CHAPTER XXIV. 
THE GODDESS AND CHILD. 
The design of one person held in another’s lap is not unfamiliar in Eastern 
art. In Egypt we see occasionally a king represented with his wife in his lap. We 
also see Isis thus represented holding her son Horus. In a cylinder of the Hittite 
age (fig. 401) we see what is probably a god holding a goddess (?) in his lap. It 
appears to follow an Egyptian design. 
That so few of the early designs on the cylinders remind one of the Egyptian 
figured mythology seems strange, considering the evidence that comes from the use 
of the cylinder itself in the earlier history of Egypt, that there was, at their origins, 
a connection between the two civilizations. Scholars have been adventurous enough 
to find evidence in various other directions of such primitive relationship. But, 






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when we turn to the art of the earlier period of Babylonia, and indeed any of the 
art that preceded the Egyptian invasion of Asia in the eighteenth dynasty, we 
shall with difficulty find anything that directly reminds us of Egypt, unless it be the 
design of the mother and child. To be sure this is a very rare design, so rare that 
not one has ever passed through my hands for the great collection of the Metro- 
politan Museum. Only four such cylinders are known, belonging to four different 
collections, those of the British Museum, the Louvre, the de Clercq Collection, and 
the J. Pierpont Morgan Library. 
That in the British Museum is of shell and of archaic style (fig. 402). The 
mother holds the child in her lap, the child’s face turned towards her. There are 
three other figures, all female, of which the first beckons with one hand the two 
that follow, while with the other hand she points to the mother and child. Her 
face is turned towards the approaching worshipers, which might suggest that at 
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