Page:History of Art in Phœnicia and Its Dependencies Vol 1.djvu/113

 GENERAL REMARKS UPON THE STUDY OF PHOENICIAN ART. 93 could not read its words. All he thought about was to cut his texts correctly on the stone. In its writing, as in its colonial system, its art, and its industry, the Phoenician genius thought only of the immediate practical result ; it was essentially utilitarian. 5. General Remarks upon the Study of Phoenician Art. The study of Phoenician art is surrounded by quite peculiar difficulties.. When we had to explain the arts of Egypt, Chaldaea, and Assyria, and to form a judgment on their merits, we had only to transport ourselves in imagination to the valleys of the Nile, the Euphrates, and the Tigris ; it was enough to explore the ruins of their buildings, and to examine the series of remains of every kind which have been collected into public and private museums. Phoenician art is not to be studied under such con- ditions as these. Upon its native soil it has left but feeble traces. Its debris must be sought for from one end of the Mediterranean O to the other. In that great collection of Phoenician texts in which every inscription should at last find a place, there are only nine from the Syrian coast ; ' Athens and the Piraeus have given nearly as many, namely seven ; 2 Cyprus has furnished eighty-six ; 3 Malta and Gozo twelve ; 4 and Sardinia twenty-four. 5 Those from Carthage are counted in thousands. The same observation applies to the remains of Phoenician art ; these are nowhere so uncommon as in Syria. M. Renan, who devoted a whole year to the exploration of Phoenicia, insists upon this curious fact and explains it historically. " The ancient civilization of Phoenicia has been more thoroughly broken up than any other. A reason for this is to be found in the fact that its habitat has always been very thickly peopled. During the Greek, Roman, Byzantine, Crusading, and Mussulman periods, they have never ceased to bufld, to re-work old stones, to beat the great blocks left from ancient days into smaller units. We may say that, for the last fifteen or sixteen centuries, very few 1 Corpus Inscriptionum Semiticarum, pars i. 1-9. 2 Ibid, pars i. 115-121. 3 Ibid. Nos. 10-96. 4 Ibid. Nos. 122-132 (including 122 bis and 123 bis). Ibid. 139-162.