Abandonne des corps les éléments charnels.
Et, pur, du genre humain ne garde que le moule,
N’en daigne consacrer que les traits éternels!
[293] Herodotus, i. 195. Strabo says the same thing, but in a passage (xvi. i. 20), in which he borrows from Herodotus without acknowledgment.
[294] There are fine series of these seals, or cylinders, both in the Louvre and in the Cabinet des Antiques of the French National Library. But the collection of the British Museum is the richest of all. It possesses about 660 examples, against the 500 of the Cabinet des Antiquités, and the 300 of the Louvre. The cabinet at the Hague has 150. A single French collector, M. de Clercq, possesses more than 400, most of them in very fine condition and of great interest. He is preparing to publish a descriptive catalogue of his treasures, accompanied by photogravure facsimiles of every cylinder. According to M. Ménant, the total number of these cylinders now in European galleries can fall very little short of three thousand.
[295] M. Fr. Lenormant explains this talismanic value of the cylinders very clearly in his Étude sur la Signification des Sujets de quelques Cylindres babyloniens et assyriens (Gazette archéologique, 1879, p. 249).
[296] We have derived most of the information contained in this chapter from the works of M. Ménant, who, for many years past has given more study to these cylinders than any other savant. We have found his Essai sur les Pierres gravées de l’Asie occidentale of special value, but we have also made use of the various reports he has published in the Archives des Missions, relating to the foreign collections visited by him, and of his papers read before the Académie des Inscriptions. We have, moreover, consulted the following works, not, we hope, without profit: De Gobineau, Catalogue d’une Collection d’Intailles asiatiques (Revue archéologique, new series, vol. xxvii.); E. Soldi, Les Cylindres babyloniens, leur Usage et leur Classification (ibid. vol. xxviii.); and Les Arts méconnus, by the same author (1 vol. 8vo. Leroux, 1881), chapter i., Les Camées et les Pierres gravées.
[297] The thickest cylinders are found among those that appear the most ancient. I measured one, in the Cabinet des Antiquités, that was barely less than an inch in diameter. On the other hand, there are some very small ones in existence.
[298] 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.
[299] 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).