[Illustration: Nos. 387-401. Plates of Gold. Sepulchre IV. Actual size.] [Sidenote: CURIOUS GOLD BUTTONS.] In the same place were found 118 gold buttons with intaglio work of seventeen different types of ornamentation which are represented in the specimens shown under Nos. 393-401 and Nos. 403-413. All of them consist of gold plate, fastened either on wood buttons like our shirt-studs, or merely on flat round pieces of wood; but of a large part of them the wooden button has disappeared, and only the gold plate remains. I need not describe the ornamentation of every one of these buttons, because the reader sees what they represent. I would here only call attention to the beautiful intaglio on the button, No. 397, which represents four long broad knives, whose handles are prolonged into spirals. [Illustration: Nos. 402-413. Gold Buttons. Sepulchre IV. Actual size.] I further found there 130 large gold buttons with splendid intaglio work, some like Nos. 414-420, which represent beautiful stars, flowers, or crosses, and others like No. 421, which has a beautiful spiral ornamentation. As with the smaller buttons, many of these 130 buttons have still retained their wooden button, shaped like a shirt-stud; while many others have only flat pieces of wood, and of a great many others the wood has disappeared and the gold plate alone remains. [Illustration: Nos. 414-422_a_. Gold Buttons. Sepulchre IV. Actual size.] [Sidenote: MAGNIFICENT GOLD BUTTONS.] Finally I found eight gold buttons of very large size, with beautiful intaglio work, of two of which I give the engravings (Nos. 422 and 422_a_). The former represents a sun, in the centre of which is a beautiful 卍 transformed into spirals, without, however, losing the marks of nails with which it was fastened. The other represents also a sun with his rays, in the interior of which is the spiral ornamentation which we have so often passed in review. All these eight very large buttons have merely flat pieces of wood; and, as I sometimes find rows of buttons so shaped, and which gradually diminish in size, lying along the swords, I feel certain that they were glued in uninterrupted rows to the wooden sheaths of these weapons, the largest button being fixed where the sword was broadest and the rest gradually diminishing in size according to the breadth of the sword-sheath.[330] It also deserves particular attention that, wherever the gold buttons have retained their pieces of wood, whether flat or shirt-stud-like, these wooden moulds have, without any exception, exactly the same intaglio ornamentation which we see on the gold plating; and there can, therefore, be no doubt whatever that all the intaglio work was made on the gold plate after it had been fastened on the wooden buttons, on which the intaglio made on the gold plate was reproduced by the pressure of the artist's hand.