032. 
14. Another impression on a tablet (fig. 52) shows still the same design, so 
characteristic of the period. The long inscription dedicates the cylinder to the king 
Gimil-Sin, who may be represented as a god on the cylinders, as Heuzey suggests; 
for the sign of divinity precedes his name as is not unusual on these cylinders from 
Agade and Ur. It reads: “Gimil-Sin, mighty King, King of Ur, King of the four 
: é : ’ 
regions, Arad-Nannar, the supreme viceroy, son of Ur-Dunpauddu, his servant.”’ 

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_—_— 
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DATED TABLETS WITH CYLINDER IMPRESSIONS. 
Yet another conclusive test of style appears in the multitude of tablets impressed 
with a seal which bears no royal name, but in which there is a date given in the 
inscription on the tablet itself. Most business tablets are dated with the day and 
month and the year of the reigning king. ‘The impression of the seal is necessarily 
contemporaneous with the writing, and we thus have a sure index of the style of 
seal in use at the date given. While thousands of these tablets have been pub- 
lished, unfortunately in very few cases are the figures on the seals given, so that 
we have not any considerable body of them accessible to scholars. It is much to be 
desired that some scholar with free access to European and American collections 
may give us drawings of seals impressed on dated tablets, not wholly for the purpose 
of providing fresh evidence of the period of the seals, but still more because we shall 
thus be supplied with a considerable number of new types and designs not represented 
upon the cylinders that are gathered in the public cabinets. No scholar except 
Ménant has entered this field and those collected by him* are mostly of the later 


* “Empreintes de Cylindres Assyro-Chaldéens relevées sur les contrats d’intérét privé du Musée Britannique.” 
