After such an example we might look upon the demonstration as made, but it may be useful to complete it by analyzing the other cups we have placed in the same class. That on which the scarabs on standards and the opposed sphinxes appear (Fig. 209) seems pure Egyptian at first sight; but if we take each motive by itself we find variations that are not insignificant. In Egyptian paintings, when the scarab is represented with extended wings they are spread out horizontally, and not crescent-wise over its head.[421] We may say the same of the sphinx. The griffin crowned with the _pschent_ is to be found in Egypt as well as the winged sphinx,[422] but the Egyptian griffins had no wings,[423] and those of the sphinxes were folded so as to have their points directed to the ground. In the whole series of Egyptian monuments I cannot point to a fictitious animal like this griffin. It is in the fanciful creations of the Assyrians alone that these wings, standing up and describing a curve with its points close to the head of the beast that wears them (see Fig. 87), is to be seen. It is an Assyrian griffin masquerading under the double crown of Egypt, but a trained eye soon penetrates the disguise. The arrangement, too, of the group is Assyrian. When the Egyptians decorated a jewel, a vessel, or a piece of furniture by combining two figures in a symmetrical fashion, they put them back to back rather than face to face.[424] Very few examples can be quoted of the employment in Egypt of an arrangement that is almost universal in Assyria. In the latter country this opposition of two figures is so common as to be common-place; they are usually separated from each other by a palmette, a rosette, a column or even a human figure (see Vol. I., Figs. 8, 124, 138, 139; and above, Figs. 75, 90, 141, 152, 153, 158, etc.), and it was certainly from Mesopotamia that Asia Minor borrowed the same motive, which is so often found in the tombs of Phrygia and in Greece as far as Mycenæ, whither it was carried from Lydia by the Tantalides.[425] The same remarks will apply to the cup partially reproduced in our Fig. 216. The ornament of the centre and of the outer band is Egyptian in its origin, but the mountainous country with its stags and its trees, that lies between--have we found anything like it in Egypt? The mountains are suggested in much the same fashion as in the palace reliefs, and we know how much fonder the sculptors of Mesopotamia were of introducing the ibex, the stag, the gazelle, etc., into their work than those of Egypt. The rocky hills and sterile deserts that bounded the Nile valley were far less rich in the wilder ruminants than the wooded hills of Kurdistan and the grassy plains of the double valley.