264 SEAL CYLINDERS OF WESTERN ASIA. 
photographs of them, I believe, were taken by myself during the Wolfe Expedition 
to Babylonia. One of them (fig. 789) is reproduced in the American Journal of 
Archeology, first series, Iv, plate 4. The drawing is much softer and finer than 
the usual Hittite or even Assyrian sculptures, and it doubtless belongs to a very 
late period of the Hittite art. The goddess, resembling Ishtar, appears to hold a 
vase in one hand and a basket, or pail, in the other. Still more in the Babylonian 
style, yet frankly modified in the style of the art of a region further west, is the 
figure of the naked Ishtar of Zirbanit (fig. 790), on a slab of alabaster, which the 
men who opened the mound at Jerabis left cruelly exposed to the elements, so that 
it was nearly ruined and falling to pieces, with cracks all through it, when I saw it 
in 1884. It is a shame that this and the other goddess just figured and one or two 
other slabs with inscriptions and figures were not carefully removed. ‘The goddess 
holds her breasts instead of simply placing her hands before her, as in the Babylonian 
figures, and she is adorned with the wings from the shoulders which the Hittites 
so much affected.* 

788 790 
A stele from Babylon, evidently carried there from some Hittite region, inscribed 
with Hittite characters, which gives us a figure of thé storm-god Teshub (fig. 791), is 
almost a duplicate of another found in Senjirli. The god, in high boots, tipped up at 
the toes, wears a short close tunic and a peculiar high hat with a bulb at the top. 
About the tunic is a wide girdle, which holds a stout dagger. In one uplifted hand 
he carries a thunderbolt and in the other an ax or haminer. The god is bearded, 
and a long lock or queue falls down behind. 
These are, I believe, all the representations of Hittite deities found in their 
bas-reliefs that require consideration. We now pass to their cylinder-seals. 
The difficulty of assigning a seal to one or another of the races and peoples 
who occupied Asia Minor and Syria during the period from 2000 B. C. to 600 B. C. 
is even greater than that of assigning a local bas-relief. While the Hittite Empire 
and art were predominant at one time or another over all the region from Smyrna 
to Lake Van, and from Nineveh to Sidon, yet the succession of races and rulers has 
been so various and has been so little disentangled by historical scholars that it is 
hard’ - possible to tell what elements of art or mythology were contributed by each 
people severally; and in the case of seals we do not know where they were made. 
This was the period of the Phenicians, the Syrians, the Hebrews, the Mycenzean 
Greeks, and other races struggling for control or existence. They were none of 
them independent of the influences of the two powerful empires of the Nile and 
the Euphrates. ‘Their art and their religion were so permeated with the elements 

* See also London Graphic, December 11, 1880. 
