Page:History of Art in Phœnicia and Its Dependencies Vol 1.djvu/103

 THE PHOENICIAN WRITING. themselves. The consequences, to which we shall have to draw attention hereafter, may be guessed. When the Phoenicians began to provide the still barbarous Greeks with those models which the latter at once hastened to imitate, they did not put into their hands any of those strange and graceless combinations of human and animal forms of which the dwellers in the Nile valley were so fond ; in the idols they exported no features but those of men and women were to be found ; their execution was awkward and rough, but it had at least the advantage of pointing to the right way, to the only path by which a great art could be reached. Even the brutality with which Syrian art insisted sometimes upon the dis- tinctive features of the sexes had its uses. It excited the curiosity of those who attempted to copy the Phoenician images, and awoke in them the desire to make a close and patient study of the human frame, the most delicate and complex of organic bodies. Thus were they led to understand the difference between the two plans on which Nature has built every living thing, a difference which shrinks almost to effacement in those animals with which the religious o iconography of Egypt was content. As often happens when the pupil is both more intelligent than his master and placed in more favourable conditions, the Greeks learnt many 'things from the Phoenicians that the latter did not know at all or knew but ill. So that, in the statuettes of stone or clay which the Phoenician merchants scattered broadcast over the whole Mediterranean basin, we must recognize the elder sisters, or rather the grand-parents, of those marvellous statues, of those noble and smiling goddesses, before whom the Greeks bent in worship, and before whose fragments we moderns bow in worship too. 4. The Phoenician Writing. In this history of art we have been compelled to reserve an important place for the written character of Egypt and Chaldaea. In the older Mesopotamian monuments the cuneiform characters are such that we can easily carry our thoughts to the time when they were nothing less than pictures ; while the Egyptian hiero- glyphs preserved that character to the end of their days. Some peculiarities of treatment in Egyptian sculpture are even to be