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SALAMIS IN THE ISLAND OF CYPRUS.
BY ALEXANDER PALMA DI CESNOLÀ, F.S.A.,
page 26

To return to the golden frontals of this collection, I may indicate one example (fig. 2), which is more elaborately decorated, and, perhaps, not so old as the above-named example. It comprises a punctured and engraved pattern of a border of alternate broad and flat, and thin and narrow leaves, arranged like the elements of the well-known echinus moulding, and between lines of punctured dots; within this border are what look like bunches of grapes en repousse, in groups of three each, forming twelve in all. At the angles of this plate of gold are holes, intended, doubtless, to attach the strings by means of which it was secured on the face of the deceased. From the same tomb comes a mouthpiece with a similar punctured border to the above, but without the grape-like granulations. All these objects came from Idalium, now Dali, with another narrow mouthpiece without ornaments of any kind. Like the frontal last represented, the other objects exhibit holes for strings. I have specimens also of oval plates of thin gold intended for eye-pieces, some of which bear on the edges indented radial lines which may have been intended to represent the eyelashes of the wearer. Of pure gold there were found during excavations nearly a dozen flowers of beaten metal, cut to the shapes of leaves, and grouped in cinquefoils, quatrefoils, and trefoils, and

severally indented en repoussé to reproduce the fibres and veins of foliage (figs. 3, 4, 5, 6). Exemplary specimens are parts of mortuary chaplets and very beautiful instances of a class of ornaments which is fairly represented in many European collections, as for example, in the Louvre, and in the museums at Naples and Borne. In the British Museum is a fine bronze helmet of Etruscan form, of the purest type, about which appears the golden wreath worn by the warrior to whom this piece of armour belonged. Other examples of the same kind exist elsewhere. I have also an eye (fig. 7) and a mouthpiece (fig. 8) decorated by the same means as that mentioned above, and with volutes of a very simple, if not primitive Ionic, character; so simple indeed are they, that we seem to trace in their plain forms something which may he called the archaic Babylonian or severer Assyrian mood. These volutes aremade to issue from little vase-shaped stems, and were probably designed by a local artist of Cyprus while under Phœnician inspiration. This pattern is enriched by a border of -shaped fret. There is, from the same site as that illustrated by the last-named relic, another fragment of gold-leaf, which exhibits double scrolls of more distinctly Greek character and, probably, later date than any of the above, the execution of the ornaments being more advanced than that of those mentioned before. In the same class are fragments of a mesh indented with patterns of a nature similar to that which has already been described. The use of the golden foil of larger or smaller dimensions, and resembling one or other of the organs of the face, to lay

upon the faces of the dead, a practice which has been well illustrated by my discoveries in the Island of Cyprus, has been lately shewn to have prevailed in Egypt, by the discovery of a golden mouth modelled to represent the lips, upon a mummy of a somewhat late period, unrolled by Mr.

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