TWO EXAMPLES OF SYMBOLISM. 25 



Etruscans, or the Romans, nor by the Barbarians who overran 

 the west of Europe in the first centuries, and yet it was through 

 the Etruscans and the Romans that we get the curious motif we 

 are now considering. What the early historians of the Franks 

 have called "bipennis," and even TreAeW d/i^ts-nfytos, has been 

 shown by Roach Smith, by Yonge Akerman, and, again recently, 

 by Barriere-Flavy, to have been a single-bladed axe, but with 

 its cutting edge prolonged into a wing on either side of the 

 socket. The true double axe, ire\eyi or \dppus, which is seen 

 represented on the sword of Tiberius, and on the triumphal arch 

 at Orange [Arausio, on the R. Araise, Provence] if not inten- 

 tionally mythological, are reminiscences of the East. 



But if Virgil says nothing of the Amazons' Carian axe, he 

 twice makes mention of their crescent shield ; and the 

 possibility now emerges that the pelta lunata, and not the Axe of 

 Lycurgus, is the prototype of the mosaic pavement motif. 

 Diodorus the Sicilian, however, who was a professed historian, 

 says that the Amazons were defended by an armour made of the 

 skins of serpents, and that their weapons were the sword, the 

 lance, and the bow (styco-t K&I \6yx<us en 8e T^OJS, III. 54). And 

 Greco-Etruscan artists, as on a vase at Arezzo, represent them 

 as clad in banded snake skins, armed with sword and lance and 

 bow, but bearing round Argolic shields withal. 



And in the large Etruscan tomb at Cervetri the walls are hung 

 with arms of bronze, but there is no double axe, and all the 

 bucklers are circular. The crescent shield, then, like Penthesilea 

 herself, belongs to mythology. 



So that, after all, we are driven to Egypt. The oldest use of 

 the lotus in decorative art was in groups of two flowers tied 

 together by the stalks, found on prehistoric pottery at Koptos 

 and on the earliest sepulchres (Fig. 12). 



The tied lotus is universally employed as a finial (Fig. 13) to 

 the panels of the tombs of the IVth Dynasty (B.C. 4800). It is 

 also found in the tombs at Thebes. 



In its most careful delineation, say Messrs. Perrot and Chipiez 

 (Egypt I., 184; II., 63), it consists of two flowers " united by a 



