Page:History of Art in Phœnicia and Its Dependencies Vol 1.djvu/235

 THE PHCENICIAN TOMB AWAY FROM PHOENICIA. 215 be considered in attempting to make the distinction. In the first place we can only look for Phoenician sepulchres in that part of the island in which the language, religion, and political supremacy of Phoenicia survived to the time of Alexander ; secondly, we shall only accept as Phoenician such tombs as, by their arrange- ment and the objects found in them, recall those we have examined on the Syrian coast, and reveal the nationality of their first proprietors. Kition, on the southern coast, remained a thoroughly Syrian town down to a very late date. This we gather from the numerous Phoenician texts found on its side, or in its immediate neighbourhood. Of these there are not less than seventy-eight, and a certain number are funerary in their character. 1 Think, too, for a moment of what the modern successor of Kition is called; it is called Larnaca, and the most probable derivation of the name is from the Greek apva!;, a box or coffer ; ta larnaca would mean "the sarcophagi " ; and we may suppose that the name was given to the town in the middle ages, from the great number of those stone troughs which lay about its site, and were encountered whenever ground was broken. Almost all these remains have disappeared. Larnaca has never ceased to be what is called an important city in Turkey, that is to say a city with a population to be counted by thousands. Masons and lime-burners have reduced to powder every block of marble or limestone on which they could lay their hands ; and yet the excavations made in the environs of Larnaca have laid bare the Phoenician sepulchres at more than one point. We are told that an anthropoid sarco- phagus was found in one of them, 2 and that the same chamber contained some alabaster vases, upon one of which a short Phoenician inscription was still decipherable (Fig. 147). There were, too, some painted terra-cotta vases, in the decoration of which no motives had been employed but those we have already encountered in Assyria and Phoenicia. 3 But most of the tombs opened at Larnaca belong to the Grceco- Roman period. The richest necropolis in really ancient tombs is that of Idalion, where one of the most famous sanctuaries of that 1 Corpus Inscr. Scmit. part i. Nos. 10-87. 2 CESNOLA, Cyprus, p. 53. 3 For the appearance presented by these chambers see the vignette given by CESNOLA, p. 53.