sculpture, sometimes carried across the dress of figures, always
carefully cut, and generally in good preservation. Next in importance to
these memorials are the hollow cylinders, or, more strictly speaking,
hexagonal or octagonal prisms, made in extremely fine and thin terra
cotta, which the Assyrian kings used to deposit at the corners of
temples, inscribed with an account of their chief acts and with
numerous religious invocations. [PLATE XXXIX., Fig. 1.] These cylinders
vary from a foot and a half to three feet in height, and are covered
closely with a small writing, which it often requires a good magnifying
glass to decipher. A cylinder of Tiglath-Pileser I. (about B.C. 1180)
contains thirty lines in a space of six inches, or five lines to an
inch, which is nearly as close as the type of the present volume. This
degree of closeness is exceeded on a cylinder of Asshur-bani-pal's
(about B.C. 660), where the lines are six to the inch, or as near
together as the type of the _Edinburgh Review_. If the complexity of the
Assyrian characters be taken into account, and if it be remembered that
the whole inscription was in every ease impressed by the hand, this
minuteness must be allowed to be very surprising. It is not favorable to
legibility; and the patience of cuneiform scholars has been severely
tried by a mode of writing which sacrifices everything to the desire of
crowding the greatest possible quantity of words into the smallest
possible space. In one respect, however, facility of reading is
consulted, for the inscriptions on the cylinders are not carried on in
continuous lines round all the sides, but are written in columns, each
column occupying a side. The lines are thus tolerably short; and the
whole of a sentence is brought before the eye at once.

[Illustration: PLATE 39]

Besides slabs and cylinders, the written memorials of Assyria comprise