Page:History of Art in Phœnicia and Its Dependencies Vol 2.djvu/435

 FURNITURE AND OBJECTS OF THE TOILET. 395 should give too conspicuous a place in his work to the human figure would be guilty of a mistake. The jewel should be a compliment to the person by whom it is worn, and that character runs no risk of being lost so long as its effects are won by simple combinations of lines, straight and curved. When leaves, or flowers, or real and factitious animals are introduced they must be so managed as to be obviously decorative both in effect and intention. But it is hardly possible to restrict the figures of men or women to such a conventional role ; once allowed a place, they have a knack of dominating all the rest. It may be said, of course, that the Phoenicians left them out from impotence, from their pure inability to model an elegant figure in small ; but, in any case, it cannot be denied that they had a very just idea of the conditions the maker of personal ornaments should keep in view. 6. Furniture and Objects of the Toilet. One of the principal staples of Phoenician trade was perfumery. Just as the Parisian factories of to-day export soaps, perfumed oils, scents, and other things of the same kind to the ends of the earth, so did ancient Phoenicia to all the coasts of the Mediterranean.^ She inherited the processes of Egypt and Assyria, and she invented new ones of her own. From Africa, Arabia, and all western Asia her ships and caravans brought every shrub from which a scent could be extracted. The secret of distillation was yet unknown, but the Phoenicians contrived to obtain highly concentrated liquids and sweet-smelling oils, some of which were credited with curative properties. 2 A great number of hands were employed on this manufacture. Tyre and Carthage must have had their perfume bazaars, as Stamboul, Damascus and Cairo, have now. The preparations which issued from these workshops were 1 SCYLAX, in a passage already quoted (Pcriplus, 112), speaks of the Phoenicians as selling perfumes to the natives of the west coast of Africa. EZEKIEL (ch. xxvii.) also alludes to the aromatic shrubs imported by them from every land with which they traded. The word /xvpov, by which the Greeks designated perfumes in general, seems to have been derived from a Semitic term, the Hebrew ttwr, which had an equivalent sense. The words (3dX(rap.ov, balsamum, are also Semitic in origin. They come from bessem or bassam, which was not so often used as mor. 2 See for example what I have said elsewhere on the manufacture of ladanum (G. PERROT, Rerue des Deux Mondes, Dec. ist, 1878, pp. 526, 527).