Transcript of Sulamith: A Romance of Antiquity
To learn more about the project or give feedback on the quality of a recording, please visit aka.ms slash audiobook. Solomith. By A. I. Kuprin. K. I. N. G. Solomon had not yet attained middle age, 45. Yet the fame of his wisdom and comeliness, of the grandeur of his life and the pomp of his court had spread far beyond the limits of Palestine. In Assyria and Phoenicia, in lower and upper Egypt, from ancient Tabriz to Yemen and from Ismar unto Persepolis, on the coast of the Black Sea and upon the islands of the Mediterranean, all uttered his name in wonder, for there was none among the kings like unto him in all his days. K. In the four hundred and eightieth year after the children of Israel were come out of Egypt, in the fourth year of Solomon's reign over Israel, in the month of Ziph, two did the king undertake the erection of the great temple of the Lord in Mount Moriah and the building of his palace in Jerusalem. Four score thousand stone squareres and three score and ten thousand that bare berthens rot without cease in the mountains and in the outskirts of the city, while ten thousand hewers that cut timber out of a number of eight and thirty thousand were sent each month, by courses, to Lebanon, where they spent a month in labor so arduous that they rested for two months thereafter. Thousands of men tied the cut trees into flots, and hundreds of seamen brought them by sea to Jaffa, where they were fashioned by tyrants, skilled to work at turning and carpentry. Only at the rearing of the pyramids of Kephren, Khufu, and Mentures, at Geise, had such an infinite multitude of laborers been used. Three thousand and six hundred officers oversaw the works, while Azariah, the son of Nathan, was over the officers, a cruel man and an active concerning whom had sprung up a rumor that he never slept, devoured by the fire of an internal, incurable disease. As for the plans of the palace and the temple, the drawings of the columns, the forecourt, and the brass and sea, the designs for the windows, the ornaments of the walls and the thrones, they had all been created by the master builder Hyramabia of Sidon, the son of a worker and brass of the tribe of Naphtali. After seven years, in the month of Bull, three the temple of the Lord was completed, and after thirteen years, the palace of the king also. For cedar logs out of Lebanon, for cypress and olive boards, for almig, shiddim, and tarshish woods, for great stones, costly stones, and hewed and polished stones, for purple, scarlet, and for bison broidered in gold, for stuffs of blue wool, for ivory and red-dyed ram skins, for iron, onyx, and the vast quantity of marble, for precious stones, for the chains, the wreaths, the cords, the tongs, the nets, the lavers, and