Page:History of Art in Phœnicia and Its Dependencies Vol 1.djvu/189

 THE PHOENICIAN TOMB. 169 which now bears the chief inscription the surface is slightly depressed, and Mariette was inclined to think that this gentle hollow occupied the place of a hieroglyphic inscription, which had been effaced by the polisher to make way for a new epitaph. 1 However this may be, whether Esmounazar was content with a ready-made sarcophagus, or whether he commissioned one for himself, the fact remains that Mariette, whose experience in such matters was very great, declared that this coffin could not be older than the time of Psammeticus. He had never found anything of the kind in Upper Egypt ; the quarries from which the rock was taken, those of Hammamat, on the way from Kaneh to Kosseyr, were not opened till towards the end of the twenty-sixth dynasty. It was about the same time that sarcophagi of this pattern first appeared, and under the following dynasties they became more and more common, down even to the period of the Greek conquest. We are thus led to believe that Esmounazar must have reigned towards the beginning of the fourth century B.C., an idea which is in complete harmony with the text of his epitaph. 2 We thus find ourselves brought very near the hour when Greek art was to triumph in Phoenicia as over the rest of the Levant, and yet we find a prince of Sidon turning to Egypt for the couch on which he was to sink into his final sleep. At the end of his elaborate study of the tombs near Sidon, M. Renan confesses that in spite of his own care and the zeal of his devoted and intelligent collaborator, M. Gaillardot, none of the tombs he cleared or objects he found in them belonged, except in a very few instances, to a period anterior to the Assyrian domi- nation, and that most of them dated from the time of the Achae- menids. The cemetery he explored so conscientiously seemed to him very small to have sufficed, during imny centuries, for a town so rich and so thickly peopled as Sidon, and he asks himself whether his successors have not yet to find the necropolis of the early founders of the Phoenician power, of those hardy navigators who were the first to explore the western seas. 3 1 RENAN, Mission, p. 414, No. 3. 2 Corpus Inscriplionum Semiticarum, pars i. p. 20. M. Clermont-Ganneau is ready to believe that the " Master of Kings " mentioned in this inscription he who, in reward for services rendered, gave over Dora and Joppa to Esmounazar was no other than Alexander. In that case the tomb would only date from the last years of the fourth century before our era. 3 RENAN, Mission, pp. 503, 504. VOL. I. Z