If we may believe M. Ménant some of the cylinders belonging to this period represent human sacrifices. Such he supposes to be the theme of the example reproduced in Fig. 146. The figure with arm uplifted would be the priest brandishing his mace over the kneeling victim, who turns and begs in vain for mercy. The issue of the unequal struggle is hinted at by the dissevered head introduced in the lower left-hand corner. To make our description complete we must notice the subordinate passage, a rampant leopard, winged, preparing to devour a gazelle.[314] The conjecture is specious, but until confirmatory texts are discovered, it will remain a conjecture. Those texts that have been quoted in support of it are vague in the first place, and, in the second, they appear to refer less to the sacrifice of human victims than to holocausts of infants, who must have been thrown into the flames as they were in Phœnicia. Why should we not look upon it as an emblem of the royal victories, an emblem similar in kind to the group that recurs so persistently in Egyptian sculpture, from the time of the ancient Empire to that of the Ptolemies?[315] The gesture in each case is almost exactly the same; the weapon raised over the vanquished both in the Theban relief and the Chaldæan cylinder is well fitted to suggest the power of the conqueror and his cruel revenges. We have reproduced this example less for its subject than for the character of its execution. The figures are modelled in a very rough-and-ready fashion; we might almost call it a sketch upon stone. The movement, however, of the two chief figures is well understood and expressive. [Illustration: FIG. 147.--Chaldæan cylinder. Basalt.] Another and perhaps still richer series is composed of stones on which the war waged by Izdubar and his faithful Hea-bani against the monsters is figured.[316] We have already shown Izdubar carrying off a lion he has killed (see above, Fig. 35). Another task of the Mesopotamian Hercules is shown in Fig. 147, where he is engaged in a struggle with the celestial human-headed bull, who has been roused to attack the hero by Istar, whose love the hero has refused.[317]