Note 134 — Chapter XVIII · DISCOVERIES AT ABOU SIMBEL.

The material of this blue helmet, so frequently depicted on the monuments, may have been the Homeric Kuanos, about which so much doubt and conjecture have gathered, and which Mr. Gladstone supposes to have been a metal. (See “Juventus Mundi,” chap. xv, p. 532.) A paragraph in The Academy (June 8, 1876) gives the following particulars of certain perforated lamps of a “blue metallic substance,” discovered at Hissarlik by Dr. Schliemann, and there found lying under the copper shields to which they had probably been attached. “An analytical examination by Landerer (Berg., Hüttenm. Zeitung, xxxix, 430) has shown them to be sulphide of copper. The art of coloring the metal was known to the coppersmiths of Corinth, who plunged the heated copper into the fountain of Peirene. It appears not impossible that this was a sulphur spring, and that the blue color may have been given to the metal by plunging it in a heated state into the water and converting the surface into copper sulphide.”

It is to be observed that the Pharaohs are almost always represented wearing this blue helmet in the battle pieces and that it is frequently studded with gold rings. It must, therefore, have been of metal. If not of sulphureted copper, it may have been made of steel, which, in the well known instance of the butcher’s sharpener, as well as in representations of certain weapons, is always painted blue upon the monuments.