Page:History of Art in Phœnicia and Its Dependencies Vol 1.djvu/219

 SARCOPHAGI AND SKPULCIIKAL FUKNITURK. 199 blocks of marble which stand out from most of the anthropoid sarcophagi. The Phoenicians were not content with thus providing for the easy management of these heavy coffins. They decorated them with plaques of metal. At least in the more elaborate examples the rings were placed in the jaws of lions' heads, many of which in bronze more or less oxidized have been found in the Sidonian tombs, 1 These masks, as may be seen from the example in the Louvre which we reproduce, are by no means wanting in character (Fig. 137). We are enabled to restore the whole of these ar- rangements by the help of the sarcophagi of the Greek and Roman period, in which they were imitated in stone (Fig. 138). In these the lions' heads are connected one with another by heavy garlands bound about with ribbons. This ornament may have been founded on reality. The handles of the wooden coffins may have been wreathed by garlands of real leaves and flowers during the funeral ceremonies. 3 We are inclined to believe that the use of these decorated wooden coffins dates from a fairly remote epoch from that of the Persian domination at least. There is, in the first place, the sug- gestive fact that under the Romans and the last of the Seleucicls the type was reproduced in a material different from that first employed ; such transpositions are always an affair of time. The bronze masks were certainly the originals of those carved by the decorators of the stone sarcophagi ; in style they are broader and simpler than the copies, which are always commonplace in exe- cution. When the tomb-chamber from which the best examples of these masks now in the Lquvre were brought was first pene- trated, the four masks it contained were found on the floor, near one wall of the chamber, and laid one within the other ; the rings and nails were lying in an opposite corner. Such an arrangement was certainly not the work of treasure-seekers and tomb-breakers. Wherever these gentry went they left evident traces of the pre- cipitation with which they carried out their work of pillage and 1 The Louvre possesses several of these masks, the fruit of M. Peretie's excava- tions and of those of M. Renan. There are as many in the collection of M. Louis le Clercq, and for every specimen spared by the rust hundreds must have perished. M. Renan tells us that most of the sepulchres of Sidon are very damp (Mission, p. 867). 2 This is an ingenious and probable suggestion of M. GAILLARDOT'S (Mission de Ph'enicie, p. 867).