mound about twelve miles from this*. They are generally in numbers of six, eight, ten, twelve, and so forth, lying in a direct line east and west, and are always near ruins where habitations have been formerly; indeed I met with a number once in a space or compound which was surrounded by buildings half standing."

The urns are both made of a well-baked coarse-grained sandy clay, having a tendency to break off in scales, the whole very much resembling freestone. They are oblong, rudely cylindrical in the middle, one end contracting, and terminating in a circular opening like the mouth of a jar with a rim thicker than the rest of the vessel, while the other end also contracts, but runs out terminating in a thinnish prolonged point. The urns are about three feet in length, and the widest two feet nine inches at its greatest girth, and in thickness varying from half an inch to threetenths of an inch. The circular opening is in both about three inches three-tenths in diameter, and was filled up with a bit of baked clay. When the boxes were opened, one of the urns had divided into two parts, the other into three, as represented in the drawing. The surface of both the vessels, particularly towards the opening, is slightly marked with circular rings, similar to those observable on vessels turned on the potter's wheel. On opening the urns, they were found to be completely filled with a very fine reddish heavy sand, not lying loose but collected into cohering masses, which contained the bones; a slight odoriferous perfume, somewhat re- . sembling spirit of aniseed, was emitted on breaking these masses. The bones lay in them without any kind of order,—a skull, a leg-bone, and the joints of a finger, for example, occupying the same lump; many of them were broken, and must have been in the same state when put into the urn. There was no appearance of flesh on any of them, nor in the urn; they were very white and rather friable, and have not crumbled down, though now opened and exposed to the air upwards of a twelvemonth. They * Dr. A. Jukes informs me that besides such urns, other urns filled with mallow seed are generally found.

+ They are most accurately delineated in the accompanying drawings, which I owe to my friend Capt. Basil Hall of the royal navy.

The same is true, March 1815, when they have been nearly two years exposed.

have no appearance of having ever been exposed to fire. All the bones were huddled together without distinction, each bone being however separated from the other by the cohering sand. In the jawbones the teeth were to appearance in good preservation, but friable like the bones: the inside of both the urns was incrusted with a thin, black, bituminous substance, which burns when exposed to flame.

In considering to what nation or sect these urns could belong, it is sufficiently clear that they could not belong to Mahometans, who do not seem ever to have deviated so far from their original customs, as to use urns or ány other device for preserving the body after the life has forsaken it. The form of the urns, (much more resembling the mummies of Egypt than the fine forms of Greek or Roman taste,) as well as the uncalcined state of the bones, take away all probability that they could belong to traders or settlers of Greece or Rome; nor does the mode of sepulture in question appear to have been adopted by the Armenians, or any other sect of Christians.

It is well known that the Parsees expose their dead in open towers or tombs, which are round, and built with an elevated platform sloping down toward the centre, where is a hollow receptacle or pit, into which all the bones are promiscuously thrown, after the flesh has been torn from them by vultures or other birds of prey, and when they have been blanched by rain. This usage of the Parsees is not peculiar to Bombay or Nousari. Chardin (vol. viii.p. 96 and 378*) gives us an account of the place of exposure of the Guebers about half a league from Ispahan. He describes it as a round tower built of large stones, thirty-five feet high by ninety in diameter, without any gate; it is mounted by a ladder, and has also a receptacle in the middle for containing the bones of the deceased after they have been disengaged from the flesh. The same appears to be the practice at Yezd and in other places of Persia, where there are still considerable remains of the Guebers. The description of Chardin very nearly applies to all the dokhmehs or places of exposure of the Parsees in different places. A passage of Herodotus, however, seems to prove that this promiscuous * Langles' excellent edition.

huddling of the bones of all the Guebers into one common receptacle, was not practised in Persia in very remote ages. That most correct and intelligent historian, after informing us that certain customs of the Persians, which he had been describing, were perfectly well known to him, adds with his usual caution*, "What relates to their dead, being kept secret, I cannot speak of it with the same certainty; as for example, that the corpse of a Persian is never interred until it has first been torn by a bird or dog. I know however with certainty that this is true of the Magi; for they practise it openly. The Persians afterwards wax up the body and deposit it in the earth." Strabo confirms this account of Herodotus: "The Persians," says he, "inter their dead bodies after inclosing them in wax: the Magi do not inter theirs, but leave them to be devoured by the birds +."

Larcher, in his remarks on the passage of Herodotus just quoted, observes that Cicero joins in giving this account: "Persæ etiam cerâ circumlitos condunt, ut quam maxime permaneant diuturna corpora." Tusc. i. 45.‡ "The bodies which were waxed," says Larcher, "were not therefore torn; or perhaps it was the remains of these dead bodies that were waxed round, or were preserved in natron, and then wrapped up in some folds of cloth, as Sextus Empiricus describes it§. The Magi long preserved the exclusive privilege of leaving their bodies a prey to the wild beasts; but, as Fabricius remarks, after Procopius and Agathias, in his note on the passage of Sextus Empiricus quoted, the Persians afterwards abandoned all bodies indiscriminately to the birds and devouring beasts." Larcher also quotes, p. 426, an epigram of Dioscorides, in which Euphrates, a Persian, requests his master not to burn his corpse, but to wrap it up and consign it to the earth without pouring water on it. All these requests are meant to prevent the elements from being defiled.

From these quotations, it seems evident that the Persians in very re

* Herodot. lib. i. cap. 140, p. 5, 7. Ed. Gronov.

+ Strabo, lib. xv.

Hist. d'Herodote, vol. i. p. 425, dans les notes.

§ Sext. Empiric. Pyrrhon. Hypolyto, lib. iii. cap. 24, p. 185.