In this cylinder it will be noticed that Izdubar is repeated twice, once in profile and once full face. Close to him Hea-bani is wrestling with a lion, the bull’s companion and assistant. In another example we find Izdubar alone (Fig. 148) and maintaining a vigorous struggle against a bull with long straight horns, and at the same time turning his head so as to follow a combat between a lion and ibex that is going on behind him.[318] The action of both these latter animals is rendered with great freedom and truth. We have already had to draw attention to the merit that distinguishes not a few of the animals in these cylinders.[319] This merit is to be found in almost every composition in which the artist has been content to make use of natural types. It is only when he compiles impossible monsters that the forms become awkward and confused. An instance of this may be found in a cylinder found by M. de Sarzec at Tello, on which winged quadrupeds seizing and devouring gazelles are portrayed (Fig. 149). Too many figures are brought together in the narrow space and the result is confusion. We are not, however, disposed to accept this cylinder as belonging to the first years of Chaldæan art. It is of veined agate, a material that was not among the earliest employed; but there are many more on which similar scenes are engraved, and which, by their execution, may be safely placed among the most ancient products of art.[320] [Illustration: FIG. 148.--Chaldæan cylinder. Black marble. French National Library.] One of the earliest types invented by the imaginations of these people was that of the strange and chaotic beings who, according to the traditions collected by Berosus, lived upon the earth before the creation of man, creatures in which the forms and limbs afterwards separated and distinguished by nature, were mixed up as if by accident. The text in question is of the very greatest interest and value. It proves that the composite figures of which Chaldæan art was so fond were not a simple caprice of the artists who made them, but were suggested by a cosmic theory of which they formed, as it were, a plastic embodiment and illustration.