[450] “Pictas vestes apud Homerum fuisse (accipio), unde triumphales natæ. Acu acere id Phryges invenerunt, ideoque Phrygioniæ appellatæ sunt. Aurum intexere in eadem Asia invenit Attalus rex: unde nomen Attalicis. Colores diversos picturæ intexere Babylon maxime celebravit et nomen imposuit.” Pliny, Nat. Hist. viii. § 74. Acu pingere, and for short, pingere, here meant to embroider. Picta or picturata vestis was a robe covered with embroideries.
[451] See Pliny, l. c. Lucretius, iv. 1026. Plautus, Stichus, Act ii, Scene ii, v. 54. Silius Italicus, xiv. 658. Martial, Epigr. xiv. 150. I borrow these citations from the first chapter of M. Eugène Müntz’s Histoire de la Tapisserie in the Bibliothèque de l’Enseignement des Beaux-Arts.
[452] See Vol. I. pp. 305–307.
[453] Nahum iii. 16.
[454] Ezekiel xvii. 4. Isaiah also alludes to the commerce of Babylon (xlvii. 15).
[455] See on this subject, François Lenormant’s La Monnaie dans l’Antiquité, vol. i. Prolégomènes, cap. iii. and especially pp. 113–122.
[456] Rawlinson, The Five Great Monarchies, vol. i. p. 108. Ménant, Essai sur les Pierres gravées, p. 128.
[457] “... the Chaldeans whose cry is in the ships,” Isaiah xliii. 14.
[458] Taylor, Notes on the Ruins of Mugeyer (Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, vol. xv. p. 264).
[459] Strabo speaks of a Chaldæan settlement on the Arabian coast of the Persian Gulf; he calls it Gerrha (xvi. iii. 3). All the products of Arabia, he says, were there brought together. Thence they were transported to Chaldæa by sea, and carried up the Euphrates as far as Thapsacus.