Page:History of Art in Phœnicia and Its Dependencies Vol 2.djvu/136

 ii4 HISTORY OF ART IN PHOENICIA AND ITS DEPENDENCIES. black and dark red laid on with the brush. 1 As for the statuettes, they form series in our museums far richer than those from Chaldaea, Assyria, and Phoenicia proper, a difference to be ex- plained by the numerical preponderance of Greeks in the population. A peculiarity which has been noticed before now may, perhaps, be explained by the same cause. It would seem that the Cypriots very seldom made statuettes of glazed earthenware ; only a few things of the kind have been found in the course of the excava- tions. In the Louvre, for instance, there are but three specimens of the art, and they are all three without the distinctive marks of FIG. 76. Terra-cotta galley found at Amathus. New York Museum. a Cypriot origin. We have already described and figured the best of the series (Fig. 3), and expressed our belief in its Phoenician character ; the other two are oriental, and must have come from a Syrian or perhaps an Egyptian workshop. 2 The Greeks seem to 1 Some of these, quite entire and in admirable preservation, are in the possession of M. de Clercq. In the Louvre and the British Museum there are only fragments (HEUZEY, Catalogue, pp. 160-162, Nos. 84-91 of the Cypriot series). Ross saw fragments of these life-size figures when he was at Dali (Reisen, p. 100). M. E. Piot has two fine heads in terra-cotta, life-size, which he bought at Beyrout from M. Peretie, who told him they came from Cyprus. 2 GENERAL DI CESNOLA ascribes alike origin to several very small figures covered with a green glaze which he found in some of the tombs at Amathus (Cyprus, P- 275).