Page:History of Art in Phœnicia and Its Dependencies Vol 2.djvu/258

 234 HISTORY OF ART IN PHCENICIA AND ITS DEPENDENCIES. cuneiform writing was inconstant use inscriptions in that character would have been less rare. And as for the three in which such legends do occur, must we look upon them as authentic products of an Eastern workshop ? Not being Assyriologists, we cannot decide thequestion, but the only competent scholar who has studied these objects seems to have no doubt upon the point. 1 According to Mr. Sayce two of these cylinders belong by their language and writing to the first Chal- dsean Empire, while the third dates from the Sargonid period ; in the latter he sees one of those seals on which the Babylonian scribes introduced, by a kind of archaic affectation, letters which were no longer in current use. We may ask ourselves, however, whether the last of these three monuments does not admit another explanation. FIG. 151. Cylinder of rock crystal. New York Museum. The cylinder in question is a large one of rock-crystal (Fig. 151). The subject is very simple; it is nothing but a figure dressed like a Chaldsean priest, standing in the attitude of worship. In front of him appears an eight-lined inscription composed of " ill- formed letters; some of them quite undecipherable." These short- comings are difficult to explain, if we admit that the work is Chaldaean, while they are quite natural if we look upon it as a copy made by some Cypriot artist from an old Chaldsean seal. We are the more disposed to accept this conjecture by the presence of a detail yet to be noticed, namely, the pair of winged sphinxes which occupy a compartment just over the priest's head. So far the workman had imitated his foreign model with care, but as the 1 Mr. SAYCE, in his article entitled "The Babylonian Cylinders found by General di Cesnola" (Transactions of the Society of Biblical Arckceology, vol. v. pp. 441-444).