carved a hunting scene, two hunters with dogs and desert animals
being arranged around a central boss. But in the upper field is a very
remarkable group, consisting of a personage struggling with two lions
arranged symmetrically. The rest of the composition is not very unlike
other examples of prehistoric Egyptian carving in low relief, but here
attitude, figure, and clothing are quite un-Egyptian. The hero wears
a sort of turban on his abundant hair, and a full and rounded beard
descends upon his breast. A long garment clothes him from the waist and
falls below the knees, his muscular calves ending in the claws of a bird
of prey. There is nothing like this in prehistoric Egyptian art.

(1) See Bénédite, "Le couteau de Gebel al-'Arak", in
_Foundation Eugène Piot, Mon. et. Mém._, XXII. i. (1916).

Perhaps Monsieur Bénédite is pressing his theme too far when he compares
the close-cropped warriors on the handle with the shaven Sumerians and
Elamites upon steles from Telloh and Susa, for their loin-girdles are
African and quite foreign to the Euphrates Valley. And his suggestion
that two of the boats, flat-bottomed and with high curved ends, seem
only to have navigated the Tigris and Euphrates,(1) will hardly command
acceptance. But there is no doubt that the heroic personage upon the
other face is represented in the familiar attitude of the Babylonian
hero Gilgamesh struggling with lions, which formed so favourite a
subject upon early Sumerian and Babylonian seals. His garment is
Sumerian or Semitic rather than Egyptian, and the mixture of human and
bird elements in the figure, though not precisely paralleled at
this early period, is not out of harmony with Mesopotamian or Susan
tradition. His beard, too, is quite different from that of the Libyan
desert tribes which the early Egyptian kings adopted. Though the
treatment of the lions is suggestive of proto-Elamite rather than