CHAPTER XIX. 
DEITIES OF AGRICULTURE.* 
While the agricultural cylinders do not belong to the most primitive periods, 
they are yet most of them early, going back to the period of the linear inscriptions, 
although usually they show no inscriptions at all. They are generally of the large 
thick style of most of those which show the contests of Gilgamesh. Some of them 
show purely agricultural scenes, with no suggestion of any deity, which is unusual 
in the art of so religious a people as were the early Chaldeans. ‘These cylinders 
give us usually a plowing scene or oxen in the cultivated grain; while others show 
us gods of agriculture decked with grain, to whom is presented a plow. One of 
the former sort appears in fig. 369. Here three men are plowing with one ox, or 
a yoke of oxen, of which only one could be drawn by the unskilful artist. It is 


369 Py ae nas ae Laie daamanianSTo 
an ox, and not a buffalo. One of the three men holds the plow firmly down by 
the two handles; a second presses down the point of the plow with a stick, while 
a third drives the ox with a whip. How the beam of the plow is connected with 
the ox is not clear, whether by a yoke or some attachment to the horns. The 
men are all clad in simple short garments that will not interfere with their work. 
Two birds are seen flying about, evidently on the lookout for worms or grubs. 
The inscription is linear and archaic. Another of probably the same period, and 
extremely well drawn, is shown in fig. 370, where we see simply two oxen standing 
in the grain, which is here distinctly not wheat or barley, the two older varieties 
of the nobler grains, but millet or durra, the coarser food of the poorer classes in 
the East to-day. It is a grain seldom seen in Europe or America, much like our 
broom-corn. 

* For an earlier discussion of these cylinders see Ward, Am. Journal of Arch., 11, pp. 261-6, 1886, where five of this 
class are figured. 
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