Ohnefalsch-Richter, ‘Cypern, die Bibel, und Homer,’ _Das Ausland_, Nos. 28, 29, 1891. Cyanus is, then, in the Iliad employed exclusively as an adjunct to the metallic inlaying of armour, and it is made similarly available in the Hesiodic poems. But in the Odyssey its sole actual use is in a frieze surmounting the bronze-clad walls of the Phæacian banqueting-hall. Hence many futile debates and perplexities. The Homeric ‘cyanus,’ most critics asserted, could not, since it was uniformly described as _black_, be a mineral of cærulean hue, such as the cyanus of Theophrastus unquestionably was; and it must be presumed to have been a metal, as obtaining a place among metals in the decorative industry of the time. It was hence variously held to be steel, bronze, even lead, while Mr. Gladstone at one time thought of native blue carbonate of copper,[433] later, however, preferring bronze. Lepsius alone recognised what is now generally admitted to be the truth—namely, that the word retained its significance unchanged from the time of Agamemnon to the time of Theophrastus. Footnote 433: _Studies in Homer_, vol. iii. p. 496. The Assyrians fabricated out of lapis lazuli, not only personal, but architectural ornaments. Bactria was its sole available source, and thence through the Mesopotamian channel it reached Egypt. Among the Babylonian spoils of Thothmes III. were a necklace of ‘true’ _chesbet_, and a gold staff jewelled with the same beautiful mineral. Artificial _chesbet_ was manufactured in Egypt from about the fourteenth century B.C. It was composed of a kind of glassy paste, tinted blue with salts of copper or cobalt, and it lay piled, like bricks for building, in the storehouses of successive monarchs.[434] Clay-bricks, too, were enamelled with it for use in decorative constructions, still exemplified in the entrance to a chamber in the Sakkarah pyramid; and the same fashion prevailed in Chaldea and Assyria.[435] The Egyptian admiration for _chesbet_ spread to the Peloponnesus, where an architectural function was assigned to it agreeing most curiously with the Odyssean use of cyanus. The spade has, on this point, surpassed itself as an engine of research; nothing is left to speculation; we seem to find at Tiryns the very arrangement which caught the quick eye of the eminent castaway in Phæacia. For in the palace[436] explored by Dr. Schliemann within the citadel of Perseus, fragments of an alabaster frieze, inlaid with dark blue smalt, were found strewn over the floor of a vestibule, having fallen from their place on its walls; and the smalt appears to be of precisely the same nature with the manufactured _chesbet_ of Thothmes III., and the Cyprian and Egyptian cyanus described by Theophrastus.[437] That it was also identical with the substance turned to just the same architectural account in the palace of Alcinous, may be taken as certain; and the discovery constitutes one of the most telling verifications of Homeric archæology.