Page:History of Art in Phœnicia and Its Dependencies Vol 2.djvu/298

 .274 HISTORY OF ART IN PHOENICIA AND ITS DEPENDENCIES. " Before this strange object can be accounted for we have then to explain away the following difficulties : the vase reproduces a charac- teristic detail of Hellenic armour and belongs to a class all other known examples of which are Greek in origin ; and yet its style is Egyptian and it bears an Egyptian inscription ; again, it comes from Greece no one looking at it could doubt that its style and inscription are Egyptian as a whole, but they are not, perhaps, quite pure. The engraving of the hieroglyphs lacks precision. The engraver seems to have copied them without thoroughly understanding their value. The same apparent inde- cision is to be encountered on a whole class of objects in ivory and metal which are generally looked upon as Phoenician imitations of the Egyptian style. The griffins facing each other and the rosettes on the cheek-pieces belong to Asia rather than to Egypt. Finally, the warrior's face, although with the elongated eyes, the thin, slightly arched nose and the thick lips of an Egyptian, has a rude and truculent expression very uncharacteristic of works from the Nile valley. All these considerations lead us to believe that this vase comes from a Phoenician workshop and is the work of some school or artist by whom the style of Egypt was very closely followed. " l We shall not stop to examine all the hypotheses that may present themselves when we attempt to arrive at the real character of this little monument and to explain the idea by which it was inspired, but perhaps the most likely explanation is as follows : " Both Egyptians and Orientals loved to represent the types and costumes of the foreign and even hostile races with which they came in contact. Heads of negroes and western Asiatics abound upon chairs, upon vases, upon the most varied utensils and even upon sandals. In the seventh and six centuries, at the time of the Saite kings, the expansion of Greece, in the shape of military and other adventurers, over the whole eastern Mediterranean, had assumed the proportions of a great historical movement, of a capital fact in the progress of antique civilization. It was no more than natural that Egypto- Phoenician arts should have reproduced these ' men of bronze ' in the shape in which they terrified all the dwellers on those coasts. And it was by means of such soldiers 1 HEUZEY, Sur un petit vase, pp. 147-151. We have reproduced the whole of this passage in spite of its length, because it is a model of criticism ; it would be impossible to show more clearly how the pasticcios of Phoenicia are to be distin- guished from the genuine works of Egypt or Asia. We may not thus arrive at absolute certainty, but at least we reach a high degree of probability.