Page:History of Art in Phœnicia and Its Dependencies Vol 1.djvu/217

 SARCOPHAGI AND SEPULCHRAL EUKMTUKK. 197 coffins ; they were not meant to be seen ; buried in deep and carefully sealed caverns, they served to honour the dead, but inscriptions on them would have been practically useless. The sarcophagus of Esmounazar is an exception to this rule, but then it was not found in a hypoo-eum ; moreover, it had never been painted. Placed in a grave and covered by a pavilion reared against the rocky mass of Mugharet-Abloun, it was almost in the open air, and may even have been visible to the passer-by. 1 Are the heads on these sarcophagi portraits ? or rather, are they meant for portraits ? When the time comes to study the few ex- isting remains of Phoenician sculpture, we shall attempt to answer that question ; at present we must confine ourselves to reminding our readers how many anthropoid sarcophagi were of terra-cotta. This implies a regular trade, an industry, so far at least as it concerns those for which clay supplied the material. In order to bring them within reach of any but the richer classes, the masks with winch they were adorned must have been obtained by the help of moulds which could be used again and again. - But the anthropoid sarcophagi are not the only ones to be found in those rectangular tomb-chambers which come down to us from the time when Phoenicia still preserved all the originality she ever had. They also contained vast troughs of white marble, with lids triangular in section but very flat (Fig. 135). The oldest coffins, those cut from the limestone of the Lebanon, were of this shape ; with the progress of luxury a finer material was brought from abroad, from Paros or some other of the western islands. It was so well chiselled and polished that even in the complete absence of ornament we are impressed by a certain beauty due to the great size of the coffins, to their good proportions, and to the excellence of their workmanship. 1 ' Either for economy or for some reason which escapes us, stone coffins seem at one period to have been superseded by wooden ones. In those forests of Lebanon of which only a few shreds now remain, the Phoenicians had supplies which must have seemed 1 REN AN, Mission, pp. 426, 427. ' 2 Among all the museums of Europe the richest in these anthropoid sarcophagi is that of the Louvre, thanks to the missions of MM. Key and Renan ; but there are also fine examples from the Syrian coast in the British Museum and at Constanti- nople (REINACH, Catalogue du Musee imperial if Antiqitith de Tchinli Kiosk, 1882, No. 21). Those in the museum of New York were found in Cyprus. 3 RENAN, Mission, p. 427.