I should say at once that these mosque lamps are more properly of the nature of lanterns—the lamp itself was suspended inside them. I do not know, however, of any example of these little internal lamps in our European collections, unless it be one of gilt green glass now at South Kensington (Plate XXIV. 2). This lamp, however, is somewhat large for the position assigned to it, and it certainly resembles those sometimes found in Coptic churches. These large lamps or lanterns were suspended by chains from the roof or from the arcades of the mosque. From the Sultan Hassan mosque alone have come twenty-one glass lamps, now in the Arab Museum at Cairo, and there are others from the same source in our home collections. The effect in the mosque when these lamps were all lighted must have rivalled the illumination of St. Sophia, described by Paul the Silentiary (p. 97). We must not forget another essential part of the Arab lamp: this is the little sphere from which the smaller chains that pass to the handles of the lamp radiate. In private houses—for the general arrangement is the same in them—this globe may be replaced by an ostrich egg. In the mosques these spheres are of metal or of glass; we have only two specimens of the latter material in European collections—one of amber-yellow glass in the British Museum (Plate XXVII. 2), a second, larger and ovoid in shape, at South Kensington. There are three others, one of blue glass, in the Arab Museum at Cairo. A similar method of suspending the lamps was in use in Byzantine churches, and something of the sort may still be seen in St. Mark’s. In the pictures of the Venetian painters of the later fifteenth century—of Bellini, and Cima, and Carpaccio—the lamps, of a strictly Oriental or Byzantine type, that hang from the niches that form the background to their enthroned Madonnas, well illustrate this arrangement.[112] [Illustration: _PLATE XXIV_ SMALL MOSQUE LAMP OF CLEAR WHITE GLASS PROBABLY SYRIAN, FOURTEENTH CENTURY OIL VESSEL, PROBABLY FOR SUSPENSION IN ENAMELLED LAMP SARACENIC, FOURTEENTH CENTURY]