Encyclopaedia Britannica > Volume 19, PHY-PRO

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P L A —P L A
at Athens, where they were now admitted to full citizen¬
ship, except that they were not eligible for the priesthood
and the archonship. After the battle of Chseronea (338)
Philip of Macedon brought back the Platseans as a counter¬
poise to the power of Thebes, but the walls were not fully
restored till some years later. Alexander the Great, then
monarch of Asia, contributed to rebuild them, in recog¬
nition, he declared, of the services which the Plataeans
had rendered against the Persians of old. With the loss
of Greek freedom Platsea sank into insignificance. The
inhabitants lived on the glories of the past, and were
regarded as braggarts by the rest of the Boeotians. In the
6th century the walls were once more restored by Justinian.
The fullest description of ancient Platsea is that of Pausanias,
who visited it in the 2d century. The great temple of Hera, he
tells us, contained a statue of Rhea by Praxiteles; the temple
of Athene the Warlike was adorned with an image of the goddess
by Phidias and paintings by Polygnotus. Close to the city gates
were the tombs of the Greeks who had fallen in the battle of
Platsea, and an altar and image of Zeus the Liberator in white
marble. The ruins of the ancient town lie about 500 yards east
of the modern village of Kokhla. They occupy a slightly elevated
plateau forming a rude triangle about two and a half miles in
circumference, of which the apex to the south almost touches the
great rocky slope of Cithseron, and the base to the north has a steep
though short descent to the plain. The outer walls follow the
edge of the plateau, but an inner cross-wall divides it into two
unequal parts. The southern and higher part is probably as old as
the Persian wars; the masonry of the northern part is more recent,
and probably belongs to the age of Philip and Alexander. It is
likely that these two parts were never included at the same time
within the city walls, but that the southern was the ancient city,
and that at one of the restorations (perhaps that of 387 b.c. ) the
northern and more spacious part of the plateau was preferred as the
site. Within this northern half, and close to the northern wall,
is a terrace on which may have stood the temple of Hera. The
north-western corner of the northern town is portioned off by a
wall, and is conjectured to have been the acropolis of the newer city.
See Dodwell’s Tour through Greece, i. p. 274 sq.\ Leake’s Travels in Northern
Greece, vol. ii. chap. 10 ; and Bursian’s Geographic ron Griechenland, vol. i. p.
243 sq.
PLATE. The word plate (connected with the Greek
TrAarn?, flat, the late Latin plata - lamina, and the Spanish
plata, silver) is usually employed to denote works in silver
or gold which belong to any class other than those of per¬
sonal ornaments or coins.1
On account of the ease with which it can be worked
and the pure state in which it is generally found, it is pro¬
bable that gold was the first metal used by man; and it
is certain that, in some countries at least, he attained to
the most marvellous skill in its manipulation at a time
when the other arts were in a very elementary condition.
As an instance of this we may mention a sword of the
bronze age, found in a barrow near Stonehenge, and now
in the museum at Devizes.2 The hilt of this sword is
covered with the most microscopically minute gold mosaic.
A simple design is formed by fixing tesserae, or rather pins,
of red and yellow gold into the wooden core of the handle.
Incredible as it may appear, there are more than two
thousand of these gold tesserae to the square inch. The
use of silver appears to belong to a rather later period,
probably because, though a widely spread metal in almost
all parts of the world, it is usually found in a less pure
state than gold, and requires some skill to smelt and
refine it. Though both these precious metals were
largely and skilfully used by prehistoric races, they were
generally employed as personal ornaments or decorations
for weapons. Except in Scandinavian countries but little
that can be called “ plate ” has been discovered in the
early barrows of the prehistoric period in western Europe.
. , me(ii8eval English the term “ a plate ” was occasionally used
in t“e of a Silver vessel. A curious survival of this use of the
word still exists at Queen’s College, Oxford, where the servants may
yet be heard asking at the buttery for so many “ plates of beer,” that
is, silver tankards.
2 Hoare, Ancient Wiltshire, 1840.
It will be convenient to consider the no less prehistoric
gold and silver work recently found at Troy, Tiryns, and
Mycenae as forming a stage in the history of Greek art.
Ancient Egypt.—An enormous amount of the precious
metals was annually brought as tribute to the Egyptian
kings ; according to Diodorus, who quotes the authority of
Hecatseus, the yearly produce of the royal gold and silver
mines amounted to thirty-two millions of minse—that is,
about 133 millions sterling of modern money. Though
this estimate is probably an exaggeration, the amount must
have been very great. The gold chiefly came from the
mines in the Bishfiri desert, about eighteen days’ journey
south-east of Kum Ombos. These mines were constantly
worked down to the time of the Arab caliphs, but now
appear to be exhausted. It is not known where the silver
came from. Gold appears to have been relatively more
abundant than silver, and the difference in value between
them was very much less than it is now. Tribute was paid to
the Egyptian kings, not in coined money, which was then
unknown, but in rings or ingots. Owing to the Egyptian
practice of burying with their dead personal ornaments
and jewellery, rather than other possessions less intimately
connected with the person of the deceased, but few speci¬
mens of either gold or silver plate have survived to our
times, whereas the amount of gold jewellery that has been
discovered is very large, and shows the utmost amount of
skill in working the precious metals. We can, however,
form some notion of what the larger works, such as plates
and vases in gold and silver, were like from the frequent
representations of them in mural sculpture and paintings.
In many cases they were extremely elaborate and fanciful
in shape, formed with the bodies or heads of griffins, horses,
and other animals real or imaginary. Others are simple
and graceful in outline, enriched with delicate surface
ornament of leaves, wave and
guilloche patterns, hieroglyphs, or iV'vy
sacred animals. Fig. 1 shows a '
gold vase of the time of Thothmes ) /
III. (Dynasty XVIII., about 1500 M
b.c.), taken from a wall-painting
in one of the tombs at Thebes. [) 1
The figure on its side is the
hieroglyph for “gold.” Others
appear to have been very large and
massive, with human figures in
silver or gold supporting a great
bowl or crater of the same metal. Fl6 L_Gold VasfN from wan_
In the language of the hiero- paintings at; Thebis.
glyphs silver is called “ white gold,” and gold is the generic
name for money,—unlike most languages, in which silver
usually has this special meaning,—a fact which points
strongly to the priority of the use of gold. On the walls
of one of the tombs at Beni Hassan there is an interesting
representation of a gold- and silver-smith’s workshop, show¬
ing the various processes employed—weighing, melting or
soldering with the blow-pipe, refining the metal, and polish¬
ing the almost finished bowl or vase. In the time of
Rameses III., about 1300 B.c., a clearly defined Assyrian
influence appears in the decoration of some of the gold
plate. A gold basket, represented in the tomb of this
king at Thebes, has on its side a relief of the sacred tree
between two beasts, the oldest of purely Aryan or Indo-
European subjects, and quite foreign to Egypt.
The chief existing specimens of Egyptian plate are five
silver phialse or bowls, found at the ancient Thumuis in
the Delta, and now in the Bulak Museum (Nos. 482 to 486
in the catalogue). These are modelled in the form of a
lotus blossom, most graceful in design, but are apparently
not earlier than the 5th century b.c. The Louvre possesses
a fine gold patera, inches across, with figures of fishes