These bulls have only been actually found in Assyria, but numerous and precise texts have been deciphered by which their existence at the gateways of Chaldæan temples and palaces has been proved.[102] They are not now to be met with in the country of their origin, because their material was too rare in the lower part of the great basin to escape the attacks of spoilers. Soft or hard, volcanic or calcareous, stone was there precious and difficult to find. Sooner or later such objects as these would be dragged from their ancient sites and broken up to be used anew. If chance had not so willed that the Assyrian palaces were preserved for us by entombment in their own ruins, we should now have known nothing of a type that played a great part in the decoration of Mesopotamian buildings, and, by its originality, made a great impression upon neighbouring peoples; or at least we should only know it by reproductions on a very small scale, like those we meet with on the cylinders, or by imitations vastly inferior to the originals, like those of the palaces at Persepolis. [Illustration: FIG. 34.--Cone of chalcedony. In the National Library at Paris. Actual size.] Instead of a human head on the body of a beast, we sometimes find the process reversed, but always with an amount of taste and reserve to which we are compelled to render due praise. We may, of course, quote instances in which the head of an eagle is put upon a human body (Vol. I. Fig. 8), or the shoulders of a man concealed under a fish’s scales (Vol. I. Fig. 9, and above, Fig. 34); but even then the sculptor has succeeded in giving to the characteristic lines and attitudes of the human figure the predominance that belongs to them, and, as it were, has made them cast an air of nobility over the whole composition. [Illustration: FIG. 35.--Izdubar and lion. Double the actual size. From a cylinder in the British Museum.]