ASSYRIAN CYLINDERS: THE TREE OF LIFE. 231 
gather the fruit, not to fertilize it. We may then conclude that the object of the pail 
or basket (the occasional weaving would allow either) is to hold the fruit gathered 
from the tree. This is fortunately one of the few cylinders of which we know the 
provenance. It was dug up in making a well in the region of Sulduz, a plain south 
of the Urumia plain, between Lake Urumia and the Kurdish Mountains. The cylin- 
der shown in fig. 714 was found at the same time, and the two came into the pos- 
session of the Rev. R. M. Labaree, a missionary in Urumia. 
To these two seals should be added the ornamentation 
on a Phenician bowl (fig. 708). Here two figures standing 
by the sacred tree hold each the crux ansata in one hand, 
while the other seizes a flower from the tree. 
There is one bas-relief (fig. 709) which has been adduced 
to support the idea that this is a case of fertilization of the 
pistillate by the staminate blossoms of the date-palm. Here the cone is crowded 
into a palmette on a tree of life rather than into a floral cluster. It is evident that 
the crowded slab did not allow room for the cone without its pressing into the tree. 
I do not venture to include in this class of cylinders, in which fruit is plucked 
from the tree of life, the remarkable cylinder already described in fig. 389, where two 
women are standing one each side of a naturalistic palm and are plucking its fruit, 
one handing it to a third woman, who already has a bunch in her hand. This is an 
old Babylonian cylinder, not Assyrian, and it must be otherwise conceived and 
interpreted. But I fnd a memorandum among my papers, made in Paris, that on a 
fragment of the de Morgan objects from Susa there is a figure, probably half-human, 
grasping with both hands the stem of the branch of the sacred tree. The branch 
seems twisted and its end curves the other way from the other branches. He appears 
to be breaking off the branch for the fruit. De Morgan puts the date of this at “ 3000 
to 2000 B. C.,” but it probably comes nearer 1000 B.C. Unfortunately, I have 
not preserved any reference which allows me to give a figure of it. 
But why should the fruit be gathered? I once showed a very large and unusual 
piece of old Persian embroidery to Rabbi Baba, the most learned of the Nestor- 
ians of Urumia, who has prepared a 
careful and complete dictionary of 
the Nestorian Syriac dialect. It rep- 
resented an enormous tree full of 
branches, and the branches were full 
of extraordinary conventional fruit. I 
asked him the meaning of it, and he 
replied that it typified the fortunes of 
WS man. It was then a tree of fortune. 
als Rabbi Baba told me that on a Mosul 
——=- rug of mine, having a design much 
like the Assyrian sacred tree, with its seven pairs of branches and their fruit of differ- 
ent colors, the tree represented the fortunes of life, the lower fruit light-green, mean- 
ing the ignorance of childhood, red the stirring of the blood, black trouble, ete. Such 
I take it is this sacred tree of the Assyrians and their neighbors. The fruits or flowers 
on the tree represent the life and fortunes which the possessor may enjoy. By the 
side of the tree may stand the owner in worship. It is not his part to break off the 


