A worshipper (on the left) indicates the divinity of the ax-bearing hewer on the sealing in Figure 42, which is perhaps a century older than those in the preceding Figures,55 while the hewer shows his mastery over a griffin by standing on its back.
Another seal, also thought to be of the ninth century,56 portrays the ogre-tamer in the same relationship to the worshipper and post as was the ax-bearer atop the griffin in Figure 42, except that now he grapples his griffin rather than standing on it (Fig. 43):
The same scheme of griffin-grappler with a cutting instrument in the left hand was incised hundreds of years earlier on the next seal, a Middle Assyrian piece attributed to the thirteenth century,57 a time corresponding to the close of the Minoan period on Crete. Here too a green tree stands at the outer edge of the scheme, as on the eighth-century seal of green and white siliceous stone above (Fig. 38), in opposition to the long dry rod employed as the haft of the hewer’s ax. This seal is a good example of what Porada and Buchanan meant when they wrote that
...Assyrian realism and use of landscape parallel similar tendencies in the contemporary art of Egypt and of the Aegean regions.58
There is substantive as well as stylistic likeness in the next instance, where two herbivores frequent the green tree just as in the iconography of Aegean glyptic; here they are an ibex and a monkey (Fig. 44):
