Page:History of Art in Phœnicia and Its Dependencies Vol 1.djvu/395

 TOWNS AND HYDRAULIC WORKS. 373 found and opened. So far as we can judge by the figures in the report there is little variety in their form, which is roughly that of a boot. The chamber is reached by a rectangular well, whose walls are built of large stones. The well is from twenty to thirty inches square at the mouth, and from five to ten feet deep. At its lower extremity it becomes lost in the chamber to which it gives access. The chamber itself, " hollowed out of the concrete- like masonry," resembles a kind of pocket, and has the longitu- dinal section, as a rule, of a surbased spherical vault. These chambers are more rough, irregular, and insignificant, whether we look at their dimensions, the quality of their workmanship, or the objects found in them, than any of the sepulchral groups found in Syria, Cyprus, or Sardinia. The chambers are all small, and the pots they contain very common, but this humble provincial grave- yard is interesting because its date can be fixed, both by what we do and what we do not find in it. There is not one of those Latin inscriptions which abound in all the cemeteries of Roman Africa ; this by itself is enough to suggest that these tombs were built before the country was made into a Roman province. And everything confirms this first impression. The arrangement of the graves is characteristic of Phoenicia ; we find a well giving access to a chamber in which the corpse is stretched upon the ground. It may be objected that this method of entombment may have remained in fashion with the Liby- Phoenicians even after the fall of Carthage. But we have evidence that these o w graves must have been built before that catastrophe, or at least not much later than the year 146, in the fact that a certain number of bronze coins were found in them, and that all those coins were Punic, with the well-known types of the horse and the palm-tree (Fig. 253). l After the middle of the second century these pieces were no longer struck, and the bronze money of Punic Carthage can hardly have continued in circulation long after that date. From 1 " Several copper medals were found ; they were sometimes a horse's head, some- times a galloping horse. On their face we find the originals of the facsimile given in the Univers pittoresque, edition of 1844, article on Carthage by Bureau de la Malle (plate vii. fig. 2, and plate viii. figs, i and 9)." Reports of Captain VINCENT. The coin reproduced on p. 374 from DURUY'S Histoire des Romaines (vol. i. p. 142) is not one of those found in the graves at Badja, but it shows the same types. It is of silver, and was most likely struck in Sicily. Obv., the forepart of a horse crowned by victory, an ear of barley, and seven Punic letters read by M. de Saulcy as Kart-ha- dast (Carthage) ; rev., a palm-tree and four Punic letters, Maknal, the camp.