CYPRUS. 27 
The use of such instruments for signature is chap. 
recorded in the books of Moses, seventeen 
hundred years before the Christian cera; and the 
practice has continued in Eastern countries, 
with Uttle variation, to the present day. The 
signets of the Turks are of this kind. The 
Romans, Greeks, and Egyptians, had the same 
custom : indeed, almost all the antient intaglios 
were so employed. In the thirty-eighth chapter 
of Genesis, it is related that Tamar demanded 
the signet o^ Judah ; and above three thousand 
years have passed since the great Lawgiver of 
the Jews was directed- to engrave the names of 
the children of Israel upon onyx-stones, " like 
the engravings of a signet;' that is to say, (if 
we may presume to illustrate a text so sacred, 
with reference to a custom still universally 
extant,) by a series of monograms, graven as 
intaglios, to be set " in ouches of gold, for the 
shoulders of the ephod." That the signet was 
of stone set in metal, in the time of Moses, is also 
clear, from this passage of Sacred History : 
''With the work of an engraver in stone, like 
the engravings of a signet, shalt thou engrave the 
two stones. Thou shalt make them to be set 
in ouches of gold." Signets without stones, and 
entirely of metal, did not come into use, according 
(2) Exod. xxviii. 9,10, 11. 
