Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 19.djvu/188

Rh 178 P L A P L A at Athens, where they were now admitted to full citizen ship, except that they were not eligible for the priesthood and the archonship. After the battle of Chseronea (338) Philip of Macedon brought back the Platteans as a counter poise to the power of Thebes, but the walls were not fully restored till some years later. Alexander the Great, then monarch of Asia, contributed to rebuild them, in recog nition, he declared, of the services which the Platajans had rendered against the Persians of old. With the loss of Greek freedom Plataea sank into insignificance. The inhabitants lived on the glories of the past, and were regarded as braggarts by the rest of the Boeotians. In the 6th century the walls were once more restored by Justinian. The fullest description of ancient Plata-a is that of Pausanias, who visited it in the 2d century. The great temple of Hera, he tells us, contained a statue of Khea by Praxiteles ; the temple of Athene the Warlike was adorned with an image of the goddess by Phidias and paintings by Polygnotus. Close to the city gates were the tombs of the Greeks who had fallen in the battle of riatiea, and an altar and image of Zeus the Liberator in white marble. The ruins of the ancient town lie about 500 yards east of the modern village of Koklila. They occupy a slightly elevated plateau forming a rude triangle about two and a half miles in circumference, of which the apex to the south almost touches the great rocky slope of Cithseron, and the base to the north has a steep though short descent to the plain. The outer walls follow the edge of the plateau, but an inner cross-wall divides it into two unequal parts. The southern and higher part is probably as old as the Persian wars ; the masonry of the northern part is more recent, and probably belongs to the age of Philip and Alexander. It is likely that these two parts were never included at the same time within tiie city walls, but that the southern was the ancient city, and that at one of the restorations (perhaps that of 387 B.C.) the northern and more spacious part of the plateau was preferred as the site. &quot;Within this northern half, and close to the northern wall, is a terrace on which may have stood the temple of Hera. The north-western corner of the northern town is portioned off by a wall, and is conjectured to have been the acropolis of the newer city. PLATE. The word plate (connected with the Greek irAan s, fiat, the late Latin pi at a = lamina, and the Spanish plata, silver) is usually employed to denote works in silver or gold which belong to any class other than those of per sonal ornaments or coins. 1 On account of the ease with which it can be worked and the pure state in which it is generally found, it is pro bable that gold was the first metal used by man ; and it is certain that, in some countries at least, he attained to the most marvellous skill in its manipulation at a time when the other arts were in a very elementary condition. As an instance of this we may mention a sword of the bronze age, found in a barrow near Stonehenge, and now in the museum at Devizes. 2 The hilt of this sword is covered with the most microscopically minute gold mosaic. A simple design is formed by fixing tesserye, or rather pins, of red and yellow gold into the wooden core of the handle. Incredible as it may appear, there are more than two thousand of these gold tesserae to the square inch. The use of silver appears to belong to a rather later period, probably because, though a widely spread metal in almost all parts of the world, it is usually found in a less pure state than gold, and requires some skill to smelt and refine it. Though both these precious metals were largely and skilfully used by prehistoric races, they were generally employed as personal ornaments or decorations for weapons. Except in Scandinavian countries but little that can be called &quot; plate &quot; has been discovered in the early barrows of the prehistoric period in western Europe. 1 In mediaeval English the term &quot; a plate &quot; was occasionally used in the sense of a silver vessel. A curious survival of this use of the word still exists at Queen s College, Oxford, where the servants may yet be heard asking at the buttery for so many &quot;plates of beer,&quot; that is, silver tankards. 2 Iloare, Ancient Wiltshire, 1840. It will be convenient to consider the no less prehistoric- gold and silver work recently found at Troy, Tiryns, and Myceme as forming a stage in the history of Greek art. Ancient Egypt. An enormous amount of the precious metals was annually brought as tribute to the Egyptian kings ; according to Diodorus, who quotes the authority of Hecatieus, the yearly produce of the royal gold and silver mines amounted to thirty-two millions of minue that is, about 133 millions sterling of modern money. Though this estimate is probably an exaggeration, the amount must have been very great. The gold chiefly came from the mines in the Bislmri desert, about eighteen days journey south-east of Kum Ombos. These mines were constantly worked down to the time of the Arab caliphs, but now appear to be exhausted. It is not known where the silver came from. Gold appears to have been relatively more abundant than silver, and the difference in value between them was very much less than it is now. Tribute was paid to the Egyptian kings, not in coined money, which was then unknown, but in rings or ingots. Owing to the Egyptian practice of burying with their dead personal ornaments and jewellery, rather than other possessions less intimately connected with the person of the deceased, but few speci mens of either gold or silver plate have survived to our times, whereas the amount of gold jewellery that has been discovered is very large, and shows the utmost amount of skill in working the precious metals. AVe can, however, form some notion of what the larger works, such as plates and vases in gold and silver, were like from the frequent representations of them in mural sculpture and paintings. In many cases they were extremely elaborate and fanciful in shape, formed with the bodies or heads of griffins, horses, and other animals real or imaginary. Others are simple and graceful in outline, enriched with delicate surface ornament of leaves, wave and guilloche patterns, hieroglyphs, or sacred animals. Fig. 1 shows a gold vase of the time of Thothmes III. (Dynasty XVIII., about 1500 B.C.), taken from a wall-painting in one of the tombs at Thebes. The figure on its side is the hieroglyph for &quot;gold.&quot; Others appear to have been very large and massive, with human figures in silver or gold supporting a great bowl or crater of the same metal. Fj(J L _ GoU Vas . from wu ,,_ In the language of the hiero- paintings at Thebes, glyphs silver is called &quot; white gold,&quot; and gold is the generic name for money, unlike most languages, in which silver usually has this special meaning, a fact which points strongly to the priority of the use of gold. On the walls of one of the tombs at Beni Hassan there is an interesting representation of a gold- and silver-smith s workshop, show ing the various processes employed weighing, melting or soldering with the blow-pipe, refining the metal, and polish ing the almost finished bowl or vase. In the time of llameses III., about 1300 B.C., a clearly defined Assyrian influence appears in the decoration of some of the gold plate. A gold basket, represented in the tomb of this king at Thebes, has on its side a relief of the sacred tree between two beasts, the oldest of purely Aryan or Indo- European subjects, and quite foreign to Egypt. The chief existing specimens of Egyptian plate are five silver pkialte or bowls, found at the ancient Thumuis in the Delta, and now in the JJulak Museum (Nos. 482 to 486 in the catalogue). These are modelled in the form of a lotus blossom, most graceful in design, but are apparently not earlier than the 5th century B.C. The Louvre possesses a fine gold patera, 6^ inches across, with figures of fishes