Page:History of Art in Phœnicia and Its Dependencies Vol 2.djvu/231

 RELIEFS ON SARCOPHAGI. 207 basins for ablution (ib. Figs. 211 and 2I2). 1 Nothing like the friezes and metropes of Greek temples have been found ; the scene sculptured on the pedestal of a colossal Hercules, remains so far an unique exception (Fig. in). There are of course not a few votive steles ; 2 but in spite of their Cypriot inscriptions they seem to belong to a debased epoch. The influence of Hellenic art is to be traced even in their careless execution. We may say the same of such funerary steles as the excavations have brought to light. 3 Some of these may even date from the Roman Conquest. The only things to which we can point as proving the existence of sculpture in relief, if not before the Cypriot artist had received lessons from those of Greece, at least before they were obliged to abandon the originality of their own school and the Oriental types to which it clung so long, are the few sarcophagi which have been found in the graveyards of Golgos and Amathus. Although broken into many pieces, two of these sarcophagi have been successfully put together ; they demand our close attention both by their subjects and treatment. The older of the two, or at least that which differs most sensibly from the style of classic Greece, is the one from Amathus (Figs. 139 142).* All four faces of this sarcophagus are enframed in a complex ornament in which elements borrowed from Greek architecture are combined with others already encountered in Egypt and Assyria. Thus, in the cornice, and just above a row of oves and another of beads, we find the knop-and-flower ornament of Egypt and Mesopotamia. Above this, again, comes a large torus, like that which occurs at the cornice on nearly every building in the Nile valley. On the two long sides the main relief is bounded at each end by a vertical band of ornament in the shape of a pilaster ; this ornament consists of those palmettes which the Phoenician decorator borrowed from Assyria, and used so frequently (see Vol. I. Figs. 73, 76, 81). On the short sides, which are not the least like each other, there was no room for palmettes and their 1 Many fragments of this kind are brought together in plate xi. of DOELL Die Sammlung Cesnola (figs. 7, 8, and 9). 2 Ibid, plate xi. figs. 1-5. 3 Ibid, plate xii. figs. 1-9. 4 Hardly any of the Amathus sarcophagi had figures upon them. Cesnola points out one, however, also in marble, on which a colossal female head was sculptured. The style was that of archaic Greek sculpture.