The subject of the glyptic art, or engraving upon stones, is very interesting to the student who seeks for evidences and traces of the social life of man in early ages. The engraved cylinders of Babylon and Nineveh, with their cuneiform legends, carry us back to traditions two thousand years before the Christian era; and from the engraved scarabei of Egypt and Etruria we form some ideas of the people whose history has otherwise been lost. We may, perhaps, consider the true era of the glyptic art as dating from the time of the Macedonian princes and the Persian conquests, although it had been practised in a rude way from far earlier times. This art of cutting figures upon bright and richly colored, though minute stones, was quite as much admired among the ancients as the laborious skill, with its powerful blows, which produced the heroic statues out of bronze or marble. And perhaps we may say that these gems, in their estimation, were of greater value, not only on account of their beauty and rarity and their minuteness, but also on account of their hardness, which defied the steel instruments of the ordinary sculptor, and yielded only to the dust and splinters of the hardest minerals, like the sapphire and the diamond. We may also safely affirm that the gem-engravers of the Alexandrian and Augustan ages were, in all that concerns excellence of design and composition, rivals of the most famous workers in marble and bronze. These admirable and wonderful artists contrived to enclose within the narrow limit of a little stone all the complicated details of an event in history, or of a fable in mythology; and to make them stand forth in beautiful relief as a cameo, or to sink them down as an intaglio, with all that truth of design and power of expression which characterize the excellence of the largest works of the most consummate masters.