Page:History of Art in Phœnicia and Its Dependencies Vol 1.djvu/161

 DECORATION. 141 steles brought from Cyprus by Cesnola. It once had a band of colour all round it, and this can still be traced across the bottom of the monument. Thanks to the judicious employment of all these subordinate means of adornment, the buildings of Phoenicia, while far inferior in their dimensions to those of Egypt and Mesopotamia, must have had a certain decorative beauty of their own. Herodotus speaks with admiration of the great sanctuary of Tyre, but if he had been an archaeologist he would have been chiefly struck with the fact that all the elements of the decoration he saw about him were already known to him. Neither there nor in any of the buildings to which his Phoenician hosts took him in Syria could he have encountered a form or motive that did not recall some- thing already seen at Memphis and Babylon.