Page:Greek Buildings Represented by Fragments in the British Museum (1908).djvu/214

 Of the rock-cut tombs there is a valuable series of drawings by Scharf preserved in the Lycian Portfolio in the Greek Department. Fig. 181, taken from one of these, is like the sculptured epistyle of the Nereid monument. Several show other varieties of the characteristic Ionian cornice of these monuments.

The "Lion tomb" at the Museum is of the second or "chest type." The slabs in the Museum were elevated on a tall base about 10 feet high. On the top of the sculptured sarcophagus would have been a heavy, widely-projecting cover. This tomb is generally dated as of the seventh century, but there is a general tendency, it seems to me, to give too early a date to all these Ionian monuments, including the Nereid monument.

The Harpy tomb from Xanthus rested on a shaft 17 feet high. Its projecting cap-stone remained. With a high plinth

below the shaft, it looked like a little turret with a deep sculptured frieze. This "frieze" was fully painted, the background, as usual, being blue. It is now dated soon after the middle of the sixth century, but comparing it with the "ark tombs," which, in some respects, seem so primitive, and yet belong to the fourth century, I cannot see why it might not be nearly a century later. The bottom moulding with its painted decoration, traces of which can still be seen, surely points to the fifth century. No. 86 is a noble procession, I should say of the fifth century ; 82 is a delightful frieze of cocks and hens, bright and natureful. (Fig. 202.) This can hardly be earlier than the fourth century. The two "ark tombs" are in the Mausoleum Room. One of them is dated by an inscription as wrought c. 370.

All these monuments appear to have been painted; there are plain traces of colour on a slab with a sphynx in the Museum, and on the Harpy tomb some patterns may be discerned where the painting has protected the surface.

Memoranda in Scharf's note-books refer to the colour of these Xanthian monuments. On January 22, 1844, was found