Page:History of Art in Phœnicia and Its Dependencies Vol 2.djvu/141

 VARIATIONS OF STYLE AND COSTUME. 119 medium which was to some extent distorting, so that we may readily understand that its influence over the development of Cypriot art was but feeble on the whole. The borrowings of both Cyprus and Phoenicia from Assyria were confined to subordinate details because they received the important parts of their education at another school. They were pupils of Egypt. The earliest exports from Phoenicia were manufactured on lines borrowed from the industries of the Nile valley, and even when the fortunes of war and the passage of time stripped the successors of Rameses of their Syrian provinces to give them to the family of Sargon, the effects of the ancient intimacy did not disappear. And if they persisted in Phoenicia, overrun as it was by the Ninevite armies, still more did they do so in insular Cyprus. Her kings indeed paid tribute to the new masters of Syria ; the stele of Sargon was raised on the beach at Kition ; certain officers of that prince or of his successors may have been stationed for a time in the island ; but no Assyrian army landed on her shores and her commerce with the Delta ports never ceased. We thus get an easy explanation of the fact that even in those figures in which the influence of Asia may be most clearly read, the fine taste of Egypt peeps out in a general breadth of execution, in the treatment of the nude, and even in the form and handling of head-dress and drapery. Moreover, the excavations at Dali and Athieno have yielded many statues in which the imitation of Egypt is quite flagrant. 1 At first sight we are tempted to believe them older than the figures inspired by Assyria, and to ask whether they may not date from the time of the great Theban dynasties, when Egypt had no rival in the East. But closer study does not confirm this first im- pression. Contrary to what we might have expected these figures are, as a rule, more advanced and more refined in style than those belonging to the preceding group. Like all other Cyprian statues they are without inscriptions, so that their workmanship is our only guide to their age. That criterion leads on to the conclusion that they are not so old as the figures described above, and history- enables us to give them an approximate date. 1 STARK was the first to point out these obvious imitations of Egyptian fashions by Cyprian artists ; he also saw clearly that the borrowings in question cannot have taken place earlier than the twenty-sixth dynasty (Archaologischt Zeitung, 1863, pp. 1-12.