Page:History of Art in Phœnicia and Its Dependencies Vol 2.djvu/122

 ioo HISTORY OF ART IN PHOENICIA AND ITS DEPENDENCIES. Cyprus England has no cause to fear the hostility which never slumbered in the Ionian islands until she surrendered them to Greece. This facile and resigned obedience many others have won from the Cypriots besides the Turks and the English. During the eighth and seventh centuries B.C. Cyprus was in a state of more or less complete dependence upon the Ninevite empire. The Greek historians have preserved no record of this subjection ; it was almost beyond their field of sight ; but the Hebrew prophets hint at it, and the fact has been placed beyond dispute by recent discoveries. On the very site of Kition, in 1846, a stele of the local limestone was found on which Sargon is represented. This stele is now in the Berlin Museum. It has, besides the figure alluded to, a cuneiform inscription, in which a king of Kition is mentioned among the six kings of Cyprus who did homage to the king of Nineveh. Inscriptions have been found in Assyria itself which confirm the evidence afforded by this stele. 1 Towards the middle of the sixth century, when Babylon, the heir of Nineveh, was nearing her end, Egypt enjoyed a short and last spell of military power and honour. Apries conquered Syria and defeated Cyprus at sea ; his successor, Amasis, carried the war into the island itself and subdued it ; but the subjection hardly lasted thirty years. 2 A new empire, that of Persia, had just sprung up and already, in the short life of a single man, it had absorbed all those countries which had previously been ruled by the Medes and Babylonians. Under Cambyses, the heir of Cyrus, it had taken Egypt from Psemethek, the son of Amasis. Phoenicia and Cyprus did not wait for the fall of Memphis to throw themselves into the arms of the conqueror ; under Darius they were included in the fifth satrapy, but .even then the Cypriot towns, Phoenician and Greek, were allowed to keep their native kings. 3 1 The Cypriot kings paid tribute to Sargon (SCHRADER, die Sargonstele des Berliner Museums, in the Abhandlungen of the Berlin Academy, 1881), to Esar- haddon (J. MENANT, Annales des Rois d 1 Assyrie, p. 208, Cf. p. 249) and to Assur- banipal (Guide to the Kouyundjik Gallery in the British Museum, p. 158). In the so-called Annals of Esarhaddon ten or twelve kings are mentioned who are apparently Cypriot (HALEVY, Revue des Etudes juives, January March, 1881). In the Assyrian texts the island of Cyprus is called Jatnau, a name which has, so far, not been satisfactorily explained (OPPERT). 2 HERODOTUS, ii. 182. DIODORUS, i. Ixviii. j and 6. 3 Ibid. iii. 19, Cf. 91.