CHAPTER XI.AMBER, IVORY, AND ULTRAMARINE.

Manyages ago, in early Tertiary times, a great forest of conifers covered the bed of the present Baltic Sea. Their copious gummy exudations had the leisure of perhaps some hundreds of centuries to accumulate, and have in fact furnished the greater part of the amber brought into commerce from before the dawn of history until now. The value set on the commodity probably gave the first impulse to the establishment of systematic relations between the north and south of Europe; and supplied means for the diffusion, far up towards the Arctic circle, of many of the secrets of Mediterranean culture. Scandinavia exchanged her amber for bronze, and the improvements that the use of bronze implied and introduced. They travelled in opposite directions, one as the correlative of the other, from the mouth of the Elbe to the mouth of the Rhone,[403]the ever-ready Phœnicians carrying the prized Eocene product eastward. There,much inequality in its distribution was prescribed by variety of tastes. In Egypt and Assyria, it had no great vogue; it is not mentioned in the Bible; but it found a ready market among the younger communities by the Ægean, just then eagerly appropriating the elements and ornaments of civilisation. In the Odyssey, the crafty Phœnician traders who kidnapped Eumæus when a child in the island of Syriê, are represented as diverting attention from their plot by the chaffering sale of ‘a golden chain strung here and there with amber beads’; and ‘a golden chain of curious work, strung with amber beads, shining like the sun,’ was presented by the suitor Eurymachus to Penelope.[404]To critics of an earlier generation, it seemed indeed incredible that a material of such remote and exclusive origin should have been familiar in the Levant nine centuries before the Christian era. But recent experience has enforced, as well as qualified, the maximAb Homero omne principium[405]: enforced it, by frequent archæological verifications; qualified it, by the disclosure of a pre-Hellenic world, by no means completely reflected in the Homeric Epics.

403.Genthe,Ueber den Etruskischen Tauschhandel nach dem Norden, p. 102.

404.Odyssey, xv. 460; xviii. 295.

405.Scheins,De Electro Veterum metallico, p. 17.

For here once more Mycenæ teaches an object-lesson. Innumerable amber beads, of varied sizes, the largest nearly an inch and half in diameter, were found in the graves there. All were perforated, andthey had manifestly once been connected together to form necklaces. And the remains of amber necklaces have likewise been disinterred from the archaic tombs of Præneste and Veii,[406]from British barrows, and from a prehistoric necropolis at Hallstadt in Austria. The earliest Italian amber seems to have been conveyed from the Gulf of Lyons along the Ligurian coast; but a subsequent and more lasting stream of supply flowed directly to the Po-delta from near the site of Dantzic. Among the early Italian specimens, are some neck-pendants carved into the forms of apes, necessarily from Oriental models in a different material—most likely, ivory.

406.Archæologia, vol. xli. p. 205.

The particular and widespread preference for amber as a means of decorating the throat had a superstitious motive. An idea somehow originated that the substance, thus worn, was potent against malefic agencies, and the persuasion doubtless accompanied it on its travels, and added to its popularity. There is, to be sure, no sign that Homer, though he only employs amber in the fitting shape for its exercise, had any knowledge of this prophylactic power; but then his indifference to rustic lore has repeatedly come to our notice. Penelope, however, and the ladies of Mycenæ, may have been less unconcerned on the point, and perhaps gave some credence to the rumours of mysterious virtue that enhanced the value of the beautiful shining substance from the dim North.That their amber was truly hyberborean has been chemically demonstrated. Fragments of Mycenæan beads, analysed for Dr. Schliemann by Dr. O. Helm, of Dantzic, proved to contain no less than 6 per cent. of succinic acid; and the presence of succinic acid is distinctive, for ‘there has been no instance hitherto,’ Dr. Helm states, ‘of a product physically and chemically identical with the Baltic amber being found in another spot.’[407]The characteristic ingredient in question, for instance, is wholly wanting in Sicilian amber, a fact strongly confirmatory of the historically attested insignificance, in Mediterranean traffic, of small local supplies. Tin and amber thus agree in testifying to the wide extension, westward and northward, of prehistoric trade; yet the first of these far-travelled materials occurs in the Iliad, and is absent from the Odyssey, while the second figures in the Odyssey, but has no place in the Iliad.

407.Schuchhardt and Sellers,Schliemann’s Excavations, p. 196.

The Greek name for amber,elektron, might be freely translated ‘sun-stone,’ a meaning partially preserved in the Latin termlapis ardens, Teutonicised intoBrennstein, orBernstein. The Englishamberis a loan from the Arabic, negotiated at the time of the Crusades; but the original Achæan word survives inelectricityand its derivatives. For the first production of that still mysterious agency was by rubbing a piece of amber, the endowment of which thereby with an attractive faculty for light objects wasnoted with no particular emphasis by Thales, the sage of Miletus.

The ‘Electrides Insulæ,’ or ‘amber-islands,’ of the ancients, corresponded, in vagueness of geographical position, with the Cassiterides or ‘tin-islands,’ of which the Phœnicians long kept the secret. The former were eventually located in the Adriatic, whither the historical Greeks succeeded in tracing the Baltic product, transported in those later days, along a second overland route from the Vistula to the Danube, and thence, by intermediary Venetian tribes, to the Istrian shore. Yet Herodotus was without any definite notion as to the derivation of amber, one of his spasmodical fits of scepticism forbidding him to admit its reported origin from a river called the Eridanus, said to flow into the sea somewhere at the back of the North wind.[408]The Eridanus, in fact, had a ‘name’ long before it had a ‘local habitation.’ Æschylus was doubtfully inclined to identify it with the Rhone, showing that he was chiefly acquainted with amber shipped at Massilia;[409]Pherecydes, knowing more of Adriatic supplies, established the ‘fluviorum rex Eridanus,’ in the bed of the Po, where it has remained. The myth of the Heliadæ, or sun-maidens, who, after their merciful transformation into poplars, continued to weep tears of amber for the fate of their brother, the lucklessly ambitious Phaethon, took definite shape inthe hands of the Attic tragedians. Homer gives no hint of acquaintance with it.

408.Lib. iii. cap. 115.

409.Helbig,Atti dell’ Accad. dei Lincei, t. i. p, 422, ser. iii.

The decorative use of amber disappeared from classical Greece. It had been adopted from the East, as part of a semi-barbaric system of ornament, and was abandoned on the development of a purer taste. The substance was, indeed, as Helbig has remarked,[410]ill-adapted for the expression of artistic ideas, and so had little value for those who directed towards the achievement of such expression their best efforts for the ennoblement and refinement of life. No amber, then, is found in the tombs of the Hellenic Greeks, nor in those of the Cimmerian Bosphorus, where the Milesian colony Panticapæum held the primacy. Even in Italy, the once prized product was left to be largely appropriated by Gallic barbarians and Istrian and Umbrian peasants. But the ‘whirligig of time,’ as usual, ‘brought about its revenges.’ As artistic feeling decayed, the favour of amber returned, and it grew under the Empire to a higher pitch than it had ever before attained. Whereupon a cavalier was despatched from Nero’s court on an exploratory expedition to the original and genuine home of the article; direct trade was opened with the Baltic, and the morning mists which had so long enveloped the origin of the ‘sun-stone’ were at length dispersed. Nevertheless, Pausanias, who saw an amber statue of Augustus at Olympia in the second centuryA.D., stillbelieved the rare substance composing it to have been collected from the sands of Eridanus.[411]Traditional errors possess strong vitality.

410.Helbig,Atti dell’ Accad. dei Lincei, t. i. p. 425.

411.Descriptio Græciæ, v. 12.

Both in the Iliad and Odyssey, Homer shows perfect familiarity with ivory. But he is entirely unconscious of its source. No rumour of the elephant had reached him. He would surely, if it had, have shared the surprising intelligence with his hearers. In the judicious words of Pausanias,[412]he would never have passed by an elephant to discourse of cranes and pygmies. Thedébutin Europe of the strange great beast ensued, in point of fact, only upon the Indian campaign of Alexander. His tusks were, however, in prehistoric demand all through the East; and the relations of archaic Greeks were almost exclusively Oriental. Assyrian ivory-carvings enjoyed a just celebrity; the palaces of Nineveh and Babylon were softly splendid with the subdued lustre of their costly material. Solomon’s ivory throne, and Ahab’s ivory house exemplify its profuse availability in Palestine; Tyrian galleys were fitted with ivory-bound cross-benches; musical instruments were ivory-dight and wrought; ebony and ivory furniture made part of the tribute of Ethiopia to Egypt; and the spoils of Indian elephants were in demand in Italy before the Etruscans had penetrated the Cisalpine plain. Thus, gold, silver, amber, ivory, and coloured glass combined with beautiful effect in akind of so-called ‘Tyrrhene’ ornaments, extant specimens of which have been taken from the Regulini-Galassi tomb, and other coeval repositories.[413]In Troy and Mycenæ, ivory was relatively plentiful. Pins and buckles were made of it, and perhaps the handles of knives and daggers.[414]Ivory plates, round and rectangular, and perforated, in some cases, for attachment to wood or leather, have been, in both spots, sifted out from surroundingdébris, and may be imaginatively supposed to have once enriched the horse-trappings of Hector or one of the Pelopides. The art of carving in ivory, however, was in both these places in a rude stage, and appears unfamiliar to Homer. He barely recognises the use of the material in substantive constructions, while availing himself of it freely for veneering and inlaying. The only piece of solid ivory met with in the poems is the handle of the ‘key of bronze’ with which Penelope opened the upper chamber to take thence the fateful bow of Odysseus.[415]For the sheath of the silver-hilted dagger given to the Ithacan stranger by the Phæacian Euryalus,[416]was assuredly notformedof ivory, although spirally decorated with it. This can be gathered from the re-application, in the Iliad, of the same phrase to designate the ornamentation with tin laid on in a curving pattern, of the cuirass of Asteropæus;[417]and it recurs, undoubtedly in a similar sense, in the following passage of the Odyssey:

412.Ib.i. 12.

413.Dennis,Cities and Cemeteries of Etruria, p. 82.

414.Schliemann,Mycenæ, pp. 152, 359.

415.Odyssey, xxi. 7.

416.Ib.viii. 404.

417.Iliad, xxiii. 560; cf. Leaf’s annotations, vols. i. p. 110; ii. 413.

Now forth from her chamber came the wise Penelope, like Artemis or golden Aphrodite, and they set a chair for her hard by the fire, where she was wont to sit, a chair deftly turned and wrought with ivory and silver, which on a time the craftsman Icmalius had fashioned, and had joined thereto a footstool, that was part of the chair, whereon a great fleece was wont to be laid.[418]

418.Odyssey, xix. 53-59.

The word rendered in English as ‘turned,’ however, does not refer to ‘turning’ with a lathe, as the earlier commentators followed by the translators supposed, but to such helical designs as Mycenæan artwork exemplifies to superfluity. And it was in the same style that Odysseus beautified his couch at Ithaca—the couch wrought of a still rooted olive tree. He reminds his queen, as yet dubious of his identity, how

Thence beginning, I the bed did mouldShapely and perfect, and the whole inlaidWith ivory and silver and rich gold.[419]

Thence beginning, I the bed did mould

Shapely and perfect, and the whole inlaid

With ivory and silver and rich gold.[419]

419.Ib.xxiii. 199-200 (Worsley’s trans.).

The chest of Cypselus must have been an analogous piece of work, though more highly elaborated; and the ‘beds of ivory,’ denounced by the Prophet with the rest of the ostentatious luxury in which Jerusalem attempted to vie with haughty Tyre, may have displayed similar ornamental designs. In the Homeric palace of Menelaus, an ideal of splendourexotic in the West, but fitting in naturally with Oriental surroundings, was sought to be realised. Some such model doubtless floated before the eyes of the poet as the house of Ahab, magnificent with panellings of that loveliest of organic substances bartered by the ‘men of Dedan’ for the finely-wrought bronze, the purple-dyed and embroidered cloths of Phœnicia.Domus Indo dente nitescit.

The door of deceptive dreams imagined by Penelope, may possibly, on the other hand, have had a Mycenæan prototype.

Two diverse gates there are of bodiless dreams,These of sawn ivory, and those of horn.Such dreams as issue where the ivory gleamsFly without fate, and turn our hopes to scorn.But dreams which issue through the burnished horn,What man soe’er beholds them on his bed,These work with virtue, and of truth are born.[420]

Two diverse gates there are of bodiless dreams,

These of sawn ivory, and those of horn.

Such dreams as issue where the ivory gleams

Fly without fate, and turn our hopes to scorn.

But dreams which issue through the burnished horn,

What man soe’er beholds them on his bed,

These work with virtue, and of truth are born.[420]

It has been conjectured that the imperfect transparency of laminæ, whether of horn or ivory, caused those materials to be associated with the shadowy forms of dreamland; but the apportionment of their respective offices was plainly determined by a play of words unintelligible except in the original Greek.[421]And it must be admitted that scarcely a worse pair of puns could be produced from the whole of Shakespeare’s plays than those perpetrated by our ‘bonus Homerus’in a passage replete, none the less, with poetical suggestions largely turned to account by his successors.

420.Odyssey, xix. 562-67 (Worsley’s trans.).

421.See Hayman’sOdyssey, vol. ii. p. 361.

It is scarcely likely that complete tusks ever found their way to archaic Greece, yet the comparison—used twice in the Odyssey—of purely white objects to ‘fresh-cut ivory,’ decidedly proves a working acquaintance with the material. Its creamy tint was, in Egypt and Assyria, constantly set off by skilful intermixture with ebony; but ebony formed no part of the Homeric stock-in-trade.

One cannot but be struck by finding that, in the Iliad, ivory is employedonlyfor embellishing equine accoutrements, but in the Odyssey,onlyfor purposes of domestic decoration. So far as it goes, this circumstance tends to reinforce the contrast of sentiment towards the horse apparent in the two poems. Thus, a species of art practised, we are given to understand, exclusively by foreigners, helps to conjure up more vividly the effect of the rush of crimson blood over the white skin of the fair-haired Menelaus: ‘As when some woman of Maionia or Karia staineth ivory with purple to make a cheek-piece for horses, and it is laid up in the treasure-chamber, though many a horseman prayeth to wear it; but it is laid up to be a king’s boast, alike an adornment for his horse, and a glory for his charioteer.’[422]And the simile was adopted by Virgil to expound a blush.

422.Iliad, iv. 141-45.

Indum sanguineo veluti violaverit ostroSi quis ebur.

Indum sanguineo veluti violaverit ostro

Si quis ebur.

Ivory-staining does not seem to have been in vogue outside of Asia Minor. Tablets of ivory were, at Nineveh, often inlaid with lapis lazuli, and ornaments of ivory were gilt; but there are no surviving signs of the application to them of colouring matters.

The second mention of ivory in the Iliad is in connexion with the slaying, by Menelaus, of Pylæmenes, chief of the ‘bucklered Paphlagonians,’ when it is said that Antilochus simultaneously smote his charioteer Mydon with a great stone on the elbow, and ‘the reins, white with ivory, fell from his hands to earth, even into the dust.’[423]The overlaying, in a decorative design, of leathern bands with small slips and rosettes of ivory, may here doubtless be understood; and a similar fashion of lending splendour to horse-trappings can, as already pointed out, plausibly be inferred to have prevailed at Hissarlik.

423.Iliad, v. 583.

Homer’s name for ivory is identical with ours for the beast producing it for our benefit. And the wordelephantis held to be cognate with the Hebrewaleph, an ox. Hence the designation came to the Greeks almost certainly from a Semitic source. It was exported, we may unhesitatingly say, from Phœnicia with the wares it served to label.

No Homeric crux has been more satisfactorily disposed of by actual exploration than that relating to the identity of ‘cyanus,’ or ‘kuanos.’ In later Greek, the term was of perfectly clear import. Itsignified lapis lazuli, either genuine or counterfeit. But the simple hypothesis of a continuity of meaning was met by difficulties of two kinds. The first regarded colour, always a perplexed subject in the Homeric poems. For uniformly, throughout their course, ‘cyanean’ betokens darkness of hue, if not absolute blackness. The epithet frequently recurs, and only once with a possible, though doubtful suggestion ofblueness. It is never used to qualify the summer sea, a serene sky, the eyes of a fair woman, or the flowers of spring. Usually, the idea of sombreness, pure and simple, is unequivocally attached to it. As when Thetis, in sign of mourning, covers herself with a cyanus-coloured robe, ‘than which no blacker raiment existed.’[424]Invisibility and the shade of approaching death are each typified as a ‘cyanean cloud’; the brows of Zeus and Heré, the waving locks of Poseidon, the mane of the Poseidonian steed Areion, the gathering tempest of war, are of ‘cyanean’ darkness; the beard of Odysseus, the raven curls of Hector, bear the same adjective, which cannot well be construed otherwise than as a poetic equivalent forblack. Nor is there any ground for supposing that it meant to convey any special shade or quality of blackness. Fine-drawn distinctions of every kind are totally alien to the spirit of Homeric diction.

424.Iliad, xxiv. 94.

The second objection to identifying cyanus withlapis lazuli or ultramarine related to function. The uses to which it is put in the Iliad and Odyssey seemed, to anxious interpreters, inconsistent with its being either of a stony or of a glassy nature. ‘Cyanus ordinarily enters into the composition of the polymetallic works described in their verses. It forms, for instance, a dark trench round the tin-fence of the vineyard represented on the shield of Achilles; and it is especially prominent in the decoration of the armour of Agamemnon. Cinyras, king of Cyprus, was the donor of this magnificent equipment; not through pure friendship. Intimidated by the Greek armament, he probably dreaded being compelled to take an active share in the enterprise it aimed at accomplishing, and purchased with a personal gift to its supreme chief, liberty to retain his passive attitude of ‘benevolent neutrality.’ The breastplate alone was a ransom for royalty.

Therein were ten courses of black cyanus, and twelve of gold, and twenty of tin, and dark blue[425]snakes writhed up towards the neck, three on either side, like rainbows that the son of Kronos hath set in the clouds, a marvel of the mortal tribes of men.[426]

425.The original has simply ‘of cyanus.’

426.Iliad, xi. 24-28.

The comparison of the snakes to rainbows may possibly refer only to their arching shapes; it is not easy to connect iridescence with a substance just previously noted expressly asblack. The shield ofAgamemnon resembled his cuirass in workmanship, but was diversified as to pattern.

‘And he took,’ we are informed, ‘the richly-dight shield of his valour that covereth all the body of a man, a fair shield, and round about it were twenty white bosses of tin, and one in the midst of black cyanus. And thereon was embossed the Gorgon fell of aspect, glaring terribly; and about her were Dread and Terror. And from the shield was hung a baldric of silver, and thereon was curled a snake of cyanus; three heads interlaced had he growing out of one neck.’[427]

427.Iliad, xi. 32-40.

The Mycenæan method of inlaying bronze was followed in the construction of both articles. But the arrangement of the contrasted metals on the cuirass in alternating vertical stripes, although rendered perfectly intelligible by Helbig’s learned discussion,[428]has not been illustrated by any actual ‘find.’ The bosses of tin and cyanus diversifying the shield, on the other hand, correspond strictly to a Mycenæan plan of ornament,[429]and are reproduced in the round knobs of gold and silver attached to the bronze surface of certain Phœnician dishes dug up from the ruins of Nineveh.[430]The Gorgon’s Head, however, does not appear in Greek art until the seventh centuryB.C.;[431]yet the suspicion of spuriousness thenceattaching to the lines in which it is mentioned may prove to be unfounded. The emblem was, at least, a favourite one in Cyprus, having been introduced thither, according to some archæologists, from Egypt. Judging by the evidence of Cyprian terracottas, it figured, surrounded with serpents, very much as on the breastplate of Agamemnon, on the corslets of priests and kings; and it seems to have been specially appropriated by a priestly caste named ‘Cinyrades’[432]to signify their supposed descent from Agamemnon’s dubious ally. The Cyprian partiality thus manifested for the dread device goes far towards proving that genuine products of Cyprian metallurgy were limned in the passages just quoted.

428.Das Homerische Epos, p. 382.

429.Schuchhardt and Sellers,Schliemann’s Excavations, p. 237.

430.Rawlinson,Phœnicia, p. 288.

431.Furtwängler in Roscher’sLexikon der Griech. Myth.; art. ‘Gorgoneion.’

432.Ohnefalsch-Richter, ‘Cypern, die Bibel, und Homer,’Das Ausland, Nos. 28, 29, 1891.

Cyanus is, then, in the Iliad employed exclusively as an adjunct to the metallic inlaying of armour, and it is made similarly available in the Hesiodic poems. But in the Odyssey its sole actual use is in a frieze surmounting the bronze-clad walls of the Phæacian banqueting-hall. Hence many futile debates and perplexities. The Homeric ‘cyanus,’ most critics asserted, could not, since it was uniformly described asblack, be a mineral of cærulean hue, such as the cyanus of Theophrastus unquestionably was; and it must be presumed to have been a metal, as obtaining a place among metals in the decorative industry of the time. It was hence variously held to be steel,bronze, even lead, while Mr. Gladstone at one time thought of native blue carbonate of copper,[433]later, however, preferring bronze. Lepsius alone recognised what is now generally admitted to be the truth—namely, that the word retained its significance unchanged from the time of Agamemnon to the time of Theophrastus.

433.Studies in Homer, vol. iii. p. 496.

The Assyrians fabricated out of lapis lazuli, not only personal, but architectural ornaments. Bactria was its sole available source, and thence through the Mesopotamian channel it reached Egypt. Among the Babylonian spoils of Thothmes III. were a necklace of ‘true’chesbet, and a gold staff jewelled with the same beautiful mineral. Artificialchesbetwas manufactured in Egypt from about the fourteenth centuryB.C.It was composed of a kind of glassy paste, tinted blue with salts of copper or cobalt, and it lay piled, like bricks for building, in the storehouses of successive monarchs.[434]Clay-bricks, too, were enamelled with it for use in decorative constructions, still exemplified in the entrance to a chamber in the Sakkarah pyramid; and the same fashion prevailed in Chaldea and Assyria.[435]The Egyptian admiration forchesbetspread to the Peloponnesus, where an architectural function was assigned to it agreeing most curiously with the Odyssean use of cyanus. The spade has, on thispoint, surpassed itself as an engine of research; nothing is left to speculation; we seem to find at Tiryns the very arrangement which caught the quick eye of the eminent castaway in Phæacia. For in the palace[436]explored by Dr. Schliemann within the citadel of Perseus, fragments of an alabaster frieze, inlaid with dark blue smalt, were found strewn over the floor of a vestibule, having fallen from their place on its walls; and the smalt appears to be of precisely the same nature with the manufacturedchesbetof Thothmes III., and the Cyprian and Egyptian cyanus described by Theophrastus.[437]That it was also identical with the substance turned to just the same architectural account in the palace of Alcinous, may be taken as certain; and the discovery constitutes one of the most telling verifications of Homeric archæology. The particular prominence of cyanus, besides, in the Cyprian armour of Agamemnon falls in admirably with what is known of the history of imitation lapis lazuli; Cyprus, owing to the abundant presence of the needful ores of copper, having become early celebrated for its production. In addition to some tubes of cobalt-glass, blue smalt trinkets in large quantities have been brought to light at Mycenæ. But if Homer took no notice of such small objects, it was probably because he deemed them too commonfor association with the noble or divine heroines of his song.

434.Lepsius,Les Métaux, &c. p. 61.

435.Helbig,Das Homerische Epos, p. 81.

436.Schuchhardt,op. cit.p. 117.

437.De Lapidibus, lv. The Scythian kind of cyanus was genuine lapis lazuli.

That the Homeric cyanus was really a kind of ultramarine enamel, seems, then, thoroughly established. And it is the only form of glass recognised in the poems. Yet the colour-difficulty survives. Our poet remains under the imputation of inability to distinguish black from blue—unless, indeed, we admit with Helbig that the word ‘cyanus’ comprised a jetty as well as an azure smalt. There is a good deal to be said for the opinion. Theophrastus plainly distinguishes a dark and a light variety, and even speaks of one of the derived pigments as beingblack; and a black enamel formed part of the materials for the Mycenæan inlaid-work. The stripes of Agamemnon’s cuirass were, according to this hypothesis, of black, the curling snakes on either side of blue cyanus. And this might help to explain the comparison of the latter to rainbows. Not, to be sure, altogether satisfactorily, since the likening to a simply blue object of the brilliant arch

Mille trahens varios adverso sole colores,

strikes the modern sense as absolutely inappropriate. Nevertheless, we have to make allowance in Homer, above all as regards chromatic estimates, for analiter visum. And it happens that the sole colour-epithet bestowed by him on the rainbow isporphureos, signifying purple of a peculiarly sombre shade. The‘crocus wings’ of Iris were, then, less conspicuous to him than her violet sandals.

Amber, ivory, and cyanus, or ultramarine-enamel, are the only non-metallic precious substances with which Homer shows himself familiar. Precious stones of all kinds lay apparently outside his sphere of cognisance. Mother of pearl, coral, and rock crystal are equally strange to him. He takes no notice of the engraved gems of Mycenæ, no more than of the porphyry, agate, onyx, and alabaster, there variously employed to diversify the framework of life. No distinctions are made in his verses between one kind of stone and another. White jade, brought from the furthest confines of Asia, though in some request at Hissarlik, may not have struck him as essentially different from any vulgar piece of flint picked up by the shore of the Hellespont. Or, if it did, his vocabulary was too scanty to allow of his expressing the sentiment. Homeric mineralogy thus embraced exceedingly few species.

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Transcriber’s Notes:On page236there was a footnote for “Blümner, Technologie der Gewerbe” but there was no anchor in the text. Those pages in Blümner are a description to the use of silver in antiquity, so the anchor was attached to the word “silver” in the text.On page255the footnote for “Lepsius,Les Métaux dans les Inscriptions Égyptiennes” is missing a page number, but page 52 contains hieroglyphics referring to iron. See Google Books for scans of the pages.Lepsius - ironMissing or obscured punctuation was silently corrected.Typographical errors were silently corrected.Inconsistent spelling and hyphenation were made consistent only when a predominant form was found in this book.

Lepsius - iron

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