Page:History of Art in Phœnicia and Its Dependencies Vol 1.djvu/160

 .[O HISTORY OK AUT IN PihKNKiA AND ITS DEPENDENCIES. The stone was overlaid with panelling of cedar, with brass, silver, and gold. 1 In this work of decoration colour could help, and sometimes, at least, it would give as good a result as a more costly lining. The few fragments we possess from buildings anterior to the Greek conquest have been so hardly treated by man and the weather, that no trace of stucco is now to be found upon them, but the remains of paintings have been encountered upon the walls of rock-cut tombs ; - steles, too, have been found on which the orna- ments, the inscription, and even the portrait of the deceased are carried out in paint. 3 The Phoenician workman must have made good use of the palette and cups we find so often in Egyptian tombs (Fig. 85). The frescoes in the tombs and on the steles belong, it is true, to the Roman period, but while we explain their preservation to our own day by the shorter space of time I-'ic.. S5. Kgyptian palette. Louvre. through which they have existed, we have no reason to suppose that such an obvious device for covering the porous stone walls of a hypogeum had not been used long before. In the two countries with which their intercourse was most intimate and continuous, in Egypt and Mesopotamia, the Phoenicians saw decoration in colour applied to vast surfaces with much taste and art. On those anthropoid sarcophagi which have been found wherever the Phoenicians established themselves, vestiges of paint still exist, some of which were very brilliant at the moment of discovery. The work of the brush is also conspicuous on one of the sepulchral 1 I Kings vi. 15, 16, and iS: "And the cedar of the house within was carved with knops and open flowers; all was cedar; there was no stone seen." 2 REMAN, Mission, pp. 209, 380, 395,408, 510. 3 RLNAN, Mission, pi. xliii., and Ci.KRMOXT-dANNKAr, Steles peintes de Sidon ( Gazette archeologique, 1877, p. 102, and plates 15, 16). The steles described by M. Clermont-Ganneau are now in the Louvre, in the Salic des Jintnres antii/ues.