Conclusion
We have now assisted at the birth of the Sword in the shape of a bit of wood, charred and sharpened. We have seen its several stages of youth and growth to bone and stone, to copper and bronze, to iron and steel. When it had sufficiently developed itself Egypt gave it a name, SFET; and this name, at least fifty centuries old, still clings to it and will cling to it. In the hands of the old Nilotes the Sword spread culture and civilisation throughout adjoining Africa and Western Asia. The Phœnicians carried it wide and side over the world then known to man. The Greeks won with it their liberty and developed with it their citizenship. Wielded by the Romans, it enthroned the Reign of Law, and laid the foundation for the Brotherhood of Mankind. Thus, though it soaked earth with the blood of her sons, the Sword has ever been true to its mission—the Progress of Society.
In Part II. we shall see the Sword attain the prime of life, when no genius, no work of art was too precious to adorn it; and when, from a weapon of offence, it developed exceptional defensive powers. Here begins the Romance of the Sword.
Footnotes
1 I refer to a vivacious but one-sided article on ‘The Sword,’ in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, May 1881.
2 The Past in the Present, &c. (Edinburgh: Douglas, 1880.)
3 Frederick the Great declared that an army moves like a serpent, upon its belly. According to Plutarch, the snake was held sacred because it glides without limbs, like the stars. Fire, says Pliny (Nat. Hist. vii. 57, and xiii. 42), was first struck out of the stone by Pyrodes, son of Cilix—silex, or flint, the match of antiquity; and hence it was called πῦρ; and Vincent de Beauvais explains: ‘Silex est lapis durus, sic dictus eo quod ex eo ignis exiliat.’ It is the Sanskrit शिल (shila), a stone, both words evidently deriving from a common root, shi or si. The ‘religiosa silex’ of Claudian (Rapt. Proserp. i. 201) was probably a block of stone like those representing Zeus Kasios, the Paphian Venus, not to mention the host of stones worshipped in Egyptian and Arab litholatry, and the old Palladium of Troy transported to Rome. ‘Prometheus,’ who taught man to preserve fire in the ferule, or stalk, of the giant fennel, was borrowed by the Hindus and converted into Pramantha. ‘Pramantha,’ however, is the upright fire-stick, first made by Twastu, the Divine Carpenter, who seems to have been a brother of Ἑστία, the Hearth; and hence it has been held to be the male symbol. According to Plato, πῦρ (whence pyrites = sulphuret of iron), ὕδωρ, and κύων are Phrygian words; and evidently they date from the remotest antiquity. Pir (sun-heat) is found even in the Quichua of Peru, and enters into the royal name ‘Pirhua.’ The French and Belgian caverns prove that striking fire by means of pyrites was known to primitive man.
4 There are still races which are unable to kindle fire. This is asserted of the modern Andamanese by an expert, Mr. H. Man, Journ. Anthrop. Inst. Feb. 1882, p. 272. The same was the case with the quondam aborigines of Tasmania.
5 This Adam Primus was of both sexes, the biune parent of Genesis (v. 3)—‘male and female created He them;’ hence the pre-Adamites of Moslem belief. The capital error of Biblical readers in our day is to assume all these myths and mysteries as mere historical details. Men had a better appreciation of the Hebrew arcana in the days of Philo Judæus.
6 I have noted his labours in the list of ‘Authorities.’
7 Chap. iii. p. 43, translated for the Hakluyt Society by Clements R. Markham, C.B. (London, 1869). It is regretable that a senile Committee of exceeding ‘properness’ cut out so much of this highly-interesting volume. The Spaniard travelled in a.d. 1532–50, published the first part of his work in 1553, and died about 1560. Readers who would study the most valuable anthropological parts of the book are driven to the French translation quoted by Vicente Fidel Lopez (Les Races Aryennes du Pérou, p. 199. Paris, Franck, 1873).
8 We need not go to the classics, Greek and Roman, for the idea of metamorphosis. It is common to mankind, doubtless arising from the resemblance of beast to man in appearance, habits, or disposition; and it may date from the days when the lower was all but equal to the higher animal.
9 Seven Years in South Africa, 1872–79, vol. i. p. 245, and vol. ii. p. 199 (Sampson Low and Co., 1881). The Simiads were African baboons, which fear man less than those of other continents.
10 Wilkinson, I. 1. Unruliness was punished by ‘stick and no supper.’ The old Nile-dwellers, like the Carthaginians and the mediæval Tartars, were famous for taming and training the wildest animals, the cat o’ mountain, leopards, crocodiles, and gazelles. The ‘war-lions of the king’ (Ramses II.) are famed in history. They also taught domestic cats to retrieve waterfowl, and decoy-ducks to cater for the table.
11 Thus Lucretius (v. 1301) calls the elephant ‘anguimanus.’ As is well known, there is a quasi-specific difference between the Indian and the African animal. The latter is shorter, stouter, and more compactly built than the former; the shape of the frontal bones differ, the tusks are larger and heavier, and the ears are notably longer. The latter trait appears even in old coins. Judging from the illustrated papers, I should not hesitate to pronounce the far-famed Jumbo to be an Asiatic, and not, as usually held, an African.
12 The word wrongly written ‘Esquimaux,’ which suggests a French origin, is derived from the Ojibwa Askimeg, or the Abenakin Eskimantsic, meaning ‘eaters of raw flesh.’ Old usage applies it to the races of extreme North America, and of the Asiatic shore immediately opposite. Innuit, a more modern term, signifies only ‘the people,’ like Khoi-khoi (‘men of men’), the Hottentots, and like ‘Bantu’ (Folk), applied, or rather misapplied, to the great South African race. Innuit, moreover, is by no means universal. The Eskimos supply a valuable study; amongst other primæval peculiarities, they have little reverence for the dead, and scant attachment to place.
13 ‘Brave Master Shoe-tye, the great traveller’ (Measure for Measure, iv. 3). The tale of porcupines ‘shooting their quills at the dogs, which get many a serious wound thereby,’ is in M. Polo (i. 28). Colonel Yule quotes Pliny, Ælian, and the Chinese. The animal drops its loose quills when running, and when at bay attempts, hedgehog-like, to hide and shield its head. It is, as the Gypsies know, excellent eating, equal to the most delicate pork; only somewhat dry without the aid of lard.
14 Ammianus Marcellinus (xxiii. chap. 4), quoted in chap. 2.
15 Odyss. xviii. 130, 131. ‘Qui multum peregrinatur, rarò sanctificatur,’ said the theologians. Hence the modern:—
Whoso wanders like Ulysses
Soon shall lose his prejudices.
16 Sir John Lubbock has calculated that among the North American savages the proportion of man to the animals which feed him is 1 to 750; and, as the hunter is at least four times as long-lived as his prey, the ratio might be increased, 1 to 3000. If this were so, and all the bones were preserved, there would be 3,000 bestial skeletons to one human. Without assuming with Mr. Evans (p. 584) that ‘respect for the dead may be regarded as almost instinctive in man,’ and that human remains would be buried, we here find one cause of the present insufficiency of the geologic record.
17 M. Eduard Pietri distributes Prehistoric Archæology proper into two ages, the Agreutic and the Georgic. Under the former he classifies the Barylithic (glacial Drift age) and the Leptolithic. Under the Georgic are included the Neolithic, the Chalcitic (copper and bronze), and the Proto-sideric.
18 Essay on Man, iii. 172–6.
19 The sepia (squid, cuttle-fish, Loligo vulgaris) defends itself by discharging its ‘ink-bag’ embedded in the liver, and escapes in the blackened water. This is as true a defence as a shield.
20 From the Greek τὸ τόξον, the bow (and arrow, Iliad, viii. 296), which seems to be a congener of the Latin taxus, the yew-tree, a favourite material for the weapon. Hence taxus, like the Scandinavian îr or ŷr, the Keltic jubar, and the Slavonian tisu, all meaning the yew-tree, denote the bow as well. The Skalds called the bow also almr (elm-tree), and askr, or mountain-ash, the μελία, which the Greeks applied to the spear. From τόξον came τοξικὸν, ‘arrow-poison,’ the Latin toxicum, whose use survives in our exaggerated term ‘intoxicating liquors.’
21 This I know to my cost, having offended a Guanaco at Cordova, in the Argentine Republic; it straightway spat in my face with unpleasantly good aim.
22 Strutt, Sports and Pastimes, ii. chap. 2.
23 Not unlike the name of a certain Australian Wagga-Wagga which has been heard in the English law-courts.
24 In Land and Water doubts have been thrown upon these single combats of the whale and thresher. See the late Mr. Buckland’s papers (October 2, 1880); Lord Archibald Campbell’s sketch; and the same paper, February 26, 1881. Those on board the wrecked cruiser H.M.S. Griffon, myself included, witnessed a fight between whale and shark in the Bay of Biafra (1862?). The Carcharias family takes its name from the sharp and jagged teeth, ἀπὸ τῶν καρχαρῶν ὀδόντων.
25 Anthrop. Collection, p. 180. Demmin, however, is additionally incorrect by making the article ‘two and a half feet in length’ (Arms and Armour, p. 413, Bell’s edition, London, 1877). In Catalogue of Indian Art in the South Kensington Museum, by Lieut. H. H. Cole, R.E. (p. 313), Sívají is made to murder the Moslem with the ‘bíchwa,’ or scorpion, a ‘curved double blade.’ This probably refers to the dagger which made ‘sicker.’
26 P. 402, where he calls ‘Sívají’ Sevaja.
27 Elphinstone’s History, ii. 468.
28 It is, they say, adored at the old fortress and Maráthá capital, Sattára (= Sát-istara, the seven stars or Pleiades). Here, too, is Sívají’s Sword ‘Bhawáni,’ a Genoa blade of great length and fine temper. Mrs. Guthrie, who saw the latter, describes it (vol. i. p. 426) as a ‘fine Ferrara (?) blade, four feet in length, with a spike upon the hilt to thrust with.’ She also notices the smallness of the grip. The Indian Museum of South Kensington contains a bracelet of seven tiger’s-claws mounted in gold, with a claw clasp (No. 593, 1868). M. Rousselet, who visited Baroda in 1864, describes in his splendid volume one of the Gaekhwar or Baroda Rajah’s favourite spectacula, the ‘naki-ka-kausti’ (kushti). The nude combatants were armed with ‘tiger’s-claws’ of horn; formerly, when these were of steel, the death of one of the athletes was unavoidable. The weapons, fitted into a kind of handle, were fastened by thongs to the closed right hand. The men, drunk with Bhang or Indian hemp, rushed upon each other and tore like tigers at face and body; forehead-skins would hang in shreds; necks and ribs would be laid open, and not unfrequently one or both would bleed to death. The ruler’s excitement on these occasions often grew to such a pitch that he could scarcely restrain himself from imitating the movements of the duellists.
29 Pliny, xxxii. 6.
30 Thompson’s Passions of Animals, p. 225.
31 Comparative Anatomy and Physiology of Vertebrates, i. 193.
32 Prim. Warfare, i. p. 22.
33 Prim. Warfare, i. p. 21.
34 Ibid. ii. p. 22.
35 The spiral horn is shown by Colonel Yule (Marco Polo, ii. 273, second edition) in an illustration as ‘Monoceros and the Maiden.’ The animal, however, appears from the short tail to be a tapir, not a rhinoceros. That learned and exact writer remarks that the unicorn supporter of the Royal Arms retains the narwhal horn. The main use of the latter in commerce is to serve as a core for the huge wax-candles lighted during the ceremonies of the Roman Catholic Church.
36 So it is called in the Catalogue of the India Museum at South Kensington; the derivation is evidently from the Hindostani singh, a horn.
37 Boutell (Arms and Armour, fig. 61, p. 269) engraves a parrying weapon with a blade at right angles to the handle. He calls it a ‘Moorish Adargue’ (fifteenth century). The latter word (with the r) is simply the Arabic word el-darakah, a shield, the origin of our ‘targe’ and ‘target.’ The adaga (not adarga, cantos i. 87, viii. 29) with which Camoens in The Lusiads (ii. 95, &c.) arms the East Africans is a weapon of the Mádu kind. I have translated it ‘dag-targe,’ because in that part of the world it combines poniard and buckler. The savage and treacherous natives of the Solomon Islands (San Christoval, &c.) still use a nondescript weapon, half Sword and half shield, some six feet long.
38 Captain Speke’s Dictionary of the Source of the Nile, p. 652 (Edinburgh: Blackwoods, 1863).
39 In the form called Manchette, or cutting at hand, wrist, and forearm with the inner edge. It is copiously described in iv. 45–54 of my New System of Sword Exercise, &c. (London: Clowes, 1876).
40 Primitive Warfare, p. 24.
41 Sir Charles Lyell, Geological Evidences of Antiquity of Man, p. 13 (London: Murray, 1863). Dr. W. Lauder Lindsay (Proc. Soc. Ant. Scot. vol. v. p. 327) says of the Maori tokis or stone-hatchets, they were used chiefly for cutting down timber and for scooping canoes out of the trunks of forest trees; for driving posts for huts; for grubbing up roots, and killing animals for food; for preparing firewood; for scraping the flesh from the bones when eating, and for various other purposes in the domestic arts. But they were also employed in times of war as weapons of offence and defence, as a supplementary kind of tomahawk.
42 The French sarbacane, the Italian and Spanish cerbotana, the Portuguese gravatana, and the German Blasrohr (blow-tube) is, according to Demmin (p. 468), arbotana, or rather carpicanna, derived from ‘Carpi,’ the place of manufacture, and the Assyrian (Kane), Greek and Latin κάννα (canna), whence ‘cannon.’ This tube, spread over three distinct racial areas in Southern Asia, Africa, and America, is used either for propelling clay balls or arrowlets, poisoned and unpoisoned. It is the sumpitan of Borneo, where Pigafetta (1520) mentions reeds of this kind in Cayayan and Palavan Islands. The hollow bamboo is still used by the Laos of Siam, and is preserved among the Malagasy as a boyish way of killing birds. Père Bourieu notes it among the Malaccan negrito aborigines, whom the Moslem Malays call ‘Oran-Banua’ (men of the woods); the weapon they term tomeang. It is known in Ceylon, in Silhet, and on both sides of the Bay of Bengal. Condamine describes it among the Yameos (South American Indians); Waterlow and Klemm, in New Guinea, and Markham among the Uapes and other tribes on the Amazonas head-waters. In the New World it is of two varieties: the long heavy zarabatana, and the thinner, slighter pucuna. Finally, it has degraded to the ‘pea-shooter’ of modern Europe. The principal feature of the weapon is the poisoned dart; it is therefore unknown amongst tribes who, like the Andamanese, have not studied toxics (Journ. Anthrop. Inst. p. 270, February 1882).
43 See the hamus ferreus pointed at both ends in Demmin (p. 124); and the German Fussängel (p. 465). The larger caltrop was called tribulus, stylus or stilus (Veget. De Re Mil. iii. 24). The knights of mediæval Europe planted their spurs rowels upwards to serve the same purpose.
44 ‘Make your hand perfect by a third attempt,’ said Timocrates in Athenæus, i. cap. 4.
45 ‘Hitherto,’ remarks Colonel A. Lane Fox, ‘Providence operates directly on the work to be performed by means of the living animated tool; henceforth it operates indirectly on the progress and development of creation, first through the agency of the instinctively tool-using savage, and, by degrees, of the intelligent and reasoning man.’
46 J. F. Rowbotham: ‘Certain reasons for believing that the Art of Music, in prehistoric times, passed through three distinct stages of development, each characterised by the invention of a new form of instrument; and that these stages succeeded one another in the same order in various parts of the world’ (Journ. Anthrop. Inst. May 1881). The author states that the Veddahs (properly Vædiminissu, or ‘sportsmen’) of Ceylon, the Mincopis (Andamans), and the people of Tierra del Fuego ‘have no musical instruments at all.’
47 Opuscula fidicularum, &c. (London: Mitchell and Hughes).
48 Specus erant pro domibus. Caverns appear to be divisible into three classes: dwelling-places—including refuges, where, as Prometheus says (i. 452), ‘Men lived like little ants beneath the ground in the gloomy recesses of grots’—storehouses, and sepulchres. All were in Lyell’s third phase. The first was when the rock began to form the channel by dissolution; the second, when a regular river flowed; and the third, when earth and air, instead of water, filled the bed.
49 Aristotle Darwin holds (sorrow! that we should say ‘held’): ‘Our male semi-human progenitors possessed great canine teeth,’ as is still shown by a few exceptional individuals. Hence we derived the trick of uncovering the eye-tooth when sneering or snarling at ‘Brother Man.’
50 Quoted from Mr. Edward T. Stevens in Flint Chips; Col. A. Lane Fox (Catal. p. 158).
51 History of the Discovery and Conquest of the Canary Islands, which dates from 1792. The unfortunate ‘master-mariner’ (see my Wanderings in West Africa, i. 116) borrows from the Spanish of Abreu-Galindo. Mr. F. W. Newman (Libyan Vocabulary: Trübner, 1882) has illustrated the four Libyan languages—the Algerian Kabáil (ancient Numidian), the Moroccan Shilhá (Mauritanian), the Ghadamsi (of which we know little), and the Tuárik (guides), or Tarkiya (Gætulian). ‘Guanche’ is a corruption of guan (Berber wan), ‘one person,’ and Chinet, or Tenerife Island; guan-chinet, meaning ‘a man of Tenerife.’ I have returned to this subject in my last book on the Gold Coast (i. chap. 5).
52 The word, also written ‘Hüttentüt,’ and originally Dutch, is supposed to be an uncomplimentary imitation of the cluck-like or smack-like ‘sonant,’ which characterises their complicated and difficult language, and which has infected the neighbouring sections of the great South African family of speech. The Hottentots had already reached the pastoral stage when first visited by Europeans; whereas the Bushmans then, as now, were huntsmen. Some derive the Hottentot-Bushman ‘click’ from the Egyptian article T (á). But Klaproth found it in Circassia, Whitmee amongst the Melanesian Negritos, and Haldeman amongst certain North American tribes. Professor Mahaffy notices that ‘old women among us express pity by a regular palatal click.’ On the continent of Europe it expresses a kind of ‘Don’t-you-wish-you-may-get-it?’ Dr. Hahn, who has lately published a scientific work upon the Khoi-Khoi, favourably reviewed by Professor Max Müller in the Nineteenth Century, has treated the subject exhaustively.
53 I can bear personal witness to the prowess of the ruffians of Nazareth, who call themselves, most falsely, Greeks. In 1871, when encamped near the village, three of my servants were so severely wounded with hand-stones that one was nearly killed.
54 Prof. Maspero, of Bulak, told me that he had some doubts about the correctness of Wilkinson’s illustration showing ‘ancient Egyptians throwing knives.’
55 The facon (faulchion) is about two feet long. Both weapons are thrown in two ways. The more common is to lay the blade flat on the palm, which is narrowed by contracting the thumb and the musculus guinearum at the root of the little finger. The other is by holding the handle and causing the dart to reverse, so as to strike point foremost. The best guard is a revolver.
56 Critical Enquiry into Antient Armour, &c., by Sir Samuel Rush Meyrick, Kt., preface, p. viii. (4to, 1842).
57 It is not, as usually supposed, a ‘bastard French word,’ from fustis, a staff, and βάλλειν, to throw.
58 Our ‘bow’ is the Gothic bogo (a bender?), Scand. bogi, Dan. buc, and Old Germ. poko. (Jähns, p. 18.) The ancients made fine distinctions in slings: thus the three-thonged weapon of Ægeum, Patræ, and Dymæ was held far superior to that of the Baleares (‘Slinging-Isles’), which had only one strap (Livy, xxxviii. 30).
59 Pliny, vii. 57. The legend points to the excellent archery of the Scythians (Turanians) and the Persians.
60 Even in modern days Dr. Woodward suggests that the first model of flint arrow-heads was brought from Babel, and was preserved after the dispersion of mankind. This is admirably archaic.
61 The crossbow is apparently indigenous amongst various tribes of Indo-China, but reintroduced into European warfare during the twelfth century (Yule’s Marco Polo, ii. 143).
62 The military engines of the ancients were chiefly on the torsion principle; those of the mediævals were of two types, the sling and the crossbow. The ‘tormentum’ was so called because all its parts were twisted; the ‘scorpion’ (or catapult), because the bow was vertically placed, like the insect’s raised tail; and the ‘onager,’ because the ‘wild asses, when hunted, throw the stones behind them by their kicks, so as to pierce the chests of those who pursue them, or to fracture them.’ So at least says A. Marcellinus (Hist. xxiii. 4). I cannot but suspect that Anna Comnena’s τζάγρα is a corruption of onager (Yule’s Marco Polo, ii. 144).
63 The National Museum of Prague, Old Graben Street, now Kolowrat, contains a fine collection of war-flails, especially the huge ‘morning star’ of John Zsizka, generally called Ziska.
64 Mostly, not always, as I learnt to my cost.
65 In a subsequent work (Bronzes, &c., pp. 27–30) Dr. Evans discusses the suggestions of Beger and of Mr. Knight Watson (Proc. Soc. Ant. 2nd S. vii. 396) that celte in Job is a misreading for certe. He justly reprobates the fashion of writing ‘Kelt,’ and the newly-coined French plural celtæ. The truth is that not a few antiquaries have confounded the instrument with the Keltic or Celtic tribes. The word, meaning a stone axe, adze, or chisel, has been erroneously derived from the Celts, properly Kelts, and by older philologists a cælando, which would convert it into a congener of cælum. It is the Latin celtis or celtes, a chisel, possibly a relative of the Welsh cellt, a flint. The word is found, according to Mr. Evans, only in the Vulgate translation of Job, in Saint Jerome, and in a forged inscription. He first met with its antiquarian use in Beger’s Thesaurus Brandenburgicus (1696), where a metal securis (axe) is called celtes.
66 In 1650 Sir William Dugdale (Hist. of Warwickshire) spoke of stone celts as the weapons of the Ancient Britons, and in 1766 he was followed by Bishop Lyttelton. In 1797 Mr. Frere drew the attention of the Society of Antiquaries to the Drift (palæolithic) instruments occurring at Hoxne, Suffolk, together with remains of the elephant and other extinct animals. He was one of several; but, as usually happens, the wit of one man collected and systematised the scattered experience of many. The man was M. Boucher de Perthes, whose finds in the drift-gravels of St. Acheul, near Amiens (1858), appeared in the Antiquités Celtiques et Anté-diluviennes, and made an epoch, changing the accepted chronology of mankind.
67 The stone-weapon was also called betulus, belemnites, and ceraunius (thunder-stone), ceraunium and ceraunia. So Claudian (Laus Serenæ, v. 77)—
Pyrenæisque sub antris
Ignea flumineæ legere ceraunia nymphæ.
‘Fuerunt auctores’ (says Aldovrandus) ‘qui hunc lapidem ceraunium, nempe fulminarem, indigitaverunt.’ According to Skulius Thorlacius, the stone-axe typified the splitting; the hammer, the shattering; and the arrow, the piercing, action of the bolt (Om Thor og hans Hammer). People carried these belemnites about their persons, because lightning was supposed never to strike twice in the same place.
68 According to Suetonius, the Roman Cæsar presided over the senate with a Sword by his side and a mail-coat under his tunic.
69 De Rer. Nat. v. 1282. He speaks of Italy, where copper and bronze historically preceded iron.
70 Sat. i. 3.
71 Leading to the fourth, or Historic, and the fifth, or Gunpowder, age of weapons. In these ‘ages’ we have a fine instance of hasty and indiscriminate generalisation. They originated in Scandinavia, where Stone was used almost exclusively from the beginning of man’s occupation till b.c. 2000–1000. At that time the Bronze began, and ended with the Iron about the Christian era. Thomsen, who classified the Copenhagen Museum in 1836; Nilsson, the Swede, who founded comparative anthropology (1838–43); Forchhammer and Worsäae, the Dane, who illustrated the Bronze Age (1845), fairly established the local sequence. It was accepted by F. Keller, of the Zurich Lake (1853), by Count Gozzadini, of Bologna (1854), by Lyell (1863), and by Professor Max Müller (1863, 1868, and 1873), who seems to have followed the Swiss studies of M. Morlot (Bulletin de la Soc. Vaudoise, tome vi. etc.) Unhappily, the useful order was applied to the whole world, when its deficiency became prominent and palpable. I note that Mr. Joseph Anderson (Scotland in Early Christian Times, p. 19) retains the ‘three stages of progress’—stone, bronze, and iron. Brugsch (History, i. 25) petulantly rejects them, declaring that Egypt ‘throws scorn upon these assumed periods,’ the reverse being the case. Mr. John Evans (The Ancient Stone Implements, &c., of Great Britain, p. 2) adopts the succession-idea, warning us that the classification does not imply any exact chronology. He finds Biblical grounds ‘in favour of such a view of gradual development of material civilisation.’ Adam’s personal equipment in the way of tools or weapons would have been but insufficient, if no artificer was instructed in brass and iron until the days of Tubal Cain, the sixth in descent when a generation covered a hundred years. Mr. Evans divides the Stone Age into four periods. First, the Palæolithic, River-gravel, or Drift, when only chipping was used; second, the Reindeer, or Cavern-epoch of Central France, and an intermediate age, when surface-chipping is found; third, the Neolithic, or surface stone-period of Western Europe, in which grinding was practised; and, lastly, the Metallo-lithic age, which attained the highest degree of manual skill.
72 In Denmark the division is marked even by the vegetation. The Stone Age lies buried under the fir-trees; the oak-stratum conceals the Bronzes, and the Iron Age is covered by birch and elders (Jähns, p. 2).
73 Yule’s Marco Polo, ii. 208.
74 Servius, ad Æneid. ii. 44, ‘Sic notus Ulysses.’
75 Col. A. Lane Fox (Prim. War., p. 24) notices the bone implements of the French caves and their resemblance, amounting almost to identity, with those found in Sweden, among the Eskimos, and the savages of Tierra del Fuego.
76 Mittheilungen der Wien. Anthrop. Gesellschaft. Vienna, 1874.
77 Pfahlbau (pfahl = palus) was originally applied to the pile-villages of the Swiss waters (The Lake-Dwellings of Switzerland, by Dr. Ferdinand Keller).
78 Wilkinson opines that the Egyptian Khons or Khonsu, the new moon of the year which appeared at the autumnal equinox when the ‘world was made,’ becomes the Biblical Sem, and that ‘Sampson’ is Sem-Kon, or Sun-fire. Jablonski (Pantheon Egyptiorum) supported the theory that Son, Sem, Con, Khons, or Djom was the god or genius of the summer sun.
79 Travels into Indo-China, &c. ii. 147, by Henri Mouhot, 1858–59.
80 ‘Pile,’ applied to the arrow-head (as ‘quarrel’ to the bolt of the crossbow), is a congener of the German pfeil, an arrow. The Scandinavian is pila, the Anglo-Saxon pil, apparently a congener of the Latin pilum.
81 Ulster Journal of Archæology for 1857.
82 The Dacota tribe is said still to ‘doctor’ the bullet by filling with venom four drilled holes, which are covered by pressing down the projecting lips or rims of the metal. Unfortunately, travellers tell us that the venom is the cuticle of the cactus, which is quite harmless. The Papuans tip their arrows with a human bone, which is poisoned by being thrust into a putrid corpse. Hence, they say, Commodore Goodenough met his death.
83 P. 258, Descriptive Catalogue of the Antiquities in the Royal Irish Academy, by the late (Sir) William R. Wilde. The Greeks, from the days of Homer, followed by the Romans, considered the use of poisoned arrows a characteristic of the barbarian.
84 The learned author adds, ‘thus confirming the opinion (deduced from the size of the hafts of our bronze Swords) that the hands of the race who used them were very small.’ I can hardly agree with him, and will give reasons in a future page.
[85] Wilde writes: ‘Sceana, which is the plural of scjan, a knife,’ the Scotch sgian-dhu, or skene (Rev. Paul O’Brien’s Practical Grammar and Vocabulary of the Irish Language, Dublin: Fitzpatrick, 1809).’
86 It is better to write Crannog, lest the word be pronounced ‘crannoje.’ It derives from the Irish crann (a tree, e.g. crann ola = an olive-tree), and properly means a platform or plank-floor.
87 Pliny, the grumbler, complains (xxxiii. 54): ‘Our very soldiers, holding even ivory in contempt, have their capuli (sword-hilts) inlaid or chased (cælentur) with silver; their vaginæ (scabbards) are heard to jingle with their silver catellæ (chains), and their belts with the plates of silver (baltea laminis crepitant) that inlay them.’ It will be seen that Divus Cæsar had juster and more soldier-like views. Scipio the younger, when shown a fine shield by a youth, said: ‘It is really beautiful; but a soldier should rely more on his right arm than on his left arm.’
88 Of Lund, Sweden. The Primitive Inhabitants of Scandinavia, &c., translated by Sir John Lubbock. Nilsson is quoted and illustrated by Col. A. Lane Fox (Prim. War. p. 135), and by Wilde (p. 254) from the Scandinaviska Nordens Ur-Invanare, 1843.
89 Chapter III.
90 A commentator volunteers the information that the bow was tipped with ram’s-horn. Nor is there any need to translate ‘goat’ by ibex.
91 Pemberton, Travels.
92 Hakluyt’s edit., p. 43. The index to this publication is very defective: one must look through the whole volume for a line of quotation. I shall again notice it in the next chapter.
[93] Wilkinson (Sir J. Gardner), A Popular Account of the Ancient Egyptians, i. chap. 5, mentions only tips of hard wood, flint, and metals.
94 The Roteiro or Ruttier of the Voyage of Vasco da Gama (p. 5, Lisboa, Imprensa Nacional) speaks of tribes about the Cape of Good Hope armed with horn-weapons ‘worked by fire’ (huuns cornos tostados). I should suggest that ‘cornos’ is an error for páos (wooden staves).
95 The khanjar proper is shaped like a yataghan, of which more presently.
96 I avoid treating of armour in a book devoted to the Sword; but the Horn Age compels me to show, in a few words, how that material, combined with hoofs, gave rise to scale armour. Pausanias, confirmed by Tacitus, informs us that the Sarmatians (Slavs) prepared the horse-hoofs of their large herds and sewed them with nerves and sinews to overlap like the surface of a fir-cone. He adds that this lorica was not inferior in strength or in elegance to the metal-work of the Greeks. The Emperor Domitian wore a corslet of boars’-hoofs stitched together; and a fragment of such horn-armour was found at Pompeii. Ammianus Marcellinus describes the Sarmatians and the Quadi as protected by loricas of horn-flakes planed, polished, and fastened like feathers upon a linen sheet. A defence composed of the hoofs of some animal, made to hold together without the aid of an inner jerkin, and used in some parts of Asia, is represented in Meyrick (plate iii.). A stone figure of old type similarly defended, and bearing an inscription in a dialect cognate with Greek, appears in vol. iii. Journ. Archæol. Assoc. Herodotus (vii. 76) tells us of a people, whose name has disappeared, that, in addition to their brazen helmets, they wore the ears and horns of an ox in brass. This horn-helmet shows the savage practice of defending the head with the skins of beasts and their appendages.
97 The Pfahlbauten im Laibacher Moraste were first noticed in the Neue Freie Presse, August 27, 1875; secondly, by the Neue Deutsche Alpenzeitung, of Vienna, Sept. 4, 1875; thirdly, by Herr Custos Deschmann (to whom the discovery is attributed) in his paper Die Pfahlbauten auf dem Laibacher Moore (Verhand. der Wiener K. K. Geolog. Reichsanstalt, Nov. 16, 1875); and, fourthly, by Carl Freiherr von Czoernig, whose study (Ueber die Vorhistorischen Funde im Laibacher Torfmoor) was read at the Alpine Society of Trieste on December 8, 1875. Between that time and 1880 the subject has been illustrated by many writers. The course of discovery also has been ‘forwards;’ and the whole moor was about to be drained in 1881.
98 Perhaps this may explain the ‘pierced implements of unknown use’ found with harpoon-heads of reindeer-horn in a cavern near Bruniguel, France. Two picks made of reindeer-antlers were produced by the ‘Grimes Graves,’ Westing Parish, Norfolk.
99 The animal remains were of bears, wolves, lynxes, beavers, badgers (probably the cave-species), hogs, goats, sheep (differing in the jaw-bone from ovis), dogs (common, and not eaten), and cattle with small teeth like those of the aurochs. The bird-bones resembled those of the common duck. Man was rare, suggesting that the pile-villagers buried on the adjacent slopes; the only human ‘find’ was an inferior maxilla with teeth much worn.
100 The word paalstab, palstab, or palstave is usually translated ‘labouring-staff,’ from at pula or pala, to labour, labourer. Dr. John Evans (Bronzes, &c., p. 72) prefers ‘spade-staff,’ the verb being at pæla, to dig, and the noun pall, a spade, spud, shovel; the Latin pala, the French pelle, and our (baker’s) peel, or wooden shovel. He confines the term ‘pal-stave’ to two forms; the first is the winged celt with the lateral extensions hammered to make a socket; the second is the spud-shaped form, with a thinner blade above than below the side-flanges.
101 M. Kugelmann, of Hamburg—a wholesale merchant, who kindly showed me his warehouse—prefers the horns of the North American and Japanese stag, especially when buttons are to be made of the crown.
102 Reports on the Discovery of Peru, by Clements R. Markham, C.B., p. 53 (London: Hakluyt Soc. 1872).
103 Oldfield’s ‘Aborigines of Australia’ (Trans. Eth. Soc.). The author was employed (1861) in collecting specimens of timber for the International Exhibition.
104 Commissioner for Victoria at the Geographical Congress of Venice, September 1881.
105 It is instructive to note the novel application of old inventions to general use when the necessities of the age demand them. The detonating and explosive force of gunpowder was known, in the form of squibs and fireworks, centuries before firearms were required. The power of steam, as a whirling toy and a copper vessel prove, was familiar to the old Egyptians, and perhaps to the Greeks and Romans under the name of æolipylæ αἰόλου πύλαι. But only at the end of the last century its motive force attracted general attention; it became a necessary of civilised life, and at once superseded the sailer and the stage coach. And by aid of the Past we may project the Future. Man will bungle over the balloon, but he will never fly straight till railways and steamers become too slow for him: when ‘levitation,’ in fact, shall become a necessity. Now the mode of transit would be an unmitigated evil to humanity.
106 In the Monuments Civils of the Salle de l’Est, Vitrine A. H., at the south side. I can give only the old arrangement, which was changed in 1879–80. During my last visit (November 1882) the new order had not been completed. These club-swords are accompanied by throw-sticks, hatchets, and knob-kerries. The old Lisáns from Thebes are illustrated by Wilkinson (loc. cit. i. 5). The name, however, is not ‘lissan,’ and they are not made of acacia, a soft wood that readily perishes. Why will writers confound acacia and mimosa?
107 The arrangement of the Swords when I last visited the collection (August 1878) was temporary till classified. The wooden blades referred to were in the Petrie Section (Case 21) to the east.
108 So the sovereign of England appointed his Lord High Treasurer by handing over to him a white rod, and the Lord Steward of the Household by presenting a white staff with the words: ‘Seneschall, tenez le bâton de nostre hostiell.’ Holding the staff was equivalent to the royal commission, and when not in the presence it was carried by a footman bareheaded. On the death of his liege lord the great functionary broke the staff over the corpse, and his duties were at an end. The Lord Marshall of England was expressly permitted to bear a gold truncheon with the royal arms at one end, and on the other his own enamelled in black. The king solemnly gave the ‘Marshall’s rod’ into the hands of Maude, daughter of the Earl of Pembroke, who made it over to her son, Earl Roger.
109 It derives from booroomooroong; and the latter denotes, among the Maoris, a part of the ceremonies practised when the boys are being made men. The symbol, we are told (Collins, New South Wales, p. 346), is knocking out a tooth with the aid of a throwing-stick. Mr. Howard Spenseley (loc. cit.) makes the average boomerang 60 centimètres long by 0·6 broad and 0·15 thick: he gives it a flight of 100 mètres.
110 Strangers in Egypt often suppose the true asp to be the Cerastes, or horned snake. As the hieroglyphics and the monuments prove, it is invariably the cobra de capello (Coluber Haja), an inhabitant of Africa as well as of Asia. The colour of this deadly thanatophid—which annually kills thousands in India—varies with its habitat from light yellow to dull green and dark brown. The worst I ever saw are upon the Guinea Coast.
111 Anthrop. Soc. July 11, 1882. General Pitt-Rivers, I believe, would localise the boomerang to the neighbourhood of the Indian Ocean, and deny it to Europe and America.
112 Loc. cit. vol. i. chap. iv. pp. 235, 236, 237, in the abridged edition.
113 Lib. iv. 4, § 3.
114 Pragmateia, vi. 22, § 1; a fragmentary but admirable account of the Roman army.
115 Trans. Irish Assoc. vol. xix. The Romans also called it aclys (Æn. vii. 730), which the dictionaries render as a ‘kind of dart.’ It was an archaic and barbarian weapon; and Virgil (Æn. vii. 730) attributes it to the Osci:—
Teretes sunt aclydes illis
Tela: sed hæc lento mos est aptare flagello.
This would mean that after the weapon is thrown it might be drawn back again with a leather thong. Possibly the cateia of Isidore (cateia, to cut or mangle, and catan, to fight; the Irish caꞇ̇ and the Welsh kad, a fight or a corps of fighters, Latin caterva), survives in the tip-cat. In the Keltic dialect of Wales catai is a weapon.
116 See his learned note (p. 410) on the weapon and on Isidore (Orig. xviii. 7): ‘Hæc est cateia quam Horatius cajam dicit.’ The disputed word probably derives from the Keltic katten, to cast, to throw.
117 Nile Tributaries, by Sir Samuel W. Baker, p. 51. The word has a curious likeness to the ‘tombat,’ a similar weapon in Australia (Col. A Lane-Fox, Anthrop. Coll. p. 31).
118 The ‘Fans’ of M. du Chaillu, a corruption unfortunately adopted by popular works. In Gorilla-Land (i. 207) I have noticed the Náyin, or Mpangwe crossbow (with poisoned ebe, or dwarf bolt), which probably travelled up-Nile like the throw-stick. The détente and method of releasing the string from its notch are those of the toy forms of the European weapon. The Museum at Scarborough contains a crossbow from the Bight of Benin. The people of Bornu (North-West Africa) also use a crossbow rat-trap.
119 It is called chakarani in the Coasts of East Africa and Malabar Coast, by Duarte Barbosa or Magellan (?). The Jibba negroes of Central Africa wear a similar weapon as a bracelet, sheathed in a strip of hide.
120 Col. A. Lane-Fox, Anthrop. Coll., p. 33. For a comparative anatomy of the boomerang the reader will consult that volume, pp. 28–61. I have here noticed only the most remarkable points.
121 The Sword stood in Case 2 of the Salle du Centre, numbered 695; and was described in p. 225 of the late Mariette Pasha’s catalogue. I cannot quite free myself from a suspicion that it was also a boomerang of unusual size. Some of the South African tribes still use throw-sticks a yard to a yard and a half long. ‘They are double as thick at one end as they are at the other,’ says Herr Holub (ii. 340), ‘the lighter extremity being in the usual way about as thick as one’s finger.’
122 This meaningless word (cartuccia, a scrap of paper) was applied by Champollion to the elliptical oval containing a group of hieroglyphics. It is simply an Egyptian shield (Wilkinson, loc. cit. i. chap. 5), and the horizontal line below shows the ground upon which it rested. The old Nile-dwellers, like the classics of Europe and the modern Chinese, use the shield for their characteristics, their heraldic badges, &c. The same was the case with our formal heraldry, which originated about the time of the Crusades, personal symbolism being its base. As Mr. Hardwick shows, the horse, raven, and dragon were old familiar badges; many of our sheep-marks are identical with ‘ordinaries,’ and the tribes of Australia used signs to serve as kobongs, or crests. Thus, too, in fortification the shield became the crenelle and the battlement, and it served to ‘iron-clad’ the war-galleys of the piratical Norsemen.
123 So there are two ways of swimming. The civilised man imitates the action of the frog, the savage the dog, throwing out the arms and drawing the hands towards his chest.
124 Journ. Anthrop. Inst. vol. iii. pp. 7–29, April, 1873.
125 An illustration is given in Mr. J. G. Wood’s Natural History of Man. He also quotes Mr. F. Baines, who describes the paddles of the North Australians with barbed and pointed looms.
126 Capt. James Mackenzie, in a paper read before the Ethno. Soc. by Mr. G. M. Atkinson (Journal, vol. ii. No. 2, of July 18, 1870. The paddle is figured pl. xiv. 2).
127 Translated for the Hakluyt Society (1874) by Mr. Albert Tootal, of Rio de Janeiro, who wisely preserved the plain and simple style of the unlettered and superstition-haunted gunner.
128 In Bacon’s day (Aphorisms, book ii.) gummy woods were supposed to be rather a Northern growth, ‘more pitchy and resinous than in warm climates, as the fir, pine, and the like.’ They are as abundant near the Equator, where the viscidity preserves them from the alternate action of burning suns and torrential rains; moreover, they are harder and heavier than the pines and firs of the Temperates.
129 Historia Geral do Brazil, by F. Adolpho de Varnhagen, vol. i. p. 112 (Laemmert, Rio de Janeiro, 1854).
130 M. Paul Bataillard (p. 409, Sur le Mot Pagaie, Soc. Anthrop. de Paris, 1874) is in error, both when he calls the people of Paraguay ‘Pagayas,’ or ‘carriers of lances,’ and when he identifies Pagaya (not a spear, but a paddle-sword) with the ‘sagaia or assagai.’ The latter word is of disputed origin, and it is meaningless in the tongues of South Africa. Space forbids me to touch its history, except superficially. ‘Azagay,’ a lance, or rather javelin, appears in Spanish history as far back as the days of Ojeda (1509); and in 1497 the Portuguese of Vasco da Gama’s expedition use the term ‘azagayas’ (p. 12, Roteiro or Ruttier, before alluded to). I believe both to be derived from the Arabic el-khazúk, a spit—in fact, the Italian spiedo, lance.
131 Markham (p. 203, Cieça de Leon) makes ‘Macaná’ a Quichua word; it also belongs to the great Tupi-Guarani family.
132 Antiquarian Researches, quoted by Markham, loc. cit. p. 181.
133 The Godeffroy Collection has produced a huge Catalogue of 687 pages (Die ethnographisch-anthropologische Abtheilung des Museum Godeffroy in Hamburg, vol. i. 8vo (L. Friederichsen u. Co. 1881). It was shown to me by Dr. Graeffe, the naturalist often mentioned in ‘South Sea Bubbles, by the Earl and the Doctor.’ As a rule the Samoans had clubs and spears, but few Swords.
134 This part of Melanesia has been familiar to the home reader by the life, labours, and death of Bishop Patterson.
135 Case 21, Petrie, No. 142.
136 The village of Abu Rawásh, north of the Pyramids of Jízah, still works this material in large quantities; and its caillouteurs, or flint-knappers, have produced excellent imitations of the so-called prehistoric weapons. I have described the flint finds of Egypt in the Journ. Anthrop. Instit. (Feb. 1879), and shall have something more to say about them. A Mr. R. P. Greg, who writes in the same Journal (May 1881) on the ‘Flint Implements of the Nile Valley,’ is not aware of the fact that I found worked flints near the larger petrified forest (Cairo). Since that time General Pitt-Rivers made his grand discovery of ‘Chert Implements in stratified Gravel in the Nile Valley’ (Journ. Anthrop. Inst. May 1882). In March 1881, when visiting the Wady, near Elwat El-Díbán (Hill of Flies) amongst the cliffs of Thebes, he came upon palæolithic flints, flakes worked with bulbs and facets embedded in the hardened grit, six and a half to ten feet below the surface. In the same strata tombs had been cut, flat-topped chambers with quadrangular pillars. The fragments of pottery enabled Dr. Birch to pronounce these excavations ‘not later than the eighteenth dynasty, and perhaps earlier.’ The New Empire in question was founded by Amosis (Mah-mes, or Moon-child) circ. b.c. 1700; it included the three great Tothmes, and lasted about three hundred years, ending with the heretic Amun-hotep IV., slave of Amun, circ. b.c. 1400, and Horemhib, the Horus of Manetho. The worked flints may evidently date thousands of years before that period. This is a discovery of the highest importance, and we may expect, with Mr. Campbell, that the ‘works of men’s hands will be found abundantly underlying the oldest history in the world, in the hard gravel which underlies the mud of the Nile-hollow from Cairo to Assouan.’ At any rate, this find disposes of the scientific paradox that Art has no infancy in Nile-land. The strange fancy has been made popular by the Egyptologist, who threatens to become as troublesome as the Sanskritist.
137 It is figured (p. 8) by Dr. John Evans (Ancient Stone Implements, &c.), who offers another ‘poniard’ (perhaps a scraper) on p. 292. On p. 308 he notes the large thin flat heads called ‘Pechs’’ (Picts’?) knives.’
138 Nephrite is so called because once held a sovereign cure for kidney disease. Jade is found in various parts of Europe (Page); in the Hartz (or Resin) Mountains; in Corsica (Bristowe), and about Schweinsal and Potsdam (Rudler). Saussurite, the ‘Jade of the Alps,’ appears about the Lake of Geneva and on Monte Rosa. Mr. Dawkins limits Jade proper in the Old World to Turkestan and China. Jade, the Chinese you, is popularly derived from the Persian jádú = (the) magic (stone).
139 I need hardly notice that the mussel-shell was the original spoon, still a favourite with savages.
140 Humboldt (Pers. Narr. vol. i. p. 100) makes the Guanches call obsidian ‘tabona’; most authors apply the word to the Guanche knife of obsidian.
141 Neuhoff, Travels, &c. xiv. 874.
142 Our word ‘glass’ derives from glese (gless, glessaria), applied by the old Germans to amber (Tacit. De Mor. Germ. cap. 45). Pliny (xxxvii. chap. 11) also notices glæsum (amber) and Glæsaria Island, by the natives called Austeravia.
143 Stephens, Yucatan, i. 100.
144 The curious and artistic rock inscriptions and engravings of the South African Bushmen were traced in outline by triangular flint-flakes mounted on sticks to act as chisels. The subjects were either simple figures; cows, gnus, and antelopes, a man’s bust and a woman carrying a load; or compositions, as ostrich and rider, a jackal chasing a gazelle, or a rhinoceros hunting an ostrich.
145 See Chap. I.
146 Voyage Pittoresque autour du Monde, par M. Louis Choris, Peintre, 1822.
147 Trans. Ethno. Soc. vols. i. and ii. p. 290.
148 Quoted by Col. Lane Fox, Prim. War. i. 25.
149 Prehistoric Man, by Daniel Wilson (vol. i. pp. 216–17).
150 Incidents of Travel in Central America, &c., p. 51; by J. Lloyd Stephens. The work is highly interesting, because it shows Egypt in Central America. Compare the Copan Pyramid with that of Sakkarah; the Cynocephalus head (i. 135) with those of Thebes; the beard, a tuft on the chin; the statue and its headdress (ii. 349); the geese-breeding at the palace (ii. 316); the central cross (ii. 346) which denotes the position of the solstices and the equinoxes and the winged globe at Ocosingo (ii. 259). In Yucatan the Agave Americana took the place of the papyrus for paper-making. Indo-China also appears in the elephant-trunk ornaments (i. 156).
151 Prim. War. ii. p. 25.
152 The two latter are in Demmin, p. 84.
153 A specimen is in the British Museum, Department of Meteorolites. (Prim. War. p. 25.)
154 The distinguished physicist, Prof. Huxley, extends on purely anthropological grounds, the name ‘Australioids’ to the Dravidians of India, the Egyptians, ancient and modern, and the dark-coloured races of Southern Europe. I have ventured to oppose this theory in Chap. VIII. Mr. Thomas, curious to say, would make letters (alphabet, &c.) arise amongst the Dravidian quasi-savages.
155 Trans. Anthrop. Inst. May 1881. Mr. Milne brought home some fine specimens of worked stones, one of which (No. 17, pl. xviii.) is a chopper in the shape of the Egyptian flint-knives.
156 Mr. Heath (who directed the Indian Iron and Steel Company) opined that the tools with which the Egyptians engraved hieroglyphics on syenite and porphyry were made of Indian steel. The theory is, as we shall see, quite uncalled for.
157 For instance, the magnificent life-sized statue of Khafra (Cephren or Khabryes) in the Bulak Museum, dated b.c. 3700–3300 (Brugsch, History, vol. i. p. 78). Scarabæi of diorite can be safely bought in Egypt, the substance being too hard for cheap imitation work. Dr. Henry Schliemann constantly mentions diorite in his Troy and its Remains (1875); for instance, ‘wedges’ (i.e. axes) large and small, (pp. 21, 28, 154): he speaks of an immense quantity of diorite implements (p. 75); of a Priapus of diorite twelve inches high (p. 169); of ‘curious little sling bullets’ (p. 236), and of hammers (p. 285). At Mycenæ he found ‘two well-polished axes of diorite.’ But as he also calls it ‘hard black stone,’ I suspect it to be basalt, as his ‘green stone’ (Troy, p. 21) may be jade or jadeite.
158 Casting the cannon called after the late General Uchatius is still kept a secret; and I have been unable to see the process at the I. R. Arsenal, Vienna.
159 Stahl-bronce = steel (i.e. hardened) bronze. The misunderstanding caused some ludicrous errors to the English press.
160 I reported to the Athenæum (August 16, 1879) this ‘recovery’ of the lost Egyptian (and Peruvian) secret for tempering copper and bronze, which had long been denied by metallurgists. Copper hardened by alloy is described in the Archæologia, by Governor Pownall. Mr. Assay-Master Alchorn found in it particles of iron, which may, however, have been in the ore, and some admixture of zinc, but neither silver nor gold.
161 Of this I shall have more to say in Chap. V.
162 This was the weight of the statue of ‘Sesostris,’ Ramses II., and his father Pharaoh Seti I.; see Chap. IX. The overseer standing upon its knee appears about two-thirds the length of the lower leg (Wilkinson, Frontisp. vol. ii.). Pliny treats of colossal statues, xxxiv. 18.
163 Les Métaux dans l’Antiquité, par J. P. Rossignol. Paris: Durand, 1863.
164 So Professor F. Max Müller, Lectures on the Science of Language, asserted, with a carelessness rare in so learned a writer (vol. ii. p. 255. London: Longmans, 1873), that ‘the ancients knew a process of hardening that pliant metal (copper), most likely by repeated smelting (heating?) and immersion in water.’ This latter is the common process for softening the metal.
165 Cieza de Leon (Introd. p. xxviii.): ‘Humboldt mentions a cutting instrument found near Cuzco (‘the City’) which was composed of 0·94 parts of copper and 0·06 of tin. The latter metal is scarcely ever found in South America, but I believe there are traces of it in parts of Bolivia. In some of the instruments silica was substituted for tin.’ The South American tin is mostly impure; still it was and can be used.
166 Apparently there are two forms of ‘Núb’ (gold), the necklace and the washing-bowl. See Chapter VIII.
167 Pliny, xxxvi. 65.
168 Here Elton, like others of his age, mistranslates Chalcos by ‘brass’:
Their mansions, implements, and armour shine
In brass,—dark iron slept within the mine.
169 Engraving on copper-plates is popularly attributed to Maso Finiguerra, of Florence, in 1460; but the Romans engraved maps and plans, and the ancient Hindus grants, deeds, &c. on copper-plates.
[170] I regret the necessity of troubling the learned reader with these stock quotations, but they are essential to the symmetry and uniformity of the subject.
171 Sophocles and Ovid make Medea, and Virgil makes Elissa, use a sickle of chalcos. Homer, as will be seen, uses the same material for his arms, axes, and adzes. Pausanias follows him, quoting his description of Pisander’s axe and Meriones’ arrow; he also cites Achilles’ spear in the temple of Athene at Phaselis, with its point and ferrule of chalcos, and the similar sword of Memnon in the temple of Æsculapius at Nicomedia. Plutarch tells us that the sword and spear-head of Theseus, disinterred by Cymon in Scyros, were of copper. Empedocles, who (b.c. 444)—
ardentem frigidus Ætnam
Insiluit—
was betrayed by his sandal shoon with chalcos soles.
172 See Macrob. Sat. vi. 3.
173 Or ‘a furbisher (whetter, sharpener = acuens) of every cutting tool of copper and iron.’ See Chap. IX.
174 I can hardly understand why Dr. Evans (p. 5) insists upon these sockets being bronze, as they could ‘hardly have been done from a metal so difficult to cast as unalloyed copper.’ He greatly undervalues the metallurgy of the Exodist Hebrews, who would have borrowed their science from Egypt.
175 Lead is also mentioned, but not tin.
176 A certain Herr Dromir patented in Germany a process for making malleable bronze. He added one per cent. of mercury to the tin, and then mixed it with the molten copper.
177 For Irish copper swords see the Archéologie, vol. iii. p. 555. They will be exhaustively described in Part II.
178 So Chalcis in Mela (ii. 7), now Egripos (Negroponte).
179 The confusion with iron appears in the Sanskrit (Pali?) ayas; Latin æs for ahes (as we find in aheneus); the Persian áhan (آهن); the Gothic ais, or aiz; the High German er (which is the Assyrian eru and the Akkadian hurud), and the English iron. J. Grimm (Die Naturvölker) connects Ἄρης with æs. That æs and æris metalla in Pliny mean copper, we learn from his tale of Telephus (xxv. 19), which, by the by, is told by Camoens (Sonnet lxix.) in a very different way.
180 χαλκεύειν δὲ καὶ τὸ σίδηρεύειν ἔλγον, καὶ χαλκέας τοὺς τὸν σίδηρον ἐργαζομένους. Jul. Pollux, Onomasticon, viii. c. 10.
181 The full term was æs cyprium, which Pliny apparently applies to the finer kind; then it became cyprium, the adjective, which expressed only locality; and lastly cuprum. The third is first used by Spartianus in the biography of Caracalla (No. 5), Cancelli ex ære vel cupro (doors of æs or copper). Ælius Spartianus dates from the days of Diocletian and Constantine (Smith, sub voc.). When Pliny writes in Cypro prima fuit æris inventio, he leaves it doubtful if æs be copper or bronze; but we should prefer the former. So he makes the best ‘Missy’ (native yellow copperas) proceed from the Cyprus manufactories (xxxiii., iv. 25, and xxxiv., xii. 31). The word misí or missí is still used in India for a vitriolic powder to stain the teeth. Cypros, the wife of Agrippa, was possibly named from Kafar = the henna plant: the Cyprus of Pliny (xii. 51) is also the Lawsonia inermis.
182 Frag. tom. i. p. 226. Edit. Bipont.
183 The island will be further noticed in Chap. VIII.
184 Cyprus, &c., by General Louis Palma (di Cesnola). London: Murray, 1877. The author excavated from 1866 to 1876, and opened some 15,000 tombs, mostly Phœnician.
185 Quoted in the Kypros of W. H. Engel (vol. i. p. 14). The two volumes are a mine of information; much of it now antiquated, but useful to later students who have less leisure to accumulate learning.
186 ‘In Cyprus, where the manufacturers of the stone called chalcitis (copper-smelters) burn it for many days in fire, a winged creature, something larger than a great fly, is seen walking and leaping in the fire.’ A brother of the salamander!
187 Some commentators (Strabo, vi. 1) confound this place with Ausonian Temĕsa, or Tempsa, in the land of the Brutii, with Temése of Cyprus.
188 Herodotus (iii. 23) tells us that, copper being of all metals the most scarce and valuable in Æthiopia, prisoners were there bound with golden fetters. As will be seen, copper has lately been found in Abyssinia.
189 An awful list of his works is given in Diogenes Laertius.
190 This ærugo was artificially made by the Ancients with acetic acid, converting copper to a green salt (Beckmann, sub v. ‘Verdigris or Spanish Green’). The green rust of the carbonate of copper is still erroneously termed verdigris (acetate of copper).
191 Ample information is given by Brugsch (Egypt under the Pharaohs, vol. i. p. 64) of Senoferu; of the valiant Khufu or Suphis (Cheops); of the Pharaoh Sahura, or Sephris; of Menkauhor (Mencheres) and Tat-ka-ra (Fifth Dynasty); of the bas-reliefs at Wady Magharah dating from King Pepi (Sixth Dynasty); of Thut-mes III. or the Great, and his sister Hashop (Eighteenth Dynasty before b.c. 1600), one of whose expeditions produced among other things ninety-seven Swords (Brugsch, i. 327), and who mentions ‘gilt copper’; of Amon-hotep III., also ‘the Great’ (Eighteenth Dynasty, about b.c. 1500); and of other Pharaohs who worked these diggings.
192 Pottery has lately been found embedded in the bricks of the Maydúm Pyramid.
193 The Souphis I. of Manetho is the second king of the Fourth Dynasty following Soris. Souphis II. is the Khafra of the Tables and the Cephren of the Greeks.
194 The hieroglyphic is of several forms; may serve as a specimen.
195 ‘Malachite’ is the Greek molochotis, from the molokhe, or marsh-mallow; whence the Arabic mulukhíyeh. In Poland, malachite and turquoise preside over the month of December.
196 Meaning the Beloved of Ptah, the Opener, the Artificer God. The word is found in the Arabic fath. It is a better derivation for Hephæstus than ‘Vaishravana’; but Sanskrit is so copious that any given word can be derived from it.
197 O Muata Cazembe, by Monteiro and Gamitto, describes the copper works in South-East Africa long known to the natives. I am told by Mr. Hooker, C.E., that he has lately seen (pace Herodotus) ‘magnificent specimens of native copper sent from Abyssinia.’
198 R.N., C.B., &c., Across Africa, vol. i. pp. 134, 319; and vol. ii. pp. 149, 329.
199 Viagens dos Portuguezes, Colecção de Documentos, &c.
200 Layard’s Nineveh, i. 224, ii. 415; 6th edit. 1854.
201 Hence our packfong, or German silver, of China, an alloy of copper (50 per cent.), nickel, and zinc (25 per cent. each).
202 The Chinese Repository gives a hundred illustrations of the implements in use by the Chinese and the Japanese.
203 Fir or fear (vir, a man), and bolg (Bolgi, Belgæ), a belly, bag, budget, or quiver. They occupied Southern Britain, and formed the third immigrant colony preceding the ‘Milesians,’ sons of Milidh or Miledh (Senchus Mor), evidently Miles, the soldier. He had two sons, Emer and Airem, from whom the Irish race is descended. Emer, says Prof. Rhys, may represent the Ivernii or pre-Celtic population mentioned by Ptolemy; and Airem, which means ‘a farmer,’ the Iranian race which introduced agriculture amongst a horde of hunters. The fourth colony was the Tuatha (people, e.g. Tuatha-Eireann = people of Erin), named from Danair, a stranger, foreigner, and properly a Dane. We have lately been shown how much true history may be obtained from these names, which had become bye-words, almost ridiculous to use.
204 Bán (our corrupted ‘bawn,’ as in ‘Molly Bawn’), white, is the Latin canus. It is also a noun substantive, meaning ‘copper.’
205 Wilde, Catalogue, pp. 58, 356.
206 Meaning Tectetan = ‘I don’t know.’ So the M’adri on an old English chart of the Euphrates.
207 Select Letters of Columbus, &c. p. 201. Translated by R. H. Major, Hakluyt Society, 1870.
208 Humboldt, Travels, iii. 194.
209 Commentaries of the Yncas. Translated by Clements R. Markham, C.B. Hakluyt Society, 1871.
210 Daniel Wilson’s Prehistoric Man, vol. i. chap. viii.; The Metallurgic Arts, Copper (pp. 231–79). Prof. Brush, of Yale College, calculated that 6,000 tons were yielded in 1858.
211 R.E., Spanish America, &c. (Philadelphia: Abraham Small, 1819), p. 49.
212 It was divided, like the Greek and Roman, into centuries (pachacas), chiliarchies (hurangos), and inspectorships (tokrikrok), generally under royalties. The organisation was due to the Ynka Inti-Kapak (the Great), b.c. 1500–1600. There was a large fleet (‘magna colcharum classis’) of ships not smaller than the contemporary European, ‘navigiis velificantur nihili vestris minoribus,’ says P. Martyr (Decad. ii. lib. 3). Neither traveller nor historian has explained how this mighty organisation crumbled to pieces at the touch of a few European adventurers.
I have read with interest the able work of M. Vicente F. Lopez, Les Races Aryennes du Pérou (Paris: Franck, 1871): he derives the word from Pirhua, the first Ynka deified to a Creator. He adopts (p. 17) against Garcilasso de la Vega, who gave the Ynkarial Empire 400 years, the opinions of the learned Dr. Fernando Montésinos el Visitador, of the later sixteenth century, who is set aside by Markham, Narratives of the Yncas (Hakluyt, 1873). Montésinos derives the Peruvians from Armenia five centuries after ‘the Flood,’ and assigns 4,000 years with 101 emperors to the dynasty; it begins with Manko Kapak, son of Pirhua Manko; and Sinchi Roka (No. xcv. of Montésinos) is Garcilasso’s official founder (p. 25).
But I cannot follow M. Lopez in his theories of ‘Aryanism’ (Zend and Sanskrit) or ‘Turanianism’ (Chinese and Tartar). The Quichua wants the peculiar Hindu cerebrals (which linger in English), and lacks the ‘l,’ so common in ‘Indo-European’ speech; ‘Lima,’ for instance, should be ‘Rima.’ It has no dual, and no distinction between masculine and feminine. But with the licence which M. Lopez allows himself, any language might be derived from any other. For instance, chinka from sinha, ‘the lion’ (p. 138); hakchikis = hashish, ‘intoxicating herb’; kekenti, ‘humming-bird,’ from kvan, ‘to hum’; huahua, ‘son,’ from su, ‘to engender,’ sunus, &c., (when in Egypt we have su); and mama, ‘mother,’ from mata, μήτηρ, mater, when we have mut and mute in Nile-land. For mara, ‘to kill,’ ‘death,’ the old Coptic preserves mer, meran, ‘to die’; and for mayu, ‘water,’ mu.
I thus prefer the monosyllabic Egyptian for Quichua roots, noting the two forms of pronoun, isolated (nyoka = I = anuk) and affixed (huahua-í, ‘my son;’ huahua-ki, ‘thy son;’ huahua-u, ‘his son’). The heliolatry of the Andes was that of the Nile Valley; Kon is the Egyptian Tum, ‘the setting sun.’ The god Papacha wears on his head the scarabæus of Ptah, or Creative Might. The pyramids and megalithic buildings are also Nilotic. The pottery shows three several styles, Egyptian, Etruscan, and Pelasgic. The population was divided into the four Egyptian castes (p. 396), priests (mankos and amautas), soldiers (aucas, aukas), peasants (uyssus), and shepherds or nomads (chakis). According to Cieza de Leon (p. 197) they thought more of the building and adorning of their tombs than of their houses; their mummies were protected by little idols, and the corpse carried the ferryman’s fee. The pyramid of Copan (Yucatan), 122 feet high, with its 6-feet steps, is that of Sakkarah. The Yucatan beard in statues is Pharaohic. The elephant-trunk ornaments (Stephens, ii. 156) are Indo-Chinese. The geese-breeding (ii. 179) is Egyptian. See also the Toltec legend of the House of Israel (ii. 172).
213 The ‘lovely valley, Andahualas,’ is from Anta and Huaylla, pasture—i.e. ‘copper-coloured meadow.’ Anta in Cieza de Leon appears to be copper, whereas other writers make it bronze.
214 Peruvian Antiquities, by Don M. E. de Rivero and J. J. von Tschudi.
215 They abandoned the native silver mines when the ore became too hard, and they smelted it in small portable stoves. They knew also the chemical combinations, sulphate, antimonial, and others; and they worked quicksilver. They had mines of Quella (Khellay, or iron), but they found difficulty in extracting it. Besides smelting, they could use the tacana (hammer), cast in moulds, inlay, and solder.
216 Ewbank, of whom more presently, sketches a well-cast axe (p. 455). He translates anta by bronze (p. 455).
217 Doubtless copied from Old-World articles. On the west side of Palenque the Sword is distinctly Egyptian (Stephens, Yucatan). I have attempted to show how easily castaway mariners could be swept by currents from Europe, Asia, Africa, and America. See ‘Ostreiras of the Brazil’ in Anthropologia, No. 1, October 1873.
218 Antiquarian, Ethnological, and other Researches. By William Bollaert. London: Trübner, 1860. We must probably change ‘brass’ into ‘bronze’ when he says (p. 90) that ‘the Peruvians used tools of brass.’
219 Appendix to Life in Brazil (Sampson Low, 1856).
220 This white copperas was detected by Scacchi on the fumaroles after the Vesuvian eruption of 1855.
221 Gold was shown by yellow, and silver by white. Dr. Evans (Bronze, &c. p. 7) suggests that the round blue bar used by butchers (Wilkinson, iii. 247) was not of steel; but his reasons are peculiarly unsatisfactory. The file is a common implement amongst savages, doubtless derived from the practice of cross-hatching wooden grips and handles. Mr. A. H. Rhind (Thebes, &c.) attributes little weight to the diversity of colours employed by ancient Egyptians to depict metallic objects, and he finds red and green confused.
222 Thus we have a blue war-helmet of ring-mail (Lepsius, Denkmäler, iii. 115 &c.), a blue war-hatchet with wooden handle, and spears pointed with brown-red and blue (copper and iron) in the tomb of Ramses III. The war-car of an Æthiopian king, in the days of Tutankamun, has blue wheels and a body of yellow (gold). Lepsius, however, adds: ‘It is very remarkable that in all the representations of the old empire, blue-painted instruments can scarcely be traced.’ This simply proves that iron and steel were rare.
223 Prehistoric Man, chap. viii.
224 It was analysed by Mr. E. Tookey, with the following results:
| Copper | 97·12 |
| Arsenic | 2·29 |
| Iron | 0·43 |
| Tin, with traces of gold | 0·24 |
| 100·08 |
The presence of the tin may have been accidental. The proportion of arsenic (2¼ per cent.) might have been expected to harden the metal, yet it was so soft as to be almost useless.
225 See chap. ix.
226 It is equivalent to the Roman’s ‘Aliud clausum in pectore, aliud in lingua promptum habere.’
227 So amongst the Jews the sharp knives for circumcision (Josh. v. 2–3) were of the silex which they learned from the Egyptians; and the custom continued long after the invention of metal blades.
228 It was opened by Herr Ramsauer, and carefully described in Das Grabfeld von Hallstatt, by Baron E. von Sacken. I shall have more to say of it in chap. xiii.
229 Prinseps’ Essays (London, 1858), vol. i. p. 222, pl. xliv. fig. 12, and Journ. R. As. Soc. Bengal, vol. vii. pl. xxxii. fig. 12. Long descriptions of copper smelting in India are found in Science Gleanings, pp. 380 et seq., No. 36, Dec. 1831, Calcutta, and in Percy (Metall. p. 387); the latter by Mr. H. F. Blanford, of the Geol. Survey, who made especial studies in Himalayan Sikkim and the Nepaulese Tirhai. The workmen, who are of low caste, win the stone in small blast-furnaces about three feet high, burning charcoal and cow-chips. They work not only the easily reducible carbonates, but sulphuretted ores, copper pyrites, with a mixture of mundic (iron pyrites).
230 Scales are apparently implied by kaskassin (1 Sam. xvii.), which in Leviticus and Ezekiel applies to fish-scales.
231 The shekel is usually estimated at 220 grs. (Troy), which would reduce the weights to 22·91 and 190·97 lbs. respectively; but Maimonides makes it = 320 grains of barley = as many grains Troy. See Parkhurst (Lex., s.v. ‘Amat’). Either figure would form a fair burden for a horse; and the spear would have been a most unhandy article, unless used by a man ten feet tall. I shall notice the Gathite’s Sword in chap. ix.
232 Ethnology of the British Islands. We also read: ‘Copper Swords have been found in Ireland; iron among the Britons and Gauls; bronze was used by the Romans, and probably by the Egyptians; and steel of varying degrees of hardness is now the only weapon employed.’ (J. Latham: see chap. vii.)
233 Trans. Edinb. Philos. Soc. Feb. 1822.
234 J. A. Phillips, F.C.S. Memoirs of the Chemical Soc. vol. iv.
235 Archæology and Prehistoric Annals of Scotland, p. 246.
236 See Sir W. Wilde’s Cat. Metallic Materials—Celts, Museum of Royal Irish Academy.
237 History of Kerry, p. 125.
238 Yet Æschylus (Agamem.) uses both chalcos and sideros generically for a weapon.
239 Ilios, &c. (London, Murray, 1880).
240 Some small objects are reported as wheel-made; but this requires confirmation, according to a writer in the Athenæum (Dec. 18, 1880).
241 The copper bracelet (Troy, p. 150, No. 88) with its terminal knobs is the modern trade ‘manilla’ of the West African coast. This survival will again be noticed in chap. ix.
242 The word in its older form was written ‘allay.’ Johnson derives it from à la loi, allier, allocare: it appears to me the Spanish el ley, the legal quality of coinable metal. We have now naturalised in English ley, meaning a standard of metals. (Sub voc. Dict. of Obsolete and Provincial English, by Thomas Wright; London, Bell and Daldy, 1869.)
243 Recherches sur les Mystères; and Mémoire pour servir à la religion secrète, &c. &c.
244 The ‘Aglaophemus,’ so called from the initiator of Pythagoras. I see symptoms of a revival in assertions concerning a ‘highly cultivated beginning, with the arts well known and practised to an extent which, in subsequent ages, has never been approached; and from which there has not anywhere been discovered a gradual advancement; but, on the contrary, an immediate and decidedly progressive declension.’ This, however, is a mere question of dates. Man’s civilisation began long before the Mosaic Creation; and science has agreed to believe that savage life generally is not a decadence from higher types, not a degeneracy, but a gradual development.
245 We now divide language into three periods: 1st, intonative, like the cries of children and lower animals; 2nd, imitative, or on onomatopoetic; and 3rd, conventional, the civilised form.
246 Axieros (the earth-goddess), Axiokersa (Proserpine of the Greeks), Axiokersos (Hades), and Casmilos (Hermes or Mercury). Ennemoser may be right in making the Kabeiroi pygmies (i.e. gnomes), but not in rendering Dactyloi by ‘finger-size.’
247 The lame and deformed ‘artificer of the universe,’ who became Hephæstos (Vulcan) in Greece, and Vishvakarma in India. Sokar has left his name in the modern ‘Sakkárah.’
248 The Assyrian cuneiforms allude to ‘the (Great) Bear making its crownship,’ that is, circling round the North Pole.
249 The temples of the Cabiri have lately been explored by Prof. Conze for the Austrian Government at Samothrace, and we may expect to learn something less vague concerning these mysterious ancients.
250 The Rev. Basil H. Cooper believes that the Phrygian was the original Ida, which gradually passed to Crete; and here the Idæi were priests of Cybele. He is disposed to connect with it the Greek Σίδ(ηρο); the German Eisen (and our iron), and the Ida feldt and Asi of the Norse myths (Day, p. 133).]
251 The name is derived by Bochart from Heb. Lub or Lelub, חיקלוב, chiefs of the Libu or Ribu, as the old Egyptians called the Libyans. Hence the Prom. Lilybæum (Li-Lúb) and the Sinus ad Libyam or Lilybatanus.
252 We have satisfactory details concerning the Chalybes, who border on Armenia, in the Anabasis (iv. 5, &c.). They dwell two days from Cotyora, the colony planted by Sinope; they are subject to the Mossynœci, and they subsist by iron-working (v. 5). Though few, they are a most warlike people, full of fight. Their armour consists of helmets, greaves, and cuirasses of twisted linen cords, reaching to the groin. They carry spears about fifteen cubits long, ‘having one spike’ (i.e. without ferule); and at their girdles a short faulchion, as large as a Spartan crooked dagger, with which they cut the throats of all whom they can master; and then, lopping off their heads, bear them away (iv. 7). Strabo makes the Chalybes the same as their neighbours the Chaldæi.
253 The well-known inscription on the tomb of Midas, and another given by Texier (Asie Mineure, ii. 57) show the Phrygian tongue to have been a congener of Greek. Even the Békos of Herodotus (ii. 2) is allied to our ‘bake,’ and Bédu to our ‘water.’ We are greatly in want of further information about Phrygia, and it is to be hoped that Colonel Wilson and Mr. W. M. Ramsay will complete the labours of Texier and Hamilton.
254 The Aryans of Herodotus, about the Arius river (Heri-rúd), are an undistinguished tribe, a mere satrapy. Strabo’s Aria (xi. 9) is a tract about 250 by 40 miles. In Pliny (vi. 23) Ariana includes only the lands of the Gedrosi (Mekran), the Arachoti (Kandahár), the Arii proper (Herat), and the Parapomisadæ (Kabul). It has been truly said that even if Aryan and Turanian man (first) centred in and emerged from these areas (the table-lands of Asia), the so-called history is entirely based on the philological discoveries of the Sanskritist school.
255 Therasia and Therassia, now Santorin. Here have been found ruins of prehistoric cities buried by the great central volcano. According to most geologists the latter was exhausted in b.c. 1800–1700.
256 I have personally noticed this, and described it in Midian Revisited, vol. i. p. 143.
257 Beckmann (s.v. ‘Tin’) tells us that the metal ‘never occurs in a native state.’ He forgets stream-tin. He also denies that the oldest ‘cassiteron’ and ‘stannum’ were tin; and considers them to mean the German Werk, a regulus of silver and lead. His vasa stannea are vessels covered with tin in the inside. In the fourth century ‘plumbum candidum’ or ‘album’ was superseded by ‘stannum.’ Speaking of electrum, Beckmann asserts that ‘the ancients were not acquainted with the art of separating gold and silver.’ ‘Britain,’ Ynis Prydhain Island, where the god Prydhain was worshipped, or rather ‘Isle of the Brythons,’ has been fancifully derived by the energetic Semitiser from Barrat-et-Tanuk = Land of Tin.
258 Ezekiel tells us that the Tyrians received tin, as well as other metals, from Tarshish, or Western Tartessus, in the Bay of Gibraltar.
259 M. Emile Burnouf, ‘L’Age de Bronze,’ Revue des Deux Mondes, July 15, 1877, also brings tin from Banca. The island is about 150 miles long by 36 broad; it has no mountain backbone, but the peak of Goonong Maras rises some 3,000 feet above the sea-level. Chinese coolies still work the mines of Mintok, and in 1852 the yearly yield was some 50,000 piculs (each = 133⅓ lbs.) at the cost of nine rupees per picul.
260 Beckmann (loc. cit.), like Michaelis, is surprised at the Midianites possessing tin in the days of Moses. These were the views of the last century. I have suggested (Athenæum, Nov. 24, 1880) that the old Nile-dwellers extended through Midian to El-Hejáz and El-Yemen, where they worked the mines which became known to the Hebrews.
261 In 1866 De Rougemont made Phœnicia supply bronze to Europe, the copper being brought from Cyprus. Besides the Mediterranean, we find a Uralian and a Danubian branch of the industry. Before 1877 France had supplied 650 bronze Swords and daggers, Sweden 480, and Switzerland 86.
262 Alias the Œstrymnides. Borlase was of opinion that the group formed one block, with several headlands, of which ‘Scilly’ was the highest, outermost, and most conspicuous. He conjectures the original name to be Syllé, Sulla, or Sulleh, a flat rock dedicated to the sun; hence the Lat. Siliræ, Silures, and Sigdeles; the Engl. Sylley, Scilley, and lately Scilly; the Fr. Sorlingues; and the Span. Sorlingas. The Keltic name of the chief feature was Inis Caer.
263 Archæology and Prehistoric Annals of Scotland, Part II. ‘The Archaic or Bronze Period.’ Daniel Wilson.
264 Pliny represents the Cassiterides as fronting Celtiberia. He considers it a ‘fabulous story’ that the Greeks fetched ‘white lead’ from the islands of the Adriatic.
265 Prehistoric Times, by Sir John Lubbock, 4th edit. (London: Williams and Norgate, 1878.)
266 The identification is not settled; some propose the Isle of Thanet.
267 Beckmann, sub voce ‘Tin.’
268 According to Messrs. Wibel, Fellemberg, and Damour, who investigated even 10/1000 parts, the average proportions were ⅒ tin to 9 copper; and ¼ tin for hard metal, as chisels, &c. M. E. Chauntre, Age de Bronze. 3 vols. (Paris: Baudry.)
269 The late General Uchatius, who ‘trusted in princes,’ and whose tragical death was greatly lamented by his friends, always declared that he had rediscovered (not discovered) the hardening of copper and bronze; and that he hoped to arrive at other secrets. His career was cut short before he learned to make the metal and the alloy resilient.
270 Thut, Tuth, Toth, Thoth, &c., the moon-god who became Hermes Trismegistus.
271 Phosphor-bronze, for whose manufacture companies are now established in London and elsewhere, has the ordinary composition with the addition of red or amorphous phosphorus dropped upon the melted metal in the crucible. Berthier (Traité des Essais, ii. 410) states that a very small quantity of phosphorus renders copper extremely hard and suitable for cutting instruments. Percy (Metallurgy) found that copper will take up 11 per cent. of phosphorus; the metal, which assumes a grey tint, is quite homogeneous, and so hard that it can scarcely be touched by the file. The addition of phosphorus promotes the reduction of the oxides, and enables an exceedingly sound and durable casting to be made; but if it exceed ½ per cent. the metal becomes very brittle. Dr. Percy has described phosphor-silver, phosphor-lead, and phosphor-iron. The phosphorus is, according to some authorities, apt to volatilise with time. At present a new form of bronze, the antimonial, in proportions of 1–2 per cent., is coming into fashion: it is said to be malleable and ductile, and to resist torsion in a high degree. Another new bronze is the aluminium, whose price has been reduced from 1,000l. to 100l. per ton by Mr. Webster, of Hollywood, near Birmingham.
272 So called from Cape Emeri in Naxos.
273 Appendix to Layard’s Nineveh and Babylon (London: Murray). The proportions are nearly those of our day. We may assume our common bronze at 11:100 for large, and 10:100 for small objects. Cymbals and sounding instruments, however, contain tin 22:copper 78.
274 Analysed by Mr. Robinson of Pimlico (Day, p. 110).
275 Schliemann’s Troy, p. 361 (London: Murray, 1875).
276 Sir W. Gell found the bronze nails in the ‘Treasury of Atreus’ composed of 12 tin to 88 copper. The Trojan battle-axes, according to Dr. Schliemann, yielded only 4, 8, and 9 per cent. of the former metal.
277 According to Helbig, the Palafittes and Terramare villagers had spears but not Swords.
278 For the tin-ore of Peru see Ethnolog. Journal, vol. lxx. pp. 258–261. Rivero, p. 230, and Garcilasso, vol. i. p. 202.
279 Amer. Journ. of Science, &c. v. 42; July 1866.
280 From descriptions and drawings by Mr. J. H. Godfrey, Mining Engineer-in-Chief to the Imperial Government of Japan.
281 M.D., F.R.S., ‘Observations on some Metallic Arms and Utensils, with Experiments to determine their Composition.’ Royal Soc. London, June 9, 1796. Philosophical Transactions.
282 Taken from Dr. Evans (Bronze Impl. &c. chap. xxi.). He compiled it from Martineau & Smith’s Hardware Trade Journal (April 30, 1879).
283 Wilkinson remarked that the Egyptian proportions of half tin and half copper were whitish.
284 Lord Rosse, in casting specula, preferred using copper and tin in their atomic proportions, or 68·21 per cent. copper to 31·79 per cent. tin.
285 Speltrum was introduced by Boyle. During the last century much zinc was imported from India (possibly supplied by China), and was called tutenag.
286 Bohn’s Trans. ii. 32–45. The learned German begins by stating that zinc was not known to the Greeks, Romans, and Arabs, and then proceeds to prove that it was. The word ‘zinc’ (from zenken or zacken, nails, spikes?) first occurs in the works of the Iatro-chemist, Paracelsus, who died in a.d. 1541.
287 Blende is a generic word, from blenden, to dazzle.
288 Mongez, Mém. de l’Institut.
289 At Goslar, however, according to Lohnriss, brass was made in a.d. 1617.
290 Pliny, xxxiii. 27. The solder (χρυσός and κόλλα, glue, or κόλλησις) is attributed by Herod. (i. 25) to Glaucus of Chios, a contemporary of Alyattes. The word kóllesis is variously rendered ‘soldering,’ ‘brazing,’ ‘welding,’ and ‘inlaying.’ Kóllesis was used to agglutinate metals, and treated with a peculiar alkali (Pliny, xxxiii. 24). The ‘gold glue’ (chrysocolla) is usually understood to be a hydrosilicate of copper; not to be confounded with the χρυσόκολλα or borax. The Mycenian goldsmiths soldered with the help of borax (borate of soda): Professor Landerer, of Athens, found this salt on an old medal from Ægina. It was called in the Middle Ages, Borax Venetus, because imported by the Venetians from Persia; and it is the Tinkal of modern India. According to Pliny, lead cannot be soldered without tin, or tin without lead, and oil invariably must be used. Later usage substituted for the latter colophonium and other resins: we now solder by means of electricity. The same writer makes Nero use chrysocolla-powder (a siliceous carbonate of copper, a kind of blue-stone which would turn green by exposure to damp) for strewing the circus, to give the course the colour of his favourite faction, the Prasine (green).
291 The Germans, who delight in German derivatives for European words, would find leiton, &c., not in luteum, but in löthen = to unite. There is little doubt, however, that the first English manufactory of calamine brass at Esher, in Surrey, was set up in the seventeenth century by Demetrius, a German. In Grimm’s Dictionary, as noticed by Demmin (chap. i), bronze is erroneously called messing (brass).
292 Derived from ὄρος, οὖρος (mountain), or from Ὀρείος, the discoverer. Metallic names in Greek are mostly masculine; in Latin and modern usage, neutral. Oreichalcum or aurichalcum, a hybrid word, became aurochalcum in the ninth century: the last corruption (middle of the sixteenth century) was archal.
293 De l’Orichalque. J. P. Rossignol (loc. cit.).
294 Some translate this word ‘yellow frankincense’ (λίβανος) colour; others derive it from Λίβανος, the Lebanon, and make it male, argurolibanus, while leucolibanus (white) was female. Finally, the word was explained by the old interpreters to be = ὀρείχαλκος = brass of Mount (Lebanon).
295 The tradition of Atlantis, a middle-land in the Atlantic, has strong claims to our acceptance. The identity of the site with the ‘Dolphin’s Ridge,’ a volcanic formation, and the shallows noted by H.M.S. ‘Challenger,’ have been ably pleaded in Atlantis (Ignatius Donnelly; London: Sampson Low, 1882). Perhaps we may trace the vestiges in Saint Paul’s Rocks, the remarkable group of rocky islets situate in the equatorial mid-Atlantic. Mr. Darwin supposed the group to be an isolated example of non-volcanic oceanic insularity; but Prof. Renard finds the ‘balance of proof decidedly in favour of the volcanic origin of the rock.’ It will be remembered that Atlantis was dismembered by earthquakes, eruptions, and subsidence.
296 Quoted by Percy from Watson’s Chemical Essays (iv. p. 85, 1786).
297 The artificial mixture of copper (four fifths) and gold (one-fifth) was called pyropus (Pliny, xxxiv. 2), from its fiery red tint; it was also made of gold and bronze, and termed chrysochalcos, ‘the king of metals.’ Æs corinthiacum (Pliny, xxxiv. 3), or Corinthian brass, used for mirrors, composed of copper, silver (steel? zinc?), and gold, was more valuable than gold. According to Pausanias (ii. 3, § 3), this malleable and ductile metal was tempered in the Fountain of Pyrene. The vulgar legend, refuted by Pliny, who tells the tale (xxxiv. 6), dates it from the days of Mummius (b.c. 146). A medal of Corinthian brass was analysed by the Duc de Luynes. Pliny (xxxiv. 3) mentions three kinds, candidum, luteum, and hepatizon (liver-colour), of equal quantities of metal; this probably resembled our own alloys. Beckmann (sub voc. ‘Zinc’ and ‘Tin’) gives a list of these and other compositions, Mannheim gold, Dutch gold, Prince’s metal, Bristol brass, &c.
298 Possibly the Armenian bole (Bol-i-Armani), used in the East as a flux from time immemorial. The ‘dropping’ or ‘distilling’ (per descensum) must allude to a distillatory or condensing apparatus, and the ‘false silver’ cannot be mercury, lead, or tin.
299 Hence tutaneg and tutanego, which sometimes meant an alloy of tin and bismuth. M. Polo (i. 21) describes ‘tutia’ as very good for the eyes; and his notice of it, and of spodium, reads, according to Colonel Yule, almost like a condensed translation of Galen’s pompholyx, produced from cadmia or carbonate of zinc; and spodos, the residue of the former, which falls on the hearth (De Simp. Med. p. ix.). Matthioli makes pompholyx commonly known in the laboratories by the Arabic name ‘tutia.’ The ‘tutia’ imported into Bombay from the Gulf is made from an argillaceous ore of zinc, moulded into tubular cakes, and baked to a moderate hardness.
300 Masc. and fem.; the neut. ἤλεκτρον is the purest form. Dr. Schliemann, noticing that it also means ‘amber’ (Mycenæ, p. 204), derives it from ‘elek, signifying resin in Arabic (?), and probably also in Phœnician (?).’ He found earrings of electrum in the so-called ‘Trojan Stratum,’ 30½ feet below the surface (Troy, p. 164). The guanin or gianin of the Chiriquis was an aururet (electrum) of 19·3 per cent. of pure gold, with specific gravity 11·55. The tombac or tombag of New Granada, used for statuettes, was also a gold of low standard: 63 gold, 24 silver, 9 copper. Usually ‘tombac’ applies to an alloy like Mannheim gold; the manufacture was introduced into Birmingham, still its chief seat, by the Turner family, a.d. 1740.
301 ‘Elektron,’ however, is generally translated ‘amber’; and it may be the harpax, or drawer, for it occurs in the same verse with ivory. Amber beads and weapon-handles were amongst Dr. Schliemann’s finds. Rossignol (p. 347) supposes that electrum, the pale-yellow or amber-coloured alloy of gold and silver, gave a name to the gum amber.
302 This text, stating a truth concerning native gold, suggests amongst many that the ancients knew the départ, or separation, of metals. It has been vehemently doubted whether they could mineralise the white metal; that is, convert it to sulphide and allow the gold to subside.
303 Rossignol quotes Zonaras, Suidas, and John Pediasimus to prove this position.
304 We now lacquer with shell-lac dissolved in proof-spirit and coloured with ‘dragon’s blood.’
305 The lead was found in even larger proportions. See chap. xiii.
306 In my commentary on Camoens (Camoens: his Life and his Lusiads), and again in To the Gold Coast for Gold (i. 17), I have attempted to identify Western Tarshish or Tartessus with Carteia in the Bay of Gibraltar. Newton makes Melcarth ‘King of Carteia’; but the word may mean either ‘city-king’ (Malik-el-Karyat), or ‘earth-king’ (Malik-el-Arz).
307 The well-known anthropologist, M. G. de Mortillet, holds that the oldest type of bronze celt in France, Switzerland, and Belgium, is that with straight flanges at the sides. This was followed by the celt with transverse stop-ridge, by the true winged tool, by the socketed adaptation, and, lastly, by the simple flat tool wanting rib or flange, wing or socket, and formed of pure copper as well as of bronze. Archæologists usually determine the last form to be the earliest; but M. de Mortillet judges otherwise from the conditions under which the finds occur.
308 This weapon (gladius) is a Sword-blade, double-edged or single-edged, straight or curved, and 4–9 inches long, much used in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. It originated from the old practice of binding the sickle, scythe, axe, hatchet, or Sword to the end of a pole and thus forming a pike.
309 The Amazons of the Mausoleum (Newton, Halicarnassus, p. 235) are armed with axe, bow, and Sword; the Greeks with javelins and Swords.
310 The Massagetæ (greater Jats or Goths) are opposed to the Thyssa (or lesser) Getæ, and both used the sagaris. But while some authors translate the word securis, others call it a ‘kind of Sword,’ and others confuse it with the ἀκινάκης, the acinaces which the Greek mentions separately (iv. 62, viii. 67). Strabo (xi. 8) connects the Massagetæ (Goths) with the Sacæ (Saxons), and Major Jähn derives Sacæ (the Shaka of the Hindus) from Saighead = Sagitta. The term ‘Saxones’ was later than the age of Tacitus, and we first find it in the days of Antoninus Pius. ‘Brevis gladius apud illos (Saxones) Saxo vocatur’ suggests that the Seax was connected with the race of old (Trans. Anthrop. Instit. May 1880).
311 Loc. cit. p. 43.
312 Egypt. akhu, Lat. ascia, Germ. Axt. The oldest form is ‘aks’ (securis), the bipennis, ‘dversahs,’ and the dolabrum ‘barte.’ In Lower Saxon axt is ‘exe,’ a congener of our ‘axe.’
313 The word is variously written and explained.
314 A silepe from the armoury of King Mosesh was shown at the National Exhibition amongst objects from Natal (Col. A. Lane Fox, Cat. p. 145).
315 Par Lacombe (Paris, Hachette, 1868).
316 I have again noticed the sahs, seax, sax, and scramasax in chap. xiii.
317 Our ‘bill’ is the German Beil, the securis, or axe. Both words appear to me congeners of the Greek βέλος, Sword or dart, showing a missile-age, from βάλλειν, to throw; not, as Jähn thinks, from the Sanskrit bhil. Robert Barret (1598) preferred the pike, although owning that the bill had done good service. Even of late years Messrs. John Mitchel and Meagher (‘of the Sword’) advised the wretched Irish peasants to make pikes out of reaping-hooks.
318 Prehistoric Times, p. 20. The Dublin Museum contains 1,283 articles of the Bronze Age.
319 I assume as a type, the bronze Sword (Tafel iv.) in Die Alterthümer von Hallstätten, Salzburg, &c. by Friedrich Simony (Wien, 1851).
320 Pliny, xxxiv. 39.
321 The word comes from the root which gave the Persian áhan; the Irish iaran or yarann; the Welsh hiarn; the Armorican uarn; the Gothic eisarn; the Danish iern; the Swedish iarn; the Cimbric jara; the German Eisen, and the Latin ferrum, with the neo-Latin ferro, hierro (Span.), &c. From iaran also we derive Harnisch, harness.
322 The unfortunate Cretans gained the name of ‘ever liars’ (ἀεὶ ψεῦσται) for telling what was probably the truth. They showed in their island the grave of Jupiter, who must have been originally some hero or chief deified after his death—evidently one of the origins of worship. The evil report began with Callimachus (Hymn. in Jov. 8); and was continued in the proverbial τρία κάππα κάκιστα (Krete, Kappadocia, and Kilikia). Hence the syllogistic puzzle of Eubulides: ‘Epimenides said that the Cretans are liars: Epimenides is a Cretan: ergo, Epimenides is a liar: ergo, the Cretans are not liars: ergo, Epimenides is not a liar.’
323 Chap. iv. The Chalybs of Justin (xliv. 3) is a river between the Ana (Guadiana) and the Tagus; called by Ptolemy and Martianus, Κάλιπους or Κάλιπος. Æschylus alludes to the original Chalybes when he personifies the Sword as the ‘Chalybian stranger,’ and in the same tragedy (Seven against Thebes) he entitles it ‘the hammer-wrought Scythian steel.’
324 ‘To the abundance of iron we may attribute the fact that the Africans appear to have passed direct from the stone implements, that are now found in the soil, to those of iron, without passing through the intermediate bronze period which, in Egypt and other countries, intervened between the ages of stone and iron.’—Anthropol. Coll. pp. 128–134.
325 ‘The High Antiquity of Iron and Steel,’ a valuable paper read before the Philos. Soc. Glasgow, printed in Iron (1875–76), and kindly sent to me by the editor, Mr. Nursey; also The Prehistoric Use of Iron and Steel (Trübner, London, 1877), from which Mr. Day has allowed me to make extracts.
326 The question is to be determined by facts, not theories. Hitherto we are justified in believing, from the skeletons dug up at great depths, or found in caves associated with the mammals which they destroyed, that Man in prehistoric times was of a low physical, and therefore mental type. We shall believe the opposite view when we are shown ancient crania equal, if not superior, to those of the present day—relics that will revive the faded glories of ‘Father Adam’ and ‘Mother Eve.’ But, meanwhile, we cannot be expected to believe in ipse dixits, inspired or uninspired.
327 For instance, in North-Western Europe, the early iron age began about a.d. 250, according to Konrad Englehardt (Denmark in the early Iron Age, p. 4, London, 1866), quoted by Mr. Day.
328 Egypt’s Place in Universal History, vol. v.; London, Longmans, 1867, with additions by Samuel Birch, LL.D.
329 When Laplace made meteorolites ejections from lunar volcanoes, Chladni suggested that they were masses of metallic matter, moving in irregular orbits through interplanetary, and possibly interstellar, space.
330 This word is tortured by non-Orientalists into various ill-forms. The Arabs write it جيزة (Jízeh), and the Egyptians pronounce it Gízeh, not Ghizeh.
331 A full-sized drawing appeared in vol. vii. of Proceedings of the Phil. Soc. Glasgow; and was repeated by Mr. Day in his book, Pl. II. he also gives Belzoni’s sickle, Pl. I.
332 When visiting the ‘Tombs of the Soldans,’ Cairo, I found a slab of blue basalt bearing the cartouche of Khufu, used as a threshold for one of the buildings. The characters had been partly erased; but the material was too hard for the barbarians who had misused it.
333 I have elsewhere noticed (chap. iv.) the colours of metals in the painted tombs of Thebes, and the blue (cyanus-colour) of the butcher’s steel. The history of this homely article is instructive. For hundreds of years it retained, in England and elsewhere, its original shape, an elongated cone. At last some ’cute citizen had the idea of breaking the surface into four edges, and of hardening it with nickel. The simple improvement now fits it for sharpening everything from a needle to a razor: it thus frees us from the ‘needy knife-grinder,’ who right well deserved to be needy, as he disadorned everything he touched.
334 Antiquity of the Use of Metals, especially Iron, among the Egyptians, p. 18 (London, 1868). Also Ueber die Priorität des Eisens oder der Bronze in Ostasien, by Dr. M. Müller (Trans. Vienna Anthrop. Soc. vol. ix.).
335 I assume this date because it marks when the spring equinox (vernal colure) occurred in the Taurus-sign. The earliest of the six epochs proposed by Egyptologists is b.c. 5702 (Böckh), and the latest is b.c. 3623 (Bunsen); the mean being b.c. 4573, and the difference a matter of 2079 years (Brugsch, i. 30).
336 The Table of Sakkarah (Memphis), found about the end of 1864 by the late Mariette Pasha, dates from Ramses the Great (thirteenth century b.c.), and makes Mibampes the first of his fifty-six ancestors. No. 2 is the new tablet of Abydos, discovered, also in 1864, by Herr Dümmichen; it enabled scholars to supply the illegible name in No. 3, the priceless Turin Papyrus, the hieratic Canon of the Ptolemies. Mirbampes, Mirbapen, or Mi-ba of the monuments is, called in Manetho ‘Miebides, son of Usarphædus’ (Cory’s Fragments, p. 112).
337 Of Ramses II., who, with his father Seti, represents the Greek Sesostris, the Sesesu-Ra of the monuments. (Brugsch, Hist. ii. 53–62: see my chap. viii.) Prof. G. Ebers has made this Egyptian proto-Homerid the hero of his romance, Uarda (i.e. Wardah, ‘the Rose’).
338 De Iside et Osiride. He quotes Manetho the Priest, who wrote during the reign of the first Ptolemy, and who told unpleasant truths concerning Moses, the Hebrews, and the Exodus.
339 The limestones of Carniola produce heaps of pisoliths, which require only smelting; and hence, probably, the early Iron Age of Noricum and its neighbourhood.
340 They suggest the magnetic and titaniferous iron sands of Wicklow, of New Zealand, of Australia, and of a variety of sites mentioned in To the Gold Coast for Gold, ii. 111.
341 The Naphtuhim of Scripture.
342 Percy’s Metallurgy, p. 874, first edit.
343 Proc. Soc. Antiq. second series, vol. v., June 1873. Mr. Hartland added rubbings of various Pharaohnic stones, hoping to ‘show how little the mind of civilised man has developed during 3,000 years.’ A pleasant lesson to humanity! But after all thirty centuries are a mere section of the civilisation which began in Egypt.
344 The Corsican is simply a blacksmith’s forge. The Catalan has a heavy hammer and blowing-machine; if the trompe be used, a fall of water is required for draught. The Stückofen is a Catalan extended upwards in the form of a quadrangular or circular shaft, 10–16 feet high.
345 It is to be noted that flint implements were found all about these works: Mr. Hartland brought home from them silex arrow-heads. The late lamented Professor Palmer observed them in other parts of the Pharan peninsula, and I made a small collection in Midian. In the Journ. of the Anthrop. Soc. 1879, I showed, following Mr. Ouvry, Sir John Lubbock, and others, that Cairo is surrounded by ancient flint-ateliers. M. Lartet explored them in Southern Palestine; I picked them up near Bethlehem (Unexplored Syria, ii. 289). The Abbé Richard and others traced them at Elbireh (in the Tiberiad); between Tabor and the Lake; and, lastly, at Galgal, where Joshua circumcised. Lastly, my late friend Charles F. Tyrwhitt-Drake, when travelling with me, came upon an atelier east of Damascus. I have noticed General Pitt-Rivers’ great Egyptian discovery in chap. ii.
346 Hek or hak (chief) has a suspicious resemblance to Shaykh and sos to sús, the mare, characteristically ridden by the Bedawin. In old Egyptian sos is a buffalo.
347 Movers (Phönicier, ii. 3), quoted by Dr. Evans (Bronze, &c. 5), finds bronze (copper?) 44 and iron 13 times in the Pentateuch, and he theorises upon the later introduction of the latter. But when was the Pentateuch written in its present form?
348 Rougemont, L’Age du Bronze, pp. 188 et seq.
349 Volney, Travels, ii. 438.
350 Much of it, however, was the amygdaloid greenstone, called in English ‘toad-stone,’ a corruption of the Germ. Todstein.
351 Speaker’s Commentary, i. 831.
352 This term seems first to have been used by Orosius (i. 2) in our fourth century.
353 In chap. ix. I shall attempt to show that Naharayn (the dual of Nahr, a river) is also applied to Palestine in such phrases as ‘Tunipe (Daphne-town) of Naharayn.’
354 Dr. Percy found that certain Assyrian bronzes had been cast round a support of the more tenacious metal, thus combining strength with lightness.
355 M. F. Lenormant (‘Les Noms d’Airain et du Cuivre dans les deux Langues... de la Chaldée et de l’Assyrie, Trans. Soc. Bibl. Archæology, vi. part 2) renders parzillu, iron; abar, lead; shiparru (Arab. صفر, brass), bronze; anaku, tin; eru or erudu, copper or bronze (Arab. ايار, copper or brass); kashpu, silver; and kurashu, gold. The learned author discovers in the cuneiforms repeated mention of the ‘ships of Mákan’ and the Kur Makannata (mountain of Makná), which he translates ‘Pays de Mákan’: finding it a great centre of copper, he is inclined to confound it with the so-called Sinaitic Peninsula. I have only to refer readers to ‘Makná’ in my three volumes on the Land of Midian.
356 Akkad is upper, Sumir lower Babylonia.
357 The Five Great Monarchies of the Ancient Eastern World, vol. i. p. 62. London, 1871.
358 The first period extended from b.c. 1500 to 909. The second from b.c. 909 to 745: the most marking names being Assurnazirpal = ‘Ashur (arbiter of the gods) protects his son,’ who built the north-west palace of Nimrúd, b.c. 884; and his son Shalmanezer II. of the Black Obelisk (Brit. Museum), b.c. 850. The third period (b.c. 745–555) numbered Tiglath-Pileser II., b.c. 745–727 (a single generation before the first Olympic, b.c. 776, when the mythic age of Greece emerges into the historical); Sennacherib (705–681); Esarhaddon (680–668), Assur-bani-pal (668–640); Nebuchadnezzar in 604–561, a contemporary of Solon (b.c. 594); Nergalsharuzur (b.c. 557); and the last Nabonidus (b.c. 555). Herodotus (b.c. 450) wrote about a century after the end of the third period, Ctesias in b.c. 395, and Berosus in b.c. 280. We have, it is clear, absolutely no historic proof that ‘the patriarchal system of communities first locally developed itself at the mouth of the Euphrates Valley,’ or began in any part of the great Mesopotamian plain.
359 Rev. B. H. Cooper (loc. cit.) would derive ‘Ida’ from the Semitic יר (yad, hand), and make the Daktyls, or fingers, its peaks.
360 I shall reserve for chap. xi. notices of iron by the classic and sacred poets of Greece.
361 Troy and its Remains, p. 362; the analysis by M. Damour of Lyons.
362 The theory of Stephani, Schulze, and others concerning the Byzantine date and Herulian origin of the Mycenæan graves, has been treated in England with some respect by Mr. A. S. Murray and Mr. Perry.
363 According to Pausanias, Alyattes, the Lydian king (ob. b.c. 570), dedicated to his god, amongst other offerings, an inlaid iron saucer.
364 Neither from this nor from any other passage can we ascertain whether the Chalybes tribe gave its name to chalybs (steel), or whether the material worked named the workmen.
365 Colonel Yule (M. Polo, ii. 96) remarks that in the Middle Ages steel was regarded as a distinct natural species made of another ore, and relates how a native to whom an English officer had explained the process of tempering replied, ‘What, would you have me believe that if I put an ass into the furnace it will come out a horse?’
366 Acies is properly the edge, that is, the steeled or cutting part of an instrument, which may be case-hardened. Hence the later words aciare, to steel, and aciarium, sharpening steel; hence, too, the neo-Latin acier, acciaio, &c.
367 See chap. xiii. Dr. Evans (Bronze, 275) says, ‘How far their process of burying iron until part of it had rusted away would, in the case of charcoal iron, leave the remaining portion more of the nature of steel, I am unable to say.’ It will appear that this burying is often spoken of; I have never seen it practised.
368 Regulus (the ‘little king’) is the residue of pure metal purged of its dross; the old alchemists so entitled it because they ever expected to find the great king—Gold.
369 At the Anthropological Congress of Austrian Salzburg (Aug. 1881) the tools attributed to the ‘Keltic’ miners were almost the same as those which I had seen near the Wrekin.
370 Ingénieur des Mines: ‘Gisements métallifères du District de Carthagène (Espagne),’ Liège, 1875; a contribution to the Proc. Geolog. Soc. Belgium; and the result of extensive geological and mineralogical observation. The coloured map shows the strata-sequence (actual and in ideal order) to be tertiary limestone, iron-ore (carbonated, manganiferous, or plumbiferous); schistes; blende; schistes; silicated iron and schistes.
371 Lectures on the Science of Language, pp. 254–55, vol. ii., edit. 1873.
372 Chips from a German Workshop (set up in England), p. 47, vol. ii., edit. 1868.
373 Mr. Day (General Table of Terms, given at end of this chapter) quotes as ‘oldest Sanskrit’ two names of iron, आर (ár or ára), meaning the planet Mars (Ares) or Saturn; iron (oxide of iron, ironstone?), brass (copper?); and अयस्, áyas (whence ayaskant, a loadstone, and ayaskár, a smith), a word already noticed in connection with æs. But Mr. Day adds to his ‘oldest Sanskrit’ ‘probably b.c. 1500’; and here again we recognise the master-touch of the subtle race—
‘for profound
And solid lying much renowned.’
374 Report of Gen. A. Cunningham (Archæolog. Survey, 1861–62). It speaks highly for Anglo-Indian vis inertiæ and incuriousness when we are told that the ‘whole length of the pillar is unknown,’ and when every observer’s account of it differs in essentials.
375 The savant who first translated the inscription Indian Antiquities, vol. i. p. 319. The dates vary between the tenth century b.c. and a.d. 1052 (!).
376 The Persian haft-júsh (seven boilings), referred to by Ibn Batutah in Colonel Yule’s letter, p. 145 (Day, p. 153).
377 Quoted by Mr. Day (p. 24) from the United States Railroad and Mining Register.
378 Mr. Day (quoting Fergusson’s Illustrations of Ancient Architecture in Hindostan, London, 1848) cautions his readers that ‘Mr. Fergusson’s dates are not to be relied on, however important his writings unquestionably are in other respects’ (p. 168). Here again we see the misleading influence of the Sanskritists, who have allowed themselves to be cozened by the ‘mild Hindu.’ Mr. Day inclines (p. 151) to the tenth century b.c. (!), when the peoples of India were, we have reason to believe, the merest savages.
379 The modern Hindus call steel Paldah, from the Persian Pulád, the Arab. Fulád. They apply to Spanish steel the terms Ispát, Sukhela and Tolad. Their favourite trial of Sword-metal is with a bar of soft gold, which should leave a streak.
380 Colonel Yule does not consider the word genuine, and with reason, as the Indo-Phœnician (‘Safá’) alphabet has no w and no z. The word first appears in ‘Experiments and Observations to investigate the Nature of a Kind of Steel manufactured at Bombay, and there called Wootz,’... by G. Pearson, M.D. (paper read before the Royal Soc., June 11, 1795). He notes that ‘Dr. Scott of Bombay, in a letter to the President, acquainted him that he had sent over “specimens of a substance known by the name of wootz, which is considered to be a kind of steel, and is in high esteem among the Indians”’ (p. 322). In Wilkinson’s Engines of War (1841) we read (pp. 203–206), ‘The cakes of steel are called wootz.’
Dr. E. Balfour states that uchhá and níchhá (in Hindustani ‘high’ and ‘low’) are used in the Canarese provinces to denote superior and inferior descriptions of articles, and that Wootz may be a corruption of the former. Colonel Yule and his coadjutor in the Glossary of Indian Terms, the late lamented Dr. Burnell, hold that it originated in some clerical error or misreading, perhaps from wook representing the Canarese ukku = steel.
| C.{ | combined | 1·333 |
| uncombined | 0·312 | |
| Si. | 0·045 | |
| S. | 0·181 | |
| As. | 0·037 | |
| Fe. (by difference) | 98·092 | |
| 100·000 | ||
Phillips, Metallurgy, p. 317. Faraday found in Wootz 0·0128–0·0695 per cent. of aluminium, and attributed the ‘damask’ of the blades to its presence. Karsten, after three experiments, and Mr. T. H. Henry, failed to detect it, and suggested that it may have been derived from intermingled slag containing silicate of alumina (Percy, Iron, &c. pp. 183–84).
382 Archiv. Port. Oriental. fascic. iii. p. 318.
383 M. Keller (Pres. Soc. Ant. Switz.) notes that crudely formed lumps and quadrangular blocks of malleable iron, double pyramids weighing 10–16 lbs., have been found in prehistoric sites. They were probably produced in primitive Catalans. Pieces of iron slag worked by the Kelts were discovered in 1862 on the Cheviot Hills.
384 The cupel (of old copel) is the French coupelle, little coupe. The muffle is a metal cupel.
385 This is the process of working Wootz given by Mr. Heath; others pack the metal with finely-chopped stalks of asclepias as well as cassia. Mr. Mallet has described the Indian manufacture of large iron masses in The Engineer, vol. xxxiii. pp. 19, 20. Beckmann (loc. cit. sub v. ‘Steel’) notices the bloomeries or furnaces. The Penny Cyclopædia and Ure’s Dict. of Chemistry (the latter the best), London, Longmans, 1839, may also be consulted. Dr. Percy gives a long account (pp. 254–66) of iron-smelting in India from Mr. Howard Blackwell. He notes three kinds of furnaces:—
| 1. Rude, like chimney-pots; used by the hill-tribes of Western India, the Deccan, and the Carnatic. | ||
| 2. Simple Catalan forge | } | Central India and the |
| 3. Early form of Stückofen | N.W. Provinces. | |
The anvil is a square iron without beak. Three kinds of Indian bellows are noticed (pp. 255–56). The people, who love stare super antiquas vias, ignore the hot blast: this contrivance causes a more active combustion, an ‘ultimate fact’ as yet unexplained.
386 Report of 1852.
387 The dialect is much more ancient than we usually suppose: it existed long before Akbar the Great and his ‘Urdú zabán’ (camp language), for we find that the poet Chand wrote in it during the twelfth century.
388 As will appear in Part II. there are many processes for making the Damascus; the exact markings, however, are best produced by that noticed above.
389 Pp. 270–3, from the descriptions of Mr. W. T. Blanford, of the Geol. Survey of India.
390 Pp. 273–5; borrowed from Travels in Borneo, by Dr. C. A. L. M. Schauer during 1843–47, p. 109.
391 The Swords of the Borneo Dyaks and the islanders of Timor and Rotti are photographed by the Curator of the Christy Collection.
392 Mr. Day quotes, book i., the Tribute of Yu, Legge’s Chinese Classics, vol. iii. part i. p. 121 (Trübner, London, 1865).
393 The ‘Celestial Empire,’ according to her annals, began b.c. 100,000–80,000; the date being probably astronomical, or rather astrological, founded, like the four Hindu æras, upon retrograde calculations. The first cycle of 60 years is attributed to the Emperor Hwang-tí, and its initiation to the 61st year of his reign, in b.c. 2637 (the Twelfth Dynasty of Egypt?). The first historical dates are given in b.c. 651, a century after the foundation of Rome: these figures afford a curious contrast between pretensions and proof. But as Englishmen after long residence ‘grow black’ in Africa, and have become semi-Hinduised in India, so in China they have allowed themselves to be imposed upon by the ‘magna fabulositas,’ the marvellous self-sufficiency of astute semi-barbarians. ‘China is a sea that salts all the rivers which flow into it.’ Yet I am curious to ascertain by actual travel if China ever possessed a centre of civilisation independent of what she received from the West; in other words, non-Egyptian.
394 Of the 214 keys or radicals. The first three arithmetical figures are lines disposed horizontally, while the Egyptians wrote them vertically. In his Terminal Table (affixed to this chapter) Mr. Day assigns Chinese to the ‘Sporadic or Allophyllian family.’ I believe it to be the oldest and, as far as we know, the original form of Turanian speech, a kind of tertium quid deduced from the so-called ‘Aryan’ and ‘Semitic’ elements of Egyptian.
395 Trans. Bib. Archæol. 1879. Sayce’s Grammar gives 522 Assyrian characters.
396 The lump of iron worked into a mass more or less rectangular is called a bloom, from the Saxon bloma, metal in mass (Bosworth): Bloma ferri occurs in the Domesday Book. Hence ancient furnaces were called bloomeries; the Elizabethan spelling is a bloomary. The blooms were beaten out to bars.
397 In Persia I was told that this was one of the ‘secrets’ of making the finest Khorasáni blades.
398 It followed the Mongols and preceded the Manchow Tartars, who still reign.
399 This process of converting iron to steel is first described in ‘Alchemiæ Gebri (El-Gabr), Arabis philosophi solertissimi, Libri, &c., Joan. Petreius Nurembergen̄. denuo Bernæ excudi faciebat. anno 1545.’ The Arab, known to Albertus Magnus, flourished in the eighth to the ninth century. According to Beckmann, he noticed the ore cineritii (cupellation) et cementi (cementation) tolerans. The mixture is usually of sal ammoniac, borax, alum, and fine salt: the many varieties are described by Percy, Ure, and a host of others. Compare also Ure’s account of cast-steel and of shear-steel, the latter so called because cloth-shears were forged of it.
400 At least it would so appear from the following passage (p. 176): ‘When we examine the etymology of ‘pole,’ or ‘pillar,’ thus—Saxon, pol or pal; German, Pfahl; Danish, paal or pol; Swedish, pale; Welsh pawl—we arrive at the Latin palus, which, besides signifying a pole or stake, is also the φαλλός of the Greeks, Mahadeva (?) or Linga (?) of the Hindoos, Bel or Baal (?) of the Chaldeans, Yakhveh (?) of the Canaanites, Ti-mohr of the ancient Irish, and Teih-mo of the Chinese,’ &c.
401 Notes from Mr. Henderson’s Diary during a Ramble through Shansi, in March 1874, published by Mr. Day (Appendix D, p. 251). Colonel Yule (Marco Polo, ii. 429), alluding to these enormous deposits of coal and metal, says: ‘Baron Richtofen, in the paper which we quote from, indicates the revolution in the deposit of the world’s wealth and power, to which such facts, combined with other characteristics of China, point as probable; a revolution so vast that its contemplation seems like that of a planetary catastrophe.’
402 Les Mondes, tome xxvi., Dec. 1871.
403 Polynesian Researches (Rev. William Ellis).
404 Researches into the Early History of Mankind, p. 167.
405 Unless greatly mistaken, I have seen iron tools made of hæmatite near the old Gongo Socco gold-mines of Minas Geraes, in the Brazil. Worked hæmatite is also mentioned in Cyprus by General Palma (di Cesnola). See chap. ix.
406 From Nature (Sept. 30, 1875); quoted by Mr. Day (pp. 217–19).
407 Flint Chips, by Edmund T. Stevens, p. 553 (London: Bell & Daldy, 1870).
408 The ‘plummet’ is figured (No. cxxxii.) in the American Naturalist (vol. vi. p. 643).
409 The people of Camarones River, Bight of Biafra, work up old cask and bale hoops into very creditable edge-tools and weapons, hoes, knives, and Swords (Rev. G. Grenfell, Proc. Roy. Geolog. Soc. Oct. 1882).
410 The origin of the modern process is still debated. Agricola (nat. 1494, ob. 1555) notices both malleable and cast iron. Dr. Percy (p. 578) quotes from Mr. M. A. Lower (Contributions to Literature, &c. 1854) that Burwash Church, Sussex, contains a cast-iron slab of the fourteenth century with ornamental cross and inscription in relief. The same authority declares that iron cannon were first cast at Buxted (Buckstead in Sussex) by Philip Hoge or Hogge in 1543 (35 Henry VIII.); and that his successor, Thomas Johnson, made ordnance pieces for the Duke of Cumberland weighing 6,000 lbs.
411 Dr. Percy (pp. 764 et seq.) notices the three processes of making steel (iron containing carbon in certain proportions): 1. The addition of carbon to malleable iron; 2. The partial decarburisation of cast iron; and 3. The addition of malleable iron to cast iron.
412 I borrow from O Muata Cazembe (Kazembe, the King) a rude sketch (p. 38) of one of the better kinds of iron-smelting furnaces used by the extensive Maráve race dwelling north of the Zambeze (River of Fish), which Europeans persist in miswriting Zambesi. The bellows, it will be remarked, are almost of European shape; but this peculiarity may be attributed to the artist.
413 Travels, pp. 275–77 (London, 1749).
414 Colonel A. Lane Fox (Prim. Warfare, i. 38) believes that the ‘Fans and Kafirs (Caffres) are totally different races.’ But both speak dialects of the same tongue, the great South African language. Modern African travellers have traced community of customs from north to south, and from east to west, suggesting extensive intercourse, in former days, throughout the length and breadth of the Dark Continent.
415 Across Africa, chap. xix., July 1874 (Daldy, Isbister & Co., London, 1877).
416 Missionary Travels, p. 402 (London, 1857).
417 Anthrop. Coll. pp. 128–134. ‘Specimens illustrating the geographical distribution of corrugated iron blades, or blades with an ogee section, double skin bellows, and iron work.’ As regards the ogee section, the author should have compared it with the arrow-heads whose plane sides are ‘bellied on a twist’ to cause rotation or rifling.
418 Diogenes Laertius tells us of Anacharsis only that he ‘wrote also about war.’
419 As all savage races show, the original anchor was a stone first bound round like a celt, and then pierced for a rope: hence the ‘fugitive stone’ used by the Argonauts as an anchor (Pliny, xxxvii. 24). In the spring of 1880 eight stone anchors of modern shape were found in Piræus harbour, and were sent to the Nautical School at Athens.
420 Wilkinson, i. 174. Mr. Day, pp. 86, 87.
421 Hence, too, we see our ‘bellows’ = ‘bellies.’
422 This word is curiously corrupted in Europe. It is formed upon the model of Dár-Wadái, &c.; and means the abode, region, home (Dár) of the For tribe. My lamented friend General Purdy (Pasha) formerly of the United Slates Army, admirably surveyed it, and died at Cairo in 1881.
423 Vulgo Kattywár; described in 1842 by Captain (the late Sir G. Le Grand) Jacob in his Report on Guzerat (Gujarát).
424 The sticks correspond with the strings on the bellows of the Egyptian monuments.
425 Iron, Jan. 8, 1876.
426 I observe that M. Terrien de la Couperie has lately derived the oldest civilisation of China from Chaldæo-Babylonia of the Akkadian Ages, b.c. 2400–2300.
427 Major Jähns (p. 416) would derive Schwert (= das Sausende, Schwirrende, i.e. whizzing) from the Sansk. svar, noise; and considers it originally a missile pure and simple. He quotes Isidore, who explains rhomphæa by wafan; Schwert and framea = asta vel gladius; ensis = hevas, hevassa; mucro = swert, gladius = wafan; culter = wafansahs, sahse. In the hebraising days Sword was derived from Sharat, to scratch, and Sabre from Shabar, to shiver.
428 Of the Flamberge and the ‘flamboyant,’ or wavy blade, more hereafter.
429 Muratori (Antiq. ii. 487) notes, ‘Spatam sive spontonem, and sponto, spunto, i.e. pugio’ (Adelung). Of spatha more to come.
430 Or ‘die Schneide,’ the older forms being ekke, egge; while ‘valz’ was the middle section of the two-handed Sword.
431 ‘Chape,’ derived from capa, and a congener of ‘cap’ and ‘cape,’ is differently used by authors. Some apply it to the mouthpiece or ring at the top of the sheath; others to the metal crampet, bouterolle, or ferule at the scabbard-tip, and others to the guard-plate. In Durfey (The Marriage-Hater Matched) we find ‘the hilt, the knot, the scabbard, the chape, the belt, and the buckles’ (of a Sword). Skinner explains it as vaginæ mucro ferreus. Mr. Fairholt defines chape to be the guard-plate or cross-bar at the junction of grip and hilt. Shakespeare, who knew the Sword, speaks of the ‘chape of his dagger’ (All’s Well &c. iv. 3) and ‘an old rusty Sword with a broken hilt and chapelesse’ (Taming of the Shrew, iii. 2). Commentators mostly explain this by ‘without a catch to hold it.’ Dr. Evans (Bronze, &c. chap. viii.) has exhaustively described the bronze chapes (bouterolles) in the British Islands.
432 A congener of our ‘quill,’ from the Lat. caulis, a stalk. Littré is not satisfactory: ‘Quillon (ki-llon, ll mouillées), s.m. Partie de la monture du sabre ou de l’épée, située du côté opposé aux branches, et dont l’extrémité est arrondie. Dérivé de quille’ (cone) ‘par assimilation de forme’ (in fact, incrementative of) ‘quille. Etym. Génev. quille; de l’anc. haut-allem. Kegil; allem. Kegel, objet allongé en forme conique, quille.’ Burn translates quillon ‘cross-bar of the hilt of an infantry or light-cavalry Sword.’
433 This must not be written, as by some English authors, pas d’ane. ‘Pas d’âne, instrument avec lequel on maintient ouverte la bouche du cheval pour l’examiner.’ Littré has: ‘Pas d’âne, nom donné, dans les épées du xvième siècle, à des pièces de la garde qui sont en forme d’anneau, et qui vont des quillons à la lame. “Le Seigneur le prit et mit un pied sur la lame... alors Collinet s’écria: Venez voir, messieurs, le grand miracle que l’on fait à mon épée; je l’ai apportée ici avec une simple poignée et sans garde défensive, et voilà maintenant que l’on y met le plus beau pas d’âne du monde.”’ Francion, vi. p. 237: ‘Pas d’âne, nom vulgaire du tussilage, à cause de la feuille.’
434 The Scottish basket-hilt, however, requires improvement, as it does not allow free play to hand or wrist.
435 The word is originally the Persian Shamshír (شمشير); but as the Greeks have no sh sound, it made its way into Europe curiously disguised. Jean Chartier (temp. Charles VII.) says, ‘Sauveterres ou cimeterres qui sont manière d’espée à la Turque.’ Sauveterre became in Italian salvaterra; and in England scymitar was further degraded to semitarge. I have no objection to scimitar, but scymitar is the older form.
436 See note at the end of this chapter.
[437] As usual, the diagram is an exaggeration. It directs the thrusting weapon too low, at the antagonist’s breast, not his eye; nor is it necessary to raise the hand so high in order to deliver the cut.
438 Quoted from Mr. John Latham by Colonel A. Lane Fox, Anthrop. Coll. p. 171. Concerning the drawing cut and its reverse, the thrusting cut, I shall have more to say when treating of the ‘Damascus’ blade in Part II.
439 The section of the modern weapon shows that the baïonnette Gras is fit only for the thrust; and, as it stops its own cut, it is useless for the menial and servile offices in which the Yataghan-bayonet, like the old coupe-choux Sword, did yeoman’s service. I can see no improvement upon the old-fashioned triangular bayonet, which amongst us has been superseded by the short Enfield Sword-bayonet. To the latter I should prefer even the bowie-knife bayonet, of which the Washington Arsenal was once full, and which has been used even lately in the United States. None but practical soldiers realise the fact that the bayonet is meant to be a bayonet, not a Sword, nor a dagger, nor a chopper, nor a saw.
440 Mr. Wareing Faulder (Exhibition of Industrial Art, Manchester, June and July, 1881, Catalogue, p. 24) suggests that the Colichemarde ‘fell into disuse probably in consequence of its costliness, combined with its inelegant appearance when sheathed.’
441 Captain George Chapman, in his Foil Practice, &c., a book which will appear in the ‘Bibliography’ (Part III.), rightly distinguishes between the triangular small-Sword, used only for thrusting, and the bi-convex cut-and-thrust ‘rapier,’ a term applied by the Germans to the Schläger, which has no point. In England most people use ‘small-Sword’ only in opposition to ‘broadsword’; but, as the Art of Fencing may be considered a general foundation for swordsmanship, all men-at-arms should understand and preserve the difference. The writer, however, observes (Notes, pp. 4, 5), that, among the various actions which may conveniently be executed with the triangular ‘Biscayan,’ there are many which cannot be so easily managed with a flat blade, or with the usual weapon of modern combat, however light and handy. Hence ‘fencers among military men should be cautioned against indiscriminately attempting with the Sword performances usually taught in lessons with the foil.’
442 It was also a proper name applied to the Paladin Renaud’s Sword. The flamberge of the seventeenth century became a rapier-blade, and no longer ‘flamboyant,’ and the difference is in the hilt, and especially the guards. The latter were shallower and simpler than the rapier form, and were more easily changed from hand to hand, as was the practice of early fencers.
443 There is another Dáo in the Eastern regions, a large, square, double-edged blade, with a handle attached to the centre. The Dah of Burma is originally the same weapon as the Nágá Dáo.
444 In the Bulletin de l’Institut Egyptien (deuxième série, No. 1, année 1880) there is an admirable paper on Eastern heraldry, ‘Le blason chez les Princes musulmans,’ by E. T. Rogers Bey. He proves that a heraldic scutcheon is known to the Arabs as rank, plur. runúk, and that the word is the Persian rang, colour, from which he would derive our (man of) ‘rank,’ a word hitherto unsatisfactorily explained. As regards the tints, ‘azure’ is evidently the Persian lájawardi; and ‘gules’ is better derived from gul, a rose, than from Fr. gueules (jaw), which is L. Lat. gula, reddened skin. These three words suggest that for the origin of heraldry in its present form we must go back to Persia. Of the Sword in European heraldry I shall have more to say in Part II.
445 Strange to say, these Sword-names are carefully omitted from Liddell and Scott, 1869.
446 The information was kindly forwarded to me by Captain F. M. Hunter, Assistant Political Resident, Aden. Along the blade runs the inscription, which will be quoted in Part II., and the characters appear modern. My informant thinks that this Chelidonian does not represent the original Zú’l-Fikár, which was two-edged.
447 This trophy hangs against the staircase wall of the fine armoury belonging to the Museo del Arsenale (Naval Arsenal), Venice. Here, however, it has become a complicated affair with Koranic inscription (ch. xl. vol. i.); open-jawed dragons’ heads at the hilt, and below the handle a rosette with various complications of ‘Yá’ (Allah!).
448 It is figured in the illustrations following the Antiquities of Orissa, by Rajendra Lala Mitra.
449 Capt. Cameron and I exhibited a specimen, made for us by good King Blay of Attábo, at a special meeting of the Anthropological Institute of London.
450 The Austrian geographer, Dr. Josef Chavanne, estimates the mean altitude of Africa at 2,170 feet (round numbers), or more than double that of Europe (971 feet, M. G. Leipoldt).
451 He makes his Ethiopians emigrate from India to Egypt—but where? when? how? The ‘Asiatic Æthiopians’ of Herodotus lie between the Germanii (Persian Kerman) and the Indus (iii. 93, &c.). The bas-reliefs of Susiana show negroid types, and Texier found the Lamlam tribe in the marshes round the head of the Persian Gulf to resemble the Bisharin of Upper Egypt. Was the Buddha one of these Cushite Ethiopians?
452 Monumental History, &c.
453 The late Mr. Lane, who was greatly attached to Cairo and its population, insisted upon the Arab origin and kinship of the Egyptian. To those who know both races they appear as different as Englishmen and Greeks. Place an Arab, especially a Bedawi, by the side of a Fellah, and the contrast will strike the least experienced eye.
454 The first instalment was sent in May 1881 to the Royal College of Surgeons for the benefit of Professor Flower and Dr. C. Carter Blake. I am aware of the difficulty in determining mummy-dates, but the fact of mummification shows a certain antiquity whose later limit is sharply defined. The mummy of King Mer en Rá (Sixth Dynasty), found near the Sakkarah pyramids, had been stripped of its bandages; but the marks impressed upon the skin showed that the system was that of later years. He can hardly be dated later than b.c. 3000; and, reckoning from that period to a.d. 700, when mummifying ceased, we have a population of embalmed bodies of some 730,000,000 in round numbers.
455 The hair is of intermediate type between negro and Malay. The Nilotes are οὐλότριχοι and ἐριόκομοι, with woolly locks, slightly flat like ribbons, evenly distributed (not in peppercorns) over the scalp. It is also a mistake to make the Nubians λισσότριχοι: none of the Nile Valley races are lank-haired like Hindús, Chinese, and Australians.
456 The full number of Herodotus is 52,000 years. Mr. Day (p. 59) is scandalised by these dates, which argue for the ‘high antiquity theory’; and appears astonished to find ‘anything placed centuries previous to the Noahitic Deluge.’ Of this more presently.
457 Each generation contained a ‘Piromis, son of a Piromis.’ The word, made equivalent to Kalos k’ agathos (= galantuomo), Pe-Rome, the man, opposed to Pe-Neter, the god.
458 Mela has been blamed for repeating Herodotus without understanding him. When he states that the sun twice set at the point where it now rises (‘solem bis jam occidisse unde oritur’), he probably means that the greater light left to the west the zodiacal sign which presided at its rising.
459 The word at first applied probably to the commander-in-chief. Wilkinson’s day derived it from Phra (pa-Ra), the sun; now it is explained Per-áo, the Great House, in the sense of ‘Sublime Porte.’
460 Antiquité des Races Humaines. Paris, 1862.
461 The ‘black land,’ opposed to Tesher, the ‘red land’ (Edom, Idumæa, Erythræa), the wilds of North-Western Arabia. It is also called on the monuments A’in (Æan in Pliny) and Ta-mera (Mera, Tomera), the ‘inundation region.’ Another old name, Aeria, is from יאר, Yior, the Nile. Kemi must not be confounded with Khem, Chemmis, universal nature, the generative and reproductive principle—Pan. When Q. Curtius writes that Chemmis ‘umbraculo maxime similis est habitus,’ I would change the first word to ‘umbilico.’ The stepped cone in the Elephanta Caves exactly explains the latter.
462 Hecatæus and Anaximander divided the globe into Europe (Ereb, Gharb, the West) and Asia (Asiyeh, the East). Their successors added Libya (Africa), a term derived from the Libu or Ribu tribes; and the Father of History a most insufficient fourth—the Nilotic Delta. The latter, however, is ethnologically correct: Egypt is neither Africa nor Asia, but a land per se.
463 In Homer, Ægyptus always applies to the Nile (Od. xiv. 268). Manetho makes it the name of a king, Sethos = Seti I. M. Maspero proposes as a derivation of the word, Ha Kahi Ptah (the land of the god Ptah). Hence the Biblical Pathros = Ptah-land (Ezek. xxix. 14). Pathyris, the western side of Thebes, and the western Provinces generally, may have named the πάταικοι (Herod. iii. 37), the obscene dwarfs who made Cambyses laugh.
464 Herodotus (vii. 66) specifies the Arians, a racial name then synonymous with the Medes. This is not the place to enter upon the subject of Aria’s enormous development.
465 As a specimen of the roots—which are most remarkable when they consist of single consonants, whose reduplication made the earliest words—take ‘papa’ and ‘mamma.’ The former is from the Egyptian pa-pa (root p), to produce, the original idea of the begetter; and the latter is ma-ma (root m), to carry, be pregnant, bear. Mut becomes mátá, μήτηρ, mater, mother: Mer (a-mor), love; meran (morior), die, and more (mare), the sea. In ‘Semitic’ we have má, Heb. and Arab. má, water; and a long array of other words (as ia, yes, yea; and na, nay) too extensive for notice.
466 Characterised chiefly by post-instead of pre-positions, by additions to the verb which make it causal, reflective, and so forth, and by the peculiar form of sentences. Examples: the Finn-Ugrian-Magyar and the Turk-Mongol-Tartar, both probably deriving from the ancient Sakas = Scythians.
467 To Aryan I much prefer the older term ‘Iranian’; Iran (Persia), which once extended from the Indus to the Mediterranean, being one of the great centres where the ‘Aryo’-Egyptian element of language developed itself, and where a typical race is still found. Nor is there much objection to ‘Turanian,’ Turan being the non-Iranian regions to the east, Tartary and China. But ‘Semitic,’ which contains a myth and a theory, should be changed into ‘Arabian.’ Egypto-Arabic attained its purest and highest development in the Peninsula; Hebrew is a northern and somewhat barbarous dialect; Syriac is a north-western offspring; Galla, a western; and so forth.
468 For whose erection every ‘authority’ gives his or her own date. Mr. Proctor’s calculation, based upon the precession of the equinoxes, is b.c. 3350. It appears to me that we also obtain the date from the position of the polar star (α Draconis), which looked down the axis of the great entrance-passage before this long tube was blocked up. We may thus assume between b.c. 3440 and b.c. 3350.
469 Records of the Past, ii. 120; and Trans. Bibl. Soc. i. ii. 383–85.
470 Brugsch, vol. ii. chap. xiv.
471 One nome (Tanis) carried a crescent and one star, others had two and three of the latter. The emblem passed over to the Byzantine Empire, and now we see upon the Egyptian flag the crescent and Seb, the five-rayed star. It is thus distinguished from the Turkish, which has seven rays.
472 See chap. viii.
473 The popular conception of the Noachian Deluge is a study. There have been millions of local and partial floods; but wherever and whenever a traveller finds the legend of an inundation he incontinently applies it to ‘the Flood.’ Dr. Livingstone could not refrain from so doing at the petty Lake Dilolo. And it is to be noted that the Egyptians, accustomed to annual freshets, utterly ignored one general cataclysm as held by the Greeks.
474 ‘Nuhu’ is found in the Nahrai tomb, Beni Hasan (Osburn, i. 239); other names are Noum, Nouf, and Nef.
475 Amun Ra (Hephæstus, Vulcan), the veiled Osiris, the ‘Hidden One of Thebes,’ is thus addressed in a papyrus:—
He is One only, alone sans equal,
Dwelling above in the Holy of Holies.
Another describes him as ‘Maker of all things; whose beginning was the beginning of the world; whose forms are various and manifold; the first to exist; the one only Being, and the Parent of all who live.’
476 Mr. Froude metaphysicises when he tells us that the religion of Egypt is the adoration of physical forces. Mankind do not worship abstractions; they begin (and mostly end) by adoring man.
477 Blind because she saw with insight, not physical vision. Her eyes are hidden by blinkers or ‘goggles.’ Her usual name is Ma, and her ideograph is the ell-measure.
478 Even ‘God save the King’ must be referred back to them.
479 It is an aorist from ‘Havah;’ so φύσις from φύω, and natura from nascor. Mystically, Ya is the past, Ha the present, and Vah the future.
480 My fellow-traveller, the Rev. W. Robertson Smith, has neglected the derivation of the ‘Prophet’ grade by Jewry from Egypt; his interesting volume (The Old Testament, &c.) wants more Egyptianism. The Prophets of Nile-land had their merits; they foretold that Pharaoh Necho’s Suez Canal would be more useful to strangers than to natives.
481 The High Priest’s robe in Jewry had 366 bells, symbolising the days of the Sothic-sidereal year. In the times of the early Pharaohs, the ‘Queen of the New Year’ appeared in coincidence with the beginning of the solar year. The Sothic æra had been fixed from observations before Thut-mes III. (Eighteenth Dynasty, circ. b.c. 1580).
482 Yet the end of chap. xix. is distinctly teleological. Were there two Jobs?
483 Abraham, the legendary forefather of the Hebrews, was a Chaldæan from Ur of the Chaldees. On the east bank of the Euphrates lies Uru-ki, Erech, or Warká, fronted by Ur, Uru, or Mughayr: the Bedawin still call the latter ‘Urhha’ in memory of ‘Ur.’ Thus Abraham was a hill-man from the harsh and rugged regions fringing Southern Armenia. Hence the ‘Jewish face,’ with its strongly marked features and its wealth of hair and beard, appears everywhere in the sculptures of ancient Babylonia and Persia. Hence, too, the superficial observation that the Afghans and hill-tribes west of the Indus are Jews because they have the typical Jewish look. The reason is that all are derived from the same ethnic centre, a great watershed of race.
484 In this section of the nineteenth century three popular crazes are producing a literature of vigorous growth. The first is the Shakespearian; not Shakespeare, but Bacon, or some other Palmerstonian pet, wrote Shakespeare. The second, apparently a by-blow of the Book of Mormon, is the descent of John Bull from the ‘Lost Tribes,’ who were never lost. The third is the Pyramid craze; and the rough common sense of the public has embodied it in ‘the Inspired British Inch’: these Pyramidists mostly forget that the Pyramid is one of three greater and some seventy lesser items which form the cemetery of Memphis.
485 Yet it is remarkable, observes Brugsch (i. 212), that from the earliest ages the curse of the Typhonic gods clings to gold. So Plutarch (Isis and Osiris) tells us that the worshippers were directed not to wear the noble metal; and this still is a general rule in El-Islam.
486 Silver, the ‘next folly of mankind,’ says Pliny (Nat. Hist. xxxiii. 31), showing his own, and rivalling Horace’s ‘aurum irrepertum et sic melius situm.’ Strange to say, neither old Egypt nor Assyria had a coinage, which Herodotus (i. 94) and a host of other writers attribute to the Lydians, the forefathers of the Etruscans. Its representative in the Nile Valley was the ring-money, which extended to ancient Britain, and which is still preserved in many parts of Africa. The golden ‘manillas’ discovered at Dali (Idalium) in Cyprus, where the breaks of the circle are adorned with the heads of animals, lions and asps, show what the now meaningless thickening of these parts originally meant.
487 ‘Lead is also united by the aid of white lead (tin); white lead with white lead by the agency of oil’ (Pliny, xxxiii. 30).
488 The Captivity of Hans Stade, p. 145.
489 Properly speaking, to ‘damascene’ is confined to ‘grit’ or inlaid iron or steel, the word evidently deriving from Damascus, once so famous for Swords. Johnson (Dict., Longmans, 1805) explains the word ‘damask,’ ‘linen or silk woven in a manner invented at Damascus, by which part, by a various direction of the threads, exhibits flowers or other forms.’ Percy (Metal. p. 185) inclines towards ‘Damascus’; but he suggests that the ‘word “damask” applied to steel may have been derived, not from the place of manufacture but from a fancied resemblance between the markings in question and the damask patterns on textile fabrics.’
490 This process resembles our niello (nigellum) inlaying. The oldest composition contained most silver and no lead. Percy (Metallurgy, p. 23) gives us its history: the first treatise by Theophilus, alias Rugerus, a monk of the early eleventh century, was translated by Robert Hendrick (London, 1847).
491 Plutarch relates (De Isid. 2) of Ochus (Thirty-first Dynasty), who, amongst other acts of tyranny, caused the sacred bull Apis to be made roast beef, that he was represented in the Catalogue of Kings by a Sword.
492 Ḳrsha, Krasher, or Krershra. The determinative is a squatting archer with bow and arrows. Marvellous to say, Brugsch (i. 51) mentions ‘clubs, axes, bows and arrows,’ utterly neglecting the Sword.
493 Egyptian national names give derivation to, but do not derive from, Greek. According to Pollux (vii. 71), however, Hemitybion is Egyptian, evidently corrupted.
494 The horse, apparently unknown to the First Dynasty of Memphis, was familiar to the Second. Mr. Gladstone (Primer of Homer, p. 97: Macmillan, 1878) supposes that the animal came from Libya or Upper Egypt; but the African horse probably originates from Asia. The first illustrations of horses and chariots are found at Eileithyias, temp. Aah-mes, Amos, Amosis, b.c. 1500.
495 The pole-axe was three feet long, the handle being two; the blade varied from ten to fourteen inches, and below it was a heavy metal ball, some four inches in diameter, requiring a powerful arm. The club in the British Museum, armed with wooden teeth, is not represented on the monuments, and probably belonged to some barbarous tribe.
496 I have already discussed the Stone Age in Egypt and in Africa (chap. iii.). We must not, however, determine it to be pre-metallic without further study. Herodotus first notices it when he tells us that the Ethiopians in the army of Xerxes used stone-tipped arrows.
497 I cannot but suspect the word of being a congener of our ‘chop.’ Mr. Gerald Massey, author of A Book of the Beginnings, favoured me with his opinion upon the ‘scymitar Khopsh.’ He identifies it with the hinder thigh (, Shepsh, or, Khepsh), of the ‘old Genitrix’ of the Typhonian type, Kfa or Kefa (force, power, might); the Goddess of the Great Bear and the place of birth. Hence the (Ru) or ‘mouth’ of the Sword came to be synonymous with the ‘edge’ of the Sword (Genesis xxxiv. 36). In the Denderah zodiac, the central figure, the ’old Genitrix,’ holds the Khopsh-chopper or falchion with the right hand. The ‘thigh of Khepsh’ is also the Egyptian rudder-oar. The Great Bear Khepsh is one of the earliest measures of the Seasons: the Chinese still say that at nightfall the ‘handle of the northern bushel’ (tail of Ursa Major) points east in spring, south in summer, west in autumn, and north in winter.
Mr. Gerald Massey’s two fine volumes have secured him, and will secure him, much bitter and hostile criticism from the many-headed who are lynx-eyed as to details while they overlook the general scheme. His object has been to show that religion and literature, science and art, originated in Egypt; and here he is undoubtedly right. Relying upon the self-evident fact that the language of the hieroglyphs contains ‘Semitic’ as well as ‘Aryan’ roots and derivative forms, he traces these throughout the languages of the world. Whether we judge his work conclusive or not, we cannot but admire and applaud the vast reading and research which he has brought to bear upon the most interesting subject.
And in another way Mr. Massey has done good. He has uttered a lively and emphatic protest against the Sanskritists and their over-weening pretensions. In vol. ii. (p. 56) he shows how shallow is the conclusion that Ophir was in India because the produce brought back by Solomon’s fleets had, according to Professor Max Müller, Sanskrit or Dravidian names. ‘Koph’ the ape is Kapi in Sansk.; but it is pure Egyptian, Kapi, whence the Gr. κῆπ-ος or κῆβ-ος. ‘Tukkiyim’ (peacocks) resembles the Toki of Tamil and the Togei of Malabar; but the root is evidently the Egyptian Tekh or Tekai, a symbolical bird. ‘Shen habim’ (teeth of elephant = tusks) may derive from the Sansk. Ibau, an elephant, but the latter is originally Ab in Egyptian. These erroneous views, coming from an authoritative source, are at once accepted, copied into popular books, and find their way round the world, to the confusion of true knowledge. They make it our hapless fate to learn, unlearn, and relearn. See ‘ape’ in Smith’s Dict. of the Bible, and, to quote one in dozens, the Trans. Anthrop. Soc. p. 435, May 1882,—‘the name for ape in “Kings” and in Greek authors, both adopted from Sanskrit.’
Mr. Massey unfortunately has not studied Arabic, hence many views which will hardly find acceptance. In interpreting the hieroglyphics he has wisely preferred the ideographic symbolism and the determinatives which, countless ages ago, preceded the phonetic and alphabetic forms.
498 For further notice of the Kopis, see chap. xi.
499 Also v. to decapitate: the Coptic form is Sebi or Sefi.
500 Bunsen, v. 758.
501 Bunsen’s Egypt, v. 429. According to Castor, the two Swords pointed at the throat of a kneeling man was the priest’s stamp denoting pure beasts, fit for sacrifice. He has noted that this survival points distinctly to human sacrifice in older days.
502 Yet the tombs at Beni Hasan date 900 years before the popular era of the Trojan war.
503 Monum. 262 fol., plates 11, 15.
504 Rosellini shows a long tapering blade with a mid-rib, apparently sunken, and a raised surface on each side. The length is divided into five parts, smooth and hatched (?).
505 The Somal have retained three other notable peculiarities of ancient Egypt; the wig (worn by the old Nilotes); the Uts () or wooden head-stool acting pillow, which further north was a half-cylinder of alabaster finely carved; and the ostrich-feather head-gear The latter was a symbol of Truth among the old Egyptians, because, says Hor Apollo, the wing-feathers are of equal length. The Romans adopted it as a military decoration. ‘Your courage has not yet given your helmet wherewithal to shade your face from the burning sun,’ say the Kurds, who add to the crest a new feather for every foe slain in fight. The Somal, after victory or murder, stick the white variety in the mop-head. We still use the phrase ‘a feather in his cap.’ The ‘Prince of Wales’ feather’ is an Egyptian ideograph of Truth. Mr. Gerald Massey seems to think that Wilkinson’s ‘Thmei’ (II. chap. viii.) is ‘only a backward rendering of the Greek “Themis”‘; that the feathers are ‘Shu’ (), and that the goddess is ‘Ma’ (), or ‘Mati.’ But surely the root of Themis would be in ‘Ta-Ma,’ the Goddess (of Truth)?
506 Compare Raa, Heb. and Ar., ‘he saw’; Gr. ὁράω, and Lat. Ra-dius.
507 Colonel A. Lane Fox remarks that the groove which is constant in these Caucasian blades is a little out of the central line, and does not correspond on each side, an alternation showing that it is derived from the ogee form. I have suggested that the idea arose from the arrow-head ‘bellied on a twist,’ and have figured the weapon in the next page (fig. 170).
508 Bronze, &c. p. 298.
509 Chap. v.
510 Returning from the exploration of Harar (1853), I sent a small collection of Somali weapons to the United Service Institution.
511 The form is accurately preserved in the formidable Afghan ‘Charay’ or one-edged knife.
512 A Critical Inquiry, &c.
513 I have shown that the heraldic Sword in the East preserves this double sword-knot (chap. vii.).
514 The Baghirmi, according to Denham, adore a long lance of peculiar construction: this spear-worship is also practised by the Marghi and the Musghu. It extended from ancient Rome to certain of the Pacific Isles; while the Fijians worship the war-club. At Baroda in Gujarát superstitious honours are paid to the Gaekhwar’s golden cannons with silver wheels.
515 English and Styrian razors are also largely imported.
516 Chap. viii.
517 Athenæus (i. 27) speaks of the Thracian dance in arms, ‘men jumping up very high with light springs, and using Swords.’ At last one of them strikes another, so that it seemed to everyone that the man was wounded.
518 Marocco, page 66 (Milano, Treves, 1876).
519 Hence the ardent desire of the Abyssinians, when first visited by Europeans, to obtain civilised Swords. Father F. Alvarez (Hakluyt Soc. 1881), who lived in Abyssinia between 1520 and 1527, shows the Barnagais (Bahr-Negush, or sea-ruler) begging the Portuguese ambassador for his rich Sword and ornaments, ‘as the great lords have few Swords’ (chap. xxx.). Prester John (the Negush or Emperor) displays ‘five bundles of short Swords with silver hilts,’ taken from the Moslems (chap. cxiii.). The King of Portugal sends as a present to Prester John ‘first a gold Sword with a rich hilt,’ and a good fencer, Estevam Pallarte.
520 Anthrop. Coll. p. 184.
521 Gorilla-land, p. 227.
522 Quenching in oil or grease instead of water is a common practice. The workman still ‘adds to the water a thin cake of grease, or pours over it hot oil, through which the steel must pass before it enters the water, for by these means it is prevented from acquiring cracks and flaws.’ (Beckmann, loc. cit. ii. 330.)
523 Specimens of all these weapons are in the Lane-Fox Collection, Nos. 1088 to 1100.
524 The Cataracts of the Congo, p. 234.
525 I have noticed that arrant humbug, the celebrated ‘golden axe’ which, in 1880–81, caused the last ‘Ashantee scare’ (To the Gold Coast for Gold, ii.). The thing sent to England was certainly not the great fetish which is held to be the national Palladium. Another memento of the last Ashantee war, ‘King Koffee’s umbrella, an article of prodigious proportions, and of gaudy material,’ only returned to where it was made. The type of the latter may be seen in most Italian market-places, shading the old women’s fruits and vegetables; and Manchester, I believe, had the honour of building it.
526 Through the Dark Continent, i. 21.
527 Described in my Mission to Dahome, passim.
528 Across Africa, vol. i. pp. 121, 139; vol. ii. 104.
529 The famous copper mines of the Congo region, whose yield, says Barbot, was mistaken for gold, are noticed in The Cataracts of the Congo, pp. 45, 46.
530 Captain Cameron has brought home specimens.
531 From O Muata Cazembe, which also contains a long and valuable description of the copper mines in South-Eastern Africa, worked by the people since olden time.
532 According to Marco Polo (lib. iii. cap. 34), the men of Zanghibar (Zanzibar) are ‘both tall and stout, but not tall in proportion to their stoutness, for if they were, being so stout and brawny, they would be absolutely like giants; and they are so strong that they will carry for four men and eat for five.’
533 Anthrop. Coll. p. 135.
534 The Journ. Anthrop. Inst. (August 1883) has printed an excellent paper ‘On the Mechanical Methods of the Ancient Egyptians.’ Mr. W. M. Flinders Petrie believes that they cut diorite with lathes and jewel graving-points (diamond? or corundum abundant in Midian?); and that the diamond was the ‘piercing-stone’ of early Babylonian Inscriptions.
535 Gen. xxiii. 18. In 2 Sam. xxiv. 6, ‘Aretz tahtim-hodshi’ should be read, ‘Aretz ha-Hittim Kadesh,’ ‘the land of the Hittites of (city) Kadesh.’
536 Trans. Soc. Bib. Archæology, vol. v. part 2, p. 354. They were then the paramount nation in Syria, from the Euphrates to the Libanus; and the Assyrians knew the region as Mat-Khatte.
537 Wild work has been made with this word. Some render it ‘large’ (i.e. whale-like); the scholiast calls the Cetians a people of Mysia; others confound them with the Kittaians (Chittim = Cypriots) of Menander in Josephus (A. J. ix. 14; Cory’s Frag., p. 30; London, Reeves & Turner, 1876); others with the people of Kiti (the circle), the Heb. Galil or Galilee.
538 ‘Two-river’ (land) is mostly applied to the great Interamnian plain, Mesopotamia. Here it must mean Syria proper; and Aram Naharayn (Highlands of the Two Streams) admirably describes Palestine, which is composed of a double anticlinal river-valley formed by the Iarunata (Jordan) and the Arunata (Orontes). The whole length and breadth of the country is distributed between the two, with the exception of the small Litani watershed.
539 The ‘Aram wine from Halybon’ was produced at Helbún (Halbáún, the inhabitants call it), a gorge-village near Damascus. Being Moslems, they no longer ferment their grape-juice; but the fruit is still famous. The Helbún people speak the broadest dialect, and are a perpetual laughing-stock to the Damascus citizens. The Aleppites derive their ‘Halab’ (Aleppo) because Abraham there milked (halaba) a cow; but the place is older than the Genesitic flood, the Flood.
540 This word is corruptly written Jerablus, Jorablus, Jirabis, &c.
541 In Rawlinson’s Herodotus (i. 463) we find that the Southern Hittites numbered twelve kings.
542 The decisive action is shown on an Egyptian tomb (Brugsch, i. 291).
543 Ramses left as memorials of his invasion three hieroglyphic tablets cut upon the rocks on the south side of the embouchure of the Nahr el-Kalb (Dog or Wolf River, the Lycus), a few miles north of the Venerable Bayrut (Berytus, &c.). They mark the ancient road which ascended the rough torrent-gorge to its origin in Cælesyria (El-Buká’a). Even since these pages have been written the coffins and mummies of Ramses II. and his daughter have been found at Dayr el-Bahri in Upper Egypt, and conveyed from Thebes to Bulak by Dr. Emil Brugsch. The same collector has been equally lucky with the remains of Seti I., although Belzoni, who discovered the tomb, sent the sarcophagus to the Sloane Museum.
544 Sesostris derives from Ses, Setesu, Sestesu, or Sestura, i.e. ‘Sethosis, also called Ramses’ (Seti-son?). The Greek Sesostris combines, I have said, the lives of Seti and his son Ramses. According to Brugsch, he is the ‘Pharaoh of the Oppression,’ and the son of the unnamed Princess (Merris? Thermutis?) who ‘found Moses in the bull-rushes.’
The Princess Thermutis, says Josephus, named Moshe (Moses) from mo (má = water) and uses, those who are saved out of it (ses = to reach land). Possibly it is Mu-su = water-son. Josephus was sorely offended by the ‘calumnies’ of Manetho; this Egyptian priest, who wrote under Ptolemy Philadelphus about the time of the LXX, declared that the Hebrews were a familia of leprous slaves who, when expelled from Egypt, were led by a renegade priest called Osarsiph (Osiris-Sapi, god of underworld); and that the number was swollen by Palestinian strangers driven out by Amenophis. He gives the number of lepers and unclean at 250,000 (= 50,000 × 5), and the Hyksos, another impure race, number also 250,000. The learned classics accepted this view, duly abusing the ‘gens sceleratissima’ (Seneca), and the ‘odium generis humani’ (Tacitus).
545 The site of Kadesh and the Buhayrat Hums (Tarn of Emessa) or B. Kutaynah, a ‘broad’ or widening of the Orontes, was first visited by Dr. Thomson of Bayrut in 1846. I rode about the ‘lake of the land of the Amorites’ in 1870; but found no ruins, or rather ruins of no importance everywhere. It was not then known to me that in a.d. 1200 the geographer Yakut (Geogr. Dict. edit. Wüstenfeld) had noticed the water in his day as the ‘Bahriyat Kuds’ (Tarn of Kadesh). Since that time the Palestine Exploration Fund (July 1881) identified the seat of Atesh or Kadesh with the Tell Nabi Mendeh, a Santon’s tomb on the highest part of the hill where the ruins lie. The site is on the left bank of the Orontes, four English miles south of the ‘broad.’ The city disappears from history after the thirteenth century b.c., but local legend has preserved its memory.
546 Prof. Ebers, who is familiar with the many portraits of Ramses-Sesostris, declares that he was a handsome man with fine aquiline features, like Napoleon Buonaparte.
547 This original and instinctive way to revive the drowned endures to the present day, despite the wrath of the Faculty.
548 Brugsch (ii. 68) gives the terms of the treaty as translated by Mr. Goodwin (Records of the Past, iv. 25); and adds instances to prove that it was acted upon. Thus he explains the hitherto mysterious countermarch, the turning back of the Hebrew exodus, at the time when the emigrants were advancing straight upon their objective. His strong point is the identification of ‘Baal-Zephon,’ about which all the commentators have made such hopeless guesses. He explains it by ‘Baal of the North’ (Typhon, Sutekh or Khepsh), the ‘Mount Kasion’ of Jupiter Kasios, a name derived from the Egyptian Hazian or Hazina.
549 So called from an old Coptic town, long ruined.
550 Rawlinson’s Herodotus, vol. i., Essay VII., and reference to Black Obelisk in British Museum. Synchronous History of Assyria and Judæa, pp. 1–82, vol. iii. pt. i.; Soc. Bibl. Archæology, 1874.
551 A Keltic word, bot = foot.
552 In popular Hebrew use, ‘Canaanite’ meant a trader.
553 Possibly the ‘pure’ (Hebr. Tohar), in which case the word is ‘Semitic.’
554 Brugsch, ii. chap. xiv. As a rule, slingers were the least esteemed of fighting men.
555 The Rev. William Wright, missionary at Damascus, first suggested that the Hamath inscriptions were Hittite. The study was begun in 1872 by the late Dr. A. D. Mordtmann at Constantinople, where is the original of the silver Hittite dish represented in the British Museum.
556 Trans. Soc. Biblical Archæol. vol. iv. pt. 2, 1876.
557 Described by M. Clermont-Ganneau in the Revue Archéologique, Dec. 1879; and figured in the Palestine Exploration Fund, July 1881.
558 In Egypt the king rests his feet upon war-captives; and making a foot-stool of the enemy is a Biblical phrase (Psalm cx. 1) which had a literal signification.
559 For the two-headed eagle in Moslem heraldry (a.d. 1190 and 1217), see p. 108 of Rogers Bey’s valuable paper before quoted (chap. vii.).
560 His chief argument for their Northern origin seems to be founded upon their boots; he forgets, however, that the Arabs of Mahommed’s day wore ‘Khuff;’ and that legal ablutions were modified to suit them. It is the cothurnus calceatus of Pliny (vii. 19) which, as we see on statues and vases, covered the foot and ankle to the calf. The Assyriologist Prof. P. Schrader, followed by Prof. G. Ebers, considers the Khita to be Aramæans.
561 And Carchemish. ‘On the Hamathite Inscriptions,’ Trans. Soc. Bibl. Archæol. vol. i. pt. 1, 1876, and vii. 298–443, on Tarrik-timmun.
562 Mr. Heath kindly explained to me the key of his system published in the Journ. Anthrop. Instit. May 1880. The figures at Ibríz having suggested ‘Semitism,’ he separated root-letters from formatives and found three Aramæan suffixes, t-na, t-kun, and t-hun. These gave an immense probability that he had hit upon the t, n, k, and h. Meanwhile Mr. Boscawen (Pal. Expl. Fund, July 1881) contends that our ‘knowledge of Hittite is confined to four syllabic characters and the ideographs.’ The Rev. Mr. Sayce was good enough to explain to me how he had determined eleven values. A comparison of inscriptions, with the silver boss of Tarkodemos as a point de départ, suggested to him that the stirrup-shape () marks the nom. sing. of proper names, and this in the Egyptian and Assyrian monuments ends in s. He assumes that adjectives agree with their substantives, which they follow by taking the same suffixes. He was at first disposed to make the broken k ( or ), which curiously resembles an old Egyptian sign, signify ‘and’ (cop. conjunct.); but the incised inscription found by Mr. Ramsey at Bór (old Tyana) proved it the determinative of an individual. The goat’s head seems from the bilingual boss to have the phonetic value ‘tarku,’ and is interchanged with (ku), (s),, and. The two spear-heads with the stirrup () appear to represent a patronymic—Kus. The second sign (= ku), which seems to be the first pers. sing. of the Aor., can be followed in the same group of characters by; whence Mr. Sayce inferred the latter to be an adjectival participial affix = u. Similarly = e, the acc. plur.; thus = ue. The bilingual boss also shows or = mi, the third pers. sing. present tense, and we find indifferently and. The gen. plur. is, but the pronunciation is not determined. The same is the case with the sock or low boot (), suggested to be the third pers. plur. of the Aorist. Lastly, the ideograph of plurality attached to nouns and verbs is.
563 Dr. Guyther, visiting the Merash citadel, has found several new characters in a long inscription on a lion, and fragments of stone with other hieroglyphs have been forwarded from Carchemish to the British Museum.
564 Under Shishonk (Shishak), the contemporary of Solomon, the conquered tribes of Edom and Judah are termed the ‘Fenekh and the Aamu (Syro-Aramæans) of a far land.’ Brugsch (ii. 210) ‘has a presentiment’ that these Fenekh are intimately related to the Jews; and he notes the similarity of Aamu with ‘Am,’ the well-known Hebrew term.
565 Some have suspected Punt to be the far later Pándya, or Madura kingdom, in Southern India. Mariette’s Punt extended from Bab el-Mandeb to Cape Guardafui (‘I was a Guard’).
566 Prof. Rugge of Christiania, however, connects Baldur with Achilles. We can hardly accept his scheme until the details shall have been better worked out.
567 ‘Bak,’ from Beki in Coptic = city, town.
568 ‘In Judæâ rivus Sabbatis omnibus siccatur’ (Pliny, xxxi. 18). The idea doubtless arose from the intermittent springs (Siloam, &c.) about Jerusalem. Josephus (B. J. viii. 5, § 1) makes his Sabbatic R. break the Jewish Sabbath (Saturday) by flowing only on that day and resting during the other six. Hence the fabled Sabbation, whose flood of huge rocks and sand-waves, sixty to two hundred cubits high, issued from the ‘Garden of Eden.’ It still hems in the ten ‘Lost Tribes,’ and is believed by the Druzes.
569 I quote from Phœnician Inscriptions, by the Rev. Dunbar I. Heath, not from the far more poetical version of the Duc de Luynes.
570 My friend Prof. Socin holds that St. Meklar of Tyre conserves the cultus of Melkarth.
571 Perhaps from the Egyptian Ur, old, ancient, original.
572 The modern Persians, and, indeed, Persian history and legend, know nothing of this wild legend.
573 A terra-cotta relief in the British Museum shows Chrysaor (Χρυσάωρ) springing from Medusa’s neck.
574 Joppa, according to tradition (Pliny, v. 14), was built by Kepheus, king of the Æthiopians, and was his capital before ‘the Deluge.’ The same author tells us that Andromeda’s chains were there shown, and that the monster’s skeleton (some fish cast ashore upon the harbour reef?) was brought to Rome by the Curule Ædile M. Æmil. Scaurus the younger, who held office in Syria (ix. 4). The bones were upwards of forty feet long, the backbone one foot and a half thick, and the ribs higher than those of the Indian elephant (a cachelot?). Ajasson declared that the remains should have been sent to those who show in their collections the weapon with which Cain slew Abel. Pausanias (second century) saw the Lydda streamlet red with blood, where Perseus had bathed after killing the ‘Ketos.’ At Joppa St. Jerome was shown the traditional rock in which holes had been worn by Andromeda’s fetters. The spot is now clean forgotten—at least, all my inquiries failed to find it. The testimony is of the highest character; unfortunately it testifies to impossibilities—all monsters are ‘contradictory beings.’ The Ketos, whale or shark (Canis Carcharias), is evidently the same that swallowed Hercules and Jonah.
575 Mgr. Bianchini very improperly translates Harpé by ‘glaive,’ and other writers absurdly use ‘scymitar.’ They could hardly better describe what it was not.
576 The bronze Perseus of Benvenuto Cellini in the Loggie dell’ Orgagna of Florence holds a falx-Sword or falchion.
577 Hence possibly the town Arsúf; and (the Isle of) Seripho, where Perseus was worshipped.
578 There seem to be three of the name: Palladius, the first missionary to Ireland; Sen Patrick, who studied under St. Germanus and died a.d. 458–61; and Patrick M‘Calphurn, also a pupil of St. Germanus, who missionarised about a.d. 440–42.
579 Horus et Saint-Georges, &c. See also a kind of sentimental study æsthetically baptised ‘Saint Mark’s Rest: the Place of Dragons,’ by J. R. Anderson.
580 From דג (dag), a fish, a Ketos, the Phœnician דגון (Dajun, Dagon); Dagan is the male, Dalas the female. Simply a fish-god. Sardanapalus was ‘he who knows Anu (the god) and Dagon.’
581 Others found at Cannæ resemble the copper Swords of Ireland, according to the Encyclopædia Metropolitana.
582 The ‘tariff of masses,’ from the temple of Baal at Marseille, speaks of Chaltzibah the Sufet. Other inscriptions inform us that the Carthaginians had a triad, Baal Hammon (Ammon); the Lady Tanith Pen Baal (Tanis or Neith, the πρόσωπον, or face, of Baal), and Iolaus.—Phœnician Inscriptions, by the Rev. D. I. Heath.
583 Ezekiel (xxxii. 27). ‘And they shall not lie with the mighty that are fallen of the uncircumcised, which are gone down to hell [Sheol = Shuala, the ghost-land of Babylon] with their weapons of war: and they have laid their Swords under their heads, but their iniquities shall be upon their bones, though they were the terror of the mighty in the land of the living.’
584 The Hebrews were probably included under the ‘miserable foreigners,’ who, at that time, numbered about one-third of the Egyptian people. It was the fashion to find ‘Hebrew’ in the ’Aper, ’Apura, ’Aperiu, and ’Apiurui of the monuments; but Brugsch has shown that these were the original ‘Erythræans,’ equestrian Arabs of the barrens extending from Heliopolis onward to modern Suez.
585 Trattato di Scherma, &c. di Alberto Marchionni (Firenze: Bencini, 1547).
586 This word will be noticed in chapter xi. I cannot wholly agree with Colonel Lane-Fox (Anthrop. Coll. p. 99) when he speaks of a ‘leaf-shaped Sword-blade attached to the end of the spear, like the Thracian romphea and the European partisan of mediæval times.’
587 May not this older form of Jupiter have derived from the ‘Semitic’ root יה, Jah (Yah), carried westward by the Phœnicians? But this is ‘stirring the fire with a Sword,’ against which Pythagoras warns us.
588 ‘Les Figures de l’Histoire d’après la Bible,’ &c. (the Athenæum, Feb. 31, 1880). ‘Lahat’ (the Germ. lohe, our ‘low’ or ‘lowe’) is in the singular a ‘flame’; in the plural ‘spells, enchantments by drugs,’ &c.
589 Mr. Gerald Massey would identify the Jewish Chereb, like the Phœnician Hereba and the Greek Harpé, with the Egyptian Kherp,, the sign of majesty typified by an oar or rather paddle—. Thus the Kherp first cut the water like a propeller, then the grain as a sickle, and at last it became a Sword—the reaper of men. This is ingenious, but nothing more: the white arm in Egypt shows no sign of derivation from the oar.
590 So Jeanne d’Arc’s Sword was taken from a church, as will appear in Part II.
591 Tacitus (Hist. v. 13) calls them a ‘band of murderers.’ The ominous word ‘Sicarius’ first occurs in Jewish history during Josephus’ time (Bell. Jud. iv. 7; vii. 11). St. Paul was charged by Lysias with heading four thousand Sicarii, who at great feasts murdered their victims with concealed daggers. Also forty Sicarii bound themselves by the Cherem-oath (the original ‘Boycotting’) to slay Paul. The Sica or Sicca will be noticed in another chapter.
[592] The Machabæan epoch is interesting, because during it the idea of a ‘resurrection’ was established. The word should be written ‘Makabi’ if derived from Mi Kamo Ka Baalim Yahveh (Ex. xv. 11).
593 The number is given in Chronicles (1, xxi. 5) at one million five hundred and seventy thousand without including Levi and Benjamin. Many attempts have been made to reconcile the little difference of two hundred and seventy thousand souls.
594 I shall notice Assyrian Arms in chap. x.
595 By a curious feat of etymology, this word, or rather the German ‘Philister’ (confounded with Balestarius or Balestæus, a crossbow-man, the militia of small artisans?) has come to signify in modern parlance one indifferent to ‘intellectual interest’ and the ‘higher culture.’ As applied to the enemy it is simply Prig writ large.
596 The Old Testament in the Jewish Church, p. 126, by the Rev. W. Robertson Smith (Blacks, Edinburgh, 1881).
597 Napoleon Buonaparte was right in attributing the instability of the great empires (Egypt, Babylon, Assyria) bordered by the Bedawin, to the destructive action of the Arab race: ‘That most mischievous nation whom it is never desirable to have either for friends or enemies’ (Ammian. Marcell. xiv. 4). I have enlarged upon this subject in Unexplored Syria (i. 210). The first noted outswarming was of the Hyksos or Shepherd-Kings (b.c. 1480 to 1530?). Another, under the influence of Mohammed the Apostle of Allah, changed the condition of the Old World; and in the present day, Turkish dominion in the regions frontiered by Arabia is being seriously threatened. Hence Ibn Khaldún of Tunis, who in a.d. 1332 began to write philosophical history, assigns to empire in the East three generations (= 120 years) and three several steps. The first, youth, is of growth (campaigning and annexing); the religion being fanaticism and the form of government a limited monarchy of a semi-republican type. The second, manhood, is a period of ‘rest and be thankful,’ of not ‘stirring up things quiet’; of enjoyment, of easy scepticism, of luxury, of despotism, The third, age, is decline and fall, the triumph of financiers and capitalists; of aversion from war and from ‘territorial aggrandisement’; it is distinguished by employing mercenaries, by religious disbelief, by tyrannic rule. (Ibn Chaldun und seine Culturgeschichte, Baron A. von Kremer. Wien.)
598 This has apparently been done by the Rev. Mr. Porter, the author of that unpraiseworthy Murray’s Handbook. His Strabo had told him that Gaza lay seven stadia or furlongs from the sea; and St. Jerome that a new town had been built. Yet we are led three miles from the shore to modern Ghazzah, and are gravely told of Moslem absurdities concerning the Makám or tomb of Samson. The old port of which the Ancients speak has evidently been buried by the sands which are attacking Bayrút, and the only survivor of the past may be the site of Shaykh Ijlin on the coast, south of the Mínat or present roads. In noticing Askelon, Mr. Porter tells us all about the old story of Ascalonia, Scallion, Shalot: nothing about the Egyptian Ac-qa-li-na. For a third edition the learned author should take the trouble to consult Brugsch Pasha’s Egypto-Syrian studies.
599 See chap. iv.
600 Cyprus, before quoted.
601 Aphrodite or Venus (Urania and Pandemos, Porné and Hetæra), at once the feminine principle in nature, the original mother and the idea of womanly beauty, was a universal personage. In Egypt she was Athor the Goddess of Pleasure, and Ashtar in Nilotic Mendes. Amongst the Arabs she became Beltis, Baaltis the feminine of Bel or Ba’al, and Alitta (Al-ilat the goddess); among the Sidonians Ashtoreth (1 Kings xi. 33); in Phœnicia, Ishtar and Astarte, which Gesenius takes to be a Semitisation of the Persian Sitáreh, a star (i.e. Venus); in Byblos, Dionæa and Dione; in other parts of Syria, Derceto, Atergatis (Ta-ur-t, Thoueris), and Nani, the latter still surviving in the Bibi Nani (Lady Venus) of Afghanistan. In Cyprus she was Anat, Tanat, or Tanith (Ta-neith = Athene?); in Persia and Armenia Mítra (Herod. i. 131), Tanata, and Anaitis = Anahid, the planet Venus; and in Carthage, Tarnt Pen Baal.
602 In Heb. Kinnúr, a lyre of six to nine strings resembling the Nubian article. Hence, probably, κιθάρα, Cithara, Chitarra, Guitar, Zither; but there is a modification by the Persian Sih-tárah or ‘the three-stringed.’
603 Thus in Jeremiah (xxiii. 29), ‘Is not my word like as a fire? saith the Lord; and like a hammer that breaketh the rock in pieces?’
604 I see with pleasure that Mr. W. P. Palmer proposes to continue his exploration of Phrygia; his lecture before the Hellenic Society (Dec. 14, 1882) promises much. The western half of the great western plateau of Asia Minor, this land of monotonous grandeur, is directly connected with the Ægean Sea by a single line of cleavage which extends from Miletus to Celænæ. Egyptian art and influence found its way to Greece viâ Phrygia as well as through Phœnicia, especially in the early days of the Argonauts and the Iliads, when Greece began to be connected with nearer Asia. Hence the wide diffusion of the Midas-myth (b.c. 670): the long-eared king’s tomb was discovered in 1800. I have elsewhere noticed how far Phrygia extended to the West, leaving indelible marks in Spain and Portugal.
605 The Lycian tongue, as far as we know, resembles Zend; and the coin with a triquetra (Rawlinson’s Herod. i. 212) has three characters apparently Hittite. The Lycian confederacy of twenty-three towns (six cities being chief) was strong enough to resist Crœsus (Herodotus). Their relationship was by the ‘distaff-side’ (Mutterrecht), as opposed to the ‘Sword-side’; and we find traces of the same antique and logical practice among the Greeks: ἀδελφὸς is evidently derived from δελφύς.
606 Major di Cesnola On Phœnician Art in Cyprus: the proofs are ‘gold and silver ornaments of remarkable beauty and grace,’ which are said to resemble the produce of Hissarlik.
607 The Cyprian Venus was worshipped in the form of an Umbilicus or Meta, according to Servius (ad Æn. i. 724). Others compare it with a pyramid.
608 Numismatique et Inscriptions Cypriotes, Paris, 1832. The Dali inscription is compared with the Lycian at the end of vol. i. pt. 1, Soc. of Bibl. Archæol. 1872. Discussing the eighty characters, the Duc de Luynes found twenty-seven Egyptian, twelve Lycian, and seven Phœnician. This would suggest that the syllabary is a branch of the picture-writing which grew to be an alphabet proper in the Nile Valley, and which, modified by the Phœnicians, passed into Greece. Others hold it to be an imperfect modification of the Assyrian cuneiforms, introduced about b.c. 700 and lasting till Alexander’s day. I have already noticed that the cuneiforms were originally pictures of natural objects; and that the same is evidently the case with the Chinese syllabary. Some of the Cypriot signs show a faint resemblance to the Devanagari alphabet, which we know to be a modern offshoot from South Arabian or Himyaritic. A gold incision from the Curium treasury (Plate xxxiv. No. 7) consists of two crescents adossed, which may be either Hittite or a simple ornament. Mr. Sayce, indeed, derives the syllabary from Khita-land. Of the crescent and the star I have already spoken; no date can be assigned to it in decorative art.
[609] I have figured a similar but broader blade as the Novacula in Etruscan Bologna, p. 66. The Prague Museum has about a dozen of these sickles found near Tepl: one (b) with a rivet-hole and a kind of beading. In the collection of Carinthian Klagenfurth I found a sickle (c, No. 1711) fifteen and a half cent. long by four broad, with an Etruscan inscription. See Chap. X.
610 The winged Sphinxes upon this patera with hawks’ heads are peculiarly Egyptian. The Sphinx, which may be older than the Pyramids, is a man-headed lion—the ‘union of force and intellect.’ Later types change the human head to that of an asp, a ram, and a hawk; and supply the latter with wings. The same is the case with the Sphinx of Troy and Assyria: it is mostly alate. The Grecian Sphinx changed the bearded human head to that of a woman; the Gyno-Sphinx in Egypt being later than the Andro-Sphinx. We find the female in the doorway of the Xanthus frieze and over the sarcophagus at Amathus (Cyprus, pp. 264–267). Those who would understand the peculiar beauty, not only of line but of expression, which the Egyptians threw into the face of the Sphinx have only to study the statue standing to the proper left of the main entrance to Shepheard’s Hotel, Cairo. It came, I believe, from the great Dromos of the Serapeum, the Apis-tombs of the marvellous Memphis cemetery.
611 Meaning Holy Lady or Great Goddess, the Syria Dea. Preceded by the digamma, the word became Famagosta, and was corrupted to Fama Augusti and to Ammochosti, a sand-heap.
612 See his diagram, p. 10, Troy and its Remains.
613 See chapter viii. These assertions are fair specimens of the harm done to philology, in uncritical England, by the one-sided and ad captandum views of the ‘Sanskritists.’ Mr. Gerald Massey hardly exaggerates when he says (i. 135), ‘It looks as if the discovery of Sanskrit were doomed to be a fatal find for the philologists of our generation.’ The peculiar mixture of philology, in its specialist form, with the science of religion and the tenebræ of metaphysics has, it appears to me, done much harm to all three; but it delighted the half-educated public. It met with scant appreciation in acute France and in critical Germany, where the editing, or rather mutilation, of texts, has been severely chastised. But the Sanskritist, much to the discredit of Oriental studies and of philology in England, has given us an indigestion of Sanskritism; during the last great Oriental Congress in London he almost monopolised time and attention, to the prejudice of Orientalism in general. Apparently a protest is on the point of being raised; but, unhappily, Teutonism is still a scourge in Great Britain, and the typical Solar myth, ‘like Hermann’s a German.’
614 Except, of course, in the bronze.
615 Charles Rau (?), an American, by means of a bow, and without using metal, bored a hole through an axe of diorite: it occupied him ten hours a day for four months (Jähns, p. 6).
616 In mediæval Romance ‘Ilios,’ ‘Ilion,’ and ‘Ilium’ were applied to the Palace of Priam.
617 Juventus Mundi, by the Right Hon. W. E. Gladstone, p. 529.
618 May it not be the black hæmatite used in Cyprus? Compare the goose’s head, the sacred basket, and the frog, Egyptian symbol of embryonic man and of Hor-Apollo (Harpocrates), in General Palma (Appendix, p. 364). But is this able writer sure about his ‘hæmatite’?
619 I.e. to one looking north and therefore west. The old Egyptians faced to the south (Hín or Khount), which they called ‘upwards’ or ‘forwards,’ in opposition to the North, which was the lower (Khir) or hinder part (Pehu). Thus their right was west (Unim) and their left east (Semah): the right leg of Osiris was the western side of the Delta. So Pliny (ii. 6) makes his observer front southwards. The Assyrian and Semites faced east (Kadam or front, opposed to Akhir or Shalam, the sun’s resting-place): hence their right (Yemen) was the south, and their left (Sham) was north. They introduced this fashion into Ancient India, where, consequently, Dakshina (dextra, the right hand) became the south, and survives in our ‘Deccan.’ The practice even extended to Ireland where Eirin or Erin (Erin, Ierne) has been derived from the Keltic ian, behind, the west; and in, an island, the isle lying west of France and Britain.
620 Travellers who have inspected the excavations deride these pompous terms: the ruins look well in book-illustrations, but the reality is mean in the extreme.
621 Dr. Schliemann shows the human umbilicus adorned with a cross. The significance of such phrases as ‘omphalos of the earth’ applied to Delphi and Paphos, is generally misunderstood. Any traveller in India who has seen a Lingait temple would at once explain it, as well as the illustration in Wilkinson (vol. i. ch. iv. p. 270) showing the Lingam-Yoni, whose worshippers are ‘cherubim’ (i.e. winged Thmei). Similarly the symbol of Chemosh of Moab and of sundry classical gods was a cone. The Dea Multimamma, Cybele, miscalled ‘Artemis’ (Diana) of the Ephesians, was a statue, not a cone, but it stood upon an inverted pyramid. The uninitiated as little understand the Crux Ansata or Egyptian Cross, the emblem of life and fecundity, which was adopted by the Coptic Christians. The sacred Tau (Tau of Ezekiel ix. 6) gave rise to the Maltese Cross in Phœnicia, and in Assyria became the emblem of Shamas the sun.
622 I need hardly remind ‘Grecians’ that Tychius is supposed to have been a personal friend of the arch-Homerid.
623 Upon this point Dr. Schliemann’s Mycenæ is more explicit.
624 It is, I need hardly say, still a disputed point whether the Homeric Greeks could or could not write. See chapter xi.
625 M. F. Lenormant, the Academy, March 21 and 28, 1874.
626 I must again protest against the use, while compelled by want of another to use the term ‘Indo-European,’ which, applied to language, contains an unproved theory. India did not supply Europe either with speech or with population. The popular belief appears erroneous as is its appreciation of Darwinism, which did not derive man from monkey. The original Egyptian roots developed themselves into a host of dialects which flourished and perished before Pali and Sanskrit, a professor’s tongue, like mediæval Latin, never understanded of the people, assumed their present shapes.
627 North American Review.
628 Professor Jebb quotes M. Dumont, Céramique de la Grèce Propre.
629 The Academy, Dec. 9, 1882.
630 I have treated the question popularly in Etruscan Bologna (London: Smith, Elder, & Co., 1876). The study owed its existence to the Rev. Isaac Taylor, who, using the Family Pen once too often, supported the Turanian origin of the Etruscans in a marvellously uncritical and unscholar-like book, Etruscan Researches (London: Macmillan & Co., 1874).
631 The stater of Crœsus was the first gold coin known to the Greeks. Most of the classical authors declare that silver was first coined at Ægina by order of Pheidon (circa b.c. 869).
632 Hamilton (Asia Minor, vol. i. pp. 145–6) has carefully described this most interesting monument.
633 See the ‘colossal male head’ in General Palma di Cesnola, Cyprus, p. 123.
634 Preface to History of Egypt, p. xvi; and vol. ii. 124, where a list of racial names is given. Brugsch, it should be noted, is here entirely opposed to his predecessors, De Rougé, Chabas, &c.
635 As opposed to the Aqaiuasha or Achæans of the Caucasus (ii. 124).
636 ‘I have seen it affirmed that in those times (early Roman) the youth was instructed in the Etruscan learning, as they are now in the Greek’ (Livy ix. 35).
637 Described in Etruscan Bologna, p. 144. The blade is in Count Aria’s collection. The Sword of Misanello, une longue epée de fer, also in that museum, is noticed in p. 359, Transactions of the Congress of Bologna in 1871.
638 One vol. folio large quarto, with 17 Tables. It was preceded by ‘Di una necropoli a Marzabotto nel Bolognese,’ 1865, large quarto, with 20 Tables. Count Gozzadini is one of the earliest students who followed in the steps of M. Boucher de Perthes.
639 A fine specimen of a dagger from Thebes with the rapier-blade, and a broad flat hilt of ivory, is in the Berlin Museum.
640 Di un antico Sepolcro a Ceretolo nel Bolognese (Modena: Vincenzi, 1879), p. 9.
641 This weapon resembled the bronze forms found at Broilo in Tuscany and in the great collection discovered in 1875 and called the ‘Fonderia di Bologna.’ An account of the latter is found in Note Archeologiche, &c. (Bologna: Fava e Garagnani, 1881).
642 The learned French anthropologist compared these weapons with those found in the Marne graves. (Les Gaulois de Marzabotto, Revue Archéol. 1870–71, &c.)
643 Count Gozzadini replied in M. G. de Mortillet’s Matériaux pour l’Histoire primitive de l’Homme; and the paper was entitled by the Editor (not by the author), ‘L’Élément Étrusque de Marzabotto est sans mélange avec l’élément gaulois’ (Jan. 1873).
644 L’Étrurie et les Etrusques, vol. i. p. 93. Atlas, p. 2, Pl. II.
645 Genthe, Program, &c. p. 15.
646 The bronze is in the British Museum; the iron in the possession of Mr. H. S. Cuming (Meyrick).
647 XXVIII. cap. 45.
648 Vol. iv, Pl. XXX.; it is copied by Meyrick.
649 The writer of this sentence is, curious to say, the learned Dr. Birch (p. 5, vol. i., Soc. Bib. Archæology, 1872). Even Justin (lib. i.) knew better; he makes Sesostris (ii. 3) 1,500 years older than Ninus, ‘the most ancient king of Assyria,’ whom he places in b.c. 2196–2144 (Wetzel).
650 In the LXX Orech; the Cuneiform Uru-ki (City of the Land); in Talmud, Urikut, City of the Dead for Babylon (hod. Warka); and in Greek Orchóe, whence perhaps ‘Orcus.’ Urukh became among the Classics of Europe ‘pater Orchamus.’
651 Assyrian Discoveries (London: Sampson Low & Co., 1876), p. 447. He gives, as a scheme of Abydenus and Berosus, the Chaldæan:—
| Years. | |
|---|---|
| Alorus and 9 kings before the Babylonian Flood | 432,000 |
| 86 kings after B. Flood to Median conquest (1st dynasty) | 34,080 (33,091) |
| 8 Median kings (2nd dynasty) | 224 (160?) |
| 11 other (3rd dynasty) | unknown |
| 49 Chaldæan (4th dynasty) | 458 |
| 9 Arabian (5th dynasty) | 245 |
| Semiramis 45 kings (7th dynasty) | 526 |
Nabonidus, the antiquary king (b.c. 555), according to a Cylinder found at Sipar (Sepharvaim, Sun-city) and studied by Mr. Pinches, assigns a date to the deified Sargina of about b.c. 3,800 years. He unburied, 18 cubits below the surface, the Cylinder of Naramsin, son of Sargina (b.c. 3750?), ‘which no king had seen for 3,200 years.’ Sir Henry C. Rawlinson (the Athenæum, Dec. 9, 1882) is disposed to accept the date ‘within certain limits.’
652 The word is Har-Minni, or Mountains of the Minni. The oldest Armenian inscriptions date from the eighth century b.c.
653 It was in attacking these Khita that Ramses II. (Sesostris) left his three ‘columns’ or tablets on the rocks near the Nahr el-Kalb of Bayrut (chap. ix.). Six Assyrian inscriptions were also known there, bearing the names of Assur-ris-ilîm, Tiglath-pileser, Assurnazirpal, Shalmanesar, Sennacherib, and Esarhaddon. No epigraphs were found on the north side of the river, where an ancient aqueduct, overgrown with luxuriant verdure, turns a mill. About three years ago, however, the proprietor, when making a new channel, broke away part of the rock, and a fragment bearing cuneiforms attracted the attention of Dr. Hartmann, Chancellor of the German Consulate. No other steps were taken till October 10, 1881, when M. Julius Loytved, Danish Vice-Consul for Bayrut, bared the face of the cliff and discovered five cuneiform inscriptions, one containing 45 lines. They seem to have been hastily cut, as they follow the shape of the rock whose surface has not been dressed. According to Professor Sayce, they are Babylonian, not Assyrian.
654 Or Asshur, ‘the Arbiter of the Gods,’ represented by the winged disc of Egypt.
655 Nineveh, destroyed by the Medes (Manda or Madu) and Persians in b.c. 583, had thus a life of 1,617 years, assuming its origin at the middle term, b.c. 2200.
656 Brugsch, vol. i. chap. xvi., shows that Seshonk (Shishak) and other Pharaohs of the Twenty-first Dynasty were Assyrians who ruled ‘Mat Muz-ur,’ the people of Egypt.
657 The great scholar derives from Egypt the Cuneiform Syllabarium, which was originally pictorial:—drawing everywhere preceded writing. The astronomy of Mesopotamia is Egyptian (the unit of measure being the ell of 0·525 mètre); and the architecture, that prime creation of the human mind, shows by temples, temple-towers, tombs, and especially pyramids (e.g. that at Birs Namrud), an imperfect imitation of the Nile Valley. Herodotus attributes to Babylon the discovery of the Pole, the Sun-dial, and the twelve hours of day, all well known to ancient Egypt. The ‘Sabbaths’ are Assyrian.
658 The Athenæum, July 24, 1880.
659 That the Assyrians had books appears plainly from the inscriptions: ‘In the night-time bind round the sick man’s head a sentence taken from a good book’ (a soporific!). Parchment was most probably the first material (Trans. of Soc. Bib. Archæology, vols. ii. 55, and iii. 432); and the language proves that the papyrus-scroll (Duppu-ga-zu) was known.
660 We find in Assyria the wild goat standing upon a capital, now the arms of Istria. The same appears at Palmyra (Prof. Socin’s Collection). The winged bulls probably suggested, like the Egyptian Cherubs, our angels’ wings. These motors should now be forbidden in statuary by Act of Parliament; or the artist should be compelled to supply the pinions with the muscles necessary for working them. I need hardly say that the required development would convert the human dorsum to the appearance of the two-humped camel. The late Gustave Doré’s admirable illustrations of Dante (Purgat. xix. 51) sin greatly in this way.
661 A goddess in alabaster has in each hand a lotus flower, which she holds against her breasts. This is characteristic of old Egypt, which derived the plant from the Equatorial African Lake-region. The same figure again wears a large Egyptian wig, the hair falling in ringlets upon the shoulders.
662 The Soma, a weed in India (Asclepias gigantea), is a derivation from Homa. The Persea, or Egyptian Tree of Life, was probably the Balanitis Ægyptiaca.
663 The careless confusion of Svastika, the worshipper-sect, with Svasti, the symbol, was made by me in my Commentary on Camoens (chap. iv. ‘Geographical’). Burnouf (Emile), in La Science des Religions, made the Svasti the feminine principle; and the Pramantha, or perpendicular fire-stick, the male. If used on sacrificial altars to produce the holy fire (Agni), the practice was peculiar, and not derived from every-day-life: as Pliny knew (xvi. 77), the savage uses two, never three, fire-sticks. The Svasti is apparently the simplest form of the guilloche. According to Wilkinson (II. chap. ix.), the most complicated form of the guilloche covered an Egyptian ceiling upwards of a thousand years older than the objects found at Nineveh. The Svasti spread far and wide, everywhere assuming some fresh mythological and mysterious significance. In the north of Europe it became the Fylfot or crutched cross.
664 Assyria, like Egypt, cultivated geometry and algebra, which have been supposed to originate from revenue surveys and altar measurements. She used the Astrolabe and popularised square roots and fractions, with a denominator of 60, the sole representative of the decimal and duodecimal systems. With her fall (b.c. 555) coincides the birth of literature in Greece, where writing became general about b.c. 500. The Assyrians were great in magic and in divination, such as birth-portents, dog-omens, &c. &c.
665 Again Egyptian. Wilkinson, II. chap. vii.
666 The nearest site would be the Caucasus, which in early ages yielded a small supply. Layard (p. 191) supposes the tin to have been obtained from Phœnicia; and, ‘consequently, that used in the (Assyrian) bronzes of the British Museum may actually have been exported, nearly three thousand years ago, from the British Isles.’
667 A ‘copper instrument from Koyunjik’ (Layard, p. 596) is shaped exactly like the so-called Etruscan razors. See chap. ix.
668 Layard, Nineveh and Babylon, p. 163.
669 See chap. vi. He figures one of the latter (Discoveries in the Ruins of Nineveh and Babylon, p. 195): it measured 3 feet 8 inches long by 4⅝ inches in breadth.
670 ‘Assyrians placing a human-headed bull on a car,’ with levers and ropes (Layard, p. 112), reminds us of the statue of Ramses II., and shows that the people could move enormous weights. Both societies had ‘unbounded command of naked human strength.’
671 Demmin, pp. 293–94.
672 We have still to explain ‘Kakku’ (weapon?) and ‘Gizzin’ (scymitar?).
673 In the Tablets we read of the ‘Star of the double Sword’ (Kakab gir-tab). ‘Hammasti,’ also, is the ‘blade of the double Sword.’
674 ‘Ashur create a Son,’ b.c. 673. Assyrian Discoveries, by G. Smith (London: Sampson Low, 1876).
675 For instance, that in the bas-reliefs of Burs Nimrúd, b.c. 1000, now in the Louvre. The hippopotamus is now never found out of Africa.
676 With cavalry as well as infantry (Layard, p. 55). Upon this, a very complicated subject, I shall have much to say.
677 Whence the French cravache.
678 This abomination popularly derives from Semiramis (Sa-am-mu-ra-mat) of Assyria, and extended far and wide. Even in the earlier part of the present century eunuchs were manufactured for Christian and Catholic Rome. The practice is still kept up in Egypt, Turkey, and Persia, although strictly forbidden by the Apostle of Allah.
679 Col. Hanbury exhibited it at the British Museum. Notes by Mr. W. St. Chad Boscawen, read April 6: Trans. Soc. Bib. Archæology, vol. iv. Part II. 1876.
680 Nebo, in the inscriptions, holds a golden reed or rod, as the Homeric Hermes is Χρυσόρραπις; he also leads the ghosts to Hades. The Chaldæan gods were, like the Egyptian, deceased ancestors, and they were followed by natural objects, Anu (sky), Bel (earth), Hea (sea), personified into a vast and various mythology. Sun, moon, and æther, were the first Triad of Babylon. Thus the Chthonic gods of Greece, Uranus (the Egyptian Urnas), Gaia and Thalassa (Assyrian), preceded the Olympic anthropomorphism. Of course they were represented with human shapes. Presently the priest introduced as godheads cosmo-poetic causes and effects, which presently peopled the Pantheon with glorified men. For, I repeat, man worships only one thing—himself.
681 George Smith, Chaldæan Genesis, pp. 62, 95.
682 Sibri or Sibirru. I have noted the probable derivation of this word from the Egyptian Sf, Sayf, or Seft; and its resemblance to our ‘sabre.’
683 Budil (says Mr. Boscawen) succeeded his father in b.c. 1350. He defended the north-eastern peoples, the Nari and the Guti, Gutium or Goim; he also built largely, and his son, Vul-nirari (Vul is my hope), from whose palace the Sword came, was one of the greatest of the early Assyrian kings. The British Museum has a long inscription recording his restoration of the causeway leading to the Temple of Ashur.
684 Layard advocates the theory that the Persians and Hindús separated from a common centre about b.c. 1500. But of what Hindús does he speak? Certainly not of the ‘Turanian’ tribes, which peopled the peninsula before the Brahmin immigration.
685 The Greeks having no sh sound, turned Kurush into Kyros.
686 Media was North-Western Persia, from Armenia to Azerbáiján, south of the Caspian. ‘Great Armenia’ afterwards included Georgia and Abkhasia. From their racial name Manda or Mada came the Greek Mantiene and Matiene. (See Bib. Archæology, Nov. 9, 1882.)
687 Herod. i. 136, 138, &c. All writers assure us that the ancient Egyptians and Persians, the Chinese and Hindús (Marco Polo), were truth-telling races who abhorred a lie. ‘How sweet a thing is truth!’ exclaimed a Nile-dweller. In the Carpentras Inscription the Lady Ta-Bai ‘spoke no falsehoods against any one.’ In the trilingual Behistun Inscription (b.c. 516) Darius the king says, ‘Thou who mayest be king hereafter, the man who may be a liar, and who may be an evil-doer, destroy them with the destruction of the Sword’ (col. iv. par. 14). They are now emphatically the reverse. The wild tribes, such as the Bedawin, the Iliyát, and the outcasts of India, still preserve the old characteristic. ‘The word of a Korager’ is proverbial on the West Coast of the Hindu Peninsula. I cannot but attribute the deterioration to extensive commerce, contact with strangers, and change of faith. The subject, however, is too vast and important even to glance at in these pages; but I may note that the Hindú has deteriorated even in my day. In 1845 the trade-books of a Sahukár (merchant) were received as evidence in our law courts. In 1883 the idea would be scouted.
688 The conquests of Alexander the Great had given the civilised world a unity of language. The Ptolemies, having asserted Greek mastery in Egypt, established that perfect toleration which is proved by the Septuagint, Manetho and Berosus.
689 Famous in the Book of Esther (Amestris), which contains scant traces of the faith of Israel. This terrible virago (b.c. 474) caused the massacre of 800 men at Shushan, and 7,500 in the provinces. From the Pehlevi name of Xerxes (Khshhershe), possibly we may derive the modern titles, ‘Shah’ and ‘Shahanshah.’
690 Hence, perhaps, Pukhtu or Pushtu, the Afghan language, an old and rugged dialect of Persian type.
691 The South American lasso has been pitted, of course on horseback, against the Sword. Many a murder has been committed with it in the Argentine Republic, the victim being ‘thugged’ unawares and dragged to death. Needless to say, the lasso was well known in Egypt (Wilk. i. 4), where it was used to catch the gazelle and even the wild ox. The Pasha or Indian lasso was ten cubits long, with a noose one hand in circumference. It was composed of very small scales, ornamented with leaden balls; and was not regarded as a ‘noble weapon.’ The Roman gladiators, called ‘Laqueatores,’ derived their name from the lasso: they must not be confounded with the ‘Retiarii.’
692 A. J. xx. 7, sec. 10.
693 To be noticed in a future chapter (xii.).
694 Chap. ix.
695 Travels in Georgia, Persia, &c. (1817–20), by Sir Robert Ker Porter. Other illustrators are Le Bruyn, Chardin, Niebuhr, and Leake (Athens, ii. pp. 22–26).
696 It may, however, have been treated as a dagger, while the Sword was worn on the left.
697 Wilkinson (Egyptians, II. chap. v.) remarks, ‘If there is any connection between the religions of Egypt and India, this must be ascribed to the period before the two races left Central Asia’; and Layard, it has been said, would place that period about 1500 b.c. I again protest against the idea that the Egyptian ever came from, or had ever anything to do with, ‘Central Asia,’ beyond civilising it.
698 Chandragupta (Sandracottus?) b.c. 316; his son Bindusara, b.c. 291; and his grandson (Dharm) Asoka or Priyadasi, b.c. 250–241, whose children divided the empire. The Topes are probably Phallic buildings.
699 I would explain the fact that India is confounded with East Africa by the classics and by mediæval geographers as a survival of the connection of the continents in the Miocene and, perhaps, in even later ages.
700 Utilised by Horace Hayman Wilson in his article ‘On the Art of War as known to the Hindús.’ Dhanu (Sanskr. the bow) came to signify any missile or weapon; and hence, Dhanúrvidya comprised the knowledge of all other arms. The bow was also named; for instance, that of Vishnu was called Shárnga (Oppert, p. 77).
701 The Commander-in-Chief drew four thousand Varvas (gold coins) per mensem. Prof. Oppert, with true German naïveté, says (p. 8), ‘If this scale of salaries is correct, and if the salaries were really paid, one would be inclined to think that an extensive gold currency existed in ancient India.’ That the country worked its gold mines is proved by the Wynaad and other diggings, lately reopened, but we may fairly doubt the coinage;—at least, till a coin be found.
702 I now borrow from Professor Gustav Oppert, On the Weapons &c. of the Ancient Hindus (London: Trübner, 1880). Unfortunately the work is unillustrated. Its capital fault is not adducing proofs, or offering highly unsatisfactory proofs, of the antiquity to be attributed to its authorities, the Shukraniti (p. 43); the Naishedha (p. 69), and the various pagodas showing firearms (p. 76). The Mánavad-harmashástra, or Institutes of Menu (Halhed, p. 53), speaks of ‘darts blazing with fire,’ a well-known missile, but not to be confounded with firearms proper. And the Institutes in their actual form are comparatively modern.
703 Prof. Oppert gives the names of all these subdivisions; and, at the same time, a lesson in Hindú absurdity (p. 11).
704 Here we have the true Indian imaginativeness. The idea of a Western anthropomorphising a bow after this fashion!
705 Prof. Oppert says that Book III. of the Nitípra-kashika is entirely devoted to the Khadga. In the Shukraniti, as will be seen, the word denotes a two-handed Sword six feet long. The Professor translates it ‘broadsword.’
706 He lived between the tenth and thirteenth centuries and wrote a notable Ovidian work. A translation is now being printed (not published) by the Hindoo Káma-Shastra Society of London and Benares.
707 The Italian word is evidently a diminutive of the Latin stilus, or rather stylus (στῦλος). Dagger (Germ. Dolch) is from the Keltic dag, point. Degen, a larger weapon, originally means a warrior; hence the Anglo-Sax. Thaegn and our Thane.
708 Strabo (xv. 1, § 66) makes the Indian Sword three cubits (= four feet and a half) in length; and the Greeks of the Alexandrine day notice two-handed Swords and bow-drawing with the feet.
709 Roteiro, p. 115.
710 This is evidently inverted. The huge falchion, an exaggeration of the Kukkri, may be seen in the British Museum, one blade inscribed with Pali characters. Most of these huge weapons were used in sacrificing; and the low-caste Mhars still behead with falchions the buffalos offered to Kali.
711 He constantly appears in the Mahabhárata, especially in Book I.
712 Some writers are determined to find chess amongst the Romans, and quote the Panegyric of Piso, and the game of Latrunculi. But if so, where are their chessmen? The earliest allusion in any known author is in Anna Comnena’s Alexias, when the First Crusade had done some good by mixing the Eastern and the Western worlds.
713 Loc. cit. p. 61.
714 Sport in British Burmah (London: Chapman and Hall, 1879).
715 Lib. ii. cap. 53.
716 The earliest date of the famous siege is b.c. 1370 (Justin, like the Arundelian marbles, gives b.c. 1184), and the latest is b.c. 724–636. In Troy and its Remains, we find (p. 123) that the age proposed for the founding of the city is b.c. 1400; that the war took place after the reigns of six kings (p. 27), say two centuries, or in b.c. 1200; and that Homer lived 200 years after the destruction of the city (p. 91), or in b.c. 1000. Thus Herodotus and Dr. Schliemann do not agree; but what possible agreement can there be upon such a subject?
717 Would it not be more prudent to say ‘not hitherto found’?
718 Dr. Schliemann, Ilias.
719 The Arab, or rather the Moslem, practice of Koran-reading may explain that of ancient Greece. There are two distinct ways: the vulgar, as though it were a profane book; and the learned with peculiar intonation (Kirá’at), of which there are some seventy systems. The Hindús recite with a similar artful modification. So the Hellenes would either pronounce their scriptures, Homer and Hesiod, according to popular accent, or intone by quantity. That men ever wrote accents without pronouncing them is one of those wild theories which can commend itself only to a savant. Besides, we know that as late as the eleventh century there were Greek authors who wrote indifferently according to accent or quantity.
720 The tools known to the Iliad were those of Central Africa, anvil, hammer, and tongs (Il. xviii. 477, and Od. iii. 434–5).
721 viii. 14; ix. 41.
722 xxxv. 12, 43.
723 E.g. δέσμοι, bands or ties; ἥλοι, studs; περόναι, pins, fibulæ; and κέντρα, points (Il. xviii. 379; xi. 634; Pausanias xi. 16).
724 iii. 2.
725 Il. viii. 20. The Assyrian Hadi or Bet Edi, ‘House of Eternity,’ probably Grecised, by an afterthought, to ἀϊδής—invisible. See the earliest ‘Miracle-play,’ the descent of Ishtar into Hadi; Soc. Bib. Archæol. vol. ii. part i. p. 188.
726 Eur. Ion. 1.
727 From the copper trumpet comes χαλκεόφωνος, ringing-voiced (Il. v. 785). The Iliad applies the epithet to Stentor (Il. v. 785), and Hesiod (Theog. 311) to Cerberus.
728 Od. iii. 425.
729 For instance, Stasinus or Hegesias, author of the Kypria or Cyprian Iliad (Herod. Lib. ii. 117), assigned to the end of the eighth century b.c., when Kypros may have had her ‘Homeric School.’ It was in nine books, of which the argument has been preserved by Proclus in Photius; and it forms a kind of introduction to the Iliad. See Palma’s Cyprus, p. 13. ‘Homer’ is said to mention iron thirty times.
730 Dr. Evans (Bronze, p. 15) quotes Dr. Beck’s suggestion that the -eros of Sideros is a ‘form of the Aryan ais (conf. æs, æris). In another place (Stone, p. 5), he alludes to the possible connection of Sideros with ἀστὴρ (a meteor), the Latin Sidera, and the English Star.
731 Od. ix. 391.
732 This is a fair instance of ‘elegant translation.’ What Homer says is:
E’en as a blacksmith-wight some weighty hatchet or war-axe
Dippeth in water cold with a mighty hissing and sputt’ring,
Quenching to temper, for such is the strength and steeling of iron.
The reply will be that Homer does not say it in this way; and to this reply I have no rejoinder.
733 Hes. Opera, 174, sq.
734 Ibid. ix. 366.
735 xi. 34, 35, &c.
736 Dr. Schliemann is assuredly singular when translating the Homeric Cyanus by ‘bronze’ (Preface to Mycenæ, p. x.). Millin (Minéralogie Homérique) holds it to be tin. The ‘Cyanus’ of Pliny (xxxvii. 38) is lapis lazuli.
737 Opera, 149; Theog. 161, and Scut. 231.
738 Erga, 742–43.
739 Il. xv. 677.
740 xi. 629.
741 Scut. Ll. 125–132.
742 Scut. 216–224.
743 Ibid. So early was that detestable invention, the metal scabbard, introduced. Thus we must understand the φάσγανα καλὰ, μελάνδετα (Il. xv. 713). Compare Eurip. Phœn. 1091. There is much more to be said concerning ‘Phasganon.’
744 Il. vii. 220.
745 Il. iii. 292.
746 Il. v. 330.
747 Il. xviii. 474 sq.
748 Il. vi. 236.
749 x. 1.
750 Il. iv. 242, xiv. 479.
751 Il. xi. 385.
752 The Romaic gh is, as far as I know, the only modern European representative of the ‘Semitic’ ghayn, which French writers must transliterate by R: e.g. Razzia for Ghazweh.
753 Even in the army of Perseus we are told by Livy (xliv. 40), the Thracians marched first brandishing, from time to time, Swords of enormous weight.
754 xiii. 576.
755 xxiii. 307.
756 i. 210, 220.
757 Il. i. 190, it is called a Phásganon.
758 ii. 45.
759 Il. xi. 30.
760 Studs, flat-headed, like rivets, are still let into the iron blade by modern Africans.
761 iii. 334.
762 Il. xvi. 130.
763 xx. 475.
764 Il. xvi. 335.
765 xviii. end.
766 So Aristophanes (Clouds, 1065) alludes to the Sword forged by Hephaistos and presented to Peleus by the gods, as a prize for resisting the temptations of Atalanta.
767 Il. x. 256.
768 xv. 712–12.
769 Iliad. xxiii. 824.
770 Sanskritists hold it to have been originally ἄσορ, and to derive from असि (asi), a Sword; whence आसिक (ásik), a swordsman (Fick, Wörterbuch der indogermanischen Grundsprache). It is probably connected with ἀείρω, because ‘carried’ on the shoulder by the bauldric.
771 Od. xi. 24.
772 Il. xvi. 115.
773 xvi. 473.
774 Il. xiv. 385.
775 In his illustrations of the Iliad, Flaxman rarely arms his warriors with the Sword, even at the Fight for the Body of Patroclus. It is to be hoped that artists in future will kindly take warning.
776 Il. xv. 256; also Hymn to Apollo, 396.
777 El. 837.
778 Odys. viii. 401–5.
779 Odys. iv. 695.
780 Line 125.
781 Odys. i. 180.
782 iv. 83–4.
783 xi. 520. In Buckley’s translation (Bell, 1878), χαλκός is mostly translated ‘steel’ (pp. 62, 72, 198). Translators are almost as misleading as dictionaries.
784 xxi. 3.
785 xxi. 10.
786 v. 230.
787 xxi. 127.
788 xvi. 295.
789 xix. 13.
790 x. 535, xxi. 34 and 119, xxii. 329 &c.
791 Line 40.
792 Il. vii. 187.
793 Il. vi. 169.
794 xiii. 28.
795 He also mentions writing on leaden plates and on linen cloths as in ancient India; such, probably, were the books of Numa.
796 v. 29.
797 vii. 186.
798 From Kshatram (crown, reign) and -pá (defender). These viceroys of Asia Minor, who sometimes held more than one province, received and despatched embassies, levied armies of mercenaries, and even engaged in foreign wars without orders of the Great King (Herod, iv. 165–7; Thucyd. i. 115 &c.).
799 ix. 62.
800 vii. 64.
801 Grote, History of Greece, iii. 323.
802 This word is erroneously translated ‘Scymitar,’ a weapon which, in its present shape, dates from about the rise of El-Islam.
803 Rawlinson’s Herodotus, 60. The learned commentator quotes Müller, Hist. Græc. (iv. 429), Amm. Marcellinus (xxxi. 2), Jornandes (De Reb. Geticis, cap. xxxv.), Niebuhr’s Scythia (p. 46, E. Tr.), &c. In vol. iii. 60, he gives a ground-plan of the tomb, whose chief place also yielded a gold shield, a whip, a bow, a bow-case, five statuettes, and an iron Sword. The space by the side contained a woman’s bones, with a diadem and ornaments in gold and electrum. Other barrows in Russia and Tartary showed bodies resting upon sheets of pure gold weighing forty pounds, with bronze weapons and ornaments set with rubies and emeralds. Herodotus’ description of the scalping (ἀποσκυθίζειν, iv. 64) would apply to the North American ‘Indians’ of our day; and the sending a messenger to Zalmoxis, god of the Getæ (iv. 94), is the practice of modern Dahome and Benin.
804 Rawlinson, iii. 54.
805 ‘Mongol’ denotes an especial race; the word is much abused by non-Orientalists.
806 iv. 70.
807 This process of ‘mixing bloods,’ as a token of brotherhood, is familiar to all travellers in pagan Africa.
808 ii. 2.
809 Mycenæ, &c. (London: Murray, 1878). It is regretable that this handsome and expensive volume should be printed upon blotting paper.
810 Il. i. 320.
811 These illustrations are from photographs bought at Athens.
812 ix. 29–31.
813 P. 307.
814 Troy, 330–31.
815 P. 279.
816 Jähns (pp. 91, 92) cannot but suspect that many of the weapons which show a marked Oriental cast are not Atreidan but Carian. This tribe about the thirteenth century b.c. spread itself, under the mythical king Minos, over the Ægean Archipelago, and colonised even the seaboard of Greece. Such words as Hymettos, Lykabettos, &c. are supposed to be Carian. The symbol of their gods was the double-axe, so common in Mycenæ; and, as Thucydides said, their practice was to bury weapons with the dead, which was not customary in Greece.
817 Yet soldering iron was known to Egypt in the Eighteenth Dynasty.
818 The position may be seen in life all over India, where the jugglers teach goats to stand and be hoisted in that position.
819 The Etruscans, however, like the Jews, disposed the feet of the corpse eastward, as told in Etruscan Bologna (p. 22). Although the author should not say so, the public has not done wisely to neglect this book; its most valuable part, the osteological details of the Etruscan, deserved a better fate and, perhaps, secured a failure. Yet it had the prime advantage of angry abuse by a certain critical journal, whose predilection for the commonplace (quâ commonplace) is expressed by vituperation of all that is not commonplace. In my case I may say of it with Diderot: ‘Perhaps they do me more credit than I deserve; I should feel humiliated if those who speak ill of so many clever and worthy people took it into their heads to speak well of me.’
820 See ‘Analysis of Mycenæan Metals’ (pp. 367–376, Mycenæ.) But the book is almost as self-contradictory as Troy.
821 For instance, by Mr. W. J. Stillman, a traveller and a scholar. In the New York Nation (August 18) he writes on ‘The True Age of the Mykenæ Finds’; and, after a fresh examination, he declares the objects post-classical, ‘probably representing the burial-place of a colony of Celts between the fifth and the second century b.c.’ What chiefly militates against this theory is the cremation of the human remains.
822 Dictionaries derive this word from σπάω (to draw). I find it in the Egyptian ‘Sft.’ It is evidently a congener of Σπάθη (dim. σπάθιον), also Romaic, and verb σπαθάω = I wield (the weapon). Spáthe means primarily a broad blade of wood or metal; secondarily a weaver’s spatel or spaddle, a spatula (Latin tela); an oar-blade, a scraper (for horse-currying), and a broadsword. Scotchmen still apply ‘spathe’ to the weaver’s lath (The Past in the Present, p. 11), which preceded the ‘pecten.’ It is also used for Carnifex in Tertullian (De Cult. Fem. cap. xiii.), and in botany for a shoot of fructification. In Anglo-Saxon it became Spad; Icelandic Spadi, our spade. The Latins (Tacit. Ann. xii. 35; Veget. De Re Mil. ii. 15) converted it to spatha; and hence the neo-Latin espée and épée, espada and spada, from which we derive our (suit of) ‘spades.’ See the play of words upon ‘Metal de Espadas’ in Camoens’ ‘Rejected Stanzas’ (canto iv. vol. ii. p. 437 of my translation). It has been subjected to other corruptions; and in Chaucer (Knightes T. 1662) ‘Sparth’ is a battle-axe:—
‘He hath a sparth of twenti pound of wighte.’
Even the learned Major Jähns derives ‘Spatha’ from ‘Spatel.’
823 Quoted by Colonel A. Lane-Fox, Anthrop. Coll. p. 174.
824 I have described it in Scoperte Antropologiche in Ossero (Trieste, 1877). The point is evidently broken off.
825 See chap. viii.
826 See chap. iii. The Danísko is the hatchet-yataghan of Demmin, p. 397.
827 Gen. iii. 24; Zech. xiii. 7; Apocalyp. i.
828 Here we find St. Michael a heavenly archetype of St. George. In the vault of the Superga, Turin, Monseigneur carries a rapier instead of a flamberge.
829 Xenophon, De Re Eq. xii. 11.
830 A world-wide juggling trick, which seems to have originated in Egypt. In Apuleius (Golden Ass, lib. i.) a circulator or itinerant juggler swallows a very sharp two-edged cavalry broadsword and buries in his entrails a horseman’s spear. This ‘Thracian Magic’ is still practised by the well-known Raf’ai Dervishes.
831 He figures the blade in his Tour (i. p. 443).
832 Galatians, Keltic Gauls, who established themselves in Western Asia Minor after the destruction of their leader Brennus at Delphi (b.c. 279). Florus (ii. 10) calls the Gallo-Græcians ‘adulterated relics of Gauls’: Strabo also alludes to the Phrygians and the three Galatian peoples (iv. 1). As Ammian. Marcell. tells us (xv. cap. ix.), ‘Galatæ is the Greek translation of the Roman term Galli.’ They consisted of three tribes, each with its capital: the Tolistobogii (= Tolosa + Boii) at Pessinus; the Tectosages (of Aquitaine) at Ancyra, now Angora, famous for wool and cats; and the Trocmi, with Tavium for principal city, lay to the east bordering on Pontus. This people, like the Gauls, their kinsmen, was ‘admodum dedita religionibus’ (Cæs. B. G. vi. 16).
833 x. 32.
834 Livy, xxxviii. c. 17.
835 Il. i. 190.
836 Il. xvi. 437.
837 Il. xxii. 310–60.
838 Il. xiv. 405.
839 In the Iliad (iv. 185) we find the ζωστὴρ and the ζῶμα different. Menelaus wears the former outside, the Sword below it, and a μίτρα or metal plate on the breast. The ζωστὴρ was probably a broad girdle strengthened with metal, and considered part of the ὅπλα: thus ζώννυσθαι, to ‘gird one’s loins,’ is to prepare for battle.
840 Doubtless Pythagoras and Socrates were monotheists after the fashion of the Egyptian priests; but the Olympus of the many-headed was peopled by a charming bevy of coquins and coquines.
841 From the treatise of M. Rodios, ΕΠΙ ΠΟΛΕΜΙΚΗΣ ΤΕΧΝΗΣ (Athens, 1868); the soldier wears an Etruscan helmet, and the pelta shield resembles an ivy leaf.
842 Philip. i.
843 To name merely the sommités: Alexander the Great, Eumenes, and Ptolemy; Hannibal; Sulla, Fabius, Marius, Sertorius, Cato, Brutus, Julius Cæsar, Mark Antony, Pompey, Metellus, Marcellus, Trajan, and Hadrian. All these commanders were famous swordsmen, concerning whose personal feats with the weapon we have ample notices.
844 The Albanians still preserve the four castes which do not intermarry. These are: Soldiers (or Landowners), Tradesmen, Shepherds, and Artisans.
845 Some of the Greek statues were larger than any Egyptian. Olympian Jove stood 60 feet, Apollo 45 (Pausanias), and the Image of the Sun (commonly called the Colossus of Rhodes) 105 feet, exceeding everything in the Nile Valley. I need not refer to Mount Athos and the Charonion of Antioch. The oldest known Greek statue is a portrait produced at Miletus in b.c. 550, and inscribed: ‘I am Chares, son of Kleisis, rider of Teichiousa, an offering to Apollo.’ The style of this and other archaic works (vases, &c.), which are rare, connects it with Assyrianism, about the age of Assurnazirpal (b.c. 880).
846 Iliad, ii. 362 and iv. 297 sq.
847 De Ages.
848 But who is to do this under a Republic? And here we foresee troubles for our neighbours in the next Prusso-Gallic War.
849 For instance, the ‘Holy City’ of Miletus, with its 300 dependent towns. When we speak of ancient Greece we must remember that it extended from Asia Minor to Sicily, Italy, and even Southern France; and from Egypt to Albania. Modern Greece is a mere mutilated trunk.
850 Demmin (p. 106, &c.) tells us that ‘the Greeks had not even a term to denote the action of riding on horseback’; and that ‘even in French a proper verb does not exist, as the expression chevaucher means rather to stroll (flâner) on horseback.’ As his English translator remarks, the assertion is hardly admissible in the face of such words as ἱππεύειν (equitare), cavalcare, to ride the horse; ἱππεία (riding), ἱππεὺς and ἱππότης (a rider, a knight), and ἐπιβεβηκώς, mounted (scil. on horseback). His interpretation of chevaucher is equally erroneous. Chevaucher, a fine old word, now only too rare, exactly expresses our ‘to ride’: Il chevaucha aux parties d’occident, is quoted from a French MS. (early fourteenth century) by Colonel Yule in his preface to Marco Polo; and the word occurs twice in the same sentence with the same sense.
851 Lord Denman’s translation.
852 D. K. Sandford.
853 ‘Armour’ is from the Lat. armatura, through O. French armeure and armure; armoire is armarium, originally a place for keeping Arms, and armamentarium is our arsenal. It is not a little curious that ‘finds’ of Roman weapons are so rare, bearing no proportion to the wide extension of the rule. We must also beware of the monuments which are apt to idealise and archaicise: this is notable in the shape of the helmet, the pilium, and the Sword. Jähns specifies as the best place for study the Romano-German Central Museum at ‘Mainz,’ under Professor Dr. Lindenschmit (p. 192).
854 In our day the only ‘Fecialists’ are the Moslem States.
855 Polybii Historiarum quæ supersunt. The voluminous and luminous writer, a contemporary of Scipio Africanus, and a captain who witnessed the destruction of Carthage, was born a.u.c. 552 (b.c. 204), nearly three centuries after the Latin conquest of Etruria. He was called ‘Auctor bonus in primis,’ and Scipio said of him, ‘Nemo fuit in requirendis temporibus diligentior’ (Cicero, De Off. iii. 12, and De Rep. ii. 14).
856 De Linguâ Lat. iv. 6.
857 Livy, viii. 8.
858 Also called Adscriptii, Supernumerarii, and Velati, because wearing only the sagum or soldier’s cloak, opposed to the officer’s paludamentum. Properly speaking, they were rear-troops, ranged in battle order behind the Triarii. During certain epochs the Rorarii stood next to the Triarii, and the Accensi, less trustworthy than either, formed the extreme rear.
859 The weapon is well shown in a monumental tablet on the Court wall of the Aquileja Museum.
860 The Clypeus, or Clipeus, of favourite Greek use, was also round, but larger than the Parma. Our ‘buckler’ (buccularius clypeus) takes its name from having on it an open mouth (bucca, buccula), in Chinese fashion, instead of the umbo.
861 In Livy’s Phalanx (a.u.c. 415) the Velites were light-armed men, carrying only a spear and short iron pila (viii. 7).
862 A congener of the Keltic Ast = branch; whence the Fr. arme d’hast. It was the Greek κοντός, contus, or lance, an unbarbed spear, a royal sceptre: under the Republic it collected the hundreds (hastam centumviralem agere); it noted auctions (jus hastæ), it was the weapon of the light infantry-man (hasta velitaris), and it served to part the bride’s hair (Ovid, Fast. ii. 560). Hastarius and hastatus, hasta and quiris are synonyms; the gæsum was a heavier weapon and barbed, and the jaculum, with its diminutives, spiculum, vericulum, or verutum, was a lighter javelin. Virgil uses hastile poetically.
863 Loc. cit.
864 The number of men greatly varied; the extremes of the Legion are 6,800 including cavalry under Scipio, and 1,500 under Constantine. In Livy’s Legion there were 5,000 infantry and 300 horse (viii. 8). Perhaps we may assume an average of 4,000 foot—a full Austrian regiment. Each line of the three numbered 10 cohorts, and each cohort three maniples. The latter were named from manipulus, a handful (of grass, &c., Georg. i. 400), because this rustic article at the end of a pole was the standard of Romulus.
865 The Signa, ensigns, or standards, were different in the legions. The Vexillum, or colours of cavalry, was a square of cloth, also called Pannus (πῆνος). The word is a congener of the Gothic Fana and Fan; the Ang. Sax. Pan; the Germ. Fahne; the French bannière and our banner. Hence, too, Gonfanon = Gundfano. When the Eagle became imperial, and the Vexillum a Labarum with a cross, this standard was splendidly decorated, and led to the French oriflamme. The latter was made of the fine red (silk?) stuff called cendalum, cendal, or sendel.
866 These ‘light bobs’ were re-organised and regularly established in a.u.c. 541, after the battle of Cannæ.
867 In fact, it formed phalanx, a word originally meaning a block or a cylinder.
868 The officer’s was adorned by way of honourable decoration with three (ostrich?) feathers black and scarlet.
869 The original kilt was the waistcloth, man’s primitive dress in the Tropics and the lower Temperates. It became an article of defence under the Greeks and Romans; and thence it spread over most of Europe. The Maltese long preserved it, and the Fustanella is still worn in Greece and Albania. In Ireland it was ancient, as it is modern in Scotland.
870 Livy, ix. 35.
871 Livy, viii. 8.
872 Pilum, like our ‘pile,’ a congener of the Teutonic Pfeil, is not a Roman invention, and was probably borrowed from the Samnites (Sallust. Cat. 51, 38). The pilum murale, used for piercing walls (Cæsar, B. G. v. 40), was a round or quadrangular shaft of three cubits, with an iron of the same length (Polybius, vi. 23, 9). The pilum was perpetually changing size and proportions; moreover, there were two kinds, the heavy and the light. The figures in the text are those of the Mayence pilum (Jähns, p. 201).
873 Livy, xxi. 8.
874 Under Trajan and Septimius Severus the cavalry adopted the iron or bronze Hamata, hooked metal chains, forming a kind of mail-coat, and the Squamata, scales sewn on to linen or leather, Demmin (p. 121) erroneously makes the latter ‘chain-armour,’ and yet his illustration shows the scales.
875 De Re Mil. i. 16.
876 Essais de Montaigne, l. ii., chap. 24 (Paris: Garnier Frères, 1874).
877 Or maître d’armes, a word borrowed by Rome from Etruria. The legionary teachers were termed armidoctores and campidoctores.
878 Athenæus (iv. 41) relates from Hermippus and Ephorus that the Mantineans were the inventors of Gladiatorism proper (μονομαχοῦντες), suggested by one of their citizens, Demus or Demonax, and that the Cyreneans followed suit.
879 Livy, xxviii. 21.
880 In early Roman days the Gladiator was infamous; even Petronius Arbiter (Satyr. cap. i) uses ‘you obscene gladiator’ as an insult.
881 Philip. ii. 25.
882 Marius and Pompey the Great both ‘kept up’ their swordsmanship in these schools and in the Champ de Mars, the latter till the age of fifty-eight.
883 Hence his simple medication when hors de combat, ‘refreshing himself with a drink of lye of ashes.’ Can they mean the antiseptic charcoal, whose use has been revived of late years?
884 Nat. Hist. xxxvi. 24.
885 Sub v. Epicurus.
886 Deipn. vi. 105. Eunus was the slave-leader in the Servile War, which began b.c. 130.
887 The first Roman artist who painted gladiators was Terentius Lucanus (Pliny, N. H. xxxv. 34).
888 The Mirmillo, alias Gallus, is supposed to be derived from a Keltic word, meaning a fish.
889 If Nero was the monster represented by the commentaries and the contemporary Christians, we must wonder how this anti-Christ was loved in life by Acte, the ‘sweet and pure-minded Christian’; and why the citizens of Rome sorrowed for his death. And there is much suggestion in the fact that the greatest persecutors of the earliest Christians were the best of the Cæsars, for instance, Vespasian, Titus, Diocletian and Julian.
890 See the character given to him by Eutropius, viii. 4.
891 De Morib. Germ. xxxiii.
892 Mariette, Recueil, No. 92.
893 The learned Mr. Tylor is notably in error when he informs Mr. Herbert Spencer (Ceremonial Institutions, pp. 174–75) that the Japanese two-sworded man (Samurai) wore sword and dagger. The blades used to be of equal length. Of the Japanese sword I shall treat in Part II.
894 Copied by Smith (Dict. of Ant. p. 456) from Winckelmann (Monumenta Inedita, Pl. 197): the latter, by the by, was murdered at Trieste.
895 The word seems to be a congener of Sahs, Sax, or Seax, the weapon supposed to have named the Saxons. It was either straight or curved, the main object being to fit it closely to the body or under the armpits. Hence it was a favourite with the Sicarius (Ital. sicario), the Assassin. Gregory of Tours has (ix. 19) ‘Caput sicharii siccâ dividit.’ A fanciful derivation of Sicily is from sica, because Cronos threw one away at Drepanum. From the diminutive form Sicula and Silicicula comes the English ‘sickle.’
896 This hide-shield, which supplanted the clypeus or clipeus, the large round article of osier-work, was also Sabine.
897 Petronius Arbiter, chap. i. 7.
898 Falx is properly a large pruning knife, plain or toothed, with a coulter or bill projecting from the back of the curved head. Besides this, there are many forms; one is a simple curve; another is a leaf-shaped blade with an inner hook, while a third bears, besides the spike, a crescent on the back. ‘Falx’ is the origin of our ‘falchion,’ an Italian augmentative form, or perhaps the Spanish facon. Cæsar (Comm. iii. 14) speaks of falces præacutæ.
899 Loc. cit., copied by Smith.
900 Mentor is mentioned by Pliny (viii. 21). The tale of Androclus is well known; he was pardoned, and presented with his friend the lion, whom he used to lead about Rome, doubtless collecting many coppers.
901 He is called by Captain Godfrey ‘the Atlas of the sword,’ and Hogarth immortalised this valiant ‘rough’ in the Rake’s Progress and Southwark Fair.
902 It is regretable to see this unmanly and ignoble ‘sport’ spreading abroad: there was pigeon-shooting at Venice during the Geographical Carnival, alias Congress, of September 1881. All honour to the English Princes who are discountenancing the butchery at home. Fox-hunting is another thing; the chief good done by it seems to be the circulation of about a million of money per annum.
903 I have described cock-fighting in the Canary Islands (To the Gold Coast for Gold, i., chap. 9). The celebrated story of Themistocles and the game-cocks made the pastime classical. Alexander the Great is said to have crucified a tax-gatherer at Alexandria who killed and ate a famous fighting-cock. Verdict, S. H. R.
904 So Μελίη and the O. Germ. Ask (an ash-tree) signify a bow: there are many instances of such nomenclature.
905 Quinctilian, Inst. Orat. xii. 11. Marchionni (p. 123) makes the Gladius short and broad for infantry, and the Ensis long and broad for cavalry, in fact, synonymous with Spatha. This view is not unusual.
906 In Claud. cap. 15.
907 Florus, ii. 17.
908 This blade greatly resembles one found in Ostirbotten, Finland, except that the latter preserves the tang. Trans. Congress of Bologna of 1871, p. 428.
909 The point was called cuspis, which never applies to the mucro, acies, or edge. ‘Differt a mucrone quæ est acies gladii,’ says Facciolati.
910 See chap. vii. In Hugues de Bançoi’s Battle of Benevento we read: ‘Le Roy Charles’ (brother of St. Louis, and then fighting to take Sicily from Manfred)... ‘crioit de sa bouche Royale à ses Chevaliers de serrer les ennemis, leur disant, Frappez de la pointe, Frappez de la pointe, soldats de Jésus Christ. Et il ne faut pas s’en étonner, car ce Prince habile avait lu dans le Livre de l’Art Militaire que les nobles Romains n’avoient pas imaginé de meilleure manière de combattre que de percer les ennemis avec la pointe de l’épée.’
911 Livy, xxxv. 12. According to Spanish tradition, Toletum (probably a Carthaginian-Punic word) was founded b.c. 540 by Hebrews, who called it Toledoth, in Arab. Tawallud, the ‘mother of cities.’
912 Properly the South-Danube country from the Wienerwald to the Inn. The great seat of the iron works was at Lauriacum (Lorch, near Enns). After b.c. 16 the province was ruled by a Procurator.
913 See chap. vi.
914 In Tonini’s Rimini avanti l’ era volgare (p. 31) we read that the Spatha-blade ‘Come ognuno sa, presso i Greci quanto presso i Latini, est genus gladii latioris; onde Isidoro nelle Origini (xviii. cap. 6) ha che alcuni spatham latine autumant, eo quod spatiosa sit, id est lata et ampla.’ But this is a dictionary derivation. In chap. viii. I have traced it back to the Egyptian Sfet, and in chap. xiii. I shall show that it is the straight broadsword as used by the Kelts.
915 Parazonium = παρά + ζώνη. Pugio, our ‘poniard,’ is from pugnus (πύξ), the fist; others take it from pungere to prick.
916 Smith (Dict. of Ant. p. 809) borrows figs. a and b from Beger (Thes. Brand, v., iii. p. 398, 419).
917 See end of chap. viii.
918 Smith (loc. cit. p. 195) renders capulus by ‘hilt.’ Pommel, however, best explains Ovid’s legend of Theseus (Met. vii. 423), who, appearing for the first time before his father Ægeus, was known by the carving on his ivory capulus, and thus escaped Medea’s aconite. Moreover, a ‘golden hilt set with beryls’ would have been very awkward to handle.
919 Virg. Æn. xii. 942.
920 Section Beaumont. The grip has four hollows to fit the fingers. This indentation-system has been revived of late years, as shown by the swords of Victor Emmanuel and General Lamarmora in the Municipal Museum, Turin.
921 Guard plates, accompanying cross-bars, have been found in Gaul.
922 These rings appear on the scabbard of Tiberius.
923 Here I rely upon Ammian. Marcell. (xxiv. 4; xxv. 3, 4, and passim). So great a reformer could not escape detraction in its most venomous form. His last words (attributed) Vicisti, Nazarene, must, I think, have been pronounced in Syriac-Arabic, Nasart’ yá Nasráni.
924 Jähns, p. 198. He gives an illustration (Pl. xvii. 14) of the ‘Annæus’ monument at Bingen; there is a double balteus worn round the waist for the Spatha, or long Sword, to the right, and the Pugio to the left, both being carried perpendicularly. The Roman Parazonium is also rare in collections.
925 In this matter we must be careful how we trust to engravings, especially from vases, &c. The careless artist often reverses the figure.
926 Military Antiq., vol. ii.; Pl. xli.
927 Quoting Lyson’s Woodchester Antiquities (Pl. xxxv.).
928 Pl. i. fig. 10. Quoted in The British Army, &c., by Sir Sibbald David Scott, a well-studied work containing a considerable amount of information.
929 Soc. of Antiq., June 29, 1876.
930 During the critical action at Thapsus, Cæsar, according to Plutarch, was hors de combat with a fit of epilepsy, the comitialis morbus (Afric. War, chap. 14). I have noticed in my Commentaries on Camoens (i. 40) the strange fact that some of the greatest men of antiquity were subject to this ‘falling sickness.’ The Egyptians held it to be a manifestation of the power of Typhon; hence the ‘divine disease’ of Apuleius (Defence), and the strange fancies of dæmoniac possession which prevailed in the earliest ages, and which have not yet died out. The learned Canon Farrar (Life, &c. of Saint Paul, Appendix, vol. i.) holds that this perhaps was the ‘thorn in the flesh’ (2 Cor. xii. 7) alluded to by the great Apostle. He quotes from Hausrath the ‘trances’ of Sokrates, the fits of Mohammed, and the faintings and ecstasies of Saints Bernard, Francis, and Catherine of Sienna; and to these he adds George Fox, Jacob Böhme, and Swedenborg.
931 This is an illustration of genius taking pains and a lesson to the leader of troops; but how many of the moderns have practised it, or have been capable of practising it? Suvóroff (Suwarroff), it is true, taught his men bayonet-exercise, with his coat off and his sleeves tucked up: Mediocrity shudders at the idea. The Russian had, by the way, curious ideas concerning the use of the weapon. ‘Brothers! never gaze into the enemy’s eyes; fix your sight on his breast, and prod your bayonet there.’ The first rule for the General is to be ever looking after his men, to live, as it were, in the saddle, and to lead the attack when requisite. What were the habits of poor Lord Raglan and of his successor General (Jimmy) Simpson? No wonder that we had the mortification of the Redan affair.
932 Strategemata, viii. 28. The ‘Macedonian’ flourished about the middle of the second century (Christian era).
933 ix. 40.
934 This word has a universal history of its own, and contains a lecture on anthropology.
Its form is onomatopoetic, the earliest form of expression, as the Egyptian miao, for a cat; and it admirably conveys the idea of muttering or stuttering. Again, it is a reduplication of sounds; another absolutely primitive construction, and the effect is emphasis.
‘Berber-ta’ (Berber-land) was applied by the ancient Egyptians (Catalogue of Thut-mes III.), whence our modern term Barbary.
The word in Hebr. ‘wild beast feeding in waste’ migrated to India, and was there corrupted to वर्वर (Varvara), a barbarous land, one who speaks unintelligibly.
‘Berber’ passed over to Greece from Egypt, and became βάρβαρος, meaning a foreigner whose language was not Hellenic, and who, therefore, was little better than a beast. (N.B. Shakespeare would have been a barbarian in Persia and Hafiz in England.)
‘Barbaros’ broadened its meaning in Rome, where it was applied to all peoples who could not speak or who mispronounced Greek and Latin. See Strabo, xiv. 2, on ‘Barbaros’ and to ‘barbarise’; thus unhappy Ovid could wail:
‘Barbarus hic ego sum quia non intelligor illis.’
Lastly, the ‘proto-Aryan’ term ‘Barbarian’ has now grown to full size, and is applied generally to the rude, the fierce, the uncivilised, and those who contumaciously ignore the ‘higher culture.’
935 This is materialism pure and simple; but all the teaching of modern science points to the material. The mysterious ‘life’ is no longer ‘vital power’; it simply represents the sum total of the energies and protoplasm. ‘Life is a property of protoplasm or bioplasm, and is the latest product of thought and research.’ And I may add that Consciousness, like Will, is a property of life in certain of its forms; a state and condition of cerebral and other atoms; the mere consequence of hitherto unappreciated antecedents.
936 Florus, ii. 3.
937 Bronze, &c. p. 297. From Aarbög. f. Nord. Oldk. 1879, pl. i.
938 Bronze, &c., p. 298. From Bastian and A. Voss, Die Bronze-Schwerter des K. Mus. zu Berlin, 1878, p. 56.
939 Bronze, &c., p. 299, from Von Sacken and Lindeschmit’s Alterthümer. The first finds by Herr Namsauer in 1846–64 were 6,000 articles from 993 graves.
940 I have already noticed the copper Ensis and coppered shield attributed by Virgil (Æn. viii. 74) to the people of Abella, an Italian district under Turnus.
941 Bronze, &c., p. 277. The author also notices the small handles of bronze Swords, ‘a fact which seems to prove that the men who used these swords were but of moderate stature’ (Prehistoric Times, p. 22). He denies their being very small, and he justly believes that the expanding part of the hilt was intended to be within the grasp of the hand. I have already explained that the hand was purposely confined in order to give more momentum to the cut.
942 Bronze, &c., p. 297; taken from Gastaldi, Pellegrini and Gozzadini. The author remarks (p. 287) that some of the bronze daggers from Italy seem also to have had their hilts cast upon the blades in which the rivets were already fixed. This is not unfrequent with the Sword, and the object seems mere imitation; like the Hauranic stone-doors, panelled as if to pass for wood.
943 Bronze, &c., p. 283, we find that the British Museum contains a specimen. Catalog. Italy, p. 28.
944 Bronze, &c., ibid., quoting from Numm. Vet. Ital. Descript., pl. xii.
945 See chap. vi.
946 De Garrul.
947 De Ferro, i. 195.
948 Lib. xliv. 3. Martial also alludes (i. 49; iii. 12, &c.) to the metallic wealth of his native province.
949 Pliny (xxxi. 4, 41) also notices the Salo or River Bilbilis (Xalon); and the Celtiberian town of the same name, now Bombola, the birthplace of the poet Martial, is near Calatayud (Kala’at el-Yahúd = Jew’s Fort), or Job’s Castle. Of the Chalybes I have already spoken.
950 Roman Archæology, by Angelo Maio.
951 The words Κέλται, Γαλάται, Γάλλο (meaning Armati, pugnaces, Kämpfer, fighters), evidently derive not from Coille, a word, but from the old word Gal (battle), Gala (arms). The name suited their natures; they were never at peace, and their bravery was proverbial: the Greeks called it Κελτικὸν θράσος = Keltic daring.
952 Cladibas or Cladias = gladius. I have noticed the shape when speaking of the Hallstadt finds.
953 Polyænus, Strategemata; Dion. Halicar. xiv. chap. 13.
954 Plutarch (De Cam. cap. xxvii.) also arms the Gauls, when attacking the Capitol, with the Kopis. ‘The first to oppose them was Manlius.... Meeting two enemies together, he parried the cut of one who raised a Kopis (κοπίδα) by hacking off his right hand with a Gladius’ (ξίφος). I presume that ‘Kopis’ is here used for the pugio, dirk, or shorter sword. Borghesi Œuvres Complètes, vol. ii. pp. 337–387, says: ‘In use and form, in grip and in breadth of blade, the Kopis much resembles our Sciabla, (Sabre).’ But its comparison with the falx and pruning hook and a medal of Pub. Carisius suggest a substantial difference: while the broadsword is edged on the convex side, the Kopis had a sharpened concave. Count Gozzadini, like General A. Pitt-Rivers, compares the Kopis with the Khanjar or Yataghan, and quotes Xenophon (Cyrop. ii. 1, 9; vi. 2, 10) to prove that it was peculiar to Orientals. I have traced the word to the Egyptian Khopsh or Khepsh, and repeat my belief that it is the old Nilotic sickle-blade with a flattened curve. But, as might be expected in the case of so old a word, the weapon to which it was applied may have greatly varied in size and shape.
955 Brennus is evidently a congener of the Welsh brenhin (the king). The Senones have left their name in Illyrian Segna, once a nest of pirates and corsairs, south of Fiume the Beautiful. I shall notice them in a future page.
[956] Livy, xxii. 46.
957 Bell. Gall. iii. 13; vii. 22.
958 Lib. x. cap. 32.
959 Lib. v. cap. 30.
960 See chapters viii. and xii. Here the word is evidently applied generically to a straight two-edged broadsword, about 1 mètre long. In the Middle Ages the weapon gave rise to many curious varieties, as the Spatha pennata and the Spatha in fuste.
961 According to Vegetius (ii. 15) the Saunion was the light javelin of the Samnites, with a shaft 3½ feet long, and an iron head measuring 5 inches. Thus it would resemble the Roman pilum. But Diodorus evidently means another and a heavier weapon which could hardly be thrown. Meyrick and Jähns (p. 390) do not solve the difficulty.
962 Lib. iv. 4, § 3.
963 De Bell. Pers.
964 The Northumberland Stone in Montfaucon (vol. iv. part 1, p. 37) shows a Gaul wearing sword and dagger on either side.
965 In Athenæus, lib. xiv., the celebrated philosopher called the Apamæan or the Rhodian, a contemporary of Pompey and Cicero, left, amongst other works, one called Τέχνη τακτικὴ (de Acie instruenda).
966 Lib. vii. cap. 10. It is evident that the Duello did not, as many authors suppose, arise with the Kelts. All we can say is that they may have originated in Europe the sentiment called pundonor and the practice of defending it with the armed hand. The idea was unknown to the classics; and, with the exception, perhaps, of the Arabs, it is still ignored by the civilised Orientals of our day, especially by the Moslems.
967 Lib. ii. caps. 28, 30, and 33.
968 Simply meaning Spearmen. Gaisate = hastatus from Gaisa (gæsum), the Irish gai, any spear. Isidore (Gloss.) translates ‘Gessum’ by ‘hasta vel jaculum Gallicè, βολίς.’ The word survives in the French guisarme, gisarme, &c. The Gæsum probably had a kind of handle and a defence for the hand.
969 Lib. xxii. cap. 46.
970 Lib. xxxviii. 21.
971 The naked bodies and narrow shields are well shown in the battle-scene on the Triumphal Arch of Orange (Jähns, Plate 29).
972 Borghesi (Tonini’s Rimini, &c., p. 28 and Tables A 3 and B 6) makes one of these gladii a ‘Kopis.’
973 Lib. v. cap. 30.
974 The cavalry was organised in the Trimarkisia (three marka, or horses) composed of the ‘honestior’ (afterwards the knight), and the clients (squires). The host that attacked Hellas, under Brennus, had 20,400 horsemen to 752,000 foot.
975 The pattern is almost universal. Moorcroft found it in the Himalayas, and I bought ‘shepherd’s plaid’ in Unyamwezi, Central Africa.
976 The first use of tattooing was to harden the skin, a defence against weather. The second (and this we still find throughout Africa) was to distinguish nations, tribes, and families.
977 ‘Galli bracchas deposuerunt et latum clavum sumpserunt.’ Diodorus Sic. (v. 30) has βράκας; in Romaic βράχι; in Italian braghe, Germ. Brüche. Our word ‘breech-es’ or ‘Breek-s’ is a double plural; ‘breek’ being the plur. of the A. S. broc, a brogue. Aldus and other old writers mistranslate the bracchæ by plaid, or upper garment. Jähns more justly renders sagum by plaid (p. 431).
978 Livy, xxxviii. 24.
979 Italy has declared herself Una. But without considering a multitude of origins, one for almost every province, she is peopled in our modern day by two races, contrasting greatly with each other. The Po is the frontier, dividing the Græco-Latin Italians to the south from the Gallic and Frankish Italians (Milanese, Piedmontese, &c.) to the north. The latter, originally Barbari, are the backbone of the modern kingdom: the Southerners are the weak point.
980 Bell. Gall. vi. 24.
981 Jähns (in his Plates 27–30) unites ‘Kelten und Germanien, Germanien und Kelten.’
982 De Mor. Germ., cap. 6.
983 So we find the god Tyr or Tuisco (regent of Tuesday), the Monthu or Mars of the North, figured in the Runes as a barbed spear ᛏ (resembling the planetary emblem of Mars). He afterwards became the Sword-god. From the Tyr-rune is derived ᛠ Er (= hêru, the sword), or Aer, which resembles the Greek ἄορ, and which Jacob Grimm connects with Ἄρης, æs and Eisen (Jähns, p. 14).
984 The older derivation is from ferrea. Jähns (p. 407) gives a host of others—Bram (thorn, bramble); Pfriem (punch, awl); Brame (a border, edging); ramen (to aim, strike), &c., &c.
985 Arms, &c., p. 419.
986 Annals, ii. cap. 14.
987 De Mor. G. cap. 6.
988 The steendysser of Denmark, dolmens of France, and cromlechs of England.
989 P. 416, Pl. xxviii. 4. In p. 417 he gives a list of many bronze-finds.
990 Tacit. Annals, ii. 14.
991 Cap. 42 and 6.
992 So the Longobards may be Long-halberts, and the Franks Francisca-men.
993 Vegetius (ii. 15) makes them use ‘gladii majores quas Spathas vocant,’ and Isidore (68, 6) says that the gladii were ‘utraque parte acuti.’
994 In Scandinavian, the noblest of the Germanic tongues, hjalt; in O. Germ, helza; Ang. S. helt, hielt, and in Mid. Germ. helze, gehilze (Jähns, p. 419).
995 Jähns (p. 419) has three kinds of hilts. The oldest is the crescent, noticed above (fig. 293); it is adorned with spirals and various figures. The second, which seems to be more general in the Sahs, or short weapon, has in the place of pommel a crutch or crescent, with the horns more or less curved, and either disunited or joined by a cross-bar. Here again spirals were disposed upon the planes: we shall see them highly developed in the Scandinavian weapons of a later date. The third hilt was a kind of tang, continuing the blade, and fitted with rounded edges for making fast wood, horn, or bone: it had generally a bulge in mid-handle. The pommel proper is little developed in these Swords.
996 ‘Sahs’ seems to have an alliance with the Latin ‘saxum’ (Jähns, p. 8, quoting Grimm). ‘Hamar’ (hammer) had the same meaning. From ‘sax’ we may probably derive the Zacco-sword of the Emperor Leo (Chronicle): ‘Item fratrem nostrum Ligonem cum zaccone vulneravit.’ The Laws of the Visigoths mention both weapons, long and short: ‘plerosque verò scutis, spatis, scramis’ (battle-axes?) ‘.... instructos habuerit.’ ‘Nimith euere saxes’ (take to your knife-swords), said Hengist, and the oaths ‘Meiner Six!’ (by my dirk), and ‘Dunner-Saxen’ (thunder sword) in Lower Saxony, are not forgotten.
997 I have spoken of the Scramasax in chap. v. Demmin (p. 152) and others deduce ‘scrama’ (broadsword) from ‘scamata,’ the line traced on the ground between two Greek combatants(!). Hence, too, he would derive ‘scherma’ and ‘escrime’—fencing. Others prefer ‘scaran’ (to shear), which gave rise to the German ‘schere’ (scissors), and our ‘shears’ and ‘shear-steel.’ The word, however, is evidently a congener of the Germ. ‘schirmen,’ to protect, defend. Jähns (p. 418) observes that the Sahs varied greatly in size. Some authorities make it a Mihhili Mezzir (muchel knife), a large cultellus. But the Frisian Asega-buch shows it to be a murderous weapon, forbidden to be worn in peace. The finds yield at times a dirk, and at times a broadsword; such, for instance, are the Copenhagen Scramsahs, 90 centimètres long, and that of Fronstetten, which, though imperfect, weighed 4·5 lbs. The British Museum contains a fine specimen of the Scramasax with engraved Runes.
998 P. 421. Pl. xxviii. 15.
999 The word is the Ang. Sax. dolc, a wound, which thus gave a name to the weapon that wounded.
1000 Bronze, pp. 261–63. Figs. 329 and 330.
1001 Germ. 6.
1002 Jähns (p. 439) quotes Asclepiodotus (vii. 3) and Ælian (xviii. 4), who describe the cuneus as Scythian and Thracian, i.e. barbarous. Unfortunately Jähns also cites the ‘Boar’s head’ of the Laws of Menu (Houghton’s Manava-Dharma Shastra, vii. 187), in the eighth century b.c.; Menu being centuries after Tacitus. I have noticed that the disposal of our chessmen shows the Hindú form of attack, the infantry in front, the horse and elephants (castles) on either wing, and the Rajah or Commander-in-chief in the centre and not in front.
1003 In its purest form the Standard-bearer stood alone at the apex, as Ingo in King Odo’s battle at Mons Panchei (Montpenssier), a.d. 892.
1004 ‘Quodque præcipuum fortitudinis incitamentum est, non casus, nec fortuita conglobatio turmam aut cuneum facit, sed familiæ et propinquitates’ (Tacit. Germ. 7).
1005 Nat. Hist., iv. 14.
1006 In Mario, 23.
1007 In later times they were carefully cleaned for another object, to show their Runic inscriptions.
1008 Malet’s Introduction to the History of Denmark.
1009 Pliny, iv. 14. Procop. Bell. Vand. i. 1.
1010 In O. Germ. Sper = hasta, lancea; Sperilîn = lanceola, sagitta; Ang. Sax. Sper, Engl. spear; Germ. Speer. The word seems to be a congener of Sparre, spar. Less commonly used is Spiess = hasta, cuspis; Scand. Spjot; O. Germ. Speoz, Spioz; Ang. Sax. spietu; Fr. espié, espiel, espiet, espieu; Ital. spiedo; Engl. spit. It seems to ally with the Lat. spina, and the Germ. Spitze (Jähns, p. 413).
1011 The peculiar celts, chisels, spear-points, &c., extended over all the peninsula of Jutland, and as far south as Mark Brandenburg (Jähns, p. 6).
1012 Neither Cæsar nor Tacitus mentions the use of the bow amongst the ancient Gauls and Germans, although the graves yield arrow-heads of stone, bone, and iron.
1013 Dr. Evans, Bronze &c., p. 299.
1014 I reserve Scandinavian weapons for Part II.
1015 Origins of English History (London: Quaritch, 1852).
1016 The Sword amongst the Anglo-Saxons and the Franks will be described at full length in Part II.
1017 These are:
No. 1. That Bronze-casting spread from a common centre by conquest or migration.
No. 2. That each region discovered the art independently, and made its own implements.
No. 3. That the art was discovered and implements were made in one spot, whence commerce disseminated them.
No. 4. That the art was diffused from a common centre, but that the implements were constructed in the countries where they were found.
1018 Bronze, &c., p. 475.
1019 Bronze, p. 473. I would notice that upon the subject of ‘Celts’ the learned author joins issue with the peculiar views of M. de Mortillet, before noticed. Bronze, &c., p. 456.
1020 The three divisions are:
No. 1. Characterised by flat or slight flanged celts and knife-daggers, found in barrows with stone implements.
No. 2. Age of heavy dagger-blades, flanged celts and tanged spear-heads, such as those from Arreton Down. In these two the Sword is unknown.
No. 3. Palstaves, socketed celts (introduced from abroad); true socketed spear-heads, Swords, and the variety of tools and weapons found in the hoards of the old bronze-founders.
And a great peculiarity in Britain is the absence of nearly all traces of the Later Bronze Period in graves and barrows.
1021 Dr. Evans, Bronze, &c., p. 300, quoting M. Alexandre Bertrand. For the condition of the Ancient Britons during the Bronze Period, see ibid. p. 487.
1022 In the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles Lettres of Paris. (Dr. Evans, Bronze, &c., p. 20).
1023 ‘On the True Assignation of the Bronze Weapons,’ Trans. Ethn. Soc. N. Ser. iv. p. 7).
1024 Bronze, &c., p. 274. See also Introductory Chapter, p. 20.
1025 See chap. v.
1026 Bronze, &c., p. 417.
1027 Bronze, &c., p. 421. The list of analyses shows lead chiefly in the Irish finds.
1028 Geog. vii. 2.
1029 Bell. Gall. v. 12.
1030 Evans’s Coins of the Ancient Britons. I have not yet read the work.
1031 Cæsar (iv. 33): ‘Genus hoc est eis essedis pugnæ;’ and he speaks again (v. 15) of essedarii. The scythe-car was known to Assyria, Jewry (the Faldat of Nahum ii. 3), and Persia, where Xenophon and Plutarch attribute to it the highest importance; even the pole ended in a lance. It became a favourite with all Keltic peoples. At Sentinum (b.c. 296) the Gauls almost defeated the Romans by suddenly throwing on a force of one thousand ‘esseda currusque.’ The Tectosages, when engaged with Antiochus Soter in Phrygia (b.c.), ranged in front of their attack 240 scythe-cars, some with two and others with four horses. Antiochus the Great armed his chariots not only with two scythe blades, but also with lances ten cubits long (?), laterally projecting (Livy, xxxvii. 41). The historian also notices the Arab dromedary-riders, ‘archers who carried their swords four cubits (= 6 feet) long, that they might be able to reach the enemy from so great a height.’ When the Gæsatæ crossed the Alps (b.c. 228) they were accompanied by a vast number of war-cars (Polybius, ii. 4, 5 says 20,000 ἁρμαμάξας καὶ συνωρίδας) which did good service at the battle of Telamon. Ossian’s Fingal offers a long description of the war-car and its uses. Many remains of these two-wheeled vehicles have been found in Keltic Europe (Jähns, pp. 394–96).
1032 Geog. iii. 6.
1033 I cannot but attribute to Italian blood the high and aquiline features which distinguish the Briton from the Northern German; the latter has been intimately mixed with the Slav race, as a glance at the Berlinese suffices to show. Portraits of the Cavalier period explain my meaning. In the Hanoverian times the ‘Roundhead’ again came to the fore, and hence the popular ‘John Bull’ portrayed in the pages of Mr. Punch. He is a good working type, but he has not the face to command or to impose.
1034 Bronze, &c., pp. 286–87. It was found in the river Cherwell and it is now in the Museum at Oxford. The first notice was in the Journ. Anthrop. Inst., vol. iii. 204.
1035 Ibid. p. 287. The author suggests that it may be foreign.
1036 Ibid. p. 288.
1037 I have already referred to the bronze dagger from Thebes, now in the British Museum, with its narrow rapier-like blade and broad flat hilt of ivory.
1038 Dr. Thurnam considered the tanged dagger more modern than that which was attached by rivets in the base of the blade, and his classification is followed by Dr. Evans, Bronze, &c., p. 222.
1039 The most perfect form of the bronze rapier is found in Ireland; of this and of the moulds I shall treat in Part II.
1040 In Agric. cap. 36.
1041 Montfaucon, Suppl. iv., p. 16; Smith, s. v. ‘Gladius.’
1042 ‘Pliny’s Ape.’
1043 Prof. Rhys, of Oxford.
1044 ‘These men from horrid woods, a hairy band,
Sends far from earth divided Irish-land.’
1045 The word ‘Pict,’ says Prof. Rhys, is first applied by a writer of the third century to the people beyond the Northern Wall and on the Solway. It evidently arose from their tattooing. He opines that ‘Scotti’ is of Brythonic origin having the same signification. This is better than the old (Scjot), the dart which named the Scythæ and the Scoti. The Picts, both of Alban and Ireland, called themselves Cruithing—‘which an Irish Shanachie has rightly explained to mean a people who painted the forms (Crotha, Ir. kꞃoꞇ) of beasts, birds, and fishes on their faces, and not on their faces only, but on the whole of the body.’ Again we find ourselves in
—‘infinita, arcana Africa orrenda.’
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