Far from demarcating a boundary between the iconography of the Aegean and Babylonian worlds, Evans’ comment about the pillar and the lion-tamer only serves to draw Babylonian cultic iconography and the story of Gilgamesh into the general fund of evidence about the existence and ritual use of the Two Trees’ story in antiquity. The Akkadian epic hero Gilgamesh was indeed a subduer of lions, among other ogres. Evans’ own glyptic example of the divine male tethering post from Khania on the northwest coast of Crete (Fig. 32) shows the two lions in the same rampant, scratching attitude as Gilgamesh’s lion displays on the famous relief from the palace of Sargon II, now in the Louvre in Paris (Fig. 35 left).
Assyrian and Neo-Babylonian glyptic art of about the same time (late eighth century b. C.) employed a parallel scheme of figures that explains the instrument in the hero’s lowered hand: it is a cutting tool (Fig. 36):
The lion alternates with a griffin in this same pictorial scheme (Fig. 37):
True to the character of his counterpart in narrative tradition, the hero of this scene is both a cutter and a subduer of ogres. These two aspects of the hero were rendered in separate, complementary pictures in Aegean art of the Bronze Age, but they appear together simultaneously on single seals in Mesopotamia, as in Figure 37 supra. There were technical reasons why in Mesopotamia more of the story of the Two Trees entered into individual productions of visual art than was usual in the Aegean. From its earliest relics in the fourth millenium onward, Mesopotamian glyptic was more elaborate and generally richer in detail than its counterpart in the Aegean region. One important reason for the difference was the often large and frequently cylindrical shape of Mesopotamian seals; they provided a more spacious surface for engraving than the elegant gold ovals and flat or lentoid stones that were worn as finger-rings, items of jewelry, in the Aegean.
Yet the pattern of story underlying the cults that are reflected in both the Mesopotamian and Aegean artistic traditions was the same. It called for hewn pillars or stocks as concomitants of the hewer and ogre-tamer, and in the eighth century b. C. the glyptic artists of both northern and southern Mesopotamia, Assyria and Babylon, perpetuated that tradition. Two of the requisite stocks duly appear between the hewer and his ogre on the cylinder of white calcedony in Figure 37 supra. There the stocks are hewn into shapes taken to be symbolic of two Assyrian ‘high’ or sky-gods, the supreme male deity Marduk on the right, and his son Nabu on the left.51 The association of these hewn stocks with father and son ‘high’ divinities is powerfully suggestive of Zeus and Apollo in the Aegean region during the same era.
