Page:History of Art in Phœnicia and Its Dependencies Vol 2.djvu/382

 344 HISTORY OF ART IN PHOENICIA AND ITS DEPENDENCIES. filled with eight horses following each other to our right. Over each horse a bird flies in the same direction. Outside this zone there is an outer and wider one, which is bounded on its external edge by a large snake, whose scaly length describes an almost exact circle, except in the region of the tail, which is slightly waved. This serpent has been compared to the favourite Egyptian and Phoenician symbol for the universe, the /cooyios, which is figured as a snake with its tail in its mouth. 1 The subjects in the outer zone are as remarkable for their execution as for their selection and arrangement. The whole conception is not " a sequence of fantastic subjects, arbitrarily chosen and capriciously grouped ; it is a plastic idyll, a story with a beginning, a middle, and an end " 2 The Phoenician metal worker has made use of a convention common to all epochs, to the middle ages and our own days as well as to classic antiquity ; he has repeated the actors in order to express the idea of succes- sion in their acts. "This first principle established," says M. Clermont-Ganneau, " I easily succeeded in unravelling the sense of the whole picture, although it remained a closed letter to M. Helbig, by whom this little monument was first published. I saw that we had to do with a consecutive story, divided into nine distinct scenes : " i. An armed hero quits his castle or fortified city in the morning ; he goes to hunt, mounted in a chariot driven by a servant ; above his head there is an umbrella, the badge of his high rank and his defence against the mid-day sun ; a quiver hangs on the side of the chariot. 3 "2. Seeing a stag upon a hillock, the hunter alights and leaves his chariot in the charge of the driver ; he advances noiselessly and from behind a tree lets fly an arrow at the quarry. " 3. The stag is struck and the hunter takes possession of him. " 4. After the hunt, a rest. We are in a wood, where palms are mingled with other trees. The horses are unharnessed and graze under the eye of the driver ; the chariot is pushed back, its pole in the air. A repast is prepared, of which the stag will afford 1 MACROBIUS, 1. ix. This symbol is very ancient. It occurs in Egyptian papyri of the Ramessid period (CLERMONT-GANNEAU, L'lmagerie, &c., p. 8, n. i). 2 CLERMONT-GANNEAU, L'Imagerie Pheniaenne, p. x. 3 See also Fig. 252.