Page:History of Art in Phœnicia and Its Dependencies Vol 2.djvu/115

 SUMMARY OF THE HISTORY OF CYPRUS. 93 At first the Syrian colonists paid a tribute to the mother country, but as their power increased they threw off the obligation, and that in spite of expeditions sent by the kings of Tyre, by Hiram in the tenth and Elulseus in the eighth century, to compel payment and enforce their sovereignty. 1 The last ties which bound Cyprus to Syria as a subject state were broken by the struggles of the latter against the kings of Assyria and Chaldcea. When money came into general use all the Cyprian kingdoms had their own ; we should mention especially a fine series with Phoenician inscriptions, on which the names of the kings of Kition occur. 2 The close relations which subsisted between Phoenicia and Cyprus down to the time of Alexander are farther proved by the great number of Phoenician inscriptions which have been found, not only at Kition, but at many other points in the eastern part of the island. But just at present the study of Cypriot antiquities is dominated by a recent and very important discovery. A writing of a peculiar type has been encountered, in which elements taken from the cuneiform inscriptions seem to be mingled with letters from the Lycian alphabet (Figs. 71 and 72). For a long time it resisted all attempts at decipherment. Scholars tried to find in it an ancient Cypriot language which must, according to the Orientalists, have been Asiatic in idiom, and the late George Smith, the young scholar whose premature death was such a loss to archaeology, was the first to establish that it was nothing but a rude and that the Periphts must have been edited in its present form about the year 333 (Geographi Greed minores, ed. Didot, vol. i. Prolegomena, p. xliv.). 1 That such expeditions were sent we know from the texts borrowed from Dios and Menander by Josephus, which he transcribes word for word (Apion. L 18 ; Ant. Jud. vni. v. 3 ; ix. xiv. 2). In the two passages which allude to the campaign of Hiram the manuscripts have altered the name of the people from whom Hiram claimed tribute ; in one place they give it as Tirvoi', in another as Iwouot, which correspond to nothing we know. The true form is furnished by a fragment of Menander quoted in a passage referring to Elukeus ; there,'in a passage which seems to be strictly founded upon that in which Hiram is mentioned, we read Km-euoi. 2 DE LUVNES, Numismatique des Satrapies, pp. 82, 83, pi. xiii. and xiv. Six, Du Ciassement des Series Cypriotes, p. 256 (extracted from the Revue numismatique, 3rd and 4th quarters, 1883). Kition and Tyre were sometimes reunited for a moment under the sceptre of a single prince. A piece of gold money, attributed to the last quarter of the fifth century, bears a Phoenician inscription to the following effect : " Of the king of Kition and of Tyre." DE LUYNES, Numismatique des Satrapies, p. 7 2.