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.

Griffin pursuing winged goat

between 700 B.C. and 501 B.C.
white chalcedony ;
Morgan Seal 746
Description
1 cylinder seal : white chalcedony ; 26 x 11 mm
Provenance
Acquired by Pierpont Morgan sometime between 1885 and 1908.
Notes
"Most of the seals of this style [cut-style]... date from the first millennium. They can be divided into an earlier group, dated approximately in the ninth or eighth century B.C. (724-733), and a later, belonging probably to the seventh and sixth centuries (734-746)... Seals 741-746 depict monsters in violent pursuit of animals or other monsters. This motif may have somehow survived from Mitannian glyptic, since seal impressions from Nuzi show similar designs (Nuzi 592, 593). Two seals of the first millennium showing the same motif have been found in Babylonia (Berlin 623, Louvre T. 241), but none so far in Assyria. This suggests that 741-746 are possibly of Babylonian origin. Moreover, the winged goat of 746 is a typically Neo-Babylonian monster."--Porada, CANES, p. 89
Summary
Griffin pursuing winged goat -- Crescent and star in sky.
Classification
Place
Southern Mesopotamia.
Department