One of the most interesting Punic stelæ that can be cited was found at Hadrumetum (fig. 213). An image of two columns is seen upon it, supporting a complicated entablature. The base of the columns is very elegant, and resembles a large vase from which acanthus leaves emerge; from the middle of this tuft of leaves a fluted stem rises, the upper part of which is fashioned like a woman’s bust. This woman is seen in full face, and holds her hands clasped upon her breast, which is also adorned with the round disk and the crescent; she has a similar disk upon her head. In the entablature a row of lotus-flowers, a winged disk supported by two uræi, and a row of uræi seen in full face and with heads erect are distinguished; everything in this monument is oriental, or, rather, Egyptian. Even in Sardinia and the Balearic Islands the votive stelæ of Tanit and Baal-Hammon enable us to follow the track of the preponderating influence of Egyptian art in Carthaginian symbolism.
If the very vestiges of Cypriote architecture have disappeared, it is not so with the works of the sculptor. The quarter of a century which has just passed has seen disinterred as if by enchantment from the bowels of the great eastern island, and then transported into the chief museums of Constantinople, Paris, London, Berlin, and especially New York, hundreds of stone statues and thousands of terra-cotta figurines of strange appearance, with picturesque head-dresses and with foolishly-smiling visages, which form a group apart in the history of art, since they are neither purely Asiatic nor purely Greek. Save in rare exceptions, the monuments of Cypriote sculpture were not imported from abroad; they are the work of that mixed race of Greeks and Asiatics, which, by means of the Phœnician ships, was in constant relation with Syria, Egypt, and Asia Minor.
The productions of Cypriote sculpture which seem to be the most ancient remind us of the figures in the Assyrian bas-reliefs; the costume is the same: a conical cap, a curled beard, a long tunic, and a short cloak passed over the shoulder. However, there are essential differences: the muscles are far from being expressed with the same vigour; no figure wears that long beard like a regular screw, which is so characteristic of Ninevite sculpture. We feel that the Cypriote artist works at a distance from a model which he only sees with the eye of memory, or else that he imitates at second-hand, and is compelled to interpret a Phœnician work which is itself only an interpretation of an Assyrian prototype. The most ancient statues discovered in the temple of Golgoi may date back from the epoch at which the Assyrian conqueror Sargon erected at Citium (Larnaca) the triumphant stela on which he relates that his vessels have vanquished Cyprus. They are of all sizes. There is a colossal head 2 ft. 9½ in. high (fig. 214). It wears a conical helmet; the eyes are prominent, the nose is straight and regular, the mouth small but full-lipped, the cheek-bones projecting; the beard is composed of long parallel tresses slightly curled at the end. This fine head, more than half oriental, may be considered as the type of its kind.
After the overthrow of the Sargonid dynasty, Cyprus was given up to Egyptian influence, which reigned there during the period which extends from the fall of Nineveh, at the end of the seventh century B.C., to the Achæmenid dynasty. But here again the imitation is only partial, and not as servile as in Phœnicia. We find Egyptian fashion modified in Cyprus by the taste of a foreign race. The figures are half-nude instead of being entirely draped; they have no garment except the shenti, tied round the waist and adorned with uræi; the bust is bare; the arms are bare, but adorned with bracelets and held close to the body; the headdress is the Egyptian pshent scarcely modified; the hair, cut straight and falling in compact masses behind the beardless head, reminds us of the Klaft.[94]
During the same period, but especially under the Persian dominion, we witness the interpenetration of the two influences—that of Egypt and that of Assyria—in Cypriote art: it is the marriage of the two styles, the union of the two streams. In the statues at Athieno, for instance, the head is Assyrian in the features of the face, the curled beard and the headdress formed of a peaked cap, but all the rest is Egyptian: the nude torso, the necklace, the shenti round the waist quaintly loaded with ornaments, the symbolical meaning of which the artist no longer understands. A striking example of this hybrid style is the famous colossus of Amathus, which is 13 ft. 11½ in. high and 6½ ft. broad across the shoulders. He is a Hercules who offers a mixture of the athletic proportions of the Assyrian Izdubar, with the type of ugliness symbolized in the god Bes. He has short horns, a low forehead, large ears; his hair and beard are treated in the Assyrian manner; he has a lion’s skin round his waist; in his two powerful hands, pressed against his breast, he holds the hind paws of a lioness. Is he not the giant Izdubar, whom Assyrian artists so often took pleasure in representing? On the other hand, his tattooed arms, his hairy skin, his lion’s skin fastened round his body, his bestial and Silenus-like face, his legs like the paws of a wild beast, are all copied from those figures of the god Bes, which the excavations in the Nile valley bring to light by hundreds. At the same time the artist handles his chisel as a Greek might. The limbs are plump and rounded: no more of those exaggerated muscles which characterise Assyrian art; nothing Eastern in the insignificant features of the face. We have already, in certain points, the Hellenic Heracles, with whom the Cypriote god is soon to be confounded.
In fact, the third element which comes into Cypriote sculpture is the Greek element, with all its
methods, as the colonies on the coast of Asia Minor understood them as early as the sixth century. In the year B.C. 500 Cyprus made an alliance with the cities of Ionia; and Cimon’s expedition in B.C. 450 determined the definite preponderance of Hellenic civilisation in that island. The statues in which Greek inspiration is recognised have something original which distinguished them at first sight (fig. 210). The physiognomy recalls that forced smile which has been called the Æginetan smile; the heads are freed from those conical head-dresses so dear to oriental art, which Greek art repudiated in order to replace them by a diadem or a high crown; the hair is no longer in ringlets and scarcely forms a row of flat curls to frame the forehead; the play of the drapery is quite different from that which comes from Nineveh, and reveals a good taste which is quite charming. In short, the Cypriote monuments, which correspond to this description, only form a branch of Greek archaic art, and we must no longer treat of them in a book devoted to the East. Let us only cite, as an example, the famous statue of the priest with the dove, which seems to date from the Græco-Persian period. It is a colossal statue 8 ft. high, representing a man holding in his hands a cup and a pigeon. His head-dress consists of a hemispherical cap which terminates in the head of an animal; three tresses of hair, a characteristic sign of Greek archaism, fall symmetrically from the back of his head on the front of each shoulder. The rows of curls in the beard which covers his mouth and chin are visibly imitated from the Assyrian fashion of dressing the hair. The fringes and draperies of the garment still remind us, indeed, as well as the square form of the shoulders and breast, of the statues of Tello; but how much more ample and harmoniously arranged they are! We have here Greek taste still imprisoned in the hieratic formula bequeathed to it by the East.
To the same Græcizing art belong all those iconic statues from the temples of Golgoi and Amathus, which, instead of the peaked cap or of the pshent, wear on their heads garlands of foliage or of narcissus, more or less high and more or less rich, but infinite in their variety. Like the statues found in Phœnicia to which we alluded above, they are portraits of priests, priestesses, or other personages who offer to the god for perpetuity the object which they hold in their hand: a flower, a fruit, a branch, a patera, a pyx, an alabastron, a bull’s head or a pigeon.
Few bas-reliefs have been noticed in Cyprus. However, a colossal statue of Heracles in the Græcizing style, found at Golgoi, had a pedestal decorated with a most remarkable bas-relief, reminding us of those in the Ninevite palaces. The ground is painted red to make the figures stand out; the relief is low and flat, the anatomical details of the figures are carefully studied and exaggerated in the Assyrian manner. The scene represents Heracles driving away the herds of Geryon, a subject which seems to be of Tyrian origin. Heracles, nude, with the lion’s skin on his back, was probably holding his bow, which has disappeared as well as his head; like the giant Izdubar, he is of colossal stature; before him is the dog Orthros, with three heads, already pierced by an arrow shot at him by Heracles; Eurytion flees with his herds; his beard and hair are treated in the Assyrian manner. He carries a whole tree, with which he was no doubt lashing his oxen; this tree is treated like those that figure on the walls of Nineveh.
Certain Cypriote sarcophagi are also decorated with Greek subjects, treated in the oriental manner: the birth of Chrysaor, who issues from the neck of Medusa, for instance, is seen; banqueting scenes and bull or boar hunts are found. A picture represented on the principal side of a sarcophagus from Amathus (fig. 218) is copied in servile fashion from the sculptures of Assyria and Egypt; there are rows of pearls, lotus-flowers and daisies; a climbing plant is even to be remarked here like the sacred tree on the Ninevite bas-reliefs. One of the figures holds the Asiatic umbrella, and the tassels of the horses are Assyrian. However, the figures of the cortège are Greek in style, attitude and costume. On the smaller sides are two oriental subjects: at one end four figures of Astarte in full face, of the type reproduced in profusion in Chaldæa and Phœnicia; at the other four figures of the god Pygmæus, who is made up, as we have seen, of Bes and Izdubar together.
In two words, Cypriote sculpture, fruitful as it is, lacks variety, like Egyptian sculpture and Assyrian sculpture, its two mistresses. It lives only by borrowing, and has invented nothing. What characterises the stone statues which it produced is immobility and hieratic stiffness, together with finish in the details and decoration. They have no features which proceed from a realistic study of nature. It has been remarked that these statues, intended to be set in rows along the inner walls of the temples, are scarcely at all modelled behind, and are flattened as if they had been carved out of slabs of insufficient thickness; moreover, though broad in the chest, they are narrow in the hips and feet; the legs are pressed closely together, so that they have to some degree the appearance of reversed cones. Cypriote art has no originality except in the Hellenic element, which it assimilates; the Cypriote artist is a Greek who has served his apprenticeship among the Orientals.
The triple influence that we have remarked in Phœnician and Cypriote sculpture is observed no less clearly in pottery. In the seventh century Assyria carried on the artistic education of Phœnicia; then it was Egypt till the end of the sixth; finally Greece enters into the lists in her turn, bringing her peculiar genius which, especially in Cyprus, joins hands with its two elder brothers. The Phœnicians, then, learnt first of all from the Assyrians and Egyptians how to model clay, and to fashion of it figures and vases of every form.
In the list of terra-cottas from Phœnicia which depend upon Ninevite art, and which were found at Amrith (Marathus), chariots holding four warriors and drawn by two or four horses hold the first rank. The figures, generally bearded, and wearing the conical cap, present in their features the purest Semitic type, like certain Babylonian terra-cottas; the harness of the horses shows the minute detail of the Ninevite equipages. Besides these chariots, figurines have been obtained from the Phœnician necropoles, which represent Astarte, nude, standing upright, carrying her hand to her breast, or else sitting and clothed in a long robe down to her feet without folds; she often wears a high calathos of Asiatic origin, which has been observed on the head of captives in the Assyrian bas-reliefs.
We know that ceramics was never highly developed in Assyria and Chaldæa; accordingly, as soon as Egyptian influence could show itself in the political sphere in Phœnicia, the pseudo-Egyptian style was not slow to replace the pseudo-Assyrian style in ceramics. The figurines of the new school, fashioned like the preceding ones in orange-red clay, represent women standing or sitting, sometimes suckling a child, holding a fan, a pigeon, or the lunar disk. The Phœnicians even learned from the Egyptians to coat their statuettes with green or blue enamel, analogous to that which is called Egyptian faïence, so that it is sometimes difficult to say whether the enamelled statuettes found in the tombs of Phœnicia are imported from Egypt or are works of native industry. In their course of servile imitation Phœnician craftsmen have reproduced even the hieroglyphic characters, which they distorted because they did not understand the sense of them.
The type most frequently copied by the Phœnicians is the grotesque god Bes or the embryo god Ptah, whom they turned into the god Pygmæus, called Patæcus by Herodotus. This large-headed and bandy-legged dwarf, of repulsive obesity, the type of deformity and ugliness, is met with everywhere in Phœnician pottery.
The pseudo-Hellenic or Græcizing style has furnished numerous terra-cotta monuments in Phœnicia, as is attested by the large head found in the necropolis of Amrith, which is nothing less than part of the lid of a sarcophagus in human form. The head is vulgar, and has neither an Egyptian nor an Assyrian appearance; it was inspired by Greek art, but to some extent followed oriental tradition. Among the Phœnician statuettes which may be referred to Greek archaic art there are figurines of Aphrodite standing upright, clothed in a long tunic, the folds of which the goddess grasps in one hand, while she holds a pigeon in the other. Tresses of hair fall over the breast on each side of the head. On other occasions the costume of these women is composed of a long robe and a mantle fastened by a brooch on the shoulder; they hold their arms close to the sides of the body.
The clay of Cyprus lends itself better than that of Phœnicia to moulding and to baking, therefore in very early times it could be utilised for this purpose; and a considerable number of its productions take us back to a very primitive stage of art. The most ancient of the Cypriote figurines follow oriental and Asiatic traditions. They represent Astarte, the goddess of fecundity; they are modelled with the thumb, with lines traced with a point, and bands of black or red for all their ornament. “The head is almost formless,” says M. Perrot;[95] “a curved, beak-like nose, a pair of large round eyes, and monstrous ears may be distinguished, each of the latter pierced with two holes at the place of attachment of the heavy elaborate earrings worn by Phœnician and Babylonian women. The arms are bent round horizontally, so that the hands lie either on the chest or the stomach.... The extreme width of the hips seems to give a promise of maternity. The scratches on the clay may be meant to represent a loin-cloth. The legs are held tightly closed; they taper rapidly downwards, and end in feet scarcely large enough to give stability.” To the same period belong those vases in the form of animals or human heads, those strange statuettes of foot-soldiers, of riders covered with speckled armour, and of war-chariots, which one might suppose to be modelled by children. Cypriote figurines are so numerous, however, that they can be arranged in a scale so as to mark without gaps the gradual stages in the progress of the art.
In Cyprus the grotesque god Pygmæus, whom we noticed in Phœnicia, is often met with, and he offers the same characteristics here as on the coast. We have always the mixture of the pseudo-Egyptian and pseudo-Assyrian styles combined in different degrees with the archaic Greek style. We will cite, following M. Heuzey, some statuettes of women with their hair dressed in Egyptian fashion, and marked by the gesture of the divine mother, holding her hand to her breast, and by the gesture of the goddess of generation (fig. 227); this last, which reminds us of the Aphrodite of Cnidos, is not found in purely oriental art. Here we catch in the very act the fusion of Asiatic traditions with Hellenic ideas. Such was the skill of Cypriote artists in pottery that they manufactured terra-cotta statues of life-size; in this case they have all the characteristics that we noticed in statuary.
Phœnician vessels carried far away into the whole basin of the Mediterranean the products of Phœnician, Rhodian, and Cypriote pottery. At Corinth, for instance, a small aryballus in the form of a helmeted head, of pseudo-Egyptian style and of Phœnician workmanship, was found. The helmet covers the whole head, except the eyes, nose, and mouth. There is an Egyptian cartouche containing the name of the king Uahabra (Apries), B.C. 599—569.
On the site of Carthage, a large mask in terra-cotta coloured reddish-brown was disinterred, which recalls at once the mask of Amrith and the lids of the Egyptian sarcophagi in human form (fig. 228). The hair is dressed in Egyptian fashion, the ears pierced to receive rings, and the cheeks marked with a groove at the natural limit of the beard. The modelling alone is rather Assyrian, and shows signs of Asiatic softness. In the excavations near the harbours I obtained one of the most remarkable examples of Punic pottery that can be cited (fig. 229). The cheerful smile of this head of Astarte gives it a strong family likeness to the head of Tanit on Carthaginian coins, and even to the archaic heads of Athena on the most ancient tetradrachms of Athens.
The terra-cottas found at Tharras and at Sulci in Sardinia, present the same types and the same hybrid character as those of all Phœnician countries. Even the Chaldæan goddess has been observed among them, nude, in full face, holding her hands to her breast, and sometimes disguised in an Egyptian head-dress; figures of Pygmies, and of Astarte sitting on a throne, holding a pigeon or a lunar disk, have also been found.
Thus, from one end of the Mediterranean to the other, wherever the Phœnicians established their factories, they carried with them their hybrid art, in which the fusion of the elements is not sufficiently marked to prevent those that are borrowed from being recognised. The dissection and analysis of each of the products of Phœnician art, both in the terra-cottas and in sculpture, enable us to restore to Assyria, Egypt, and Greece what belongs to each of them; this work done, nothing is left which is the property of the Phœnicians except the execution.
According to Pliny’s testimony the invention of glass has long been attributed to the Phœnicians. The following is a translation of his account: “In that part of Syria which is called Phœnicia, and which lies next to Judæa, a marsh named Cendevia exists at the foot of Mount Carmel. It is regarded as the source of the river Belus (Nahr-Halu), which, after a course of five miles, falls into the Mediterranean not far from the colony of Ptolemais. The waters of this river flow slowly; they are deep, muddy and unhealthy, but religious rites have made them sacred. The Belus only deposits sand at its mouth; and this sand, formerly unfit for any use, becomes white and pure as soon as the waves of the sea have rolled and washed it. The bank measures at the most five hundred paces, and yet for many centuries this small space has sufficed for the manufacture of glass. It is related that nitre-merchants, alighting on this shore, were about to prepare their meal, when they perceived that there were no stones to support the pots. They ran in all directions without finding any, and then in despair they took the blocks of nitre with which the vessels were laden and made an impromptu furnace. But scarcely was the fire lighted, when the salt melting mixed with the sand, and streams of a transparent liquid, unknown till then, were seen to flow. Such was the origin of glass.”[96]
It is easy enough to recognise the kernel of historical truth contained in the fable echoed by Pliny. The Phœnician merchants having lighted their fire by chance in the cavity of a rock which concentrated the heat, obtained a commencement of vitrification of nitric salt: in this no doubt the invention of the Phœnicians consisted. They had discovered white transparent glass, while before them the Egyptians and the Assyrians only knew an opaque glass produced by the combustion of certain plants.
Opaque glass, or rather glass paste, seems to be of Egyptian origin. The vitreous substance serves as a varnish to terra-cotta from the time of the first dynasty, and it is found thus employed on the posts of the sepulchral door of the step-pyramid at Sakkara. In later times it is applied as a glaze to scarabæi, sepulchral figurines, and paintings. Soon it was perceived that this material had consistency enough to be used by itself: “From that time,” says M. Frœhner, “the manufacture of what we call glass-ware, that is to say, of small ornaments, beads, armlets, and figurines of opaque glass, isochrome, or of several colours, was invented; it did not stop here, and commerce spread its products everywhere.”[97] The invention of glass-blowing soon followed: the oldest coloured glass vase known bears the name of Thothmes III. (Eighteenth Dynasty). White glass appears in Egypt much later; bottles of transparent glass, preserved at the British Museum, are of the Twenty-sixth Dynasty.
In Chaldæa and Assyria, the progress must have been the same as in Egypt; the vitreous substance was employed at first as varnish on bricks, statuettes and vases; then opaque glass and finally transparent glass were arrived at gradually, perhaps under the influence of Egypt. Assyrian objects of vitreous paste, such as rings, necklace-beads, small vases, are not rare in our museums; but transparent white glass seems to have been imported from Phœnicia, and never used to more than a limited extent in Mesopotamia. The celebrated transparent glass vase of Sargon (B.C. 722-705) at the British Museum is well known: in spite of its cuneiform inscription, it is Phœnician in style and matter, so that we are obliged to suppose that it was executed in the workshops of Sidon at the time when Sargon was master of the country. “This vase,” says M. Frœhner, “is the prototype of the unguent-flasks of which we have so many specimens in alabaster (alabastra) of Egyptian and Phœnician manufacture. Very heavy in form, and consequently of a very archaic style, it resembles a purse; its walls are thick, and two square appendages form the handles. The technical process followed in its manufacture is no less primitive, for it was not blown; the workman took a piece of cooled glass; then with a lathe he rounded the body and hollowed out the interior, exactly as if he were working in alabaster. To put it in its true place, we must remember that the Phœnicians were the first to produce white glass of this purity of tone.”
But before chance taught them to utilise the fine sand on the banks of the Belus and to manufacture from it that fine transparent glass so much vaunted by ancient authors, the Phœnicians had borrowed from their neighbours the Egyptians and Assyrians the art of employing vitrifiable matter as enamel. At Rhodes, Salzmann discovered enamelled vases of Phœnician origin; the geographer Scylax informs us, on the other hand, that Phœnician merchants exported objects of vitreous paste, that is to say, amulets and necklace beads, even beyond the pillars of Hercules. The necropoles of Cyprus have furnished some glasses with thick walls, slightly transparent, which were certainly manufactured in the workshops of Tyre or Sidon. M. G. Rey brought from Phœnicia to the Louvre an idol of vitreous paste in the form of a cone placed between two quadrupeds; but the most interesting Phœnician monument in vitreous paste that we can cite is the necklace from Tharras in Sardinia. It is formed of forty beads, two cylinders, four bulls’ heads, and a large grotesque mask of Pygmæus (Louvre).
From the foregoing facts, it results that though the Phœnicians had for many ages a monopoly of the glass-manufacture, they cannot be considered as its inventors. They only made admirable use of the material placed by nature in their hands. The wonderful properties of the sand of the Belus are vaunted not only by Pliny but by Josephus and Tacitus. The glass manufactured by the Phœnicians was purer and clearer than that of Egypt, and consequently more sought after; not only alabastra and amphoriskoi, worthy of mediæval Venetian artists, issued from their workshops, but also false gems of coloured vitreous paste, imitating precious stones so as to be mistaken for them; hence the prosperity and reputation of the manufactures of Tyre and Sidon. Lucian says of the complexion of a beautiful young girl that it is more diaphanous than the glass of Sidon.[98]
This last city was the centre of the Phœnician glass manufacture from the remotest antiquity to the Roman period; but remains of ancient furnaces, glass fragments of various colours, and scoriæ, have been found at Tyre, which attest the existence there also of important glass-works.
A fine glass flask, moulded and decorated with fruit, found at Jerusalem, has been attributed to the age of the independence of Judæa; but it may well be not earlier than the Græco-Roman period, like the ornaments of vitreous paste found in the tombs of the kings by Saulcy. These objects, as well as flakes of greenish glass, found in Palestine, probably came from the workshops of Hebron or Aleppo, which are in activity to the present day, and produce before our eyes vases which imitate the ancient specimens to perfection.
The glass-workers of Tyre and Sidon signed their works at the Græco-Roman period, like their colleagues the potters. Those of Sidon added the name of the workshop to their own; the Greek or Latin stamp placed in relief on the thumb-rest or handles had the double advantage of giving the name of the manufacturer and of presenting a rough surface, which made it easier to hold the vase. The best known of the Sidonian glass-workers, Artas, lived in the first century of our era; the productions of his workshops are found with his mark in all the countries bordering upon the Mediterranean.
One of the most original sides of Phœnician art consists of the manufacture of bronze, silver or gold dishes, on which various subjects in Assyro-Egyptian style are
chiselled, engraved, or even hammered in repoussé. The skill of the Tyrian and Sidonian artists in this branch of art was celebrated from the highest antiquity. Solomon appeals to them for the furniture of Jehovah’s Temple; in Homer, Achilles offers as a prize for the races, in the games organised for the funeral of Patroclus, “a crater of chiselled silver, holding six measures, and without rival on earth for beauty: skilful Sidonian craftsmen made it;” elsewhere the poet speaks of a silver crater, the work of Hephaistos, which a king of Sidon gives to Menelaus. The Phœnician dishes found at Nimroud (fig. 92), in Cyprus, and at some points of the Mediterranean coasts, are specimens of those goldsmiths’ works which astonished Homer’s Greeks. They are pateræ without feet, shallow and hemispherical, such as those seen in the hands of the Assyrians in the bas-reliefs of Nineveh. The figures which decorate them are on the inner surface, and arranged in concentric zones. Engraved or hammered in repoussé, these subjects seem sometimes to represent, not trivial figures nor images of deities, but, on the contrary, genre pictures, and scenes like those in the Egyptian paintings. Thus the subject which decorates the silver-gilt patera (fig. 233) discovered in 1876 at Palestrina, the ancient Præneste, in Latium, has been ingeniously explained by M. Clermont-Ganneau.[99] In the concentric zone bordered by a long serpent a small drama is developed in relief in a series of successive phases; it might be called “A Hunting Day, or Piety Rewarded. An oriental play in two acts and nine tableaux.” We see: (1) the hero leaving his house in his war-chariot; (2) he alights to shoot a deer; (3) capture of the deer; (4) halt in a wood after the hunt; the horses are unharnessed; (5) preparations for the meal, in which the deer is to be eaten; (6) an ape attacks the hero, who, fortunately, is protected by a winged deity; (7) the ape is pursued and thrown down by the horses; (8) the hunter kills the savage beast; (9) triumphal entry into the house. The interpretation would be complete if a mythical name could be given to the hero of the drama.
Hunting scenes of the same kind, but not so easy to explain, decorate a silver dish from Cære in Etruria, of the same manufacture as the pateræ of Phœnicia, or Cyprus. On one of the silver dishes from Dali (Idalion) possessed by the Louvre, there is a lion hunt; on the patera from Amathus there is the siege of a fortress.
The treasury of Curium furnished Cesnola with a large number of these pateræ in silver or electrum, on which appeared engraved subjects of the same inspiration and the same style: figures with four wings, struggling with a lion; Astarte with her hand upon her breast, beside hideous patæci, Isis-Hathor, Egyptian sphinxes and sparrow-hawks; hunts, battles, religious sacrifices. Everywhere on these monuments, which, as the Homeric poems show us, were so greatly sought for by the Greeks of the heroic age, and imported by Sidonian merchants, we find copies of the usual designs on the Egyptian and Assyrian monuments, an unconscious mixture of hybrid scenes, which have nothing original except this quaint amalgam itself, even more striking here than in the other manifestations of Phœnician and Cypriote art. If we had a larger number of these curious dishes, we should find, no doubt, that the motives are little varied, often repeated, even in subjects as interesting as the Hunting Day, and that the effort of imagination here made by the Phœnician artist has been little inventive. Fortunately for the reputation of Phœnician and Cypriote goldsmiths, other monuments show that their metallurgy was not limited to these interesting pateræ. Thus, for instance, Cesnola brought from his excavations in Cyprus a fragment of a large bronze crater, the handles of which are decorated in the most original fashion. We here find lions standing on their hind legs holding œnochoæ, and clothed in fishes’ scales, like the god Anu in Assyro-Chaldæan symbolism.
In Cypriote furniture and ornaments we observe the same characteristics of a hybrid art. There are little silver vases chiselled in the Assyrian style with rare elegance, handles of sceptres, and other precious utensils like those of Nineveh. Certain ornaments, intended for women’s head-dresses, are of exquisite workmanship; so are the ear-rings, the necklaces of gold, gems and glass; with figures of lions, rams, deer, masks with curled beards in the Assyrian fashion, heads of Isis-Hathor and lotus-flowers. Some of these necklaces and bracelets end in lions’ or serpents’ heads, and form models which Greek artists needed only to copy, for they are masterpieces in their kind. We have seen that the Ninevite excavations brought to light ivory tablets carved by Phœnician artists, and imported into Mesopotamia by commerce: plaques of the same style have been obtained from Phœnicia itself: they were ornaments of precious caskets. These products of Phœnician industry were imported into all the coasts of the Mediterranean; and, at Palestrina, in Latium, an ivory tablet was found, on which a vessel manned by rowers is engraved, similar to those in the Egyptian paintings. Ostrich-eggs, found in Etruria, arranged to serve as vases, are adorned with engraved figures, the Phœnician character of which could scarcely be disputed: there are zones of warriors on foot, on horseback, and in their war-chariots; files of animals, fights of lions with bulls in semi-Egyptian style; the frame of these scenes is borrowed from Assyria; the whole is relieved by iridescent colours.[100]
If we had in Phœnicia bas-reliefs like those of Assyria, and paintings like those of Egypt, we should be able to give some account of those brilliant stuffs of dyed purple, described by classical antiquity with so much enthusiasm. It was to the Tyrian god, Melkarth, that tradition assigned the invention of this dye, obtained, as it is well known, from the juice of a marine shell, the murex, which is found especially on the coast of Phœnicia. We can only affirm, according to literary testimony, that the workshops of Tyre and Sidon produced stuffs in abundance, the colour of which, as the ancients remarked, instead of being altered and deteriorated by a bright light, was only rendered more vivid and brilliant by it.
The glyptic art, through the multiplicity of its productions, is one of the principal elements of Phœnician archæology, and teaches us more than the miserable fragments which remain of pottery or sculpture. Here, more clearly than in the other branches of art, we find imitation of Egypt and Assyria taken for granted, as a witness of the poverty of invention of the Phœnician intellect. Two cylinders exist in the De Clercq collection which bear a cuneiform inscription by the side of Egyptian figures. That which we give as an example (fig. 238), after M. Menant,[101] is the seal of “Annipi, son of Addume the Sidonian.” Thus the owner of the cylinder is a Phœnician; he has inscribed his name in Assyrian beside the god Set,[102] Reseph, the warrior god, and Horus with the hawk’s head. The style of the inscription, like that of the figures, betrays, however, the unskilful hand of the Sidonian imitator.