Page:A History of Art in Chaldæa & Assyria Vol 2.djvu/302

270 have already had to draw attention to the merit that distinmiishes not a few of the animals in these cylinders. 1 This merit is to be found in almost every composition in which the artist has been content to make use of natural types. It is only when he compiles impossible monsters that the forms become awkward and confused. An instance of this may be found in a cylinder found by M. de Sarzec at Tello, on which winged quadrupeds seizing and devouring gazelles are portrayed (Fig. 149). Too many figures are brought together in the narrow space and the result is confusion. We are not, however, disposed to accept this cylinder as belonging to the first years of Chaldaean art. It is of veined agate, a material that was not among the earliest employed ; but there are many more on which similar scenes are engraved, and which, by FlG. 148. — Chaldsean cylinder. Black marble. French National Library. their execution, may be safely placed among the most ancient products of art. One of the earliest types invented by the imaginations of these people was that of the strange and chaotic beings who, according to the traditions collected by Berosus, lived upon the earth before the creation of man, creatures in which the forms and limbs after- wards separated and distinguished by nature, were mixed up as if by accident. The text in question is of the very greatest inter- est and value. It proves that the composite figures of which Chaldsean art was so fond were not a simple caprice of the artists who made them, but were suggested by a cosmic theory of which they formed, at it were, a plastic embodiment and illustration.

"There was a time," says Berosus, "when all was water and darkness, in which monstrous animals were spontaneously engendered : men with two wings, and some with four ; with two faces, and two heads, the one male and the other female, and with


 * r1 See above, page 144, and Fig. 70.