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tulated, and the field of the gorgeous India more minutely explored.

In enumerating the ancient mines, I ought not to have omitted more particularly mentioning, as not the leaft celebrated, the filver mines of Attica and the golden mines of Thrace. The annual produce of the mines of Sunium I do not find precisely ftated, though that it was very confiderable may be collected from this circumstance, that, whereas in Afia, according to Herodotus, the proportion of gold to filver was as one to thirteen; at Athens, according to Plato, it was but as one to twelve.* of the produce of the Thracian mines, re-opened, after the conqueft of Thrace, by Philip, king of Macedon, we can ftate, with certainty, from Diodorus, that it amounted to one thousand gold talents annually, or near three millions of our money, which went, by hereditary claim, additionally to fwell the treasures of the great Alexander. The principal hoards, however, of treasure, both in bullion and coined money, among the Greeks, we know to have been in their temples, which

*See Herodotus, lib. iii. and Plato in Dialog. Hipparchus, + Diodorus Siculus, lib. iii. p. 249.

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were crowded with presents of immense value; brought by the fuperftitious from every part of Greece. These temples were confidered as national banks, and the priests officiated as bankers, not always indeed the most honest, as was once proved at Athens, where the state-treasurers, having expended or embezzled the public money, had the audacity to fet fire to that part of the temple of Minerva where the treasure was contained, by which facrilegious act that magnificent fane was near being wholly confumed. Their purpose, however, was fully answered, fince the registers of the temple were reported to have perished with the treasures, and all refponfibility precluded.

The temple, juft mentioned, the fuperb fane of Jupiter Olympius, at Elis, and that of Apollo, at Delphi, were the principal of thofe facred depofitaries. The priests, at all times, concealed the total fum of the treasures lodged in them with too much caution for us to know the amount, yet, when the Phocenfes, urged to despair by the exactions of the Thebans, feized on the treasures of Delphi, they amounted to ten thousand talents, above two millions two hundred and fifty thousand

pounds

pounds fterling;* and probably that but a small portion of what holy perfidy had previously secured. Those depofited at the great temple of Ephefus, confidered through all ages as inviolable, probably far exceeded those of the three laft-mentioned. After all, whatever credit may be due to the piety of mankind in devoting their gold and filver to the service of the deity, it was extremely impolitic to make their temples, as was the custom through all antiquity, the receptacles of fuch unbounded wealth; fince it ferved only to fpirit up every desperate invader of Afia to acts of the most nefarious plunder and facrilege, as was dreadfully and repeatedly experienced by the miferable race of Palestine. Violent and reiterated as were the outrages committed in the Holy Land in the fucceffive irruptions of their rapacious neighbours, they were by no means fo extensive and ruinous as the defolation which the fanguinary fury of Mahommedan fuperftition, hurled with its wafteful hand over the fertile provinces of Hindoftan, and through her auguft pagodas; pagodas overflowing for

• Diodorus Siculus, lib. xvi. cap. 76.

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ages

ages with the accumulated wealth of the whole western world.

I have already fhewn, that it was to the fhores of India that the great current of the treasures in gold and filver, produced by the mines of Spain, flowed, to be there fwallowed up in a vortex that never regurgitated the fhining spoil. Imagination is scarcely able to conceive the magnitude of the amount, in bullion and coined money, amaffed during fo many centuries in that fecluded region of Afia; and the historians of Mahmud, of Gazna, who principally enjoyed the plunder of it, are at a lofs for words to describe the astonish, ment and exultation of that prince, whofe mind equally felt the goad of avarice and ambition, at the fight of it. They endeavour to imprefs us with some faint idea of it, by afferting, in their hyperbolical way, that he there faw a tree of pure gold, of an enormous fize, growing naturally out of the foil;* which, though doubtless to be understood allegorically, may approach nearer the truth than fome other of their romantic strains, fince, to imitate vines and other trees in gold

See Orme's Hindostan, vol. i. p.9.

was

was an ancient and very favourite cuftom of the Indian metallurgifts; and I have already, in former parts of this work, given two very appofite inftances of it. The first is from Curtius, who, defcribing the palace of the luxurious monarch Muficanus, whofe domain: was fituated towards the mouth of the Indus, that anciently rolled down gold from its mountainous fource, particularly mentions the golden vines that twined: around each of the columns that fuftained the portico of hist palace, in whofe fpreading branches were feen interfperfed birds of filver, and others of vari ous coloured enamel, to refemble nature. The fecond was the fplendid gallery, seen by Tavernier, in the palace of Agra, which was partly covered with a kind of lattice work of gold, over which the tendrils of a golden vine diffused themselves, bearing fruit, of emerald, rubies, and other precious ftones, refembling grapes in their different advances towards maturity; but this magnificent project he was obliged to drop, as, according to that traveller, it would have taken up more riches than all the world could furnish. The fame device I have had repeated occafion to mention as much in esteem at the Perfian court.

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