Designating figurative and non-figurative elements in a comprehensive and coherent manner is essential for iconographic research, no matter if we are dealing with indepedent pictorial elements or their “attributes”. Obviously, identification of visual elements in ancient cultures entails a subjective decision depending on the knowledge and perception of the person doing the labeling. Often, an identification remains open to question and must be revoked later on.
Since it would be neither feasible nor desirable to leave it out altogether, we decided to address this thorny issue by identifying a pictorial element on three levels: