[192] Rock, p. xxv. Yates (p. 3) says they cut their gold for wearing apparel into thin plates, and did not draw it into wire, as it is translated in the Vulgate (Exodus xxxix.). The ephod made by Bezaleel was of fine linen, gold, violet, purple, and scarlet, twice dyed, with embroidered work. This tradition must have guided the artist who designed the ephod in the National Museum at Munich, in the seventeenth century, for a prince boy-bishop.
[193] Quintus Curtius says that many thousands, clothed in these costly materials, crowded out of Damascus to meet Alexander.
[194] There is a very ancient local tradition at Shŭsh, that A.D. 640, in the reign of the Kaliph Omar, the body of the prophet Daniel was found, wrapped in cloth of gold, in a stone coffin; and, by order of the victorious general, it was placed in one of glass, and moored to the bridge which spanned the branch of the Euphrates flowing between the two halves of the city, so that the waters flowed over it. See “Chaldea and Susiana,” by Loftus, and Sir G. W. Gore Ouseley’s translation of a Persian version of “The Book of Victories.” Alexander is said to have been buried in a glass coffin. (See Wilkinson’s “Ancient Egyptians,” ii. p. 102, note †.)
[195] Yates, pp. 367-70; Rock, p. xxvi.
[196] “Aura intexere eadem Asiâ invenit Attalus Rex unde nomen Attalicis.”—Pliny, viii. c. 48, and Yates, p. 371. The reign of Attalus II. was B.C. 159-188.
[197] “And they did beat the gold into plates, and cut it into wires, and work it into the blue, and the purple, and the fine linen.”—Exod. xxxix.
[198] See Yates, p. 371; and Bock, xxxiii.
[199] Pliny, xxxiii. In the Museum at Leyden there is a shred of gold cloth found in a tomb at Tarquinia, in Etruria. This is a compactly woven covering over bright yellow silk.
[200] Gold wire is still worked through leather at Guzerat. See Birdwood, p. 284, Ed. 1880. Marco Polo mentions this embroidery 600 years ago. Bk. iii. chap. xxvi. (Yule). The hunting cuirass of Assurbanipal (pl. [1]) appears to be so worked, and of such materials. Also see Wilkinson, “Ancient Egyptians,” vol. iii. p. 130. This gold for weaving was beaten into shape with hammers.
[201] Pope Eutichinus, in the third century, buried many martyrs in golden robes.