Page:History of Art in Phœnicia and Its Dependencies Vol 1.djvu/22

 2 HISTORY 01 ART IN PIKKNRIA AND ITS DEPENDENCIES. to fix the attention of so many half barbarous races ? Was it by their original inventors that they were carried so far a-field ? No. Neither Egyptians, nor Chaldaeans, nor Assyrians, had occa- sion to hawk their own goods over the basin of the Mediterranean. Egypt, indeed, equipped fleets and carried on a maritime commerce ; she had none of the dread of salt water that used to be attri- buted to her; but it was upon the Red Sea that she launched her vessels ; it was with the tribes of Arabia and of the Somali coasts that she had direct trade relations. There is nothing to suggest that an Egyptian vessel, either of war or commerce, ever put out from the mouths of the Nile and lost sight of the low shores of the Delta on an adventurous voyage to Cyprus or Crete. As for the Chaldaeans and the Assyrians, they did now and then succeed in embracing the coasts of Syria in their empire, but it was as conquerors only that they appeared in its maritime cities ; they made no attempts to turn them into bases for further conquests ; in modern phraseology, their flag never waved over the waters of the Mediterranean. There must, then, have been middlemen by whom the forms and motives invented in Egypt and Mesopotamia were carried to the foreign races who borrowed and used them : and these o middlemen must, by native faculties, by culture and by geo- graphical position, have been naturally fitted for the task they had to fulfil. Among all those nations of the ancient world who have left a name in history, to which especially must we award the honour of having rendered this great service to civilization ? We must not, of course, forget the claims of the tribes established in Upper Syria and Asia Minor, the Khetas, the Cappadocians, the Phrygians, and Lydians the chain of tribes, in fact, that con- nected the valley of the Euphrates with the shores of the yEgaean Sea. They received with the one hand what they gave with the other. Through them the Greeks of Ionia became possessed of certain myths and forms of worship, of certain processes, types and motives, which we can track across the whole breadth of western Asia. But Egypt could never have won its widespread influence through their means. Land communication remained slow, difficult, and uncertain throughout antiquity. A sandy desert, or a chain of inhospitable mountains inhabited by savages no less inhospitable, was enough to bar all passage to commerce. With the sea it is another matter. It appears to separate