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 and 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 whole 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 between 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 from 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,