Page:History of Art in Phœnicia and Its Dependencies Vol 2.djvu/239

 RELIEFS ON SARCOPHAGI. 215 and son. 1 In some Assyrian reliefs mothers are shown thus bearing their children astride upon their shoulders. 2 Whatever the connection may have been between Bes and this sepulchral Astarte it is certain that they are combined both in the earthenware group and on this elaborate sarcophagus, whence we may infer that both were placed in the first line of tomb-deities by the Phoenicians. And all this adds greatly to the interest and importance of the object we are now discussing. In it we see a work carried out under the impulse of Phoenician ideas and traditions by an artist educated in the school of Greece. With the exception of Citium, Amathus retained its western character later and more strongly than any other town in Cyprus, but even there the influence of an art whose supremacy began to be felt as early as the end of the sixth century by every people that came into contact with its fine style and free, frank originality, could not be long withstood. The influence of Greek archaism is still more sensible in the sarcophagus of Athieno (Figs. 143-145) ; and yet it is not of marble, but of the local limestone, while the lions at its four angles are quite in harmony with the Cypriot tradition ; we have already seen them used as a finial to many steles found in the island (Vol. I. Fig. 54, and above, Fig. 131). This motive and the material in which the whole work is carried out are enough to prove its origin. With these exceptions, there is apparently nothing here either Oriental or even purely Cypriot in character. Of the four themes, or pictures, between which the sides of the sarcophagus are divided, there is only one in which an unreal being is introduced, and there we see at a glance that the subject is that murder of Medusa by Perseus, which was sung by the poets and figured by the artists of Greece. The murder is over, and from the Gorgon's bleeding trunk spring Pegasus and Chrysaos ; the victor makes off on the right, the head of his victim slung on a stick. Between Medusa and Perseus there is a dog, who may have occurred in some variant of the legend which has not come down to our times (Fig. I43). 3 1 HEUZEY, Sur quelques Representations du dieu grotesque appele Bes par les Egyptiens (in the Comptes Rendus de V Academic des Inscriptions^ 1879, pp. 140-149). 2 See especially a slab exhibited in the vestibule to the Assyrian Museum at the Louvre. 3 In his rather too subtle and ingenious explanation of the reliefs on this sarco- phagus, CECCALDI will have it that this dog is identical with the Egyptian Anubis