It was noticed by those who saw the veil of oxide drawn away from the ornamentation of these bronze vessels that a large proportion of them were Egyptian rather than Assyrian in their general physiognomy. Some of them displayed motives familiar to all those who have travelled in the Nile valley. Take, for instance, the fragment we have borrowed from one of the best preserved of them all (Fig. 209).[412] Neither the minute lines of palmettes in the centre, nor the birds that occur in the outer border, have, perhaps, any great significance, but nothing could be more thoroughly Egyptian than the zone of figures between the two. The same group is there four times repeated. Two griffins crowned with the _pschent_, or double tiara of upper and lower Egypt, have each a foot resting upon the head of a kneeling child, but their movement is protective rather than menacing. Instead of struggling, the child raises its hands in a gesture of adoration. Between the griffins and behind them occur slender columns, quite similar to those we have so often encountered in the open architecture of Egypt.[413] Between the groups thus constituted are thicker shafts bearing winged scarabs on their campaniform capitals. These same columns and capitals occur on another cup from which we detach them in order to show their details more clearly.[414] In one instance the terminal of the shaft is unlike anything hitherto found elsewhere; it is a sphere (Fig. 210); but the contour of the next is thoroughly Egyptian (Fig. 211), and the symbols on the last three, a scarab and two uræi, proclaim their origin no less clearly (Figs. 212 to 214). [Illustration: FIGS. 210–214.--Columns or standards figured upon a bronze cup; from Layard.] [Illustration: FIG. 215.--Bronze platter. Diameter 8 inches. British Museum. Drawn by Wallet.] We gather the same impression from a platter only cleaned quite lately and consequently not to be found in Sir H. Layard’s works; it is now reproduced for the first time (Fig. 215). The whole decoration is finely carried out in line with the burin. The middle is occupied by a seven pointed star or rosette, nine times repeated. Around this elegant and complex motive there are concentric circles, the third of which, counting from the centre, is filled up with small figures hardly to be distinguished by the naked eye. We divine rather than see lions, birds, seated men, and certain groups of symbols, such as three lines broken and placed one above the other, which are continually recurring in the hieroglyphic writing of Egypt. The fifth zone has conventional papyrus stems alternating with rosettes. The sixth, much larger, is filled with ovals surmounted by two plumes and the uræus, that is by the royal cartouch of Egypt in its usual form. The interior of each oval contains very small groups of figures separated from one another by four horizontal lines.