Page:History of Art in Phœnicia and Its Dependencies Vol 1.djvu/223

 SARCOPHAGI AND SEPULCHRAL FURNITURE. 203 of its new occupant. 1 We may guess that the evidence thus brought under their eyes of the comparative inability of cedar coffins to resist the climate of these hypogea, determined the Phoenicians to abandon their use and to return to stone sarcophagi, on which, however, they took care to reproduce the ornamental details of the cases in which the great princes of independent Phoenicia had been put to their rest. The Phoenicians did not burn their dead. The few traces of cremation which have been encountered in the cemeteries belong o evidently to the classic decadence. The explorer is soon convinced of this by the shapes and sizes of the graves, coffins, and sarcophagi, which are always governed by the proportions of the intact human body. None of the skeletons discovered, whether whole or in fragments, show any trace of the action of fire. The funerary furniture has exactly the same character as with the Egyptians and Chaldaeans ; as in the tombs of these two peoples the objects of which that garnishing is made up are partly arranged round the walls of the chamber, partly placed on the body itself. Thus we often find set up against the wall those perfume phials which, in most cases, are identical in shape with the Greek alabastron ; '- these are of glass, of terra-cotta, and sometimes, but not often, of oriental alabaster. One of the latter material was brought from Sidon by M. Renan (Fig. 139) ; 3 it is shaped carefully, and highly polished. A few ivory ones, very delicately shaped, have also been found. The presence of these perfume vases in tombs is to be explained by man's natural desire to retard, or at least to hide, the decom- position of the body. Vague hopes and superstitious fears led him to deposit idols and amulets of every kind beside the dead, who were then placed after death under the protection of the gods whom they had adored during life. Mysterious symbols were scattered broadcast over the walls and floors of the tomb, each one of which might attract the attention and wake the sympathy of 1 According to those who explored it, this particular tomb contained nothing but the bronze masks and the ironwork of which we have spoken, but in many chambers in the same neighbourhood the stone coffers, with carved masks and garlands which mark the period of the decadence, were found (Mission de P/icnicie, p. 866.) 2 In a tomb close to the Mugharet-Abloun thirty of these bottles were found ranged against the wall. 3 Mission, p. 432.