ic water patterns. Etruscan Museum. Vatican.]

The cross (Pl. 25), was a sign and a pattern in prehistoric art. It
was the double of the Tau, the Egyptian emblem of life; and while the
Jews reject the Christian cross, they still claim to have warned off
the destroying angel by this sign in blood over the lintels of their
doors in the first Passover.

But the most ancient and universal form of the cross is that of the
Swastika, or Fylfote. This "prehistoric cross" is said to be formed of
two fire-sticks, belonging to the ancient worship of the sun, laid
across each other ready for friction; but losing that meaning, from an
emblem they fell into a pattern, and this you will still find, utterly
meaningless, on Persian carpets of to-day.

Sir G. Birdwood gives the Swastika as the sectarial mark of the Sakti
sects in India. Fergusson names it with the mound buildings, as
belonging to all Buddhist art; and examples of the Swastika are to be
found on Rhodian pottery from the Necropolis of Kamiros, where we find
also the key pattern.

In early Greek art the Swastika and Gammadion are everywhere,
especially as embroidery on dress. Minerva's petticoats are sometimes
worked all over with the latter. On an early Greek vase in the Museo
Gregoriano, are painted Ajax and Achilles playing at dice; and the
mantle of Ajax is squared into an embroidered pattern that alternately
represents a sun or star and a Gammadion (Pl. 26, No. 2). But it is
unnecessary to multiply classical examples, which are endless.

The Christian Cross was often formed by converting the Tau into the
Gamma, the sacred letter of the Greeks. It is said to have been the
emblem of the corner-stone, and as a pattern, was called, down to the
thirteenth century, the "Gammadion;" and though it had lost its
original motive, it continued to preserve the idea of a secret and
mystical meaning.

The Gammadion, as well as the Swastika, enters largely into the
illuminations of the Celtic Book of Kells and those of the Lindisfarne
MSS.; also it is to be found on the Celtic shields in the British
Museum, together with the Swastika. Both appear in the Persian carpets
of to-day, and as patterns were, in ecclesiastical decoration,
employed down to the fifteenth century, both for European and British
textiles. The Swastika, as well as the wave pattern, is of mysterious
and universal antiquity, and has certainly traversed four thousand
years,--how much more we dare not say. It is