Page:History of Art in Phœnicia and Its Dependencies Vol 2.djvu/223

 ANIMALS. 199 human head was borrowed. 1 We have already found it repeated three times in a small terra-cotta pavilion (Vol. I. Fig. 2o8). 2 Among the Dali terra-cottas in the Louvre there is a woman- headed bird holding a child or a small human figure in its arms. 3 In after years this type was seized upon by the Greeks for their harpies and sirens, but Cypriot sculpture shows a curious variant on the motive which is quite enough to prove its Egyptian origin. "In Egypt this symbolic bird has hands which, as a rule, it holds up to its lips, as if to drink the celestial water poured out by Hathor. Its sex is that of the defunct, its chin being often provided with a pointed beard." 4 Now, in a Cypriot monument we find this same human-headed bird with arms and a square beard (Fig. 134) ; the hands are raised to the mouth, not, however, to FlG. 134. Human-headed bird. Limestone. Greatest length 6J inches. Louvre. direct the life-giving stream into it, but to support the instrument known as the Pan-pipes. With the Greeks the characteristic of a siren is her song ; here, then, the sculptor has wished to figure a siren, but a male one. In his time the sex of the strange being in which a human head is joined to the wings and voice of a bird had 1 Art in Ancient Egypt, Vol. I. Fig. 38. 2 To be quite accurate, only one of these three figures, the one at the door, is so modelled that we can recognize the body and wings of a bird (HEUZEY, Catalogue, p. 155); but although the potter has been less careful to indicate the form in those cases where the heads alone could be seen by the spectator, it by no means follows that he did not have the same notion in his mind. 3 HEUZEY, Catalogue, p. 155. 4 HEUZEY, Sur les origines de Findustrie des terres cuites (paper read at the public session of the Academic des Inscriptions, 17 November, 1882).