10 SEAL CYLINDERS OF WESTERN ASIA. 
was used to cut circles, as in the coarse rope pattern, or held at an angle to make 
a crescent, whether of the moon or of a dog’s tail. The work with these tools 
is sometimes extremely coarse, so that it is almost impossible to recognize the 
design, and sometimes so fine that it seems like free-hand work. Specimens of 
the work of these tools may be seen in figs. 23, 24, 25. In figs. 24, 25 we see 
the work of all three tools. The round dots are made with the burr, or drill; 
the straight lines, deeper and wider in the middle, are made with the disk; and 
the circles, and the crescents deepest and thickest in the middle, are made with the 
tube. It may be that at the latest period the tools were revolved by attachment 
to a wheel, like the potter’s wheel, which was worked by the foot. Such a use of 
a tool rapidly revolved by the wheel may be what Pliny means by the “terebrarum 
ferva,” which he says in his “Natural History,” Lxxvi, LXXXviI, was of chief 
advantage in gem-cutting.* And yet it is not clear that anything like the potter’s 
wheel was used to revolve the tools, at least in the period of the cylinders. Even 
at the present time in the East the engraver’s work of the finest kind, such as the 
most delicate Arabic lettering, is done with the simple bowstring, and the most 
minute disks are attached to the end of the tool. Some of the finest Assyrian 
cylinders seem to show the use of such minute disks, for the straight lines do not 
protrude at all beyond their border, nor are they thickest in the middle. Indeed, 
at times the parallel straight lines in the wings grow broader toward the lower end 
and could not have been made by a large thick disk. Very minute dots and points 
were made with a burr, and very short lines with the edge of a very small disk and 
not with the free hand. 
In earlier times a copper tool would be used, with a flake of corundum fast- 
ened in it, and later an iron tool, which in still-later classical times, but not during 
the Assyrian period, would have attached to it a flake of diamond instead of corun- 
dum. This sort of tool is what the prophet Jeremiah has in mind when he says 
(17:1): “The sin of Judah is written with a pen of iron with a point of emery;f 
it is graven upon the table of their heart.”” “The Greeks, and equally the Egyptians 
and the Assyrians, had no knowledge of the diamond until the Indian conquests 
of Alexander. We learn from Petrie (“Pyramids and Temples of Gizeh,”’ p. 173) 
that the Egyptians did all their fine stone-cutting with emery, the coarser opaque 
form of corundum, of which the sapphire and the ruby are the finer forms. Emery 
sand was found in abundance in Ethiopia. The Greeks obtained corundum from 
Naxos and Cyprus; but Theophrastus says that the best emery was brought from 
Armenia, which was accessible to the Babylonians, and indeed they might very 
likely have found sources of corundum in Elam or Arabia. 



* For a discussion of the tools used in gem engraving by the ancients, see C. W. King, “ Precious Stones and Metals,” 
p- 50; “ Gems and Semi-precious Stones,” p. 192; also Soldi, “ Les Cylindres Babyloniens,” p. 15. 
} The Hebrew word shamir, emery, is mistranslated “diamond ” in both the Authorized and Revised Versions. 
