Page:History of Art in Phœnicia and Its Dependencies Vol 1.djvu/211

 SARCOPHAGI AND SEPULCHRAL FURNITURE. 191 the influence of Syrian culture seems to have been long pre- dominant. 1 At these places they were of marble, but those discovered in Malta and Gozo were all of terra-cotta.- We have seen that the Phoenicians at home also made use of this material. In Sicily two at least, perhaps three, have been found in the neighbourhood of Solunte, an old Phoenician city on the northern coast, some leagues west of Panormus, the modern Palermo. 3 They are both of marble. The excavations on the site of Carthage have not yet brought any anthropoid sarcophagi to light, and it is thought, therefore, that those of Solunte were carved for Phocni- o ' cian immigrants rather than for the native Punic merchants. Corsica, too, has furnished similar relics. The Phoenicians, so long established in Sardinia and on the Ligurian coast, certainly had naval stations, factories, or at least harbours of refuge and victualling ports, on the shores of the smaller island ; and some of FIG. 131. Comparative sections of. a Phoenician sarcophagus and an Egyptian mummy-case. From Renan. their people must there have died and found their graves. This is proved by the monument noticed by Merimee, in 1840, as a " statue of Appriciani," but of which the true character escaped him. 4 The materials for comparison were then, in fact, beyond his reach. But the conditions were changed when the Louvre was o 1 CESNOLA, Cyprus, p. 53. 2 RENAN, Mission, p. 424. CARUAN.A, Report on t]ie PJuvnidan and Roman Antiquities in the Group of the Islands of Malta (8vo, Malta, 1882), p. 29. One of those here quoted bears a male, the other a female, figure. 3 RENAN, Mission, pp. 405, 406. Of these two sarcophagi one was found in 1695, the other in 1725. It appears from the plates to Orville (Sicula, vol. i., Amsterdam, 1764, p. 42 et set].} that three of these sarcophagi were known in the eighteenth century. Only two are known at present. They are both in the museum at Palermo, and were described by D'ONDES REGGIO in 1864, in the Bullettino della commissione di antichita e di belle arti in Sitilia, p. i, pi. i. Nos. 1-3. As early as 1847 FRANCESCO DI GIOVANNI recognized their Phoenician origin ; his paper is printed at the head of the Bullettitw, before that of d'Ondes Reggio. 4 Notes (Fun Voyage en Corse, p. 53 et seq. The condition of the monument is too bad to warrant the reproduction of Merimee's sketches in these pages.