The Net full of prisoners symbolises the capture of the enemies of the city. To indicate the impossibility of escape (Jastrow continues), “a prisoner who has thrust his head out of one of the meshes is being beaten back by a weapon in the hands of the god.”[910] King further elaborates the scene; “The god grasps in his right hand a heavy mace which he lets fall upon the Net in front of him containing captives, whose bodies may be seen writhing and struggling like fish in the broad meshes. On the relief, the cords of the Net are symmetrically arranged: the rounded corners at the top show it as a Net formed of ropes and cordage.”[911] But later Sumerian scholars deny that Ningirsu has anything to do with the Net or even figures in the scene. On the _Stèle des Vautours_ the person represented is not a god, but a king, Eannatum, with captured soldiers enclosed in the Net (_Shusgal_). What is more, the king in the accompanying inscription, not only designates the Net as that of Enlil, the earth god, but also of Ninharsag, the mother goddess, of Enki, the water god, of Siu, the moon god, and of Shamash, the sun god. All the greater gods were supposed to carry nets: Ningirsu must certainly have possessed one, but neither he or it are depicted here. FOOTNOTES: [904] We sometimes find with an army crossing a river, as delineated in the sculptures, each soldier with the skin beneath his belly and paddling with his legs and arms, but retaining in his mouth one of the legs of the skin, into which he blows as into a bagpipe. The act of paddling across a big river, like the Euphrates, would of itself need all his breath; but King points out that the sculptor, in the spirit of primitive art, which, diffident of its own powers of portrayal or distrusting the imagination of the beholder, seeks to make its object clear by conventional devices, wishes to indicate that the skins are not solid bodies, and can find no better way of showing it than by making his swimmers continue blowing out the skins. [905] _Five Great Monarchies_ (London, 1862-67), vol. I. p. 99. [906] In each case Esarhaddon “cut off his head.” Both heads were sent to Nineveh for exhibition. Asur-bani-pal was a greater specialist in heads than his father: the head of any foe whom he particularly hated or feared, such as Teumann of Elam, was preserved by some method, and hung conspicuously in the famed gardens of the palace. A sculptured representation hands down the scene to us. The king reclines on an elevated couch under an arbour of vines: his favourite queen is seated on a throne at the foot of the couch: both are raising wine cups to their lips: many attendants ply the inevitable fly-flappers, while at a distance musicians are ranged. Birds play and flutter among the palm and cypress trees; from one dangles Teumann’s head on which the eyes of the king are gloating. Such is the picture drawn by de Razogin, _Ancient Assyria_ (London, 1888).