Page:History of Art in Phœnicia and Its Dependencies Vol 2.djvu/255

 GEMS. 231 With their commerce the Phoenicians could have no difficulty in procuring all these stones. Some would come from Central Asia, by way of Chaldaea ; others from the peninsula of Sinai, by way of Egypt ; and some they would find at their hands, in Palestine. Thus one of their favourite materials, the dark green jasper, is to be found in large blocks in the Djebel-Usdum, on the shores of the Red Sea. 1 We see, then, that Phoenicia had all she wanted for the cultivation of the glyptic art ; she had models, instruments, and materials ; once she had grasped the use of a seal she must have quickly found its advantages, and used it in business both in Syria itself and in her distant colonies. The number of intaglios attributable on one ground or another to the Phoenicians, the Jews, and the Aramceans is very great ; we can here only find room for a few examples, which we have chosen in such a way as to give an idea of the forms they preferred and of the subjects they habitually treated. It appears that the cylinder form of seal did not find favour with them : to obtain a good stamp with it required both practice and an appreciable instant of time ; even in Mesopotamia it was so used in most cases as only to make a partial impression. 2 A practical race like the Phoenicians found it more convenient to use seals by which a complete print could be given by a single instantaneous motion, so that they adopted the scarab and the cone, the former from the Egyptians, the latter from their Asiatic neighbours. We can, then, point to only a very small number of cylinders cut in Phoenicia. Perhaps the most curious of them all are those in the Tyskewitch collection, on which the owners' names are inscribed in cuneiform characters. 3 They are not Assyrian, for tympana and foramina of the prophet are nothing, he says, but the wheels, or drums, of wood or lead on which lapidaries polish their stones, and the drills with which they pierce them. 1 LORTET, La Syrie d'Aujourd'/nii, p. 433. 2 See Art in Chaldcea and Assyria, Vol. II. pp. 254-5. 3 OPPERT, Deux Cylindres pheniciens avec Inscriptions en Caracteres cuneiformes (Comptes Rendus de F Acadhnie des Inscriptions, pp. 180-184). It is a pity that M. Oppert has been satisfied with figuring the inscriptions ; we should have been very grateful for reproductions of the images by which they were accompanied. We have seen these, and their characteristics are entirely those of Phoenician work in which the artist has been inspired by Egyptian models. We are told that these two cylinders were found in Egypt.