————————_vobis auctoribus umbræ Non tacitas Erebi sedes, Ditisque profundi Pallida regna petunt; regit idem spiritus artus Orbe alio_———— Sings _Lucan. Phars._ I.
_Et regis cineres extructo monte quiescunt._ Lucan.
’Till in the month of March, 1723, Mr. _Halford_ order’d some trees to be planted on this hill, in the middle of the noble plain or _area_ at the top, which is 60 cubits diameter. The workmen dug up the body of the great king there buried in the center, very little below the surface. The bones extremely rotten, so that they crumbled them in pieces with their fingers. The soil was altogether chalk, dug from the side of the hill below, of which the whole barrow is made. Six weeks after, I came luckily to rescue a great curiosity which they took up there; an iron chain, as they called it, which I bought of _John Fowler_, one of the workmen: it was the bridle buried along with this monarch, being only a solid body of rust. I immerg’d it in limner’s drying oil, and dried it carefully, keeping it ever since very dry. It is now as fair and entire as when the workmen took it up. I have given a sketch of it in plate XXXVI. There were deers’ horns, an iron knife with a bone handle too, all excessively rotten, taken up along with it.
_Pausanias_, in _Eliacis_, writes, how in his time, a _roman_ senator conquer’d at the _olympic_ games. He had a mind to leave a monument of his victory, being a brazen statue with an inscription. Digging for the foundation, just by the pillar of _Oenomaus_, they took up fragments of a shield, a bridle and _armilla_, which he saw.
Our bridle belong’d to the harness of a _british_ chariot, and brings into our thoughts the horses and chariots of _Egypt_, mention’d in earliest days. The _Tyrian Hercules_, who, I suppose, might bring the first oriental colony hither, was a king in _Egypt_. In scripture, when _Joseph_ was prime minister there, we find chariots frequently mention’d, both for civil and military use. In _Joshua_’s time, xvii. 16, 18. the _Canaanites_, _Rephaim_ or giants, (_Titans_) and _Perizzites_ had them. So the _Philistines_. Our ancestors the _Britons_ coming both from _Egypt_ and _Canaan_, brought hither the use of chariots; and they remain’d, in a manner, singular and proper to our island, to the time that the _romans_ peopled it. And it was fashionable for the _romans_ at _Rome_, in the height of their luxury, to have _british_ chariots, as we now _berlins_, _landaus_, and the like.