Page:History of Art in Phœnicia and Its Dependencies Vol 2.djvu/397

 METALLURGY. 359 encountered upon other cups, sometimes occupying the place of honour in the centre, sometimes distributed in the concentric circles. The king brandishing his mace over the heads of his foes ; the hawk-headed god blessing his victory ; heroes slaying monsters ; two griffins facing each other from either side of a palmette ; a winged woman, thoroughly Egyptian in style and costume, holding two lotus flowers. Here there is enough apparent variety ; but all these motives are no more than the current patterns of the Phoenician workshop ; the artist seems to have set himself to lavish all his stock upon a single object. But even here, upon the intermediate zone, we find what we are tempted to look upon as a connected scene from pastoral life, copied from nature. The only fictitious being that figures in it is the sphinx, close to which we see two royal car- touches, as if engraved upon a wall. The sphinx may well have been introduced for no deeper reason than to show that the scene is the Nile valley. Horses and bulls feed peaceably side by side ; two bulls fight with each other ; a cow suckles her calf ; but the lion, too, is there to trouble repose. In all this was our artist directly inspired, or did he merely repeat the stock ideas of the workshop ? The latter, evidently ; for even in the comparatively small number of examples we possess, we find all that occurs here repeated again and again, with perhaps, the single exception of the fighting bulls. The group of the cow with her calf, is taken from the art of the Nile valley, as our readers may convince themselves by looking at our Fig. 277, in which a medallion from the centre of a silver bowl found at Caere is reproduced. Here we find the same tender scene going on in a papyrus brake, which is quite enough to betray the Egyptian origin of the motive. Beside these elaborate bowls the workshops of Tyre, of Kition and of Carthage, must have turned out vast numbers of a simpler and cheaper kind. Some of these had no decoration but papyrus stems, placed at exactly equal intervals, with a few stags and birds walking and flying among them. 1 A silver cup from Cameiros has a rosette in the middle and a garland of lotus flowers round the edge ; between the rosette and the garland some Egyptian ovals, singularly awkward in execution, are introduced. These designs are on a layer of gold which only 1 See CESNOLA, Cyprus, pp. 316, 336.