Page:History of Art in Phœnicia and Its Dependencies Vol 2.djvu/278

 254 HISTORY OF ART IN PHOENICIA AND ITS DEPENDENCIES. this that any of them date back to the ancient empire, or even to the great Theban dynasties. Egyptologists have discovered that even in the Nile valley, and, consequently, among the peoples who copied the Egyptian types, certain ovals were taken up again and repeated many centuries after the kings to whom they had belonged were dead. No doubt their great antiquity gave them a prestige and fascination which brought them into the common repertory of the Egyptian decorator. l But the hieroglyphs were not enough for a varied decoration, and engravers supplemented them with other motives more or less faithfully copied from Egyptian originals. Such for instance is the disk surmounted by an Osiride head-dress, and flanked by two uraei (Fig. 188). In another example we see the winged asp with the disk and crescent on his head (Fig. 189). Sometimes it is a more complicated affair. Here (Fig. 190) we find the oval accompanied by a hawk-headed god with the double crown in FIG. 188. Sardinian scarab. 2 FIG. 189. Sardinian scarab. 3 adoration before an ithyphallic statue. On another the same deity stands sceptre in hand beneath the disk and crescent (Fig. 191). Three dog-headed individuals, a triple Anubis, occupy the lower part of a scarab of glazed faience ; on the upper part appear an 1 See a note contributed by MARIETTE to M. Renan's Mission de Phenicie, p. 854. EBERS expresses the same opinion in the article already quoted. There is nothing surprising in the fact that M. Renan encountered scarabs with the oval of Thothmes III. in Phoenicia (Mission, p. 490) ; it might be thought they were carried thither by the Egyptian armies, but we know that they were the object of a widespread commerce, because they have been found in islands and countries on which no Theban Pharaoh ever set his foot. In Cyprus the names of Mycerinus and Thothmes III. have been found upon these intaglios (A. DI CESNOLA, Salaminia, pp. 137-139), and it was not until the Saite period that the island became connected politically with Egypt. As for Rhodes it was never even menaced by the ambition of Egypt, but even there SALZMANN found in a tomb a scarab inscribed with the oval of Khoufou, the Cheops of the Greeks (Revue archeologique, 1863, vol. viii. p. 2). 2 Bullettino archeologico Sardo, vol. i. p. 120. 3 Ibid,