Page:Archaeological Journal, Volume 7.djvu/21

Rh behind them. Almost all their art-monuments are of a period later than the seventh century before Christ, or the dawn of Hellenic civilisation, and few have been found in the vicinity of the chief cities of Phœnicia. Their remains are so essentially intermingled with those of other nations, and exhibit such traces of foreign influence, as the extant monuments in Malta, Corfu, Corsica, Sicily, and Etruria, the coins of the south coast of Asia Minor, and Carthage, and Sicily show, that it is almost impossible to point out with certainty any predominant characteristic of Phœnician art. Mechanicians rather than artists; manufacturers of perishable commodities; gain, the principle of their policy and existence; the Phœnicians have not left a ripple on the shore of the history of mankind. It is necessary to bear this in mind, before attempting to pronounce that any monument is of Phœnician art.

The fact of no object that can be satisfactorily identified with the Phoenicians, having been yet found in Britain, and the legitimate doubts as to the direct maritime commerce between Tyre and the coast of the Cassiterides, would create considerable caution in receiving a newly found monument as of Phœnician origin. At the same time, certain peculiarities of type which distinguish Asiatic forms, arts, and religions from the Greek, consisting in the union of human and animal forms, and in the decoration of animal types, occur in the Phœnician cultus, which seems to have been more allied to the Egyptian and Assyrian idolatries than to the Hellenic. The scanty remains of works of art of this people that have reached us, show considerable local peculiarities. At Cyprus, they appear intermediate between the Greek and the Assyrian, proto-Hellenic. On the coinage of the states of Asia Minor, and the islands where the presence of their language and strange forms proves their Semitic origin, the art is almost Greek, scarcely so locally distinct as that of the Etruscans.

In the Sardinian idols and votive figures of the Phœnician gods, the extreme elongation of the figures and rudeness of the art might appear at first oriental peculiarities; but the same is observed in the numerous figures of more unequivocally Greek gods found in the sepulchres of Italy.

Objects, indeed, of a similar nature to the one under consideration, have been found in Sicily. A golden bull in the possession of the Prince Trabbia, was discovered