Page:History of Art in Phœnicia and Its Dependencies Vol 1.djvu/114

 94 HISTORY or ART IN PHOENICIA AND ITS DEPENDENCIES. stones have been cut from any quarry in Syria. The old blocks have been made to serve again and again, until nothing of their original physiognomy is left. The Crusades especially were disastrous in this respect. The Templars, the Hospitallers, the whole of the great feudal bodies of Syria, built gigantic walls for their own defence, and as they were good builders and seldom used a stone without having it first re-worked, the evidences of the early civilization were widely obliterated. Hence the archaeo- logical destitution of the coasts of Syria and Cyprus " The situation of Phoenicia has Ind a great deal to do with the destruction of its antiquities. Buildings near the seaboard run a much greater risk of destruction than those hidden away in the interior, especially in a country like Syria, where there were neither roads nor vehicles, and where anything that was too heavy for a camel had to stay where it was. But on the Phut:nician coast a ship could be brought up close to any ancient building and its stones removed with ease. It was thus that the pagan Ephesus (which is distinct from the Christian Ephesus or A'ia- Solo2tk) served as a marble quarry for the builders of Constantinople. The enterprises of Djezzar, of Abdallah Pacha, of the Emir Beschir, and, at an earlier period, those of Fakhreddin, had an analogous effect in Syria. Similar causes have led to the rapid disappearance of Athlith in our own days " In Syria religious reactions were no less fatal to the monuments. Christianity, so tender to antique works in Greece, was a great destroyer in the Lebanon. 1 The natives of the Lebanon, both Mussulman and Christian, are, if I may venture to say so, quite without the sentiment of art ; their feelings cannot be reached by plastic beauty ; their first impulse at the sight of a statue is to break it Finally, the greed of the natives has also been the cause of wide destruction. They have broken up tombs and destroyed inscriptions in their haste to get at the treasures within ; every sepulchre that was not hidden has been broken to pieces. .... Political anarchy and the absence of all public control have contributed to the same result When we reckon up all these conditions, and add to them the zeal of those modern searchers for antique wealth who overrun the whole country, we 1 See the Mission de Phenicic, pp. 220, 287; and M. A.MKDKK THIERRY'S account of the destructive missions of St. John Chrysostom, in the Rente des deux Monties of ist January, 1870, pp. 52 et seg.