Page:The Industrial Arts of India.djvu/280

 of this breast ornament, are great clusters of dates, highly conventionalised* These cones are sometimes replaced by pomegranates, and, strange to say, the tree of life represented on modern Yarkand rugs is always a pomegranate tree* The cone figured by Canon Rawlinson, voh ii, p* 212, as a pine- apple is clearly a bunch of dates bursting from its spathe, This cone appears on late Italian and early Renaissance 'brocades [25] crowned, with flames rising from the crown, and alternating with oak leaves, from which long-stalked acorns are represented issuing forth like the cones from the trunk and head of the date Horn *

The original Horn was the Sanskrit Soma, Sarcostemma viminah, vel brevis tigma, a leafless [the rudimentary leaves are scarcely visible] scandent asclepiad, with its flowers collected in umbels, fan -like en silhouette f a native of the southern slopes of the Cash- mere Valley and Hindu Kush, the fermented juice of which was the first intoxicant of the Aryan race* It is still used as an intoxicant by the Brahmans, and the succulent stalks are chewed by weary wayfarers to allay their thirst* It is admirably represented on the Assyrian sculptures [26]; and in R awl in son’s Anamt Monarchies, vol* ii, p. 236, it is figured twined very characteristically [27], although highly conventionally, about the date tree, forming the Tree of Life/* Asherah, or a grove/' sacred to Assbur, the Supreme Deity of the Assyrians, the Lord and Giver of life. Canon Rawlinson notices the resemblance of the limn head to the Greek honeysuckle ornament, and adds, “ I suspect that the so-called * flower J honeysuckle) was in reality a representation of the head of a palm-tree*” The accompanying Greek ornament [2S] from the vase of Nicosthenes is obviously derived from the Assyrian form of the tree of life* Possibly the date was substituted for the original