Page:A History of Art in Ancient Egypt Vol 1.djvu/47

 Syrians and Carthaginians, we can estimate the duration of their stay in each of the countries which they visited, and the amount of influence which they exercised over the various peoples who were tributary to them. Forty years ago this was impossible; the writings of ancient authors were our sole source of knowledge as to the style and taste of Phœnician art, and the ideas which they imparted were of necessity inexact and incomplete. Wherever they passed the Phœnicians left behind them numbers of objects manufactured by them for exportation, and these objects are now eagerly collected, and the marks of the Sidonian and Carthaginian makers examined and classified, and thus we are enabled to recognize and describe the industrial processes and the decorative motives, which were conveyed to the Greeks and to the races of the Italian peninsula by the "watery highway" of the Mediterranean. Fifty years ago the land routes were as little known as those by sea. The roads were undiscovered which traversed the defiles of the Taurus and the high plateaux of Asia Minor, to bring to the Greeks of Ionia and Æolia, those same models, forms, and even ideas, and it was still impossible to indicate their detours, or to count their stages.

Leake had indeed described, as early as 1821, the tombs of the Phrygian kings, one of whom bore that name of Midas to which the Greeks attached so strange a legend; but he had given no drawings of them, and the work of Steuart, which did not appear till 1842, was the first from which any definite knowledge of their appearance could be obtained. Müller knew nothing of the discoveries of Fellows, of Texier, or of Hamilton; while he was dying in Greece, they were exploring a far more difficult and dangerous region. A few years afterwards they drew the attention of European savants to the remains which they had discovered, dotted about over the country which extends from the shores of the Ægean to the furthest depths of Cappadocia, remains which recall, both by their style and by their symbolic devices, the rock sculptures of Upper Assyria. The Lycian remains, which give evidence of a similar inspiration and are now in the British