As illustrating the fame of that city, Strabo quotes Homer (Iliad IX, 383) "with her hundred gates, through each of which issues two hundred men with horns and chariots." The prophet Nahum (III, 8–10) draws another picture of the city after its capture by the Assyrians: "populous No (or No-Amon, City of God) that was situate among the rivers, that had the waters round about it . . . . Ethopia and Egypt were her strength, and it was infinite; Put and Lubim (Cyrene and Libya) were thy helpers. Yet was she carried away, she went into captivity; her young children also were dashed in pieces at the top of all the streets; and they cast lots for her honourable men, and all her great men were bound in chains."
6. Brass.—The Greek word is oreichalcos, "mountain-copper," which Pliny (op. cit. XXXIV, 2) makes into a hybrid, as aurichalcum, golden copper; brass, a yellow alloy, as distinguished from pure copper or the darker alloys. Pliny describes it as an ore of copper long in high request, but says none had been found in a long time, the earth having been quite exhausted. It was used for the sestertium and double as, the Cyprian copper being thought good enough for the as.
Oreichalch seems to have been a native brass obtained by smelting ores abundant in zinc; the Roman metallurgy did not distinguish zinc as a separate metal.
Mines yielding such ores were held in the highest estimation, and their exhaustion was deeply regretted, as in the case of the "Corinthian brass." But later it was found by accident that the native earth, calamine, an impure oxide of zinc, added to molten copper, would imitate the true orreichalch; and this the Romans did without understanding what the earth was, just as they used native oxide of cobalt in coloring glass without knowing the metal cobalt.
(See Pliny XXXVII, 44, and Beckmann, History of Inventions, II, 32–3.)
Philostratus of Lemnos, about 230 A. D., mentions a shrine in Taxila in which were hung pictures on copper tablets representing the feats of Alexander and Porus. "The various figures were portrayed in a mosaic of orichalcum, silver, gold, and oxidized copper, but the weapons in iron. The metals were so ingeniously worked into one another that the pictures which they formed were comparable to the productions of the most famous Greek artists" (McCrindle: Ancient India, 192).
The Greek word is effectively used by Oscar Wilde in his poem The Sphinx:
| —the God of the Assyrian, |
| Whose wings, like strange transparent talc, rose high above his hawk-faced head, |
| Painted with silver and with red and ribbed with rods of oreichalch. |
