CHAPTER XXXVI. 
ASSYRIAN CYLINDERS: BEL AND THE DRAGON. 
The conflict between Bel and the dragon is not found on the older Babylonian 
monuments. It first appears in the Assyrian period. In the earliest Chaldean art 
we have the dragon driven by a god in his chariot, or with the god standing on his 
back, but not the representation of the conflict itself. It is possible that the story 
of the conflict which led to the subjugation of the dragon had not yet been developed 
and that accordingly the mastery of the god of light and order over the representa- 
tives of darkness and disorder had not yet been figured in art. We have no 
representation of the sort from the earlier Babylonian period, unless we are to 
find it in fig. 563, which bears the name of Dungi, King of Ur, and is taken from 
an impression on a tablet. See fig. 51, also figs. 187a and b. Here, however, it is a 
figure like Gilgamesh, duplicated for symmetry, which is in conflict with a dragon. 





EKA 
WAYS” 
L\ 
43 






565 
The texts we now have of the fight between Bel Marduk and Tiamat are quite late, 
even in the Assyrian history, belonging to the time of Assurbanipal of the seventh 
century; but the essence of the story must have been considerably earlier, although 
originating in Babylonia. Indeed, it is distinctly two centuries earlier in Assyrian 
art, inasmuch as the remarkable representation of the fight between Bel and the 
dragon on two slabs (fig. 564), in the British Museum, comes from the temple of 
Ninib built by Assurnazirpal in Nimrid, where was an earlier capital of Assyria. 
This standard representation, more or less varied, was often repeated on Assyrian 
seals and in later times was very much modified, as we shall see. 
The fight between Bel and the dragon is an early cosmogonic story of the con- 
flict between order and disorder; of the creation of the world out of monstrous 
chaos. Originally, if one can judge from indications gathered by L. W. King in 
his “Seven Tablets of Creation,” it was another god of an older time, either Ea or 
197 
