The famous temples of Melkarth at Tyre, and of Astarte at Sidon and at Gebal (Byblos), which excited the admiration of ancient travellers, are no longer known except in memory. The maabed of Amrith alone gives us some idea of their architectural arrangement; they consisted of courts, in the centre of which rose the shrine of the deity built upon a platform. The Phœnician and Canaanitish temple showed therefore a strong resemblance to the temple of Jerusalem and also to the great mosque of Mecca,—the only monument which perpetuates this architectural type among us.
Nothing but a few fragments is now left of the temples built by the Phœnicians in Cyprus. The great prosperity of this island under the Romans and in the middle ages is the direct cause of the destruction of the monuments of an earlier age. The superb cathedrals of Famagusta and Nicosia, the fine churches built under the Lusignan dynasty, the formidable ramparts constructed by the Venetians, rose at the expense of ancient buildings, the materials of which were turned to profit as stone-quarries. The celebrated sanctuary of Astarte at Paphos, for instance, is only known to us by the conventional representation of it upon coins belonging to the Roman period. We are able to distinguish in this figure a court surrounded by a balustrade, and beyond the court a structure which reminds us of the pylons of Egyptian temples: it is a gigantic gate between two towers, provided with a large aperture through which we perceive the sacred stone, flanked by two candelabra; above hover the star and crescent. The roof, on which doves are resting, was supported by columns forming a portico. Tacitus, who relates the visit of Titus to the temple of Paphos, says that the goddess was represented in it under “the form of a circular block, rising in the form of a cone, gradually diminishing from the base to the summit.” This description corresponds with the stone which the medals show us. According to the excavations carried on by P. di Cesnola on the site of the temple, the building was almost 220 ft. long by 164 ft. broad; the peribolus measured 688 ft. by 540 ft.; the principal gate, perhaps that which figures on the coin, had an aperture more than 16 ft. broad.
The temple of Golgoi (Athieno), the ruins of which were disinterred by Cesnola, was a rectangular building constructed of bricks dried in the sun; the substructure alone was of stone. On the north and on the east were doors with wooden frames. Within, wooden pillars, surmounted by stone capitals, supported the roof, formed of pieces of wood placed close together, on which mats and reeds were arranged with a thick layer of beaten earth. The exterior of the temple, coated with white rough-cast, must have been of a most modest appearance. The interior, on the contrary, was laden with the richest ornaments. In the middle of the enclosure a tall cone of grey stone was found, a yard high, which must have been the sacred stone of the goddess, and reminds us of the image at Paphos described by Tacitus. Round the mystic cone, a whole population of stone statues painted in brilliant colours, set in a line along the walls or ranged in files in the centre of the building, formed, as at Tello, the dumb train of worshippers of the goddess. Votive offerings were hung on the walls above a row of bas-reliefs, analogous to those of the Assyrian palaces. Stone lamps in the form of shrines, fastened to the walls, lighted up this curious scene.
In the temple of Curium, Cesnola ascertained the existence of a crypt to which a staircase gave access; it was composed of four subterranean chambers cut in the form of apses in the rock and communicating with one another by doors and a passage. These chambers are about 22½ ft. long on each side, and 13 ft. high; it was here that the famous treasure of Curium was found, consisting of the plate of the temple, and of votive offerings made to the deity.
The recent excavations which we have shortly described, though they have scarcely brought more than substructures to light, yet enable us to describe the Cypriote temples with some exactness. While those of Phœnicia are built on heights, reminding us of the primitive high-places, the sanctuaries of Cyprus are generally in the plain, in the midst of fertile fields, like the temples of Egypt. The shrine of the deity was under the open sky like the Greek temples; around, and at a greater or less distance, rose a gallery covered with a roof supported within by colonnades forming a portico, and without resting upon the wall of enclosure.
A Phœnician inscription of the fourth century before Christ relates the erection of several temples to various deities, notably to the god Sadambaal and to the goddess Astarte in the island of Gaulos (Gozo). The remains of these sanctuaries are still in existence: they are called the Giganteja, or “Giant’s dwelling,” and consist of two neighbouring enclosures not communicating with one another. Constructed of irregular masonry, formed of enormous blocks, they are parallel, and their gates open on the same façade; though one is larger than the other they both follow the same interior arrangement. Each is composed of two oval or elliptical chambers next to one another, and communicating by a narrow passage; the farther chamber contains also a semicircular apse. The great temple is 119 feet long from the entrance to the bottom of the apse; its greatest breadth is 75 feet. The area is uncovered; in one of these enclosures a conical stone has been discovered analogous to those in the temples of Phœnicia and Cyprus.
At Malta, ruins of temples have been discovered constructed on the same principles as the Giganteja of Gozo. The Hagiar Kim, “stones of adoration,” near the village of Casat Crendi, presents identical architectural features, with the enormous blocks of its irregular masonry. The plan, however, is a little more complicated: it is a series of seven ellipsoid chambers built next to one another.
Not a single stone is left above ground of the temples raised by the Phœnicians in Sicily, Sardinia, Spain,
and even Carthage, The famous sanctuary of Astarte, which stood on the scarped peak which overlooks Eryx, in Sicily, has perished; so has the temple of Baal-Hammon at Marsala (Lilybæum) and the Sardo-Phœnician sanctuaries of Baal-Samaim, Astarte, Eshmun, and Baal-Hammon indicated by the Punic inscriptions discovered at Sulci. The temple of Melkarth, at Gades, so much resorted to in the time of Strabo has left no traces. It is in vain that the name of the powerful city of Carthage and of the illustrious men whom she brought forth excite our enthusiastic curiosity; to no purpose has the site upon which she was built become French soil: the Romans respected nothing in the city of their most formidable enemies. The destruction which followed Scipio’s conquest, in the year 146 before our era, was systematic, and extended to the very foundation of the walls. What did escape was altered and transformed for the profit of the Roman colony which rose upon the Punic ruins, and which was itself upon two occasions the object of a savage demolition. There is, therefore, nothing Phœnician to be expected from the archæological excavations at Carthage from the architectural point of view; except mutilated inscriptions, almost all that is discovered is Roman, Christian, or Byzantine. The Chapel of Saint Louis, near which Boulé undertook his excavations, stands on the site of the famous temple of Eshmun in the middle of the acropolis of Byrsa; on the neighbouring hill was the temple of Tanit, whom the Romans called Virgo cœlestis; between Byrsa and the harbour, beside the forum, in the neighbourhood of which I carried on some excavations with M.S. Reinach in 1884, rose the temple of Baal-Hammon. To these topographical indications the memorials of the sanctuaries of Hannibal’s city are limited.
If hardly anything is left of the Phœnician temples on all the shores of the Mediterranean, it must be admitted that the state of the case is almost the same with regard to civil monuments. The position of the formidable ramparts of Tyre, which held conquerors of cities like Sargon, Nebuchadnezzar, and Alexander so long in check, can with difficulty be recognised at a single point: it is probably marked by a submarine wall of enormous blocks, bonded with a concrete in which lime is mixed with crushed bricks; these walls, according to Arrian, were 147 ft. high.
The enclosure of Banias (Balaneum), between Tortosa and Latakieh, is still partly standing; but is it of Phœnician or of Pelasgic origin? It extends to a length of about 1,970 ft.; the wall, pierced by three gates, from 26 ft. to 32½ ft. broad, is built of blocks of grey limestone of irregular form, which are neither trimmed nor cemented. It is from 16 ft. to 26 ft. thick, and, in places, is still as much as 32½ ft. high. Broken lines, recesses and projections seem to announce the approaching appearance of bastions and towers in the art of fortification. The Pelasgic walls of Eubœa, Tiryns and Sipylus present analogous features.
What remains of the substructures of the walls of Aradus, Berytus, and Sidon, indicates the employment of large and fine blocks irregularly laid. In the Carthaginian ramparts of Eryx, in Sicily, the stones bear Phœnician letters which acted as position marks for the masons, but this fortified enclosure does not date from an earlier period than the fourth century, and the Punic architects must have imitated their neighbours the Greeks. The walls of Carthage, which roused the astonishment of the ancients, were from six to seven leagues in circumference; they consisted, at least at certain points, of three concentric walls, arranged in steps in consequence of the declivity of the ground. Nothing is left of them except a sort of talus at intervals, which serves as the boundary of cultivated fields. Constructed of hewn stone, they were, according to the statements of ancient writers, 77 ft. high and 34 ft. thick; the towers were still higher and stronger.
Since temples and ramparts have always been constructed in the most solid form, and that most capable of resisting the attacks of time and of men, if very little of these is left there is a much stronger reason why hardly anything should remain of civil monuments and private houses. In the soft limestone of the Phœnician coast the primitive inhabitants hewed out their dwellings like Troglodytes. In later times, by the aid of civilisation, the tombs alone were opened in the sides of the mountains, and the living cut out enormous blocks of stone with their picks, in which they hewed doors and chambers. At Amrith there is a monolithic house cut in this fashion, which M. Renan considers as the type of the genus. It is 98 ft. square and 71 ft. high; the walls are 2 ft. 7 in. thick; in the interior three chambers are divided by thin partitions contrived during the hollowing of the rock. Sometimes only the lower part of the walls have been hewn in the rock, which thus only forms a monolithic plinth one or several yards high, and completed to the roof by light masonry.
At Cyprus traces of structures which could be attributed to the period of Phœnician dominion are sought in vain. The only monuments which give some idea of the civil architecture of this famous island are models of houses in terra-cotta, found at Dali and preserved at the Louvre (7¾ in. high). The most remarkable of these little buildings has a door guarded by a sphinx. At the two windows appear the heads of women; on each side of the door, columns with capitals in the form of lotus-flowers support a projecting roof. But of what architectural value can such a toy, modelled in so coarse a manner, be?
The poverty of monuments is even more absolute in the case of Carthage and the western basin of the Mediterranean. What travellers who visit the site of the old city admire above everything are the unheard-of efforts made by the ancients to catch the water from the sky and store it in vast covered basins, or else to bring water from springs at great distances. Nowhere throughout the East, where there has always been the greatest anxiety to provide water—not at Jerusalem, where the Siloam aqueduct was tunnelled, nor at Tyre, where the aqueduct was dug which brought the waters of Ras el-Ain into the city—are such grand traces left of the works undertaken with this useful object. Only the gigantic viaduct which goes for several leagues to bring the waters of Mount Zaghouan to Carthage, does not date, as it is at the present day, from an earlier period than the reign of Hadrian; and the same must be said of those immense vaulted cisterns, near Byrsa, in which a whole Arab village lodges at the present day, and in which tourists take drives: it has never been possible to say exactly how much is anterior to the period at which the Roman colony was founded. The Carthaginians, two hundred years before our era, certainly knew the vault and the dome, the natural and primordial elements of oriental architecture, as well as the Romans. The walls, vaults, and domes of the cisterns of Carthage are of a mediocre stone, furnished by the quarries of Zaghouan: small irregular blocks are buried in a very thick mortar of lime, so excellent that it unites with the stone and gives to the whole structure the homogeneous character of one single immense block. The Byzantine ruins which cover the plain of Carthage are built with equally bad materials and an equally good cement.
We must now enquire whether any trace remains of the constructions which the Phœnicians must have
undertaken in order to establish or maintain those ports on the Mediterranean coasts in which their vessels found a sure refuge. These works must have shown the most characteristic side of the art of building among this nation of merchants. However, they have perished almost entirely like the rest, or else they are still buried under the sand. Tyre and Sidon had two harbours, of which only the site is now to be distinguished. The two harbours at Carthage, the commercial harbour and the cothon or military harbour, are still there, but three-quarters of them are covered with sand, and they no longer contain more than a pool of shallow water. Lengthy and costly excavations, of which those undertaken at Utica may give some idea, could alone tell us what they formerly were. At present we can only confirm the exactness of Appian’s description when he says: “The harbours of Carthage were constructed in such a way that ships passed from one into the other; on the side of the sea they had only one entrance, 70 ft. broad, which was closed by iron chains. The first harbour, intended for merchant vessels, was furnished with numerous and various mooring-cables. In the middle of the second there was an island; round this island, as on all the edges of the basin, were large quays. The quays presented a series of docks which could contain a hundred and twenty vessels. Above the docks, storehouses had been constructed for the rigging. Before each dock rose two columns of the Ionic order, which gave to the circuit of the harbour and the island the appearance of a portico. In the island a pavilion had been built for the admiral, from which trumpet-signals sounded, and orders were transmitted by the herald, and in which the admiral kept his look-out. The island was situated near the mouth; its surface had a perceptible elevation above the plane of the water, so that the admiral might see all that passed on the sea without those who were coming from the open being able to distinguish what was being done within the harbour. Even the merchants who found shelter in the first basin could not see the arsenals in the second; a double wall separated them from it, and a special entrance gave them admission into the town without having to pass through the military harbour.” Go at the present day to Carthage, and you will observe with astonishment the modest extent of these two reservoirs, which formed the harbour of the great African city. They are parallel to the sea, from which a narrow strip of land separates them; the admiral’s island is still in the centre of the cothon, which is circular in form, and communicates by a narrow canal with the merchant harbour; the latter forms a large rectangle, and opens into the Mediterranean by a mouth a few yards wide. The Carthaginian vessels were scarcely larger than our fishing-smacks. The jetty which sheltered them on their entrance into the harbour of Carthage has left a trace marked by large blocks, which at certain points reach the level of the sea. The two harbours of Utica were not more spacious: one was only 328 ft. by 108 ft., the other 780 ft. by 327 ft.
Of all the Phœnician towns, that which has preserved the most remarkable remains of its ancient jetty is Thapsus (Dimas), on the eastern coast of Tunis. The mole which, though dilapidated, still rises 8 ft. above the waves, is 850 ft. long, and its breadth is 35 ft. The peculiarity of its construction is that it is pierced by a series of small passages, arranged in three rows: their object was to deaden the violence of the shock of the waves, by allowing them to pass through the openings. Here again it is uncertain whether we are looking at a work exclusively Phœnician, Roman, or Byzantine.
The most important of the monuments discovered in Phœnicia are the tombs. Nearly all are hewn in the rock, and are, as in Judæa and Arabia, great caves in which the sarcophagi of an entire family were deposited. The necropolis of Marath (Amrith), explored by M. Renan, furnished specimens of tombs which seem to be the most ancient, the most spacious, and hewn with the greatest skill. The descent into them is by a shaft, as in Egypt, and notches are cut in the wall of the rock into which the hands and feet must be inserted; but in the more recent tombs a flight of steps is substituted for the shaft. At the bottom a low door is found on two sides, leading into a larger or smaller number of rectangular chambers. These rooms communicate with one another by means of passages in which a few steps are generally found, so that the most distant chambers are at a lower level than the others. Sometimes there are even two stories of chambers; in the partition of rock which forms the intermediate ceiling a shaft is pierced by which they are entered from above. The sarcophagi are ranged round the walls, or placed in niches or cavities for coffins, hollowed out on the sides: once filled, these niches were closed by a large slab, on which an inscription might be written in honour of the dead. The necropoles of Tyre and Adlun present the same types of sepulchral caves.
Now, may we ask, what was the outer aspect of a Phœnician necropolis in which the tombs were thus hidden under the ground? Often, especially when the tombs were those of rich men, a stela or cippus of small size appeared above them, and marked the position of the cave and the opening of the shaft. Tombstones of this kind, either monoliths or constructed of masonry, are scattered over the plain of Amrith; they are called on the spot meghazil (in the singular, mighzal); one of them (fig. 198) is described by M. Renan as “a master-piece of proportion, elegance, and majesty”: it is 32½ ft. high, and consists of a base from which four lions project, two cylindrical drums placed one above the other and decorated with denticulated sculpture, and, finally, a small hemispherical dome carved in the block.
A sepulchral monument at Amrith, the Burj el-Bezzâk, is entirely distinguished from caves and structures of the form which we have just described; it rises above the ground, like an ordinary house, and is built, without mortar, of regular masonry, with blocks 16 ft. long. It terminated formerly in a pyramidal roof, and its full height was 52½ ft. In the interior, there are only two chambers one above the other, each communicating with the outside by a narrow aperture. Round the walls of these chambers there were numerous niches for coffins, separated one from another by partitions.
The necropolis of Sidon, which is more considerable than that of Amrith, presents the same peculiarities: the caves are constructed in the same manner; only at the present day no meghazil are any longer to be seen near the orifice of the shaft. In the poorest caves the corpses were laid upon the ground or deposited in graves; in other sepulchres cavities for coffins are hewn out all round the chambers; in the richest, finally, the bodies were placed in sarcophagi buried in the floor of the chamber. The hypogæa of Gebal differ from the type observed at Sidon, Tyre, and Amrith, by the peculiarity that the descent into them is neither by a shaft nor by a staircase; the aperture is formed in the vertical side of the mountain, and is sometimes surmounted by a pediment and a few decorative mouldings (fig. 203).
Of all the sarcophagi found in the Phœnician necropoles, perhaps not one can be attributed to an earlier date than the reign of Cyrus. The simplest are
large monolithic troughs, provided with a convex or triangular lid. Some of them are decorated with garlands, foliage, and chaplets; the corners of the lid are sometimes provided with acroteria. The only ones which have a real artistic interest are the sarcophagi in the form of human figures, or rather of mummy-cases, the head of the dead person, and sometimes the arms also, being carved in relief on the lid. These sepulchral urns were coloured in imitation of the wooden sarcophagi of the Egyptians, which they copy in their form; while the carved work of the faces shows us that Assyrian influence was dominant in Phœnicia long after the disappearance of Nineveh. The sarcophagi of Tabnit and Eshmunazar, which only date from the year B.C. 350, disclose to us a remarkable peculiarity in the means adopted by the Phœnicians, merchants and navigators before all things, in order to furnish the tombs of their dead with stone coffins. These peculiar monuments, of black amphibolite, issue from the Egyptian quarries of Hammamat near Cosseir, and they originally contained Egyptian mummies. Phœnician sailors stole them or bought them for money; the ashes which they contained were thrown to the four winds, the hieroglyphic inscriptions and the Egyptian scenes, carved or painted upon the plaster which covered the stone, were entirely or partly removed and replaced by the epitaphs of Tabnit and Eshmunazar. A considerable number of Phœnician sarcophagi are thus borrowed coffins, and by no means the work of indigenous artists.
Sarcophagi in the form of the human figure have been discovered in nearly all the countries in which the Phœnicians established their factories, in Cyprus, Sicily, and Malta, and they everywhere present the same characteristics: only the head of the dead man is in relief. At Saïda, a sarcophagus was found in which the arms are carved beside the body; the sleeve of the garment ends above the elbow, and the left hand holds an alabastron. In the museum at Palermo a sarcophagus is preserved which came from Solus, the lid of which has the form of a true reclining statue like a mediæval tomb: it is a woman clothed in a long peplos over a short tunic, the sleeves of which end at the shoulder; the left hand also holds a vase for perfume.[91] Besides stone sarcophagi, leaden and terra-cotta troughs have been found in the necropoles of the Syrian coast, and also coffins of cedar-wood, decorated with metal ornaments, generally bronze lions’ heads.
The sepulchral chambers of Phœnicia contain mortuary furniture not without interest. It consists of alabastra of glass, terra-cotta and alabaster, standing against the wall; and of idols in terra-cotta, representing Baal-Hammon sitting between two rams, the god Bes, of Egyptian origin, the god Pygmæus, Astarte sitting or standing with a dove in her hand, and, lastly, terra-cotta chariots holding one or two figures, with two or four horses harnessed to them. Besides these objects of Phœnician manufacture, amulets and statuettes, imported from Egypt, are found. The body of the deceased was enveloped in bands; the mouth and eyes were often covered with gold leaf, and rich men often placed a complete mask, formed of gold leaf, in which all the features of the face are marked: it is thus seen to what an extent Egyptian habits were implanted in Phœnicia. Lamps, amphoræ, amulets and ornaments are also found in the tombs of the Syrian coast. Women were buried with their necklaces, their rings, their bracelets, their ear-rings, their metal mirror, their pyxes for cosmetics and perfumes, and their toilet articles. Rings, provided with engraved stones which served as seals, are also found; nowhere, except in Cyprus, have weapons been discovered in the tombs of this nation of merchants.
In the Cypriote necropolis at Dali (Idalion) there are often at the side of the corpses pieces of pottery with geometrical decorations, bronze weapons, gold ornaments, metal dishes with figures engraved on the inner side, statuettes of Astarte, of warriors, of chariots and of riders similar to those on the Phœnician coast.
Among the tombs at Amathus which are Phœnician and date from the fourth century, there are some constructed of fine regular masonry, with a door framed in a fillet, and a flat roof, or one with a double slope like those of our houses. These tombs sometimes contain several chambers, along the walls of which the sarcophagi were set in a row, sometimes in the human form, sometimes with a triangular lid.
The Phoenician tombs found in Malta, in Sicily and in Sardinia, present the same arrangement as those on the coasts of Syria and Cyprus: the descent into the cave is by a sunken shaft or by a flight of steps, and the chambers resemble those that we have described. At Caralis and at Tharras pyramidal cippi have been found in situ, above ground, which marked the position of the burial-places, as we have already seen in Phœnicia: in these tombs the furniture is imported from Egypt, Etruria and Asia.
The necropolis of Mehdia, on the eastern coast of Tunis, contains tombs, the descent into which is by shafts as at Aradus. The tombs of Thina (Thenæ) near Sfax, those of Carthage on the hill near the town called Jebel Kawi, have all been violated in antiquity or by the Arabs. Constructed on an uniform plan, they consist of a rectangular chamber, the descent into which is by a flight of steps. All round this room, the orifices of the coffin-niches are seen like the mouths of ovens. The staircase may have as many as ten steps; the chamber is 6½ ft. high, from 19½ ft. to 21 ft. long, and 9½ ft. broad. The walls are coated with a white stucco which sometimes was adorned with figures in relief; the fragmentary subjects which I was able to detect seemed to me to be Greek and perhaps Roman in style.
To sum up, the Phœnician tomb represented only two types: the erect tomb above ground, and the subterranean tomb. The first was monolithic, or built like a house; the second was either on a level with its entrance in the side of the rock, or else it was reached from above by means of a shaft or a staircase. Both contained a greater or smaller number of chambers according to the number of corpses to be buried in it. These bodies were, save in rare exceptions, placed in sarcophagi sometimes deposited in cavities contrived in the wall of the chamber, sometimes in ditches hewn out in the floor, sometimes simply deposited along the walls. The mortuary furniture varied according to the wealth of the families; it included, together with amulets and figures of deities, all the toilet articles and ornaments used by the deceased during his earthly existence.
Phœnicia, it must not be forgotten, was by turns subjected to the yoke of the Egyptians and Assyrians, who introduced into it, with their garrisons, their art, their customs, their industries and all that characterised the peculiar genius of their civilisation. The conquerors were the masters of the Phœnician artists, and the few objects which came from the hands of the latter were inspired by Egypt or Assyria; it is only from the time of Alexander that a third element, Greek art, begins to reveal its action in Syria.
The field of study offered by Phœnician sculpture is remarkably limited: it consists of the bas-reliefs of certain sarcophagi, of votive stelæ and of meagre fragments of stone statues. The sarcophagi in human form, of which we have already spoken, though not of an earlier date than the Hellenic epoch, show us very clearly the Egyptian and Assyrian influences at work in Syria. If the form of the troughs is Egyptian, if the finest of them have actually been imported from Egypt, the sculptures with which they are decorated are altogether Assyrian. The symmetrically undulating curls of the beard are like those of the Ninevite colossi; only it is to be observed that the artist can handle his chisel like a Greek. From the time of the Seleucids, the physiognomy of these heads which stand out in high relief on the lid of the sepulchral trough, grows more and more Hellenic, and is modified in accordance with Greek models; so that if a chronological classification of all these monuments is undertaken, the most ancient would be those in which Egyptian and Assyrian influence is most marked; the most recent are those in which the Greek style finally prevailed.
In the rare fragments of buildings anterior to the Macedonian epoch, observed in Phœnicia, the elements of decorative sculpture are borrowed from Egypt and Assyria: nowhere has an original motive of indigenous inspiration been found. The gate of a structure described by M. Renan at Umm el-Awamid has a lintel on which two small figures of Egyptian appearance are sculptured in adoration before the winged disk supported by uræi.[92] The Phœnicians imported this solar globe, even more ancient in Egypt than in Assyria, into every coast. It is found in Cyprus, Malta, Sardinia and Carthage, where it is carved on the votive stelæ of Tanit and Baal-Hammon. The sphinx is also one of the principal elements of Phœnician sculptures: not only its form, but even its posture, is copied from the sphinxes of the Egyptian temples; it reclines on a pedestal, and has upon its head the pshent and the uræus; but it has more than the Pharaonic sphinx—namely, wings borrowed from the Assyrian and Persian genii. Other fragments of architecture show us the motives of their decoration,—rosettes, palmettes, guilloches and denticulated designs of Assyria.
Astarte, on the stela of the king of Gebal, Jehaw-melek, has the costume, attitude, and attributes of the Egyptian Isis, while the king, standing before her, resembles the Ninevite monarchs in adoration before their favourite deities, or Darius and Xerxes on the bas-reliefs of Persepolis. A stela at Amrith represents a deity standing on a lion, an Assyrian subject already reproduced in Hittite bas-reliefs; a still greater similarity is seen in the lion’s cub held by the figure as by the hero Izdubar, and the energetic modelling of his limbs bears witness that the artist was educated at the school of Nineveh. And yet the god’s head-dress, and the winged disk placed above his head, are Egyptian in form.[93]
The study of sculpture in the round leads to the same conclusions. The Phœnician patœci, images of the god Pumai (a word from which Pygmy and Pygmalion are derived), were only copies of the Egyptian gods Bes or the embryo Ptah: this type of ugliness united to strength was carved in wood at the bows of the ships, in order to terrify the enemy. While statues found in Phœnicia are clothed with the Egyptian shenti, lions forming the doorposts at Umm el-Awamid are only half sculptured in the round: the head, fore-quarters and front paws are the only parts carved. Nothing could more directly recall the lions of the Assyrian palaces.
If the Chaldæans, as early as the time of Gudea, were accustomed to erect in their temples statues of kings, of pontiffs, or even of private individuals, whose image thus remained always present before the eyes of the deity, the Phœnicians took care not to renounce this habit. M. Renan relates that in an underground chamber near the maabed of Amrith a considerable number of fragments of white limestone statues was discovered; they were also found at Cyprus (fig. 210). These statues are iconic in character; they are portraits of the “masters of the sacrifices,” as the Phœnician texts call the devotees who had themselves represented in the very act of accomplishing their vows, in order that the deity might not forget them. The archaic statues lately found on the Acropolis at Athens seem also to have, if not the same iconic character, at any rate the same symbolic meaning.
Carthage, which was a city of warriors as well as of merchants, had despoiled all the towns that she had conquered of their artistic wealth, in order to adorn her temples and palaces. This systematic depredation was so great a scandal in antiquity that when Scipio took possession of Rome’s haughty rival, he invited the inhabitants of the Sicilian towns to come and point out their artistic property, and resume their ownership of it; all that was not reclaimed was carried away to Rome, and a nation of statues was seen passing along in procession behind the triumphal car. Besides these Græco-Roman works, the fruit of pillage, which adorned the public places of Carthage, there were those which were the work of the Greek artists whom Carthage was pleased to summon to her bosom; there were also those of Carthaginian craftsmen educated at the school of the Greeks: these last alone interest us here, and the scanty specimens which exist of them confirm us in the opinion that the Carthaginians were not more artistic than the Phœnicians.
These monuments consist almost exclusively of votive stelæ anterior to the taking of Carthage by the Romans in B.C. 146. These boundary stones, from 11¾ in. to 19½ in. long by about 5¾ in. broad, were intended to be fixed in the ground, and therefore the lower part is still in the rough; the upper part, trimmed on its four sides, is particularly well smoothed on one of its larger faces; on this side alone is found a votive inscription addressed to the goddess Tanit, the Punic Astarte, and to Baal-Hammon. Above the inscription various symbols are represented in engraved lines, rarely in relief. The stela terminates in an imitation of a gabled roof, often provided with two acroteria. The decoration of these Punic stelæ is, however, still Greek, as is proved by the design of the acroteria, ovals, triglyphs, volutes, pediments, and even Ionic columns which figure in it. The symbols, carved in the most barbarous fashion by workmen who could not claim the title of artists, are borrowed from the Punic religion and from the fauna and flora of Africa. The commonest is the open hand, raised towards the sky and generally set at the point of the gable; the Arab still paints it in black on the white lime with which he plasters his house: it averts the evil eye. We find also the Egyptian uræus; the solar disk with the crescent, a symbol of Tanit; the ram, the symbol of Baal-Hammon; the caduceus, the horse, the elephant, the bull, the rabbit, fish, the palm, the rudder, the anchor, the hatchet, the lotus-flower, vases of various shapes, ships and fruit. We also meet with the Divine Mother holding her child in her arms; a young child standing or crouching with an apple in its hand; or a funeral banquet, as on Greek stelæ.
The great female deity of the Carthaginian Pantheon, Tanit, is found not only under the form of a human figure, but very often under that of a symbol difficult to describe. It is a sort of triangular mannikin (fig. 212), the traditional and degenerate representation of a sacred stone; this triangle is furnished with protuberances in its upper part, and resembles to some extent a man clothed in a long robe, who straddles his legs and raises his outstretched arms to heaven: this sacred cone with arms corresponds well enough to the description by Tacitus of the Paphian Aphrodite. The supreme Trinity, consisting of Baal-Hammon, Tanit and Eshmun, is also frequently symbolised by three cippi of unequal height, placed side by side, and joined on a common base. This symbol is also represented on the stelæ at Hadrumetum and Lilybæum; the cippi are broader at the base than at the summit, and the middle one is surmounted by the solar disk and the reversed crescent. Sometimes a fire-altar served by a pontiff burns at the feet of this symbolical figure (fig. 212).