[85] Ezek. xxvii. 15. Ivory was amongst the objects brought to Solomon by the navy of Tharshish (1 Kings x. 22).
[86] The height of the glass vase is 3¼ inches; of the alabaster, 7 inches.
[88] 1 Kings, x. 18. This is a highly interesting illustration of the work in Solomon’s palaces. The earliest use of metal amongst the Greeks appears also to have been as a casing to wooden objects.
[89] Herod, i. 14.
[90] Both sculptures have, however, been completely restored in the British Museum.
[91] No tradition is more generally current in the East than the well known story of the Seven Sleepers and their Dog. There is scarcely a district without the original cave in which the youths were concealed during their miraculous slumber.
[92] They were first visited by the late M. Rouet, French consul at Mosul. In my Nineveh and its Remains, vol. ii. p. 114 note, will be found a short description of the sculptures by my friend Mr. Ross. These are the rock-tablets which have been recently described in the French papers, as a new discovery by M. Place, and as containing a series of portraits of the Assyrian kings!
[93] These tombs are not of the Assyrian epoch. The Jews, as well as other nations of antiquity, were, however, accustomed to make such rock-chambers for their dead, as we learn from Isaiah, xxii. 16. “What hast thou here? and whom hast thou here, that thou hast hewed thee out a sepulchre here, as he that heweth him out a sepulchre on high, and that graveth an habitation for himself in a rock?”
[94] I examined the remarkable tablets at the Nahr-el-Kelb, on my return to Europe in 1851. They were sculptured, as I stated in my first work, by Sennacherib, the king of the Bavian monuments.