Page:History of Art in Phœnicia and Its Dependencies Vol 2.djvu/170

 148 HISTORY OF ART IN PHOENICIA AND ITS DEPENDENCIES. afterwards to be more clearly made out ; they contain, as it were, the first sketch of types which were to acquire more and more precision as art progressed. Of all these types the most primitive in character is that which embodies the idea of creative nature ; and wherever the human intellect has made an effort to embody that idea in a visible per- sonality it has turned instinctively to the female form ; it is with the body and under the features of woman, the nurse and mother of the generations, that the never failing power which supports and perpetuates life is figured. Thus was created that goddess of Fertility whom we have already encountered, under various names, in Egypt, Chaldsea, Assyria, and Phoenicia, a deity who was in Greece to become the goddess of Beauty. Such a development required plenty of time ; ages elapsed between the earliest terra-cottas found in Cypriot tombs and the appearance of the Greek Aphrodite. Many of the oldest objects of the kind were found in the cemetery of Alambra, a little to the west of Dali. Everything found in this graveyard, whether pots or statuettes, had a peculiar aspect of its own, suggesting an industry still in its childhood and groping towards results. Every collection of Cypriot art can boast examples of the class to which we allude. 1 In other tombs, at different points in the island, similar things have been found, but found in smaller quantities. The figures to which we are now alluding are modelled with the thumb and decorated partly with lines scratched into their substance, partly with coarse daubs of colour. The potter has taken a lump of soft flat clay and shaped it into a rude image of the human body (Fig. 98). 2 The head is almost formless ; a curved, beak-like nose, a pair of large round eyes and monstrous ears may be distinguished, each of the latter pierced with two holes at the place of attachment of the heavy, elaborate earrings worn by Phoenician and Babylonian women. The arms are bent round horizontally, so that the hands lie either on the chest or the stomach (see Vol. I. Fig. i5o). 3 In the example here figured they appear to hold a vase. The extreme width of the hips seems to 1 CESNOLA, Cyprus, ch. iii. FROEHNER, Collection de M. Albert Barre, p. 2. 2 HEUZEY, Catalogue, pp. 136, 146 147. 3 In some of these terra-cottas the breasts are not indicated ; but in that case there is a rude suggestion of a robe, made with the help of colour, which accounts for their absence.