Page:History of Art in Phœnicia and Its Dependencies Vol 2.djvu/104

 82 HISTORY OF ART IN PHOENICIA AND ITS DEPENDENCIES. suggested to us by our study of the marble anthropoid sarcophagi ; in most of those the style of execution seemed to us to be derived from that of the yEgina pediments. We may say as much of the female mask which once formed part of a terra-cotta sarcophagus (Vol. I. Fig. 130). It is made of the same earth as the statuettes, but is less ancient. The figurines date from the beginning of the sixth century, and show that the products of Greek art, or at least pasticcios upon them, were then beginning to compete successfully with those of schools inspired by Egypt and Assyria. It might be objected to the theory we have adopted, that the habits of the Phoenicians would be broken in upon and their ideas upset by this wholesale borrowing of types created by a foreign race. Such an objection would be ill-founded. " When they imported the statues of Greek goddesses, and reproduced them in their own workshops, the Phoenicians never hesitated to identify them with their own national deities. Both peoples had been long accustomed to such interchanges, which were caused sometimes by superficial similarities, but not seldom by real historical affinities. Not a few of these little idols were Oriental in origin, and had only half lost their Eastern character, so that they easily found their places in Asiatic shrines. Heracles was identified with Melkart, Aphrodite with Astarte and also with Baaltis, who, by her con- nection with Adonis had contributed to endow Aphrodite with the funerary rdle she plays in the sepulchral terra cottas. The antique polytheism had a common basis, and the beliefs which sprang out of it were wide enough and vague enough to lend themselves to all kinds of comparisons and exchanges, which were, indeed among the commonplaces of the international life of the time." * In the sequel of this history, readers will find the proofs we cannot offer them here. When we come to study the oldest Greek statuettes, and especially those of Rhodes, we shall recognize an original art which even while developing itself in an atmosphere strongly impregnated with Oriental tradition, had its own way, and that a new and very personal way, of looking at and interpreting nature. The observations to which such an examination will lead, may perhaps, have the result of making us accept as proved an assertion which as yet only presents itself as a likely hypothesis. Its plausibility is already increased, however, by the induction to which an attentive reader must have been brought by the facts 1 HEUZEY, Catalogue, p. 90.