Page:A History of Art in Ancient Egypt Vol 1.djvu/50

 were much older than the Greeks; why should he have postponed their history to that of the decline and fall of Græco-Roman art? Would it not have been better to put the little he had to tell us in its proper place, at the beginning of his book?

This curious prejudice makes the study of a whole series of important works more difficult and less fruitful. It prevents him from grasping the true origin of many decorative forms which, coming originally from the East, were adopted by the Greeks and carried to perfection by their unerring taste, were perpetuated in classic art, and thence transferred to that of modern times; and this, bad though it is, is not the worst result of Müller's misapprehension. His inversion of the true chronological order makes a violent break in the continuity of the phenomena and obscures their mutual relations. There is no sequence in a story so broken up, falsified, and turned back upon itself. You will there seek in vain for that which we mean to strive after in this present history of antique art—a regular and uninterrupted development, which in spite of a few more or less brusque oscillations and periods of apparent sterility, carried the civilization of the East into the West, setting up as its principal and successive centres, Memphis, Thebes, Babylon, Nineveh, Sidon, Carthage, Miletus and the cities of Ionia, Corinth and Athens, Alexandria, Antioch, Pergamus, and finally Rome, the disciple and heir of Greece.

Ottfried Müller saw clearly enough the long and intimate connection between Greece and Rome, but he did not comprehend—and perhaps in the then state of knowledge it was impossible that he should comprehend—that the bonds were no less close which bound the Hellenic civilization to the far more ancient system which was born upon the banks of the Nile, and crept up the valleys of the Tigris and Euphrates, to spread itself over the plains of Iran on the one hand and of Asia Minor on the other; while the Phœnicians carried it, with the alphabet which they had invented and the forms of their own worship of Astarte, over the whole basin of the Mediterranean. His error lay in his arbitrary isolation of Greece, in dragging her from the soil in which her roots were deeply imbedded, from which she had drawn her first nourishment and the primary elements of that varied and luxuriant vegetation which, in due time, became covered with the fairest hues of art and poetry.