Page:History of Art in Phœnicia and Its Dependencies Vol 2.djvu/110

 88 HISTORY OF ART IN PHOENICIA AND ITS DEPENDENCIES. kinds of trees. 1 Without some precautions of the kind it would have been difficult to insure a supply of the timber necessary for the masting and sparring of ships, for the roofing and flooring of houses ; and Cyprus was famous for her dockyards and for the excellence of the timber she put into her work. 2 When the Ptolemies made such efforts to conquer her and to hold her against the Seleucidae it was because they had need of her forests for the construction of those fleets on which their supremacy in the Levant depended. In later times the Lusignans were great builders ; for more than a century they raised castles and palaces and those Gothic churches whose ruins give a western look to so many Cypriot towns. In all these there were massive timber construc- tions, like those of our middle-age architects, of which the materials must have been grown in Cyprus itself. And the value of these forests was immensely increased by their situation in an island. Difficulties of transport made all antique quarries and timber forests that lay far both from a water way and from any site on which those materials could be employed, of very little use. Ancient Cyprus was famous for its cedars, its cypresses, its walnuts, and its planes. The cedar has disappeared, the cypress is hardly to be met with out of gardens, but both the plane and the walnut still flourish. All those travellers who have visited the island in spring agree in saying that nowhere in the whole basin of the Mediterranean is the ground covered with a more luxuriant growth of shrubs and wild flowers. Violets and anemones, the hyacinth, the narcissus, the crocus, the different kinds of tulip, spring up with a splendour and variety of colour that we westerns can equal only by careful cultivation. Shrubs such as the agnus-castus, the myrtle, the arbutus, and above all, the rose, the blossom born of the soil fertilized by the blood of the Syrian Adonis, also flourish. Aphro- dite carried her favourite flower into her native island, and the roses of Cyprus were renowned throughout all antiquity. Even 1 Mission de Pfienia'e, pp. 259-281. The complete formula is ARBORUM GENERA IV CETERA PRIVATA ; as a rule it is abridged. 2 AMMIANUS MARCELLINUS (xiv. 27), in boasting of the natural wealth of Cyprus, says that a great ship could be built there " from truck to keelson," without going outside the island for any of the necessary materials. Even an abundant supply of tar was to be obtained from its pine forests. According to THEOPHRASTUS (Hist, of Plants, v. 9), the cedars of Cyprus were larger than those of Lebanon.