Page:History of Art in Phœnicia and Its Dependencies Vol 2.djvu/303

 CERAMICS IN CYPRUS. 270 We have now visited all the coasts of the Mediterranean in our search for the remains of Phoenician pottery, and it cannot be denied that the harvest is small. Two facts, however, have been ascer- tained : in the first place, the Phoenicians learnt the Egyptian secret of enamelled pottery ; in the second, profiting perhaps by examples imported from Mesopotamia, they inaugurated a manu- facture which was never developed in Egypt, namely, that of painted pottery, in which all the decoration was laid on the surface of the clay with a brush. This last-named industry is only known to us in a very small number of examples which can be ascribed to Syria with any certainty ; so far as we can guess from these, the painted vessels were less esteemed than those covered with a vitrified glaze, and the potters by whom they were decorated were therefore content with geometrical lines. We shall find a very different state of affairs in Cyprus, whose ceramic wealth offers a very startling contrast to the poverty of Phoenicia. For in spite of its close connection with Tyre and Sidon, Cyprus was not Phoenicia. No doubt many of the vases found in the graveyards of Kition, Idalion, Golgos and Amathos, may have been the work of Phoenician potters, but the mixture of two races, the Semite and the Greek, seems, as in sculpture, to have given birth to a new art, an art of greater scope in some respect than that of Phoenicia proper, an art in which we can trace a first sketch, as it were, of the qualities by which Greek art was to be so profoundly divided from that of Egypt and Asia. 2. Ceramics in Cyprus. Cyprus is rich in plastic earth ; this is proved by the countless terra-cotta figures found in the tombs. Even now the Cypriot potters send goods to all the ports of Syria and Asia Minor. Some of their models are less elegant and less decorative than they used to be, but others, and especially those of very large size, have changed but little in the course of three thousand years. 1 1 G. COLONNA CECCALDI, Monuments antiques de Chypre, p. 270. We take this piece of information, together with many others, from the materials for a study on the Ceramique de Chypre, left unfinished by its author. We have also made liberal use of MR. A. S. MURRAY'S Appendix to Cesnola's Cyprus, entitled, On the Pottery of Cyprus (pp. 392-412).