Page:History of Art in Phœnicia and Its Dependencies Vol 2.djvu/354

 326 HISTORY OF ART IN. PHCENICIA AND ITS DEPENDENCIES. manufacture is universal at Kition ; it is even to be found in tombs whose dates, as we know from the Roman lamps and money found in them, are retent enough. 1 5 3. Glass. The trade of the glass worker has close affinities with that of the ceramist ; it is difficult to say under which head such a manu- facture as that of " Egyptian faience " or enamelled earthenware should come (Plates V. and VI.). By the substance of their bodies they belong to ceramics ; by their skins to glassmaking. But the question is of slight importance ; the thing to be remem- bered is that the industry of the enameller implies that of the glassmaker. The ancients ascribed the invention of glass to the Phoenicians. 2 Such an error can be readily explained. During those distant centuries when Greece was still in her infancy all the glass con- sumed in the Mediterranean was purveyed by the Phoenicians. Those to whom it came were in no position to distinguish between merchants and producers. Until the comparatively late day when the Greeks themselves began to frequent the Delta ports they must have believed the Phoenicians to be incomparable artizans who knew how to do everything, who themselves made all the objects of luxury they sold, and especially those things of glass whose lightness, whose variety of form and brilliancy of colour were so delightful to savage or half civilized people. But we must not fall into the same mistake. The real inventors of glass were the Egyptians. Its manufacture dates back as far, perhaps, as the ancient empire. 3 In any case it was in full swing in the time of the first Theban empire, before the Phoenician cities were founded, or, at least, before they had risen to any kind 1 Mittheilungen des Deutschen archceologischen Instituts in A then, 1881, p. 194. 2 This, at least, seems to be the belief of Pliny, when, in the geographical enumeration in his book v., he calls Sidon " artifex vitri Thebarumque Boeotiarum parens." Elsewhere (xxxvi., 190), and without naming the Phoenicians, he recounts the well-known incident according to which the discovery of glass was due to pure accident. But he places the scene of the accident on the Phoenician coast, near Ptolemais, on the banks of the river Belus, the Nahr-Halou. J Traces of its manufacture ought, perhaps, to be recognized in the tomb-paintings on the plateau of Sakkarah (LEPSIUS, Denkmceler, vol. iii., plates xiii. to xlix.).
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