Part 2 / Book 3 — CHAPTER IV. ANOTHER GROUP OF ARCHÆOLOGISTS AND EXPLORERS.—THE SPOILS OF XANTHUS, OF BABYLON, OF NINEVEH, OF HALICARNASSUS, AND OF CARTHAGE. (continued 2)

‘Of the age of the next works of which I must speak, and which are a large portion of the collection from Xanthus, I have great difficulty in forming an opinion. The whole 661were found around a basement which stands on the edge of a cliff to the south-east of the ancient Acropolis. The monument which stood upon this stoa has been thrown down by earthquake, almost the whole of its ruins falling towards the north-west. These works are of a people quite distinct from the preceding, both in their architecture, sculpture, and language: these are purely Greek. On carefully examining the whole of the architectural members of which I have specimens selected (some retaining coloured patterns upon them), as well as the position in which each of the various parts were thrown, I have, in my own mind, reconstructed the building, the whole of which was of Parian marble, and highly finished. The monument which I suppose to have crowned this basement has been either a magnificent tomb, or a monument erected as a memorial of a great victory. In reforming this, I require the whole of the parts that we have found, and none are wanting except two stones of the larger frieze, and the fragments of the statues. The art of this sculpture is Greek, but the subjects show many peculiarities and links to the earlier works found in Lycia. The frieze, representing the taking refuge within a city, and the sally out of its walls upon the besiegers, has many points of this character. The city represented is an ancient Lycian city, and has within its walls the stele, or monument known alone in Xanthus. The city is upon a rock; women are seen upon the walls. The costume of the men is a longer and thinner garment than is seen in the Attic Greeks. The shields of the chiefs are curtained. The saddle-cloth of the jaded horse entering the city is precisely like the one upon the Pegasus of Bellerophon, and the conqueror and judge is an Eastern chief, with the umbrella, the emblem of Oriental royalty, held over him. The body-guard and conquering party of the chief are 662Greek soldiers. Many of these peculiarities are also seen in the larger frieze, and also in the style of the lions and statues. The form of the building, which alone I can reconcile with the remains, is a Carian monument of the Ionic order. Bearing in mind all these points, I am strongly inclined to attribute this work to the mercenaries from Æolia and Ionia, brought down by Harpagus to conquer the inhabitants of Xanthus, whom they are said to have utterly destroyed. This monument may have been the tomb of a chief, or erected as a memorial of the conquest of the city by Harpagus. No inscription has been found, or it might probably have thrown some light upon the date of this work. In the immediate neighbourhood were found the other friezes, representing hunting-scenes, a battle, offerings of various kinds and by different nations, funeral feasts, and several statues which are of the same date.’ Sir Charles then concludes thus:—

‘The whole of the remaining works now to be traced amidst the ruins of Xanthus are decidedly of a late date; scarcely any are to be attributed to a period preceding the Christian era, and to that age I cannot conceive the works just noticed to have belonged. A triumphal arch or gateway of the city at the foot of the cliff of which I have spoken has upon it a Greek inscription, showing it to have been erected in the reign of Vespasian, A.D. 80: from this arch are the metopes and triglyphs now in the Museum. |Travels and Researches in Asia Minor, pp. 429, 430 (1852).| Through this is a pavement of flagstones leading towards the theatre. To this age I should attribute the theatre, agora, and most of the buildings which I have called Greek, and which are marked red upon the plan. To this people belong the immense quantity of mosaic pavements which have existed in all parts of the city. Almost all the small pebbles in the fields are the débris of these works. In many 663places we have found patterns remaining which are of coarse execution, but Greek in design.’

The Marbles of Halicarnassus, of Cnidus, and of Branchidæ.

The not a whit less interesting discoveries at Halicarnassus and elsewhere, made chiefly in the years 1856, 1857, and 1858, by Mr. Charles Newton, now claim attention, but my present notice of them can be but very inadequate to the worth of the subject. They as richly deserve a full record as do the explorations of Layard or those of Fellows.

The earliest, in arrival, of the Halicarnassian Marbles were procured by our Ambassador at Constantinople (then Sir Stratford Canning, now) Lord Stratford de Redcliffe. These first-received marbles comprise twelve slabs, sculptured with the combats of Greeks and Amazons in low-relief; and were removed from the walls of the mediæval castle of Budrum, in the year 1846, with the permission, of course, of the Sublime Porte. It is a tribute all the stronger to the energy of Lord Stratford to find another man of energy writing, in 1841: ‘I would not have been a party to the asking what—to all who have seen them’ (namely, the Marbles of Halicarnassus, built into the inner walls of Budrum Castle)—‘must be considered as an unreasonable request.’ |Travels and Researches in Asia Minor, pp. 429, 430 (1852).| It took, it is true, five years for Lord Stratford to overcome the obstacle which to Mr. Fellows seemed, in 1841, quite insuperable.

The mission to the Levant of Mr. Charles Newton. 1856–58.

In 1856, and expressly in order to a thorough exploration of the site of Halicarnassus, and of other promising parts of the Levant, Mr. Charles Newton, then one of the ablest of the officers of the Department of Antiquities (whose loss at the Museum, even for three or four years, was not very easily replaceable), accepted the office of British Vice-Consul at Mitylene. In 1857, he discovered 664four additional slabs (similar to those received from the Ambassador), on the site of the world-famous mausoleum itself; several colossal statues, and portions of such; together with a multitude of architectural fragments of almost every conceivable kind; columns—mostly broken into many portions—with their bases, capitals, and entablatures, in sufficient quantity and diversity to warrant a faithful restoration of the ancient building by a competent hand.

From Didyme (near Miletus), from Cnidus, and from Branchidæ, many fine archaic figures in the round; some colossal lions; and an enormous number of fragments both of sculpture and of architecture; with many minor antiquities, various in character and in material, were successively sent to England. Mr. Charles Newton’s narrative of his adventures at Budrum, and at several of the other places of his sojourn and excavations, is very graphic. Some portions of it are worthy to be placed side by side with the best chapters of the earlier narrative of the explorations and travelling experiences of Layard.

Of the most famous trophy of Mr. Newton’s first mission to the East—the mausoleum built by Queen Artemisia—the discoverer has himself more recently given this brief and striking descriptive account:—

The tomb of Mausolus at Halicarnassus.

This monument, writes Mr. Newton, in 1869, was erected ‘to contain the remains of Mausolus, Prince of Caria, about B.C. 352. It consisted of a lofty basement, on which stood an oblong Ionic edifice, surrounded by thirty-six Ionic columns, and surmounted by a pyramid of twenty-four steps. |Guide to the Department of Antiquities, &c., pp. 74, 75.| The whole structure, a hundred and forty feet in height, was crowned by a chariot-group in white marble, in which probably stood Mausolus himself, represented after his translation to the world of demigods 665and heroes. The peristyle edifice which supported the pyramids was encircled by a frieze, richly sculptured in high-relief,’ and so on. The frieze thus mentioned is that of which the twelve slabs were, as already mentioned, given by Lord Stratford de Redcliffe in 1846, four exhumed by Newton himself in 1857, and one more purchased from the Marchese Serra, of Genoa, in 1865. This piecemeal acquisition of the principal frieze, by dint of researches spread over twenty years, is not the least curious of the facts pertaining to the story. But the annals of the Museum comprise ten or twelve similar instances of ultimate reunion, after long scattering, of the parts of one whole. They tell of manuscripts (made perfect after the lapse of a century, it may be) as well as of sculptures, thus toilsomely recovered.

But the Greco-Amazonian battle-frieze was not the only frieze of the famous mausoleum. The external walls of the ‘cella’ had two other friezes, of which Mr. Newton succeeded in recovering several fragments, some of them of much interest. And the mausoleum was profusely adorned with sculptures in the round as well as with the richly carved figures in relief, both high and low, which encircled (in all probability) the very basement, as well as the peristyle and the cella portions of this marvellous structure. Lions in watchful attitudes (‘lions guardant,’ in heraldic phrase) stood here and there, and the fragments of these which have been recovered testify to their variety of scale, as well as to their number. The names of five famous sculptors of the later Athenian school—Scopas, Leochares, Bryaxis, Timotheus, Pythios—who were employed upon the decoration of the tomb itself, or upon the chariot-group, have been recorded, and it would seem that each of four of these had one side of the tomb specially assigned to him. ‘The material of the sculpture was Parian marble, and the 666whole structure was richly ornamented with colour. |Newton, in Guide, as above, p. 74; and Travels and Discoveries in the Levant, vol. ii, pp. 108–137; and passim.| The tomb of Mausolus was of the class called by the Greeks heröon, and so greatly excelled all other sepulchral monuments in size, beauty of design, and richness of decoration, that it was reckoned one of the “Seven Wonders of the World.”’

While Layard was unearthing Nineveh; Fellows bringing into the light of day the long-lost cities of Lycia; and Charles Newton restoring, before men’s eyes, this funereal marvel of the ancient world, which had long been known (in effect) only by dim memories and traditions; |The explorations of Nathan Davis at Carthage and Utica.| Dr. Nathan Davis, in his turn, was exhuming Carthage and Utica. All these distinguished men were labouring, in common, for the enrichment of our National Museum, within a period of some twenty years. Three of them may be said to have been busied (in one way or other) with their self-denying tasks contemporaneously.^[42] If we take into the account the variety, as well as the intrinsic worth, of the additions thus made to human knowledge; above all, if we duly estimate the value of those links of connection 667between things human and things divine, which are the most essential characteristic of some of the best of these acquisitions, it may well be said that the annals of no museum in the world can boast of such an enrichment as this, by the efforts of the travellers and the archæologists of one generation. And all of these explorers are—in one sense or other—Britons.

On one incidental point, I have to express a hope that the reader will pardon what he may be momentarily inclined to think an over-iteration of remark. If I have really adverted somewhat too frequently to the connection which many of these rich archæological acquisitions, of 1842–1861, present between the annals of man and the Book of God, I have this to plead, in extenuation: Certain writers pass over that connection so hurriedly as almost to lose sight of it. And we live in an age in which some of our own countrymen—some of those among us to whom the Creator has been most bounteous in the bestowal of the glorious gifts of mind and genius—have even spoken of our best of all literary possessions as ‘Jew-Records,’ and ‘Hebrew old-clothes.’ Those particular expressions, indeed, were employed long before the arrival of the Assyrian Marbles. But I think I have seen them quoted since.

The spoils of Carthage and Utica.

Among the spoils of Carthage and of Utica which we owe to Dr. Nathan Davis, are many rich mosaic pavements, of the second and third centuries of our era, and a multitude of Phœnician and Carthaginian inscriptions, extending in date over several centuries. And it must be added that many of the antiquities, and more especially of the mosaics, excavated under Dr. Davis’s instructions at Utica, were found to possess greater beauty, and a more varied interest, than most of those which were disinterred by him 668from amidst the ruins of Carthage. Many of these, like some of the choice treasures of Nineveh, are, in a sense, still buried—for want of room at the British Museum adequately to display them. The reader may yet, but too fitly, conceive of some of them as piteously crying out (in 1870, as in 1860)—

‘Here have ye piled us together, and left us in cruel confusion,

Each one pressing his fellow, and each one shading his brother;

None in a fitting abode, in the life-giving play of the sunshine;

Here in disorder we lie, like desolate bones in a charnel.’

Other conspicuous augmentors of the Galleries of Antiquities.

Many other liberal benefactors to the several Archæological Departments of the Museum deserve record in this chapter. But the record must needs be a mere catalogue, not a narrative; and even the catalogue will be an abridged one.

Foremost among the discoverers of valuable remains of Greek antiquity, subsequent to most of those which have now been detailed, are to be mentioned Mr. George Dennis, who explored Sicily in 1862 and subsequent years; and Captain T. A. B. Spratt, who travelled over Lycia and the adjacent countries, following in the footsteps of Sir Charles Fellows, |Spratt and Forbes’ Travels in Lycia, Mityas, and the Cibyrates (2 vols; 1847), passim.| and who enjoyed the advantage of the company and co-operation of two able and estimable fellow-travellers, Edward Forbes and Edward Thomas Daniell, both of whom, like their honoured precursor in Lycian exploration, have been many years lost to us.

The antiquities collected in Sicily by Dennis, at the national cost, were chiefly from the tombs. They included very many beautiful Greek vases, a collection of archaic terracottas, and other minor antiquities.^[43] Some of the 669marbles discovered by Spratt are of the Macedonian period, and probably productions of the school of Pergamus.

At Camerus and elsewhere, in the island of Rhodes, important excavations were carried on by Messrs. Biliotti and Salzmann. These also were effected at the public charge. |Reports of British Museum; 1864, and subsequent years.| In the course of them nearly three hundred tombs were opened, and many choicely painted fictile vases of the best period of Greek ceramography were found. Those researches at Rhodes were the work of the years 1862, 1863, and 1864. In 1865, the excavations at Halicarnassus were resumed by order of the Trustees, and under the direction of the same explorers, and with valuable results. In 1864, an important purchase of Greek and Roman statues, and of the sculptures from the Farnese Collection at Rome, was made. In the following year came an extensive series of antiquities from the famous Collection of the late Count Pourtalès. Of the precious objects obtained by the researches of Mr. Consul Wood, at Ephesus, in the same and subsequent years, a brief notice will be found in Chapter VI.

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