The Garden of Cyrus

intervals of housing, as there necessarily had to be when the monument of Ninus a legendary king of Assyria and founder of Nineveh occupied no less than ten furlongs about 1.25 miles. ❧ AND, though not one of the Seven Wonders of the World, yet a noble relic of antiquity—and made according to a design exceeding all the rest—had its principal parts arranged in this manner: the Labyrinth of Crete. It was built upon an oblong rectangle original: "long quadrate" containing five large squares, which connected through right-angle turns and ended in the center of the middle square, where the Minotaur the mythical creature with the head of a bull and the body of a man lived—if we follow the description found on the elegant medal in Agostino Antonio Agostini (1517–1586), an Italian archaeologist and numismatist. And though in many accounts we calculate roughly by the "square," that term is very often to be understood as an oblong rectangle; this was the shape of the Ark of the Covenant, the table of the showbread sacred bread placed in the Jewish Temple, and the stone in which the names of the twelve tribes were engraved—that is, three in a row, which naturally creates an oblong figure original: "longilateral", whereas a perfect square would be formed by nine stones in a three-by-three arrangement. ❧ AS to what shape the stones themselves held, tradition and Scripture are silent. However, lapidaries craftspeople who cut and polish gemstones in precious stones favor a "table" or oblong square cut, and in such a proportion that the two side facets and the three lower facets are equal to the top facet; the angles of the side facets contain and form the hypotenuses original: Latin "hypothenusæ," the longest side of a right-angled triangle, or the broader slanted sides. ❧ THAT the Tables of the Law the stone tablets of the Ten Commandments were of this shape has been confirmed by general imitation and tradition. Yet we are unwilling to burden the shoulders of Moses with such massive original: "massy" stones as some paintings place upon him. For it is plainly stated that he came down with them in his hand; the word "hewing," strictly understood, implies no such massive labor, but rather the cutting and shaping of them into a specific form and surface. Furthermore, some believe them to have been emeralds, and if they were made of the materials of Mount Sinai, it is not improbable that they were marble. Since the words were not many—the letters being fewer than seven hundred—and the Tables were written on both sides, they required no such huge dimensions. ❧ THE beds of the ancients were different from ours today (which are almost square), being constructed as oblongs with a length about double their width, not unlike the area or "bed" of this quincuncial rectangle. The single beds of Greece were six feet and a little more in length, and three feet in width; the giant-sized bed of Og an ancient king of Bashan described in the Bible as a giant, which was four cubits wide and nine and a half cubits long, did not vary much from this proportion. The funeral bed sarcophagus of King Cheops Khufu, the Pharaoh for whom the Great Pyramid of Giza was built in the Great Pyramid, which measures seven...