Page:Discovery and Decipherment of the Trilingual Cuneiform Inscriptions.djvu/64

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MODERN DISCOVERY
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is another square roome whose blacke marble wals are yet abiding.' It has eight doors 'exquisitely engraven with images of Lions, Tygres, Griffons and Buls of rare sculpture and perfection: a top of each door is the image of an Emperour in state with staffe and scepter.' Elsewhere he amplifies this account. 'In other places (for the wals are durable) Battailes, Hecatombs, triumphs, Olympick games, and the like, in very rare sculpture and proportion.' The country people gave different accounts as to whom this figure was intended to represent, and they variously proposed Jamsheat, Aaron, Sampson and Solomon, but they excluded Rustan. This room measured 'ninety paces from angle to angle, in circuit three hundred and sixty paces, beautified with eight dores,' and joining it were two smaller apartments, one seventy by sixty, the other thirty by twenty paces. He was told that the first was the Chamber of the Queen and the other the nursery. He was particularly struck by the appearance of the latter. 'The wals are,' he says, 'rarely engraven with images of huge stature, and have been illustrated with gold which in some places is visible, the stones in many parts so well polisht that they equal for brightnesse a Steele mirrour.' He was at a loss to assign this wonderful building to any of the known styles of architecture: 'whether this Fabrick was lonick Dorick or Corinthiack I cannot determine, but such to this day it is that a ready Lymmer in three moneths space can hardly (to do it well) depict out all her excellencies.

He also noticed the tomb mentioned by Don Garcia. It lies, he says, 'somewhat further, over heaps of stones of valewable portraictures.' 'It is cut out of the perpendicular mountaine,' and represents 'the image of a King (which may be Cambyses) adoring three deities,

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