Page:A History of Art in Ancient Egypt Vol 2.djvu/436

 400 A History of Art in Ancient Egypt. He brought back the phinder of his successful combats to the crowded cities of his own country, with their countless monuments and their memories of a glorious past ; he could enjoy life only where the tombs of his ancestors and his own happy dwelling marked the spot where he should repose when that life had ceased. By taste, then, the Egyptian was no traveller. But in time the men of other nations came to seek him ; they came to buy from him the countless wonders which had been created by his skilful and patient industry. The Phoenician, especially after the begin- ning of the eighteenth dynasty, took upon himself the useful office of middle-man ; in later days, under the Psemetheks and their successors, the Greek came to dispute that office with him. Like the Portuguese and the Dutch in China and Japan, first the Phoenicians and afterwards the lonians had their factories at Memphis and in the cities of the Delta. Thanks to these adroit and enterprising middle-men, Egypt had a large foreign trade without either ships, sailors, or merchant-adventurers. Upon this point much valuable information has been obtained from the texts, but the discoveries of modern archaeology have been still more efficient in enabling us to form a true and vivid conception of the trade carried on by the inhabitants of the Nile Valley. Ever since attention was first drawn to the wide distribution of such objects, not a year has passed without articles of Egyptian manufacture being discovered at some distant point. Syria and Phoenicia are full of them ; they have been found in Babylonia and in Assyria, upon the coasts of Asia Minor, in Cyprus, in the islands of the Grecian Archipelago, in Greece itself, in Etruria, in Latium, in Corsica and Sardinia, in the neighbourhood of Carthage ; they are, in fact, spread over all Western Asia and the whole basin of the Mediterranean. At the moment when the Phoenicians began to secure the monopoly of this trade the Egyptian workshops had no rivals in the world ; and when, after many centuries, other nations began to pour their manufactures into the same markets, they had long to compete in vain against a prestige which had been built up by ages of good work and well earned notoriety.