Page:History of Art in Phœnicia and Its Dependencies Vol 2.djvu/358

 328 HISTORY OF ART IN PHOENICIA AND ITS DEPENDENCIES. account of ancient glass to these late pages, because the industry in question was always of extraordinary importance in Phoenicia, where it held its place down to the very end of antiquity, or, to be more exact, down to the middle ages, and even to our own century. Several ancient writers allude to the glass factories on the Syrian coast, and even now the sites of many could be identified without much trouble. Lortet tells us that at Sarepta, among the ruins on the shore, lumps of glass could be picked up in any numbers, fat fiascos of the blowers. 1 There is nothing in this to be surprised at when we remember that glass furnaces flamed on these coasts for five-and-twenty centuries and more. In the twelfth century, A.D., Tyre still had glass works in full activity. 2 Nothing of the kind is to be found in the often-pillaged Sour, nor even in the much more prosperous Saida. 3 But the industry did not perish because it shrank from the exposed cities on the coast ; it migrated to an inland city which was protected from periodical devastation both by its situation and by the sacred character of its shrines. I remember seeing some fine bracelets of blue glass sold in the precincts of the Holy Sepulchre at Jerusalem ; in form and colour some among them reminded me of antique jewels. My curiosity was aroused. I asked where those things were made, and they told me at Hebron, where glass works still existed by which a very large trade was carried on, their manufactures being exported by Arab and Jewish traders, even as far as the Soudan. 4 The character of these objects is always the same ; little vases and other vessels, ear- rings and nose-rings, bracelets, anklets, and armlets, among the last named some whose types have certainly been handed down from a remote antiquity. One is a human eye, the eye of Osiris ; 5 another represents a human hand with two extended fingers ; this is a charm against the evil eye, and is known as the Kef- 1 LORTET, La Syrie Aujourd'hui, p. 113. 2 Voyages de Rabbi-Benjamin, Fils de lona de Tadele, en Europe, en Asie, et en Afrique, depuis VEspagne jusqu'a la Chine, etc., translated by J. P. BARATIER (Amsterdam, 1734, 2 vols. in i, 8vo.), vol. i. p. 72. 3 See PLINY, H. N. xxvi., 191 ; Sidone quondam us qfficinis nobili. 4 M. CLERMONT-GANNEAU, to whom I am indebted for much information on the glass works of Hebron, tells me that Aleppo also profited by the insecurity of the coast towns in the same way. 5 Art in Ancient Egypt, Vol. I. Fig. 103.