Page:History of Art in Phœnicia and Its Dependencies Vol 2.djvu/301

 PHOENICIAN CERAMICS. 277 zone consists of petals radiating from the neck, the second of the royal ovals of Apries crowned with feathers and flanked by a hawk, an urseus, and a papyrus plant. The lowest zone is decorated with the knop and flower ornament. The whole of this decoration is cut into the paste. The mouth, which is broken, is surrounded by a circle of oves and a palmette in strong relief appears at the bottom of the handle. The duplication of the cartouche^ the absence of royal titles, the very shape of the figures we have just enumerated, all help to dis- courage any notion that this little vase is really of Egyptian origin, but the whole of its ornament is taken from that country, and we can see in it nothing but a Phoenician work of about the end of the sixth century B.C. The same characteristics are to be found in some other vases at the Louvre, where they are exhibited in the same cases as the objects found by Salzmann at Cameiros. 1 On one, shaped like a flattened globe, we find a crouching personage with out- stretched arms and wings. It is a by no means accurate repre- sentation of Khou, a goddess who often occurs on sarcophagi. On the reverse there is a disk-crowned lion's head, perhaps a souvenir of the goddess Pasht. Upon a small cenocho we find two flying birds traced with the point ; they look like an enlarged copy of the figure which represents the sound of p in the Egyptian phonetic alphabet. Another cenochoe has no ornaments but some Assyrian rosettes. Finally, a small vase shaped like a woman's head should be mentioned; the elongated eyes and the method of dressing the hair are both Egyptian. The simplest type of all is that of a spherical alabastron with a blue glaze, where the neck is encircled at its base with radiating leaves. There is another rosette on the bottom, and the whole body is divided into three horizontal zones which are cut up in their turn by vertical grooves. Similarity of process allows us to connect with this series a group of very peculiar vases which as yet have only been found at Cameiros ; we give three examples in our Plate VI. Having no handles, they come into the alabastron class ; some are flat bottomed, others pointed ; they have been compared to some figured at Nineveh and in those Egyptian paintings which represent the Khetas, or inhabitants of Syria, carrying tribute to Thothmes III. 1 DE LoNGpiRiER, Musk Napoleon III. plate xlix. We have borrowed the description just given from the letterpress to this plate.