Page:History of Art in Phœnicia and Its Dependencies Vol 2.djvu/462

 422 HISTORY OF ART IN PHOENICIA AND ITS DEPENDENCIES. dedicate to a careful study of the Mycaenian civilization as a whole. We are, then, at present content with pointing to the monuments in question, so that we may not seem to ignore their existence. 8. Textiles. In all countries possessing a vast industry and a wide foreign trade there are few things that go farther or bring in more profit than woven fabrics. European manufacturers, and especially those of England, send their cotton stuffs overall the four quarters of the world ; they deliver them at so low a price, even in the most distant markets, that the local industry cannot complete with them ; so that wherever the latter is not dead it is moribund. In antiquity the conditions were different ; the old Oriental civilization did not have the same crushing superiority over the rest of humanity. There was no machinery. The loom used by the weavers of Egypt, Chaldsea, or Phoenicia hardly differed from those in the tent of the nomad or in the hut of the mountaineer. When the relations between Phoenicia and the western tribes began the latter already understood how to weave, so that Tyre and Sidon could hardly hope to dress the outer world in the stuffs they made or imported from Egypt and Mesopotamia, 1 but they might fairly aspire to furnish it with its more elaborate tissues. And, in fact, both among the nations immediately about them and those beyond seas they had the monopoly of the trade in rich hangings, carpets, and dress stuffs. The value of such things depended on various qualities. The muslins of Egypt were famous for their softness, whiteness and transparency, the carpets woven by the women of the poorer Asiatic tribes, were sought then as now for their warmth and for the capricious beauty of their designs. Carthage, too, exported carpets and embroidered cushions. 2 But the most highly esteemed of all were, perhaps, the stuffs em- broidered by the agile needles of those Sidonian slaves whose skill is praised in the Homeric poems. 3 With threads of gold, or 1 See EZEKIEL, chapter xxvii. verses 7, 16, 18, 20. 2 These carpets and cushions were imported into Athens in the fifth century (ATHENJEUS, Hermippos, i. 49). 3 'AyAaa epya iSwa, Odyssey, xv. 417. In the Iliad (vi. 289) Homer speaks of the L, worked by the women of Sidon, which Paris took with him on