CHAPTER XXXII. 
THICK CYLINDERS WITH SHRINES AND ANIMALS. 
There is a class of Babylonian cylinders which stands so separate from Baby- 
lonian art that it is difficult to assign its place in a scheme of classification. They 
include the largest cylinders, 30 to 40 mm. in length and nearly as thick, although 
some are smaller, but of the same relative dimensions. ‘The large cylinders are 
usually made of a hard, white marble, and are engraved in a coarse way with figures 
of animals, ibexes, etc., and what can best be described as a shrine or doorway. 
Ménant, in his “Glyptique Orientale,” 1, p. 51, gives a drawing of a cylinder of 
this type and assigns to it the extremest antiquity; and in his description of the 
“Collection de Clercq” he puts cylinders of this type at the very front of his “Cata- 
logue,’ as representing the most archaic style. Heuzey follows Ménant, and in 
his magnificent “Découvertes en Chaldée par Ernest de Sarzec” (pp. 276, 277, 
plate xxx, fig. 1) he describes a fine cylinder of this type as “belonging to a very 
ancient epoch of Chaldean glyptic art”; and he offers this cylinder, here again 
confessedly following Ménant, as an example of the “very primitive use of the 
bouterolle,” or revolving burr, the terebra of the ancients. 
It is characteristic of all these cylinders that they are deeply worked in the 
joints and body of the animals or human figures with the bouterolle. ‘This fact 
would raise a question as to their very high antiquity, as we have no other examples 
of cylinders thus engraved before the times of the Kassite dynasty, when the use 
of these mechanical contrivances seems to have been introduced from Egypt by 
way of Syria and the Hittites. To be sure Heuzey (p. 276) refers to a bas-relief 
of the date of Ur-Nina (plate 1 drs, fig. 2) as showing the use of the bouterolle in 
very ancient times; but that is again a unique case in archaic bas-reliefs; and the 
round holes under the arms and under the chair can, I think, be otherwise explained 
than by the assumption that the bouterolle was in regular use. Certainly if used in 
marble it ought to have been used in hard stones; but no instance of the sort is 
known. Of course the vertical holes through the cylinders and other objects must 
have been made by a process of rolling, but not with the bouterolle as used later 
in seals. 
The material of these cylinders is peculiar; usually, in the case of the larger 
ones, of pure white marble, and in the case of the smaller ones, of a pink or red 
marble. The hard, crystalline, white marble was very little used in the archaic 
cylinders, and the pink marble not at all. We do have a number of pearly-white 
aragonite cylinders that go back to a very early period, but that is an allotropic 
form of calcium carbonate, differing from marble, and is readily distinguished from 
it. These are heavy, thick, coarse cylinders, all deeply bored with round holes 
and quite unlike any of the recognized forms of antique art. 
An excellent example of this type is found in the de Clercq collection (fig. 484). 
In this case, which is unusual, the shrine, or doorway, is double. We may conceive 
of it as two folding doors. ‘There are two ibexes over two bulls. They could hardly 
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