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On

them, two children, with similar caps, hold vases for the libation. Three wood piles, sustained by seven vases with handles, and placed under the sun, bear slain lambs. the left are two young maidens, who are only attached to the stone by the feet and back : the Arabs have broken off the heads and disfigured them with their lances. Various hieroglyphics around give, no doubt, the history of this sacrifice, which I believe is meant to Jupiter Ammon, a symbolical deity, by which the antient Egyptians denoted the Sun's entrance into the sign of the Ram. This animal was consecrated to Jupiter, and they then celebrated the commencement of the astronomical year and the renewal of light. The monument thus described, cut in hard stone, cannot but endure to the latest posterity.*

Of this most valuable and elaborate remain of antiquity, so directly elucidatory of the Mithratic worship of the Persians, and which, perhaps, has not, for its singular curiosity, its rival in the world, Mr Mazell, my engraver, has taken uncommon pains to furnish the reader with an exact copy: and Mountfaucon himself having farther obliged his readers with various judicious observations and conjec

* Savary's Letters on Egypt, vol. i. p. 448.

tures

tures concerning the several objects pourtrayed upon it, I shall state them, as a guide to the judgement of the reader, while he surveys with wonder a work thus exquisitely wrought with so rude an instrument as the chissel.

The Persians, our author remarks, had two ways of representing the SUN in sculpture and painting; the one, under the form of a young man, whom they denominated MITHRAS; and the other in the similitude of a HUMAN FACE RADIATED. The latter is exhibited in the annexed plate; and, in the second part of this volume, my subscribers will be presented with a very correct engraving, copied from a rock, of the Persian Mithras, WINGED, with other astronomical symbols. By the three piles on which the lambs are extended for sacrifice, he is of opinion, are symbolized the THREE SEASONS; for, antiently, they reckoned only three. By the seven vases are denoted the SEVEN DAYS of the week, or else the seven planets; and, in corroboration of this last conjecture, he refers to an image of Mithras engraved in another part of his Antiquities, near which are seven altars flaming to the honour of that deity. The representation of TIME and its various parts, by symbolical figures, was a very common and a very natural practice with those anticnt mytholo

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gists who adored the SUN, whose revolutions are the fountain and guide of all the divisions of time, as the supreme God! The TIARA on the heads of the priests, he observes, very much resemble those of the Persians going in procession in the bass-reliefs found at CHelmiNAR, near the antient Persepolis, to be seen in his second volume. The surrounding hieroglyphics, however, are evidently of Egyptian origin; since the HAWK, which appears on one side, and the IBIS, on the other, were birds holden in the highest veneration among the antient Egyptians. Their being sculptured, together with the symbols of the Persian superstition, in this image, are irrefragable proofs of his antecedent assertion, that, at the period of its excavation, the Egyptian and Persian devotion had begun to assimilate.*

Caves, and other similar subterranean recesses, consecrated to the worship of the Sun, were very generally, if not universally, in request among nations where that superstition was practised; and some of these caverns were full as curious in their construction, though possibly not so magnificent, as those

* Consult the whole of Mountfaucon's ingenious remarks in the page of his Supplement cited before.

of

of Media, Persia, and India. Various engravings of Mithratic caves in Media and Persia are to be met with in the travels of Le Bruyn and Sir John Chardin in the former of those countries. The mountains of Chusistan, in particular, at this day abound with stupendous excavations of this sort. From the higher Asia the veneration for sacred caverns gradually diffused itself over Asia Minor. The lofty steeps of Parnassus, sacred to the Muses, were covered with caverns. The Sybil made her dark responses amidst the gloom of a cayern; and it was from the hallowed rock of Delphi that the priestess of Apollo, (the solar deity of Greece,) inspired with a holy fury, uttered those oracles, that were so widely celebrated in the antient world. In the course of its progress from the East, this species of devotion so far infected even the Roman people, in the early periods of their empire, that they celebrated feasts in honour of Mithra, and dedicated an altar to that deity, with this inscription, Deo invicto soli Mithra. The reigning idolatry was vigorously attacked by those celebrated fathers of the church, the eloquent Tertullian and the more violent Jerome; the former of whom ridicules the votaries of that superstition under the term of knights,

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knights, or soldiers, of Mithra,* while the latter brands the place of their worship with the title of the Den of Mithra. The antient valence, indeed, of the solar worship in Róme is evident from the sacred reverence that prevailed for the vestal fire, which was kindled by the rays of the sun, and which the virgin priestesses, who attended it, kept continually. burning in consecrated vases. In such profound veneration 'was this hallowed flame holden, that the accidental extinction of it was supposed to be the fatal presage of the most dreadful calamities to the empire. Virgil represents Æneas, the vaunted progenitor of the Romans, as zealously preserving this sacred fire amidst the surrounding conflagration of Troy ;

Vestamque potentem,

Æternumque adytis effert penetralibus ignem.

Virg. Æneid. ii. 297.

The worship of Mithra, which still continued to be practised by some devotees, was finally proscribed at Rome, by order of Gracchus, præfect of the prætorium, in the fourth century.

*Mithra signat in frontibus milites suos, lib. i. cap. 1, de Baptismo.

+ Mithra Spelæum, epist. ad Lætam, cap. li.

Allusive