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The favorite elements of design are bands and spirals and a variety of animal and vegetable forms, chiefly marine. Quadrupeds and men belong to the latest period of the style, the vase-painters of the early and central Mycenaean periods having abstained, for some reason or other, from those subjects which formed the stock in trade of the gem-engravers.
As the Gothic architects indulged their imagination in the most wonderful combinations to represent evil spirits or the varieties of vice and sensualism, so the Persian gem-engravers seem to have allowed their fancy to run riot in the creation of monsters, representative of the Powers of Darkness or of different kinds of evil, The stones exhibit the king in conflict with a vast variety of monsters, some nearly resembling the Persepolitan, while others have strange shapes unseen elsewhere.
It was of three colors light blue, dark blue, and purple. The golden specks, however, with which it was sprinkled really spots of yellow pyrites rendered it useless to the gem-engravers of Pliny's time. The zathene, the gassinades, and the narcissitis were gems of inferior value.
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