Page:History of Art in Phœnicia and Its Dependencies Vol 2.djvu/146

 124 HISTORY OF ART IN PHOENICIA AND ITS DEPENDENCIES. given to the face by the arrangement of the hair. The body is covered only by the schenti about the loins ; one of those wide necklaces worn by the kings and deities of Egypt, 1 lies about the neck, and circles of metal embrace the arms just above the elbow. But the most characteristic and the most purely Egyptian detail of the whole work is the vertical band of stuff which hangs between the limbs and fills up the space between the lateral folds of the schenti. As in the statues of Pharaoh this band is decorated with the regular religious symbols, the two uraei, which are back to back and crowned with the solar disk. 2 Sometimes we find strange motives in this place. Look, for instance, at the statue from Golgos reproduced in Fig. 83. Here the head-dress is of a peculiar form, showing more clearly, perhaps, than anywhere else the desire to imitate the pschent ; but the ornament on the front of the schenti is still more interesting. This consists of an eye, the eye of Osiris, a well-known Egyptian motive, below which appears a head of Medusa with her serpent and pendent tongue, and, lower still, a pair of winged ursei, a motive which only occurs very rarely in Egypt in some of the tomb paintings showing the soul among the terrors of Ament. 3 These ursei are disk-crowned, like those of Egyptian royalty. But the centra] motive of the whole, the Medusa's head, is Greek, for although an oriental origin for the Gorgon myth is suspected by more than one scholar, it has not yet been proved. 4 It is quite necessary that one should dwell to some extent on the motives employed by the Cypriot sculptor for the decoration of this vertical band or apron ; it shows better than anything else how much and in what spirit he borrowed from Egypt. In 1 Art in Ancient Egypt, Vol. I. Plates III. and IV., and Figs. 85, 172, 175, 176, &c. 2 Ibid. Vol. I. Fig. 103. 3 WILKINSON, Manners and Customs of the Ancient Egyptians, vol. ii. pp. 338-339. See, for example, the reproduction of Section K of Chapter 149 of the " Book of the Dead " (Das Todtenbuch der ^Egypttr .... herausgegeben von Lepsius, 4to, Leipsig, 1842), and one of the pictures on the sarcophagus of Seti I. (The alabaster sarcophagus of Oimenephtah I. . . . drawn by J. Bonomi, and described by S. Sharpe ; London, 4to, 1864, plate xi.). In these two monuments the wings are horizontal, but we find them arranged as on the Cypriot fragment in a painting in one of the chambers of Seti's tomb at Thebes (LEPSIUS, Denkmaeler, part iii. plate 134). 4 On this subject M. CLERMONT-GANNEAU has said enough to pique our curiosity but not enough to satisfy it ; he has not yet published his promised solution of the whole question (L'Imagerie Phenicienne, part i. pp. 128-139).