The most familiar form of the sacred tree is that employed by the Assyrians, to a certain extent as a decorative ornament, on the sculptured slabs that adorned the walls of the royal palaces. This was the curious conglomeration of knots and leaves which various figures—winged genii with horned hats emblematic of divinity, eagle-headed figures, etc.—worship, and to which they make offerings, and touch with a conical object resembling the fruit of the fir or pine. An ingenious suggestion has been made to the effect that the genius with the pine-cone is represented in the act of fructifying the tree with the pollen (in an idealized form) from the flowers of another tree, just as it is necessary to fructify the date-palm from the pollen of the flowers growing on the “male” tree. This, however, can hardly be the true explanation of the mystic act represented, as similar genii are shown on other slabs not only holding out the conical object as if to touch therewith the figure of the king, but also doing the same thing to the effigies of the great winged bulls. Of course, the fructification of the king would be not only a possible representation to carve in alabaster, but one that we might even expect to find among the royal sculptures. The fructification of a winged bull, however, is quite a different thing, and in the highest degree improbable, unless the divine bull were a kind of representation of the king, which, though possible, is at present unprovable. This symbolic scene, therefore, remains still a mystery for scholars to explain when they obtain the material to do so. It seems to be a peculiarly Assyrian design, for the offering of a pine-cone or similarly-shaped object to the sacred tree has not yet been found in Babylonian art. The Babylonian sacred tree is, moreover, a much more natural-looking object than the curious combination of knots and honeysuckle-shaped flowers found in the sculptures of Assyria. As in the case of the tree shown in the picture of the Temptation, described below, the sacred tree of the Babylonians often takes the form of a palm-tree, or something very like one. (See pl. III.)