Page:A History of Art in Chaldæa & Assyria Vol 2.djvu/287

Gems. 255 It is rare to find an impression as sharp and complete as that on the tablet from Kouyundjik, which we borrow from Layard (Fig. 133). In the great majority of cases signatories were content with using only one side of their seals, usually the side on which their names were engraved. Sometimes when they wished to transfer the whole of their cylinder to the clay, they did so by several partial and successive pressures. 1 The imperfect stamp with which the Chaldaeans were satisfied could easily be produced without the help of such a complicated contrivance as that shown in our Fig, 132. Nothing more was necessary than to lay the cylinder upon the soft clay and press it with the thumb and fore-finger. The hole through its centre was used not to receive an armature upon which it might turn, but merely for suspending it to some part of the dress or person. In most cases it must have been hung by a simple cord passed round the neck. Now and then, however, the remains of a metal mount have been found in place, but this is never shaped like that shown above. It is a bronze stem solidly attached to the cylinder, and with a ring at its upper extremity (Fig. 134). 2 Cylinders are also found with a kind of ring at one end cut in the material itself (Fig. 135). How were these cylinders carried ? They must have been attached to the person or dress, both for the sake of the pro- tecting image with which most of them were engraved, and for convenience and readiness in use as seals. In Chaldaea the 1 Menant, Essai sur les Pierres gravées de l'Asie occidentale, Introduction, p. 19. In the British Museum M. Menant made a careful examination of a tablet on which these successive impressions from a cylinder allowed the whole of the scene with which it was engraved to be studied {Rapport sur les Cylindres Assyro-Chaldèens du Musée britannique, p. 95, in the Archives des Missions scientifiques, 1879). Even as late as 1854, a fine connoisseur like De Longperier could think that the cylinders were purely amulets and were never used as seals {Notice des Antiquités assyriennes exposes dans les Galeries du Louvre, 3rd edition, p. 87). No such assertion could be made now. Hundreds of impressions are to be found on the terra-cotta tablets from Mesopotamia, and moreover, we find this formula in the inscription borne by many of the cylinders: "Seal (kunuku) of so-and-so, son of so-and-so." In Assyrian the word kunuku meant, as the word seal with us, both the instrument used and the impression it gave (Menant, Essai, introduction, p. 17). Some of these impressions are figured in Layard, Discoveries, chapters vi and xxv. See also his Monuments, second series, plate 69. 2 The Louvre possesses a cylinder mounted in this fashion. It was found by Place in the foundations of the Khorsabad palace. See De Longperier, Notice, p. 98, (No. 469 in the Catalogue).