Wilde also notices, in the Royal Irish Academy, weapons, tools, and ornaments of red metal or pure copper. These are thirty celts of the greatest simplicity and the earliest pattern, rudely formed tools, a few fibulæ, a trumpet, two battle-axes, and several Sword-blades of the short, broad, and curved shape usually called scythes. The pure copper celts, formed upon two or three types, are the oldest in the

Dublin collection, and were probably the immediate successors of the stone implement. As a rule they have one side smoother than the other, as if they had been run into simple stone moulds; they are also thicker and of rougher surface than the bronze article. For the most part they are rude and unornamented wedges of cast metal: a few are lunette-shaped and semilunar blades. The cleansed specimens show a great variety of colour. When first found, the brown crust, peculiar to the oxidised. metal, readily distinguishes them from the bronze patina, the beautiful varnish of æruginous or verdigris hue, artificial malachite resembling in colour the true native carbonate of copper.

The broad scythe-shaped Swords, numbering forty-one, are supposed to be 'specially and peculiarly Irish.' The straight blades are shown by their large burrs, holes, and rivets either to end in massive handles of metal, or to be attached to wooden staves, long or short. Of this kind some are curved. As many are of 'red bronze' (pure copper), darkened by oxidation, it is probable that they are of great antiquity, like the celts of that period. Although in some cases the points have been broken off, yet the edges are neither hacked, indented, nor worn; hence the conclusion that they were true stabbing Swords. Yet Mr. John Evans declares that he knows no such thing as a copper Sword. In this matter he partially follows Lévesque de la Ravalière, who declared copper arms unknown to the Greeks and Romans, Gauls and Franks: this savant was refuted and charged with unfairly treating his authorities by the Comte de Caylus in a description of seven copper Swords dug up (1751) at Gensal in the Bourbonnais. The Abbé Barthélemy attributed seven copper blades to the Franks in the reign of Childeric.

We have ample evidence that' copper' is ambiguously used by modern travellers. The modern discoverer of Troy 2 gives us, in his last and revised volume, a full account of exploring fifty-three feet deep of débris and laying bare the stratified ruins of seven cities, including that of the 'ground floor' and the Macedonian ruins. The two lowest bear witness to a copper age anterior to bronze, whilst they

1 Yet Eschylus (Agamem.) uses both chalcos and sideros generically for a weapon.
2 Ilios, &c. (London, Murray, 1880).

yielded the only gilded object, a copper knife, and the most advanced art in specimens of hand-made pottery. The second from below was walled, and the third, the most important, was the Burnt City, the city of the golden treasures, identified with Ilios. The explorer claims to have reduced the Homeric Ilium to its true proportions. The grand characteristic in his finds is the paucity of iron, which appeared only in the shape of oxidised 'sling-bullets': tin is also absent. Both these metals, it is true, oxidise most readily; yet, had the objects been numerous, they would have left signs, in rust and stains. From 'Troy' we learn (p. 22) that all the copper articles met with are of pure copper, without the

2

admixture of any other metal': the author also finds that 'implements of pure copper were employed contemporaneously with enormous quantities of stone. weapons and implements.' He will not admit ('Troy,' p. 82) that he has reached the bronze period when he discovers in the Trojan stratum,' at a depth of thirtythree to forty-six and fifty-two feet, nails, knives, lances, and 'elegantly-worked battle-axes of pure copper.' And we can accept the copper, for much of it was analysed by Professor Landerer, of Athens, 'a chemist well known through his discoveries and writings.' He examined the fragments found in the 'Treasury of Priam,' and made all of them to consist of pure copper, without any admixture of tin or zinc (Troy,' p. 340). When treating of the Bronze Age, I shall show that alloys were not wanting.

Some small objects are reported as wheel-made; but this requires confirmation, according to a writer in the Athenæum (Dec. 18, 1880).

2 The copper bracelet (Troy, p. 150, No. 88) with its terminal knobs is the modern trade 'manilla' of the West African coast. This survival will again be noticed in chap. ix.

CHAPTER V.

THE SECOND CHALCITIC AGE OF ALLOYS '-BRONZE, BRASS, ETC.:

THE AXE AND THE SWORD.

THE use of copper, I have said, would be essentially transitional; and the discovery of smelting one kind of metal would lead immediately to that of others and to their commixture. Moreover, when casting and moulding began to be a general practice, unalloyed copper difficult to smelt, and when melted thick, sluggish, and pasty, would not readily run without some mixture into all the sinuosities of the mould. In this chapter I propose to notice the second chalcitic age—that of the earliest combinations of metals, their workers, and their application to weapons.

J. P. Rossignol, following the opinion of the symbolists and mysticists, as the Baron de Saint Croix,2 Creuzer, Freret, and Lobechs,3 assigns a Divine origin-after the fashion of the day-to metallurgy, making it resemble in this point Creation, articulate language, and the discovery of corn and wine. So he understands the Oɛoλoyoúμɛva (subjects of a theological nature) alluded to by Strabo (x. 3, § 7). It is the old hypothesis of supernatural agency in purely natural matters, a kind of luxus-wonder, as the Germans call useless miracles, which had waxed stale, even in the days of Horace-'parcus Deorum cultor et infrequens.' He considers the Curetes and Corybantes, the Cabiri (Kabeiroi) of Lemnos and Imbros, and the Idæi Dactyli of Crete, the Telchines of Rhodes, and the Sinties, Sinti, or Saii of Thrace (Strabo, xii. 3, § 20) as metallurgic daíμoves, or genii prisoned in human form, and typifying the successive steps of the art. In these days we hardly admit the intersit of a deity when human nature suffices to loose the knot; nor do we believe that our kind began by worshipping types.

The word in its older form was written 'allay.' Johnson derives it from à la loi, allier, allocare: it appears to me the Spanish el ley, the legal quality of coinable metal. We have now naturalised in English ley, meaning a standard of metals. (Sub voc. Dict. of Obsolete and Provincial English, by Thomas Wright; London, Bell and Daldy, 1869.)

2 Recherches sur les Mystères; and Mémoire pour servir à la religion secrète, &c. &c.

The 'Aglaophemus,' so called from the initiator of Pythagoras. I see symptoms of a revival in assertions concerning a 'highly cultivated beginning, with the arts well known and practised to an extent which,

Man has always worshipped one thing,

in subsequent ages, has never been approached; and from which there has not anywhere been discovered a gradual advancement; but, on the contrary, an immediate and decidedly progressive declension.' This, however, is a mere question of dates. Man's civilisation began long before the Mosaic Creation; and science has agreed to believe that savage life generally is not a decadence from higher types, not a degeneracy, but a gradual development.

We now divide language into three periods: Ist, intonative, like the cries of children and lower animals; 2nd, imitative, or onomatopoetic; and 3rd, conventional, the civilised form.

himself, and himself only, either in the flesh or in the ghost-that is, in the nonflesh or the objective nothing-till he arrived at the transcendental Man, the superlative, the ideal of Himself.

How little of fact is known about the mysterious tribes above mentioned becomes evident by a glance at the classics. All six are supposed to be Asiatics, worshippers of Rhea (the earth), the great mother of the gods and queen of the metal workers. Yet Strabo explains Curetes from Greek terms κópoɩ (boys), κópaι (girls), koupá (tonsure), and κоʊρотpopɛî (to bring up the Boy, i.c. Jupiter). Similarly their brethren, the nine Corybantes, were termed from their dancing gait and negro-like butting with the head, KорÚTTоVтая. They inhabited Samothrace (Samothracia alta): this venerable and holy island, in hoar antiquity a general rendezvous of freemasonry, or rather of free-smithery, forms a triangle with metallic Thasos and with volcanic Lemnos.

The three or four Cabiri1 bear a Semitic name, Kabir=the great or the old. They seem at first to have represented Ptah-Sokar-Osiris,2 and Herodotus (iii. 37) mentions their temple at Memphis. They became in Phoenicia the carliest boatmen or primordial shipbuilders, identified by some with the Sesennu or Egyptian Octonary; by others with the seven planets or the stars of Typho, our Great Bear ; 3 and by others, again, with the seven Khnemu (gnomes) or pygmy-sons who waited upon their father Ptah-Vulcan. They inhabited Lemnos, where Hephæstus, when expelled, like Adam, from the lowest heaven, took refuge among the Pelasgi (Diod. Sic. lib. v.): hence the latter preserved their worship. Damascius (Life of Isidorus') says: 'The Asclepius of Berytus is neither Greek nor Egyptian, but of Phoenician origin; for (seven) sons were born to Sadyk, called Dioscuri and Cabiri, and the eighth of them was Esman (i.e. Octavius, No. 8), who is interpreted Asclepius.' 4

The Idæan Dactyli (fingers or toes) who occupied 'fountful Ide'.5 consisted of five brothers, representing the dextra or lucky hand (science, art), and five sisters for the sinistra or unlucky (witchcraft, ill omens). The names of these 'hands' (iron workers) were Kelmis (fire or heat the smelter), Damnameneus (the hammer, or who governs by strength, Thor), Hercules (force, animal or mental), and Akmon (the anvil or passive principle). Hence Pyracmon the Cyclop, one of the seven architect brothers who, according to Strabo (viii. 6), came from Lycia

Axieros (the earth-goddess), Axiokersa (Proserpine of the Greeks), Axiokersos (Hades), and Casmilos (Hermes or Mercury). Ennemoser may be right in making the Kabeiroi pygmies (i.e. gnomes), but not in rendering Dactyloi by 'finger-size.'

2 The lame and deformed 'artificer of the universe,' who became Hephaestos (Vulcan) in Greece, and Vishvakarma in India. Sokar has left his name in the modern 'Sakkárah.'

The Assyrian cuneiforms allude to 'the (Great) Bear making its crownship,' that is, circling round the North Pole.

The temples of the Cabiri have lately been explored by Prof. Conze for the Austrian Government at Samothrace, and we may expect to learn something less vague concerning these mysterious ancients.

The Rev. Basil H. Cooper believes that the Phrygian was the original Ida, which gradually passed to Crete; and here the Idai were priests of Cybele. He is disposed to connect with it the Greek Zíd(npo); the German Eisen (and our iron), and the Ida feldt and Asi of the Norse myths (Day, p. 133).

and built the 'Cyclopean Wall' in the Argolid. These Cyclopes (monocular giants) worked metal, and under their magic hands,

Fluit æs rivis aurique metallum ;
Vulnificusque chalybs vasta fornice liquescit.

By later writers, the Cyclopes, who

Stridentia tingunt

Æra lacu (En. viii. 445, Georg. iv. 172),

were held to be Sicilians.

The Telchines (fascinators, from Oéλyew, to charm) are mentioned as metallurgists by Stesichorus the Sicilian (nat. B.C. 632): they were the sons of Thalassa, i.e. they came from beyond the sea; they colonised Telchinis, and they made arms and statues of the gods like the Dædalides or artist families of later Athens. The Sinties (plunderers) from Tò σívɛolai (to pill), who, according to Hellenicus of Lesbos (nat. B.C. 496), were pirates besides being coppersmiths (xaλkvés), and who were eventually murdered by their wives, represented the ancient Lemnians. So Homer (Od.' viii. 290) speaks of the 'barbarous Sintian men' who received Vulcan when kicked out of Paradise. A modern school of Tsiganologues would identify them with prehistoric Gypsies, who have still a tribe called Sindi; but this theory would bring the arts from India westwards, whereas the current flowed the clean contrary way. Finally, Herodotus (i. 28), initiated in the mysteries, makes the Chalybes or iron-workers, neighbours (and congeners ?) of the Phrygians.

2

It is not difficult to see the general gist of such legends. All these tribes probably came (like Pelops, Tantalus, and Niobe) from the same place, Phrygia, the fertile plateau of Asia Minor, and its Katakekaumene or volcanic tract. It was, as far as we know, the first western centre which developed the 'Aryan' or non-Semitic element of the old Egyptian tongue. It also formed the point de départ of the European 3 (miscalled 'Indo-European ') branch of the family that owned the Aryaland (Airyanem-vaejo), whose ethnic centre was the barbarous region about Ray, Heri, or Herat. Hence, says Herodotus (iii. 2), the Egyptians owned the Phrygians

The name is derived by Bochart from Heb. Lub or Lelub, p, chiefs of the Libu or Ribu, as the old Egyptians called the Libyans. Hence the Prom. Lilybæum (Li-Lúb) and the Sinus ad Libyam or Lilybatanus.

We have satisfactory details concerning the Chalybes, who border on Armenia, in the Anabasis (iv. 5, &c.). They dwell two days from Cotyora, the colony planted by Sinope; they are subject to the Mossynæci, and they subsist by iron-working (v. 5). Though few, they are a most warlike people, full of fight. Their armour consists of helmets, greaves, and cuirasses of twisted linen cords, reaching to the groin. They carry spears about fifteen cubits long, 'having one spike' (i.e. without ferule); and at their girdles a short faulchion, as large as a Spartan crooked

dagger, with which they cut the throats of all whom they can master; and then, lopping off their heads, bear them away (iv. 7). Strabo makes the Chalybes the same as their neighbours the Chaldæi.

The well-known inscription on the tomb of Midas, and another given by Texier (Asie Mineure, ii. 57) show the Phrygian tongue to have been a congener of Greek. Even the Békos of Herodotus (ii. 2) is allied to our bake,' and Bédu to our 'water.' We are greatly in want of further information about Phrygia, and it is to be hoped that Colonel Wilson and Mr. W. M. Ramsay will complete the labours of Texier and Hamilton.

The Aryans of Herodotus, about the Arius river (Heri-rúd), are an undistinguished tribe, a mere