Plan your visit. 225 Madison Avenue at 36th Street, New York, NY 10016.

Plan your visit. 225 Madison Avenue at 36th Street, New York, NY 10016.

Sacred tree, bull, and lion-griffin

between 1300 B.C. and 1155 B.C.
white marble ;
Morgan Seal 591
Description
1 cylinder seal : white marble ; 35 x 14 mm
Provenance
Acquired by Pierpont Morgan sometime between 1885 and 1908.
Notes
"Seals 590 and 591 are engraved with a linear technique like that appearing in seals discovered at Warka and Babylon in Kassite layers of about 1300 B.C. or earlier (Berlin 561, 563). This technique appears to have been used very rarely in contemporaneous Assyrian cylinders, although it became the basis of the linear style of the Assyrians in the ninth and eighth centuries." Porada, CANES, p. 66
Summary
Center: sacred tree between bull and lion-griffin, both rampant, bird below each -- In field: six-pointed rosette above rhomb; five-pointed rosette -- Borders of crosshatched triangles.
Classification
Place
Southern Mesopotamia.
Department