Page:History of Art in Phœnicia and Its Dependencies Vol 2.djvu/297

 PHOENICIAN CERAMICS. 273 the work must have been done before the verifiable glaze was spread on the clay. " The joints of the helmet are clearly marked by these incised lines ; the movable cheek-pieces are each decorated with a rosette, which seems to be stamped rather than engraved ; on the part covering the back of the neck there are vertical lines, which remind us rather of the plaits of an Egyptian klaft than of any style of or- nament made use of by the Greeks. The band marking the crest is raised in front, somewhat after the same fashion as Pharaoh's asp ; the nose-piece is rudimentary, and at the crown there is an ornament of leaves, deriving from the lotus. With the ex- ception of these mainly decorative points the helmet is identical with a Greek cranos of bronze, of a form intermediary between the ancient casque, the aulopis of the painted aryballoi, and the helmet with salient vizor reproduced in the moulded vessels of the same kind. " We have reserved to the last a detail of ornament which makes this little object one of our rarest and most precious documents for the history of antique art. Upon this Grecian helmet we find on each side of the skull, incised with the same sharp point as the rest of the decoration, a line of hieroglyphs, among which appears a royal oval between two seated griffins. In spite of its careless ex- ecution, this oval has been recognized by competent Egyptologists as that of Ouha-abra, a Saite prince and the Apries of the Greeks, who reigned in Egypt at the commencement of the sixth century (from 599 to 569 B.C.). And this is not the only place where this same oval occurs on small vases of glazed earthenware. It is to be found twice repeated upon an aryballos of the ordinary shape now in the Louvre, which was found at Cameiros and pub- lished by Longperier as a work of Egypto-Phcenician manufacture (plate 5 ; central figure at. the top of the page). The object we are discussing is then all the more rare in that its date is fixed, for at least it cannot be earlier than 599. " The place of its discovery is no less interesting. It was presented to the Louvre by an Athenian dealer in antiquities who said it came from Corinth. This merchant had no dealings with the East, and never suspected that the vase could be of Egyptian or Asiatic manufacture. It is therefore probable that it was found in Greece, and the once intimate relations between Corinth and the East are enough to explain its presence in that city. vor.. TI. N N