Fig. 172.—Glass goblet and jug.
Several transparent glass goblets profusely decorated with polished concave facets lay near the rhyton. At the same Seleucid-Parthian level there were numerous fragments of transparent colourless or pale-blue glass vessels, among them finely-formed handles of oinochoae and amphorae moulded while the material was still soft (Fig. [172]). The earlier glass is invariably opaque and multi-coloured. The usual form is the small alabastron either pointed or rounded at the base. The ornamentation consists of a web of multi-coloured glass lines encircling the vase, which is made of a rough gritty frit. The lines while still hot are broken first from above and then from below, thus forming lines roughly S-shaped (Fig. [173]). These vases certainly date back here to the same early period as in Egypt (cf. Kisa, Glas im Altertum, i. p. 9, “about 1500 B.C.”). We need not necessarily regard them as imports, however, for the older the civilisations the more their products resemble one another. Thus the pottery vases of Nagada resemble those of Surgul. From the time of the Sargonids onwards, the importation of Egyptian glass and other wares may first be observed without any doubt, such as apotropaic eyes, weird scaraboids, and the like. Decorative glass beads made like the alabastrons just described, and which are general in Babylon in early times, date back as far as the fourth millennium in Fara.
Fig. 173.—Ancient glass.
Fig. 174.—Earthenware bell.
A number of utensils and toys were found, especially in Merkes. Several pottery utensils of remarkable form, which must have been employed for some business purpose unknown to us, are still inexplicable. A bell of burnt clay that occurs rather frequently is worthy of notice (Fig. [174]). It looks like a pointed beaker, but it is always perforated at the base, and near the hole it has two projections, which are often fashioned like animals’ heads and must have served for suspension. A string passed through the hole, with a clapper of unburnt clay attached to it. It was only when we found one of these clappers still bearing the print of the string inside a bell that we could distinguish the bells as such, and not as pierced beakers; it is, of course, only rarely that the clappers are found in place.
Fig. 175.—Woman on a beaker or omphalos.
At the top of an upturned beaker a female (?) figure is often seated (Fig. [175]). Behind the seat there is a hole through which the smoke of a pastille concealed within the beaker could ascend and surround the figure with mystic vapour. Three panther (?) heads on a stake, widening out in the shape of a foot, as they are often represented on kudurru as symbols of a god, were doubtless intended for some religious purpose, as well as the bark (Figs. 176, 177) that frequently occurs, and in which an animal is lying. This latter cannot be identified owing to the roughness of the workmanship. The vessel is of equal height both at stem and stern, which end above in two volutes that curve inwards and are often in the form of human heads. In other, later, types the stem is often armoured with a ram. The keel is always flat and is certainly intended for use on terra firma, on which the boats could be dragged by a cord passed through a hole in the stem, for certainly these terra-cotta vessels could not float. The bark played a very important part in the religious ceremonies of the Babylonian, as it did in those of the Egyptian. It was in them that the gods performed their processions under Gudea as they did under Nebuchadnezzar. Among many other divinities, Marduk and Nabu had their sacred barks, to the furnishing of which Nebuchadnezzar refers in the great Steinplatten inscription (3, 8, and 70). “The furniture of the temple of Esagila I adorned with massive (?) gold, the Kua-bark with ṣarîr and stones like the stars of heaven.—The Ḫêtu-canal-bark, the means of conveyance of his lordship, the bark of the procession of the New Year, the feast of Babil—its wooden karê, the zarâti which are in it, I caused to be clothed with tîri šašši and stone” (trans. by Delitzsch). The animal that lies in these pottery boats must therefore undoubtedly have represented a sirrush.