Page:Early Man in Britain and His Place in the Tertiary Period.djvu/479

] penetrating to the Mediterranean, under Tiglath Pileser I. (B.C. 1130 to 1090). In 866 B.C. the Assyrians conquered Phœnicia, including the great merchant cities of Tyre and Sidon, and subdued their great rival, Egypt, in 672 B.C., under Esar-haddon. Cyprus fell under the arms of Sargon in 710-705. The conquest of Phœnicia and of Egypt constitutes a landmark in the arts of the Mediterranean peoples, since from that time articles of Assyrian design penetrated to Greece and Italy, and took the place before occupied by those of Egypt, and they continued to hold their own until they were displaced by the development of Lykian art in Greece and the Etruskan art, and that of Magna Græcia in Italy. Their distribution was mainly due to the great traders of the Eastern Mediterranean, the Phœnicians.

The limit of the Assyrian influence to the north is marked by the discoveries in the sepulchral tumuli in the valley of the Dnieper at Wasilkow, in the government of Kiew, in which twenty-four gryphons, stamped in thin gold, along with glass beads, copper beads, and various other articles in gold and silver, have been met with. These gryphons probably passed northwards through the hands of the Greek traders of Olbia, along a route (Fig. 168, III.), to be examined presently, reaching from the Black Sea to the amber coast.

The great Semite merchants of the East, the Phœnicians, dwelling on the seaboard of what became ultimately the battle-ground between Egypt and Assyria,