Page:History of Art in Phrygia, Lydia, Caria and Lycia.djvu/83

 SlPYLUS AND ITS MONUMENTS. 67 are very well preserved (Figs. 40, 41). A door leading to a kind of small ante-room opens in the northern wall, F, whence the chambered grave, properly so called, is entered. The ceilings are flat, and the grave is a trough cut in the floor, H. As at Charalambe here also, the skill of the artist was chiefly directed towards the exterior ; be it in polishing the rock surface around the base, cutting grooves on the north and south sides, i, j, for the outflow of the water, or piercing the small circular tank, K, in one of the corners. The north, south, and west faces are quite plain. On the other hand, the eastern face is profusely decorated : first, by an elongated window-shaped niche, divided into four compartments ; then a cornice with ornamental ancone slightly salient beyond the rocky wall. On this side the pyramidal base of the cubical block has no steps. Despite these irregularities, in its pristine state, the tomb from its very quaint appearance was not wanting in attractiveness. When we drew up our list of the older monuments of Sipylus, or at least of the most noteworthy, nothing was said about sculpture : not because the art for that period was unrepresented, since even at the present hour are works of the highest interest, such as the bas-reliefs of Sesostris, described by Herodotus, and the Cybele of Mount Codine, seen by Pausanias ; but because the inscrip- tions about these images prove that they were executed in the period preceding the introduction of letters derived from the Phoenician alphabet, when characters akin to the Hamathite obtained throughout Asia Minor. Hence we were obliged to class the figures under notice with the series of monuments which, for want of a better name, we have termed Hittite. To these sculptures we have nothing to add, except a bust discovered by M. Spiegelthal near the village of Bouja, situated in a mountain eastward of Smyrna, called Tashtali. 1 His description, which we borrow, was written before the mutilation of the monument by the fanatic natives. M. Dennis, her Majesty's Consul at Smyrna, had it removed by night so as to save it from further dilapidation, and secretly despatched to the British Museum in 1869. To quote from the German explorer : as you ascend the path leading to the alpine village of Bouja you pass a sinking of some 8 to lorn, deep, and loom, long, surrounded by a wall composed 1 A. MARTIN, Trois Monuments des environs de Smyrne, left re a M. G. Perrol (Revue Arche., Nouvelle Se'rie, torn. xxxi. pp. 321-330).