ether with well-built
granaries, workshops, and barracks, and other records of river life
as are supplied by sculptured stones and inscriptions, and the double
discovery of hoards of gold coins) has come to light a spacious and
massively constructed stone building, apparently a military
store-house, worthy to rank besides the bridge-piers of the North
Tyne among the most important monuments of Roman Britain. There is
much here, indeed, to carry our thoughts far beyond our insular
limits. On this, as on so many other sites along the Wall, the
inscriptions and reliefs take us very far afield. We mark the
gravestone of a man of Palmyra, an altar of the Tyrian Hercules--its
Phoenician Baal--a dedication to a pantheistic goddess of Syrian
religion and the raised effigy of the Persian Mithra. So, too, in the
neighbourhood of Newcastle itself, as elsewhere on the Wall, there
was found an altar of Jupiter Dolichenus, the old Anatolian God of
the Double Axe, the male form of the divinity once worshipped in the
prehistoric Labyrinth of Crete. Nowhere are we more struck than in
this remote extremity of the Empire with the heterogeneous religious
elements, often drawn from its far Eastern borders, that before the
days of the final advent of Christianity Roman dominion had been
instrumental in diffusing. The Orontes may be said to have flowed
into the Tyne as well as the Tiber.

This quotation has been given at length in order to sustain the
contention--put forth more than once in this book--that treasures
associated with the Roman epoch lie around us in every part of our
island, and that all sorts of novel surprises mutely await the advent
and quest of the diligent investigator.

But to return for a moment to Corstopitum. It has been realised that
the city was a centre of iron-work and pottery-making to supply the
needs of the troops. It furnished a base for the invasion of
Caledonia by Lollius Urbicus in A.D. 140, and for the great
expedition of Septimius Severus in A.D. 208. Much of the area
excavated during 1906 and the following years has been filled in, but
the most important buildings remain open--two large granaries, the
fountain or public water-pant, and a large unfinished building, which
may have been designed as a military storehouse, or as the praetorium
of a legionary fortress which never came into being. The most
remarkable finds made here have been the Corbridge lion in stone,
which now enjoys an European reputatio