Page:History of Art in Phœnicia and Its Dependencies Vol 1.djvu/240

 22O HISTORY ov ART IN PIKKNICIA AND ITS DEPENDENCIES. was engraved before the vase was fired. 1 Metal cups with figures cut upon them are among those objects whose Phoenician origin is best established. In the oldest of these tombs we find types already encountered in Syria, such as horsemen and chariots in terra-cotta. The naked deity with large hips, in which archaeolo- gists agree to recognize a goddess of generation, is certainly of Chakkean origin, 2 and who but the Phoenicians could have carried her to Cyprus ? The very plan of the tomb is identical with that of some burial-places we have noticed at Amrit, Tyre, and Sidon. Before he knew anything of the discoveries in Cyprus, Gaillardot came to the conclusion that the oldest of the Sidonian tombs were those in which a chamber of moderate size had a ledge across the back of it. On that ledge, or on the floor, the bodies were placed without coffins of any kind.^ None of these primitive tombs were found in a virgin state in Phoenicia itself; they had all been pillaged and used a second time ; but the Cypriot hills had guarded their deposits better than the rocks of the Syrian coast. The necropolis of Alambra furnished the oldest Phoenician sepulchres which have yet been discovered ; we should not be astonished were it proved that they date from the first settlement of Sidonian colonists in the island, before the beginning of the eleventh century B.C. Other parts of the cemetery of Dali, those in which the painted vases and metal cups have been found, must also be very ancient ; on these objects no trace is to be discovered of the influence which Greek art began to exercise over Phoenician industry towards the seventh or sixth century. East and north-east of Dali and nearer to Larnaca lies the village of Athieno, in the neighbourhood of which a fane almost as celebrated as that of Idalion, namely, the temple of Golgos, is supposed to have stood. 4 But whether Golgos was at Athieno . ' CKSNOLA, Cyprus, p. 68 : " Vase with Phoenician inscription burnt in on the clay." 2 History of Art in Chaldiea and Assyria, vol. i. p. 83 and fig. 16, vol. ii. p. 92 and figs. 41, 4 2. 3 REN AN, Mission de PJieniae,^pp. 481 and 483. 4 This site was proposed by M. DE Vooi'E, and accepted by M. KIEPERT for his excellent map of the island (New and Original Map of the Island of Cyprus, to the scale of i 400,000 ; Berlin, 1878, Dietrich Reimer). It has been disputed by M. RICHARD NEUBAUER in a paper entitled : Der angebliche Aphrodite-tempel zu Golgoi und die daselbst gefundenen Inschriften in Kyprischen Schrift (in the Com- mentationes philologies in honorem Theodori Mommseni, i vol. 8vo, p. 173). M. Neubauer attempts to show that Golgos was only a suburb of Paphos, and he supports his idea with texts, some of which appear to deserve serious attention.