About the Book

This article by William Duthie appeared in The Intellectual Observer for February 1867, with a coloured plate drawn from the originals by Duthie himself.

His argument is a good one. The antiquarians — Prisse d'Avennes, Wilkinson, Birch, Layard — had described these objects thoroughly as remains, but nobody had looked at them as pieces of workmanship, as things a goldsmith made and another goldsmith might learn from. So he draws them as they were worn rather than in their present dilapidated condition, and numbers them from the simplest work to the most elaborate.

The eight specimens run from Assyrian earrings out of Kouyunjik, about 700 B.C., through a Babylonian necklace, to a Ptolemaic ring of Serapis, Isis and Horus of about 300 B.C.

This site reproduces the complete text of the original 1867 edition, digitized page by page from the original printing. The book is in the public domain.