And, further, the fact that in the cosmogonic traditions of the Chaldeans and Babylonians respecting the tree of life and paradisiacal fruit, there was contained a dramatic myth, closely resembling in form the Biblical narrative of the Temptation, appears to be as positively established as may be in the absence of written texts, by a cylinder of hard stone preserved in the British Museum.[67] There we actually see a man and woman, the former wearing on his head the kind of turban peculiar to Babylonians,[68] seated opposite each other on either side of a tree, from whose spreading branches two big fruits hang--one in front of each of the figures who are stretching out their hands to gather it. A serpent is rearing himself behind the woman. This representative might serve as a direct illustration of the narrative in Genesis, nor as M. Friedrich Delitzsch has observed, can it lend itself to any other interpretation. M. Renan has no hesitation in agreeing with ancient commentators in finding a vestige of the same traditions among the Phenicians in the fragments of the Book of Sanchoniathon, translated into Greek by Philo of Byblos. In point of fact it is there told, in connection with the first human pair, that Aion--which seems a rendering of Havah--"invented feeding on the fruits of the tree." The learned academician even thinks he discovers in this passage an echo of some type of Phenician figured representation, retracing a scene such as that recorded in Genesis, and visible on the Babylonian cylinder. Certain it is that, at the epoch of the great influx of Oriental traditions into the classic world, we see a representation of the kind figure on several Roman sarcophagi, where it indicates positively the introduction of a legend analogous to the narrative of Genesis, and associated with the myth of the formation of man by Prometheus. One famous sarcophagus in the Capitol Museum displays in the neighbourhood of the Titan, son of Japetos, who is performing his work as modeller--a pair--man and woman--in the nudity of primeval days, standing at the foot of a tree, the man's gesture showing that he means to gather its fruit.[69] We meet with the same group in a bas-relief built into the wall of the small garden of the Villa Albani in Rome, only here it is in still closer conformity with the Hebrew tradition, as a huge serpent is coiled round the trunk of the tree beneath which the two mortals are standing. It is this plastic type that was imitated and reproduced by the earliest Christian artists, when they attempted the representation of the fall of our first parents, which formed so favourite a subject with them, both in sculpture and painting.