The cylinders were suspended by these holes, but how? In casting about for an answer to this question, the idea that the Babylonian attached the greatest importance to the clear reproduction, in the clay, of every detail of the design engraved upon his seal, has been taken as a starting point, and a system of mounting invented for him which would leave nothing to be desired in that respect (see Fig. 132). It is a reproduction, in small, of a garden roller; as a restoration, however, it can hardly be justified by the evidence of the monuments. Examine the terra-cotta tablets on which these seals were used, and you will see that their ancient possessors did not, as a rule, attempt to impress the whole of the scenes cut in them upon the soft clay. 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.[298] The imperfect stamp with which the Chaldæans 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).[299] Cylinders are also found with a kind of ring at one end cut in the material itself (Fig. 135).