Page:History of Art in Phœnicia and Its Dependencies Vol 2.djvu/102

 8o HISTORY OF ART IN PHCENICIA AND ITS DEPENDENCIES. made no attempt to assign those movements to their proper cen- turies. In such a matter there can be no question of a precise date, but all we know, whether from history or the monuments, goes to prove that Phoenicia did not come under the influence of Assyrian art until the end of the eighth century ; it was in the first half of the seventh century that she really became a province of the Sargonids. It was a little later, towards the end of the same century and in the course of the next, that the style of Egypt recovered its vogue ; our readers will remember what renewed glory the various Pharaohs known as Psammeticus and Amasis threw over the Nile kingdom. Lastly, it was at about the same time, that is from the end of the sixth to the end of the fifth century, that Phoenician modellers set themselves to imitate the types of the new art then springing up in the island of Rhodes and in the Doric and Ionian cities of Asia M inor. 1 1 must not be thought, however, that during any one of these periods Phoenician art was content to draw its inspiration from a single source. In the oldest monuments of lapidary sculpture, on the coast as well as in the interior of Syria, we have found a mixture of Egyptian and Asiatic elements. It was always so down to the final triumph of that Greek art which was to become, under the heirs of Alexander, the art of the whole civilized world. Until this revolution was accomplished the Phoenician artisans remained faith- ful to their eclectic principles ; they took wherever they found them sich types and motives as they thought would please the nations with whom they traded. In the sixth or fifth century, while one workshop was turning out statuettes more or less inspired by Egyptian taste, another would be busy imitating the archaic work of Greece. The statuettes belonging to this latter class are by far the most interesting of them all. " The types comprised in this group are found at many points on the Mediterranean basin, and they are almost identical not only in style and design, but also in make and substance. Strangely enough, however, they are absolutely wanting in Cyprus, even in that great deposit at Kition where figures of the pseudo- Egyptian series were found in such numbers. On the other hand, they are to be frequently met with in the countries which possessed old Greek colonies, and especially in Rhodes, where figures of this kind and vases painted in the local style formed the mass of the booty collected from the graveyard of Cameiros. Specimens of