DISTRICT OF TROAS. 
tl 
«is; and all the shores of the Hellespont near the mouth of 
the river, with Sigeum, and the other tumuli upon the 
coast. From this tumulus we descended once more into the 
plain of Troy, upon an eminence of the southern side of which 
it is placed, and came in half an hour to a village called 
Erkessy. In the street of this village is a marble soros, quite 
entire. This was brought from Alexandria Troas, and is now 
used as a public cistern. It is of one piece of stone, seven 
feet in length, three feet and a half wide, and without in¬ 
cluding the operculum, rather more than three feet in depth* 
The inscription upon it is in Greek characters, beautifully 
cut, and in a very perfect stat^. Having before published the 
original,* I shall here merely add a translation; as it will serve 
to prove what I so lately stated concerning the nature of the 
Grecian, and, I may add, Egyptian soros; the chamber of the 
great pyramid of Cheops containing a sepulchre of granite of 
the same form and size; and another, once the soros of Alex¬ 
ander the Great, mentioned by Herodian, being now in the 
British museum. 
. u Aurelius Agathopodos Othoniacus, and the son of 
Aurelius Paulinas, who also was a Pancratiast, of whom there 
is a hollow statue in the temple of Smintheus, and here in 
the temple of jEsciilapius, I have placed this soros for myself 
and my dearest father, the 'afpre-written Aurelius Paulinas, 
and to my descendants. But if any person shall dare to open 
this soros, and lay in it the dead body of any other, or any 
man’s bones, he shall pay, as a fine to the city of the Troa- 
denses, two thousand five hundred drachmas, and to the most 
sacred treasury as much more.” 
The characters of this inscription cover one side of the soros 
at Erkessy, precisely as the hyeroglyphical characters cover 
those of the Alexandrian. Both one and the other have been 
used,by the modems as cisterns ; and it may reasonably be pre¬ 
sumed the repugnance of a very few of our English antiqua¬ 
ries, to admit that such cisterns were originally designed as 
receptacles for the dead, will, in the view of satisfactory evi¬ 
dence, be done away. 
going first west, and then southwest, I came to Chemar in two hours. From Che- 
mar, passing Karagatch, you reach in seven hours Aiasraata, distant two miles from 
the sea ” IValj)ole's MS, Journal. 
* See the “ Letter addressed to the gentlemen of the British Museum,” con¬ 
taining a summary of the auth r s observations concerning “ the tomb of Alexander S' 9 
with some additional evidenc respecting the Alexandrian soros, printed at Cam¬ 
bridge in 1807, by way of sup A nent to a former dissertation on the same subject- 
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