Note 298 — Chapter II · SCULPTURE. (continued 3)

Ménant, Essai sur les Pierres gravées de l’Asie occidentale, Introduction, p. 19. In the British Museum M. Ménant 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-Chaldéens 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 exposées 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 (Ménant, 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.