CHAPTER III. 
CLASSIFICATION OF CYLINDERS. 
The prime classification of the Oriental cylinders must be chiefly geographical 
and national, although with this would partly coincide a chronological classification. 
1. First would come, soon to be dismissed as of comparatively little conse- 
quence or influence, the Egyptian cylinders, but valuable for the cartouches of 
kings. “They were local and peculiar, unrelated generally to those of other coun- 
tries, and were superseded in Egypt by the use of the scarab. They appear in the 
dawn of [:gyptian history, and were then fairly common, and they are occasionally 
met with in an archaizing way as late as the twenty-second dynasty. The fact 
that both Egypt and Chaldea in their earliest period used the cylinder seal is one 
of the evidences on which scholars rely to prove that the two civilizations had 
somewhere a common origin. As Egyptian cylinders have been so fully treated 
by Egyptologists, they are not included in this volume. 
2. The next class we may call the Chaldean, to indicate the country and the 
successive kingdoms of early Chaldea, as Babylon itself did not emerge into history 
until many centuries after the art of cutting seals had been invented. The earlier 
kingdoms in Babylonia were rather Chaldean than Babylonian, the term Chaldea 
being used to designate mainly the southern portion of Babylonia. The kingdoms 
that arose there before the supremacy of Babylon was achieved by Hammurabi 
might more properly be called either Sumerian or Semitic, or, if we prefer, Elamite 
or Arabian; but the term Babylonian has come to include the whole succession of 
kingdoms which, from the dawn of history to the conquest of Cyrus over Nabonidus, 
or even until the capture of Babylon by Alexander and the substitution of a West- 
ern for an Eastern civilization, held possession of the southern valley of the Tigris 
and Euphrates. Nor is it possible, before the time of the Persian conquest under 
Cyrus, to separate the art of Elam from that of Babylonia. There were many 
wars between the two, with alternate conquests. The lower valleys of the Tigris 
and those of the Ulai and Choaspes form a single terrane separated by no natural 
barrier. In early times Chaldea and Elam were one country. 
3. The third division of the subject will be concerned with Assyrian cylinders, 
and it includes all those produced under the influence of the Assyrian Empire. 
Here, while the Babylonian influence was immense and while the ruling element 
of the population was Semitic, from Babylonia there came in, coincident with a 
new chief god Assur, new motives in art and religion—whether original or gathered 
from the surrounding Mesopotamian or Syrian tribes or those further north in 
the highlands of Asia Minor, we can not always tell. The general type continued 
long after the fall of Nineveh, and cylinders will be called Assyrian that were prob- 
ably made and used in Southern Babylonia in the latest periods of the use of the 
cylinder. 
4. A fourth chief division will be the Syro-Hittite, which can not be sharply 
separated into subdivisions, Hittite, Syrian, Phenician, and Mycenzan. It is often 
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