20 SEAL CYLINDERS OF WESTERN ASIA. 
impossible to distinguish them. Practically one common civilization prevailed all 
over western Asia Minor and Syria to the border of the Arabian Desert and the 
Mediterranean Sea. 
5. A fifth class must be allowed to the Persian cylinders of the Achzmenian 
period. Their motives and their style of engraving are quite distinct from those 
both of Babylonia and Assyria. They had a short period, but are perfectly distinct. 
6. We must give a separate class to those cylinders which we may call Cypriote 
because hitherto found chiefly in Cyprus. ‘They are of a late period, and no more 
include the early purely Babylonian cylinders occasionally found in Cyprus than 
they would an early Egyptian cylinder found there. 
These six classes will include the great mass of cylinders. But there will 
remain a considerable number whose geographical or national origin we can not 
assign, as well as some exceptional ones that show quite other influences. Some 

few are dominated by the influences of an early Greek art, and may even belong 
to a period long subsequent to Alexander. Others, but very few, seem distinctly 
Arabian, or may be called Sabean. Then there are those which would appear, 
from their material and their subjects, to have come from some of the independent 
kingdoms or tribes of hill people to the north or east of Assyria, but it would be 
hazardous to conjecture more definitely. There are rude geometrical cylinders 
and those with indefinite lines or figures, which might have sprung up anywhere 
among an uncultivated people and which deserve no assignment of place and 
hardly a recognition in any classification. 
Under all these principal divisions there will be subdivisions, depending mainly 
on the subjects or gods figured on the cylinders, and also in part on the successive 
changes in style or subject in the course of centuries. It is to these divisions and 
subdivisions, classified as far as possible, that the succeeding chapters are devoted. 
The evidence as to the place to which a cylinder belongs within such a system 
of classification has to do both with the general division to which it must be assigned 
