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Basanites, Basalt

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BASANITES.
41
the sarcophagus in the British Museum commonly known as the Tomb of Alexander.
The Egyptians continued to sculpture Basalt, then known as " Marmor Thebaicum," to a late period of the Roman Empire. Spartian describes a statue of Pescennius Niger in this stone, a choice allusive to his name, a present from the Prince of Thebes, as then standing in Niger's former palace at Borne, and thus barbarously Latinizes the Greek dedicatory lines below it :—
The more compact pieces of this extremely hard mate­rial were used for scarabei and intagli by the later Egyptians, It is not unusual to find Gnostic amulets, belonging to tha Alexandrian sects, engraved in Basalt. Engravers, how­ever, of a good period, have never made use of so coarse a material. The only black stones ever presenting intagli of artistic value are the Black Jasper and Agate, and even they were but in small request with the Romans.
It is unaccountable why the Romans should have con­sidered the Basalt as an exclusively Ethiopian production, when precisely the same rock was being quarried a few miles off in the Campagna (near Baccano), in vast quan­tities, to pave their roads ; the " silox " of the Via Appia being a true Basalt. Perhaps, however, these suburban quarries did not supply masses of sufficient dimensions to be worked into statues ; and it is still more likely that all the sculptures in Basalt known to the Romans had been executed in Egypt, which would to a certain extent have prevented their discovering what really was the material.
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