But we learn more from the bas-reliefs about the taste for ornament among the Assyrians, and about the goldsmiths’ work at Nineveh and Babylon. Kings and genii wear necklaces, ear-rings, diadems, and bracelets. Their forms are always elegant and present great variety. The diadems are circles, perhaps of gold, broader in the middle, and generally decorated with a rosette, in the centre of which a glittering gem was doubtless conspicuous. Deities carried in procession wear high tiaras also surmounted by a rosette, the essential element of which is a precious stone. Bracelets are worn above the elbow and on the fore-arm; these are circular disks, sometimes closed and decorated with rosettes, at other times ending in two lions’, deers’, rams’, or serpents’ heads; some are twisted two or three times round the arm. Among the ornaments which hang from the necklace, the cross, of that form which we call the Maltese cross, must be cited; the same symbol, which reminds us of the Egyptian _crux ansata_, is also found in the ear-rings (fig. 63). As for seal-engraving, its abundant examples do not surpass in artistic merit the Chaldæan work which we have already described. Assyrian cylinders, that is to say, those which were especially manufactured at Nineveh, are distinguished from those of Babylon and Chaldæa by a drier and more commercial style of work.[51] Inscriptions are rarer, and engraved in Ninevite characters: the myths represented by the engravers are the same as at Babylon, but the figures have a more modern appearance: for instance, the winged bulls with human heads, and the genii with eagle’s beaks and four wings, are copied from the bas-reliefs in the palaces of Khorsabad, Nimroud and Kouyunjik. The Assyrian cylinders of the archaic epoch present the technical characteristics that we have already indicated in Chaldæa: the joints of the limbs are rendered by means of a drill producing small hemispherical holes, and the rest of the body is executed with another instrument which hollowed out parallel lines. These peculiarities are clearly distinguished on a fine cylinder which we give after M. Menant (fig. 115): it represents three figures who seem to sacrifice upon a tripod to the sun, the moon, and the seven planets. [Illustration: Fig. 115.--Archaic Assyrian cylinder (after Menant).] [Illustration: Fig. 116.--Assyrian cylinder. De Clercq collection (after Menant).]