strength as in the case of Gilgamesh, or transfixed by an arrow, speared, or stabbed as we see him so frequently on the bas-reliefs of Assyrian palaces. But lions were probably domesticated now and again as they are to-day. On Sir Henry Layard’s first visit to Hillah, he was presented with two lions by Osman Pasha; one of these, he tells us, was a well-known frequenter of the bazaars, the butcher-shops of which he was in the habit of regularly looting, but apart from this amiable little vagary, he appears to have been fairly well-behaved. In his description of the animal, Layard says that he was “taller and larger than a St. Bernard dog, and like the lion generally found on the banks of the rivers of Mesopotamia was without the dark and shaggy mane of the African species.” He further informs us that he had however, seen lions with a long black mane on the river Karûn, which river flows into the Gulf not far from Moḥammerah in the extreme south of Babylonia; but lions of either class are very rarely seen in Mesopotamia to-day, and these as a rule, only at a distance. The serpent played a smaller part in Mesopotamian art than the lion, but at least from some points of view, a not less significant one. Two serpents entwined round a pole form the centre of the device engraved on the famous cup (cf. Fig. 90) dedicated by Gudea, patesi or priest-king of Lagash about 2450 B.C., to his god Nin-gish-zi-da, who was apparently emblematized by serpents, and on either side of the entwined reptiles, are two winged and serpent-headed monsters, while in a few cylinder-seals of the older period, we find a bearded god whose body consists of a serpent’s coil. In this connection we may compare the device on a cylinder-seal of the same Gudea (cf. Fig. 64), where the intermediary god who is introducing the patesi to a seated deity, whom Ward believes with some reason to be Ea, is characterized by serpents rising from his shoulders. But the most familiar example of the serpent in Babylonian mythological representation is that of the seal on which two beings, perhaps divine, perhaps human, are seated on either side of a tree, and behind one of the two an erect serpent is figured; this seal owes its fame to the opinion held by earlier scholars that this scene represents the pictorial counterpart in Babylonia of the Hebrew tradition of the Fall. Judging from the representations of snakes found on vases, boundary-stones, cylinder-seals and elsewhere, the snakes prevalent in Mesopotamia at the time when these monuments were prepared, must have been of considerable size, while we know from the literature that some of these snakes were poisonous. The Assyrian kings further make mention of the prevalence of snakes in some of the countries whither they conducted expeditions, or which were subject to them, thus Esarhaddon for example tells us that the land of Bazu swarmed with snakes and scorpions like grasshoppers.