For it is not the least interesting fact in this particular and most richly-yielding field of Assyrian archæology—that several men in Germany;—more than one man in France;—and one man, at least, in Persia, had been working simultaneously, but entirely without concert, at those hard and, for a time, almost barren studies which were eventually to supply a master-key to vast libraries of inscriptions brought to light after an entombment of twenty-five hundred years.
The travels and researches of Sir Charles Fellows in Lycia.
Scarcely smaller than the debt of gratitude which Britain owes to Mr. Layard and to Lord Stratford de Redcliffe, for the Marbles and other antiquities of Assyria, is the debt which she owes to the late Sir Charles Fellows for those of Lycia. Nor ought it to be passed over without remark that the admirably productive mission to the Levant of Mr. Charles Newton seems to have grown, in germ, out of the applications made at Constantinople on behalf of Sir Charles Fellows. In that merit he has but a very small share. The merit of the Lycian discoveries is all his own. He has now gone from amongst us,—like most of the benefactors whose public services have been recorded in this volume. How inadequate the record; how insufficient for the task the chronicler; no one will be so painfully conscious, as is the man whose hand—in the absence of a better hand—has here attempted the narrative. The Museum story has been long. What remains to be said must needs be put more briefly. But because Sir Charles Fellows has been so lately removed from the land he served with so much zeal and ability, I shall still venture to claim the indulgence of my readers for a somewhat detailed account of the work done in Lycia, and of the man who did it.
The analogies and the contrasts between Fellows and Layard.
In one respect, it was with Charles Fellows as with Austen Layard. A youthful passion for foreign travel, and what grew out of that, lifted each of them from obscurity into prominence. But Layard achieved fame at a much earlier age than did Sir Charles Fellows. Sir Charles was almost forty before his name came at all before the Public. Layard was already a personage at eight and twenty. This small circumstantial difference between the fortune of two men whose pursuits in life were, for a time, so much alike, deserves to be kept in mind, on this account: Sir Charles lived scarcely long enough to see any fair appreciation of what he had accomplished. Even those whose political sympathies incline them to a belief that Mr. Layard’s official services will never suffice to console Englishmen for the interruption of his archæological services, hope that he may live long enough to enjoy a rich reward for the latter in their yearly-increasing estimation by his countrymen at large. They will delight to see the fervid member for Southwark utterly eclipsed in the fame of the great discoverer of long-entombed Assyria.
The travels in Asia Minor, and what grew thereout.
Sir Charles Fellows was the son of Mr. John Fellows, of Nottingham. He was born in 1799. In the year 1837, he set out upon a long tour in Asia Minor. Archæological discovery no more formed any part of a preconcerted plan in Mr. Fellows’ case than it did, two or three years afterwards, in Mr. Layard’s. Both were led to undertake their respective explorations in a way that (for want of a more appropriate word) we are all accustomed to call ‘accidental.’
In February, 1838, he found himself at Smyrna. After a good deal of observation of men and manners, he betook himself to an inspection of the buildings. |Journal written during an Excursion in Asia Minor, pp. 8, seqq. (edit. 1852).| He soon found that not a little of the modern Smyrna was built out of the ruins of the Smyrna of the old world. Busts, columns, entablatures, of white marble and of ancient workmanship, were everywhere visible, in close admixture with the recently-quarried building-stone of the country and the period. But not only had the old marbles been built into the new edifices; they had been turned into tombstones. Certain Jews, of an enterprising and practical turn of mind, had bought, in block, a whole hill-full of venerable marbles, in order to have an inexhaustible supply of new tombstones close at hand. |Ibid., p. 9.| In another part of the suburbs of the town, the walls of a large corn-field turned out, on close examination, to be built of thin and flat stones, of which the inner surface was formed of richly-patterned mosaic, black, white, and red. From that day, the traveller, wheresoever he journeyed, was a scrutinising archæologist. And the traveller, thus equipped for his work, was busied, two months afterwards, in exploring that most interesting part of Asia Minor (a part now called ‘Anadhouly’), which includes Lydia, Mysia, Bithynia, Phrygia, Pisidia, Lycia, Pamphylia, and Caria; and much of which was never before trodden—so far as is known, and the knowledge referred to is that of the best geographers in England, discussing this matter expressly, at a meeting of the Geographical Society—by the feet of any European.[[41]]
The explorations in Antiphellus and its vicinity. 1838, April.
On the eighteenth of April, Mr. Fellows found himself in the romantically beautiful, but rugged and barren, neighbourhood of Antiphellus. The ancient town of that name possessed a theatre, and a multitude of temples, grandly placed on a far-outjutting promontory. For miles around, the rocks and the ravines were strewn with marble fragments. The face of the cliff, which, on one side, overhangs the town, was seen to be deeply indented with rock-tombs, richly adorned. They contained sarcophagi of a special form. The lid of each of them bore a rude resemblance to a pointed arch. It sounds at first almost grotesquely, in the ear of a reader of Mr. Fellows’ Journal of 1839, to hear him speak of Lycian tombs as ‘Elizabethan’ in their architecture. But, in the sense intended, the term is strictly apposite. |Journal of an Excursion, &c., as above, p. 164.| If the reader will but glance at one of Mr. Fellows’ many beautiful plates of those rock-tombs, he will see at once that they look not unlike the stone-mullioned windows of our own Tudor age.