Page:Travels & discoveries in the Levant (1865) Vol. 1.djvu/163

Rh sunk in the ground up to the mouth, at the door of their houses, and are called cupas,-which seems to be a corruption of the Arabic koub, a vault. In our excavation, the pithoi were found only a few inches below the surface, the plough having worked down nearly to their level. They varied in size, the largest being about 4 feet 6 inches in height. We found them lying on their sides, the mouth generally looking to the south-east.

The mouth of each pithos was closed by a flat stone. Each contained one or more skeletons, doubled up, and in several were painted vases. One jar contained eight small vases mixed with the bones.$62$ The figures painted on some of the vases were in black on a red ground; others red, on a black ground: all seemed of a very late period.

The pithoi have been anciently mended with leaden rivets, numbers of which were found among the bones. Some of these were nearly a foot long.$63$

Immediately below these jars we came to the native rock of the field, a proof that no earlier interments had taken place in this cemetery.$64$

I took advantage of a little lesiure at Renköi to read the Iliad over again in the presence of the great national features of the scene. No one who has not seen the magnificent outline which bounds the horizon of the plain of Troy can bring home to his mind the stirring and marvellous narrative of the poet as Homer meant it to affect his readers or rather hearers. We supply the scenery of the Iliad from our imagination, or, rather, we do not supply it at all; we do not think of the Homeric landscape,