Page:History of Art in Phœnicia and Its Dependencies Vol 1.djvu/116

 96 HISTORY OK ART i PIKKMCIA AND ITS DEPENDENCIES. those at Tyre and Sklon. It was the same at Carthage. As her commerce and political importance developed, it became more and more necessary that she herself should be in a position to produce the objects with which she trafficked in the markets of the West ; all the industries of the metropolis must in time have been acclimatized within her walls, with their hereditary secrets and their accumulations of motives and models. In most cases we are quite unable to distinguish between a Phoenician vase made in Syria and one turned out from an African workshop. But Carthage is as bare as the Syrian coast of the works of Phoenician architects and artisans. The real Carthage, the Punic city, was twice destroyed by conquerors, who burnt, dismantled, and demolished as soon as the place had fallen, and the ruins they left were finally removed by the rebuilders of a few generations later. Old materials were used again, and their original features destroyed. The few monuments that may have escaped destruction are now buried under such heaps of debris that modern explorers of the site have hardly touched them at any point. It is in Sicily, in Sardinia, and in Italy, that we shall find the products of Carthage, just as we find those of Syria in the islands and on the mainland of Greece. The remains of antiquity are everywhere better preserved in Greece and Italy than in Syria or Africa. Their vast cemeteries have handed down to modern curiosity great collections of sepulchral furniture, in which Phoenician art is largely represented both by works which really belong to it and by the imitations which it provoked. But it may be asked, How do we recognize this art in the absence of examples found in Syria itself, or at least at Carthage, which might give us types of the style and taste of Phoenicia ? To this we answer, in the first place, that such examples are not entirely wanting. Exhausted as it is, the soil of Phoenicia has yielded a certain number of monuments by the careful examination of which we can arrive at certain well defined conclusions. By comparing these one with another, we obtain at least the rough outlines of the formula we seek, and these outlines become clearer in the light of Phoenician history. Phoenicia was the vassal successively of Egypt and Assyria, and in the objects that left her workshops she must have mingled elements taken from both those great civilizations. Phoenicia alone was in a position, by her geographical situation and the part