The Babylonian legends also tell of trees on which grow precious stones. In the Gilgamesh epic a mystic cedar tree is described. This grew in the Elamite sanctuary of Irnina and was under the guardianship of the Elamite king Humbaba. Of this tree an inscription relates: It produces _samtu_-stones as fruit; Its boughs hang with them, glorious to behold; The crown of it produces lapis-lazuli; Its fruit is costly to gaze upon. Another tree bearing precious stones was seen by the hero Gilgamesh, after he had passed through darkness for the space of twelve hours. This must have been a most resplendent object, to judge from the following description on a cuneiform tablet:[351] It bore precious stones for fruits; Its branches were glorious to the sight; The twigs were crystals; It bore fruit costly to the sight. One of the rarest and most significant specimens illustrating the use of valuable stones for religious ceremonial purposes in the pagan world is in the Morgan-Tiffany collection. It is an ancient Babylonian axe-head made of banded agate. So regular, indeed, is the disposition of the layers in this agate that one might be justified in denominating it an onyx. Its prevailing hue is what may be called a “deer-brown”; some white splotches now apparent are evidently due to the action of fire or that of some alkali. This axe-head bears an inscription in archaic cuneiform characters, and presumably in the so-called Sumerian tongue, that believed to have been spoken by the founders of the Babylonian civilization. The form of the inscription indicates that the object dates from an earlier period than 2000 B.C. [Illustration: BABYLONIAN AXE HEAD. Agate, with inscription. Morgan collection, American Museum of Natural History, New York.] While the characters are clearly cut and can be easily deciphered, the inscription is nevertheless exceedingly difficult to translate. It is evident that the axe-head was a votive offering to a divinity, probably on the part of a certain governor named Adduggish; but whether the divinity in question was Shamash (the sun-god), or the god Adad, or some other member of the Babylonian pantheon, cannot be determined with any finality. The French assyriologist, François Lenormant, who first described this axe-head in 1879, and Prof. Ira Maurice Price, of the Semitic Department of Chicago University, both admit that it may have been consecrated to Adad. As the weather-god, the thunderer, the axe-symbol would have been more especially appropriate to him in view of the usage, almost universal among primitive peoples, of associating stone axe-heads or axe-shaped stones with the thunderbolt, and hence with the divinity who was believed to have launched it toward the earth.