Page:Discovery and Decipherment of the Trilingual Cuneiform Inscriptions.djvu/39

 which they say the mother of Solomon is buried. Upon it is a kind of chapel on which are engraven Arabic characters denoting "Mother of Solomon." This place they call Messeth Sulcimen, or Temple of Solomon. The door looks towards the east.' Such is the earliest account in modern times of the famous ruins of Persepolis and Pasargadae, although Barbaro was quite unaware of their identity. It will be observed that he also visited Naksh-i-Rustam, and saw in the Sassanian bas-relief of Rustam the figure of Samson. It is possible that the notes of his journey were fuller than the published account, and they may have fallen into the hands of Sebastiano Serlio, a Bolognese architect. A few years before the appearance of the 'Viagi,' Serlio published his celebrated treatise on Architecture, which enjoyed extraordinary popularity, and was translated into many languages. In it he gives a drawing of the façade of an edifice which he had heard was supported by a hundred colunms. He had never seen it or its ruins, and seems to have had no idea where the building had stood, though he apparently gives us to understand that it was Grecian. The drawing shows a building with ten columns in front, adorned with Corinthian capitals, and supporting a second story of four colunms and architrave. He had heard that only a few of the columns remained above ground, but he decided to present his readers with his conception of what it must have resembled. He ventures so far as to give the dimensions of the columns, although he anticipates that the whole thing will be flouted as a chimera or a dream. He thus gives us the first of a long series of conjectural 'restorations,' with which successive generations of architects have enlivened their