Page:History of Art in Phœnicia and Its Dependencies Vol 2.djvu/362

 330 HISTORY OF ART IN PHOENICIA AND ITS DEPENDENCIES. they do now. Scientific discoveries were not made every few months, compelling a complete renewal of the plant and change in the. processes of this or that industry every year or two, A single set of formulee, once discovered and established, served for generation after generation ; the son changed nothing in the practice of the father, even to the turn of a hand. We may quote a specimen here and there, which may, as a fact, belong to the time when Greek was spoken at Tyre, but it will none the less be a product of the art whose story we are about to relate. We have put aside, however, as special manufactures, those kinds of glass which began to be produced under the successors of Alexander, and reached their highest development in the time of the Roman empire. We may safely affirm that none of the specimens we reproduce are later than the period when Greek art was still in its infancy, was still under the ascendency of the Asiatic civilization. Most of these types have been found in Rhodes, in the cemetery of Cameiros of this the reader may convince himself by consulting Salzmann's Jotirnal of his Ex- plorations, in the British Museum, and by examining the treasures those excavations yielded. 1 The alabastrons, the amphorae, the little cenochoes, in this series, display almost every variety of form, design, and colour, that we shall have to describe, and these vases were found in sepulchres which, from their other contents, are believed by archaeologists to date from about the eighth or seventh century before our era. The first glass must have been manufactured on or near the coasts of the Egyptian Delta. Potash is to be found more or less in all vegetables, but it is to be extracted in considerable quantities only from marine plants, and it is to a combination of potash, or soda, with flint and chalk that glass is due. For more than fifty years past, soda and potash have been extracted directly from sea salt, 2 but in the East the method practised in the days of the Ousourtesens, perhaps even in those of Cheops, is still employed. On the shores of the Dead Sea the Arthrocnemum fruticosam grows in abundance, and reaches a height of two or three yards. Arabs may often be seen cutting its stems, which they then stack 1 M. Froehner counted sixty-eight Cameiros vases of this character in the British Museum. 1 This invention is due to a Frenchman named Francois Leblanc ; his process has been carried to great perfection in recent years.