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SALAMIS IN THE ISLAND OF CYPRUS.
BY ALEXANDER PALMA DI CESNOLÀ, F.S.A.,
page 49

subjects represented on the body of the box may have been in vogue for gnostic or heretical worship, at a period coeval with the top itself. The evidence of style is, however, unchallengeable. The finder of this very curious relic of Cypriote antiquity was doomed to disappointment while he fancied that it might contain treasure. The box, being opened, enclosed only a small pebble, which has, unfortunately, disappeared. This is the more to be deplored, because, however trivial the vanished object may have seemed to the untutored eyes of its discoverer, there cannot be any doubt that a stone which had been so carefully and, so to say, sumptuously deposited in the

1 This resembles a tessera or ticket for the theatre, of which there are several in the British Museum.

earth many centuries ago, must have had a peculiar history and characteristics, all hopes for elucidating which vanished for ever when the pebble was lost. If, as was probably the case with regard to the glass drops of diverse colours found in another leaden box, this little pebble had been piously placed in its casket of ivory by some relation of the dead in whose grave it was found a thousand years and more after the last tears were shed over that grave, how much pathos would have affected those who had sympathy enough with human sorrow to enter into the history of the apparently, insignificant little stone. Another ivory group comprises two little figures of women standing side by side, and amply draped in the Greek mode; the figure on the left is veiled; her companion is bareheaded. A column, altar, or term, is between the figures, and may be taken to indicate the religious purposes of the group. The ivory rods1 are conjectured to have been employed on lyres, in order to turn the strings of those instruments over the tops of the same; they are supposed to have served the purpose of a bridge, while other specimens of ivory, already referred to, were undoubtedly used to secure the ends of the strings of the lyre.

1 Plate VII, fig. 10.

CHAPTER VIII.

BONE AND SHELL ANTIQUITIES.

ONE, as a material employed in manufacturing arts, is much more common in the north of Europe, than in the south of that continent and in Asia, where the preferable material ivory could be obtained with comparative ease. The bone antiquities of northern races are numerous and valuable; those of Cyprus are, if not so numerous, at any rate of noteworthy character. In the course of the extensive excavations which I conducted at Salamis, I found, among other relics

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