Page:History of Art in Phœnicia and Its Dependencies Vol 2.djvu/118

 96 HISTORY OF ART IN PHOENICIA AND ITS DEPENDENCIES. up a body of historical evidence which has been too much neglected." l From all these accounts it would appear that the Greeks were established in Cyprus a few years after the Trojan war, that is to say, about the twelfth century B.C. At any rate they must have been there at the time the Iliad took the form in which it has been handed down to us. It sends no Cypriot contingent to I lion, but, on the other hand, it was to Stasinos, a Greek of Cyprus, that one of the oldest of the Cyclic poems, the aa-^Ma Kv-rrpiana, was attributed and owed its name. The Greek cities must, then, have been founded between the moment when Homer drew the materials for his poem from the ^Eolian ballads and that in which the activity of Cyclic poets began ; so far as dates can be fixed or even hinted at in such a matter, it would be between the beginning of the tenth century and the end of the ninth that the Greek race, already possessed of Crete, Rhodes, and nearly the whole, coast of Asia Minor, threw itself upon this outpost of Syria. It is certain that the incursion took place before the Hellenic world began to make use of the Cadmean alphabet, that is to say, before it began to note the sound of its own language by letters taken from Phoenicia. If the new colonists had brought this useful instrument into Cyprus with them, we should not have found them employing, down even to the Persian domination, a peculiar system of writing which the syllabic value of the signs and the absence of soft consonants made but ill fitted to their idiom. And where did they get this system of signs, a system com- prising some fifty-five different characters ? When they wanted to write the ^Eolian dialect, which appears to have prevailed in the Greek part of Cyprus, did they adopt characters from the cuneiform syllabaries ? or, as scholars are now inclined to think, did they take them from the Hittites ? This is hardly the place to treat such a delicate question, even cursorily ; no conclusions could be arrived at without the most minute and delicate comparisons, but from certain indications it appears likely that the characters we are discussing were invented in Asia Minor, and used there many centuries before the Phoenician alphabet. Short inscriptions in the character have been found even as far as the Troad, in the ruins of Hissarlik ; and they certainly belong to a much earlier 1 HEUZEV, Catalogue des Figurines, &<:., pp. 113 and 115.