DIGGING UP THE PAST.

Shannon News, 24 December 1925, Page 3

DIGGING UP THE PAST.

Of “Bahrain, fha,t groat hunter,” we are told that “the wild ass stamps o’er his head, but cannot break his sleep.” It is a I’a.ir conjecture, how. ever, that the pick of the archaeologist will find him sooner or later. The bones of Tutankhamen are a show, and now it is reported that these of Queen Tinhanan, who was an ancestress of the Numidians, have been discovered, nobly sepulchred, by &n American director of excavations in the French Sahara. ;As in the case of the more ancient Egyptian, neither the sanctity of death nor the lapse of ages has availed to protect these royal remains from vulgar Scrutiny for we are told that “the body is wonderfully preserved, wearing a gold jewelled diadem, necklaces of precious stones, and gold and silver bracelets.” If the old Queen’s body should be left in its tomb, however, she can expect to be comparatively undisturbed ,in her last resting slace, Tamaraset, where this discovery has been made, is almost a thousand miles from the coast of Algeria, Sands of the desert surround it on every side, and if this was the burial place of the ancient rulers of the Numidians one is forced to wonder why they took their Kings such a long way to bury them. The Numidians in their day were to the Carthagin ians and Romans something like what the Riffs have been to France and Spain. Conquered, after a painful war, by the Power which survived the other, they contributed some of the best light horsemen to the Roman’ armies, and soldiers on the Roman wall in Britain doubtless knew them as well as our soldiers know the Cfurkhas. So far as excavations are con. corned, more interest is Jikely to bo felt by the world at large in those which are still taking place in the vicinity of Carthage itself and jhnong the cities which succeeded It under the Roman dominion. North Africa was then a highly civilised part of the world. A few weeks ago the ancient city of Jemila, distant not far from Constantine, which is a main centre, was opened formally with great acclamations to tourist and general traffic, a new motor road having been built to it to make it accessible. The French arc immensely proud of Jemila, we are informed, tnougli it never had any particular historical importance. Built in the first place as a military outpost, it was in the third and fourth centuries after Christ a pleasant and cultivated city, one of many. \ It was no more than that. For more than twenty years the French have been unearthing and repairing it, and to-fclay it >can be seen in something very like its ancient form. “Something unmistakably suggests itself of vanished power and grandeur,” it has been said; “it is a true ghost'of the Roman Empire; and, silent and dignified in its solitude, it seems to reproach us for thus bursting ip our noisy vehicles s upon its immemorial sanctity.” The ruins fall into three distinct parts, First, there is the lesser group, covering perhaps an acre, of which the Basilica is the principal building of interest; it is built on a crypt paved with mosacs; and the baptistery is hard by. Next, on a slope, is the theatre, with its proscenium, not quite intact but sufficient even now for acting After the theatre is the city proper, down which is a long paved street; but before one begins to walk down it one sees the Capitol still grandly up. holding its front on enormous columns and towering visibly over the ’whole site. Forum, paths and fountains, private houses with their courtyards, porches, and inscriptions, the •remains of all of them can be traced with the aid of euide books “No one need ever repent of visiting Jemila,” says a writer in the London “Times” "and the chances are that as a tourist resort it will become one of the chief in Algeria.”