Page:History of Art in Phœnicia and Its Dependencies Vol 2.djvu/63

 SCULPTURE AMONG THE NATIONS IN THE INTERIOR OF SYRIA. 41 render the peculiarities of a living form or to mark the features which distinguish it from others and betray its own special capabilities. Phoenicia made portraits of animals no more than she made those of men. Neither did she invent fantastic beasts ; she took them, indeed, from her neighbours ; she sprinkled griffins and sphinxes over everything she decorated ; she put the winged and FIG. 37. Cilician coin. From Gerhard. human-headed bull on her coins (Fig. 37), but to none of these imaginary beings did she give the grandeur and nobility we admire in the sphinx of Egypt or the winged bull of Nineveh. Under the burin and chisel of her artisans those motives became common enough, but no attempt was made to vary them, to give them renewed 1 life, to endow them with a spirit and soul of their own. 5. Sculpture among the nations in the interior of Syria. Between the Phoenician cities of the coast and the middle stream of the Euphrates, between Amanus and Sinai, lies a wide region which is all included, in these days, in the name of Syria. In antiquity it was inhabited by several very different populations. The Philistines in the south were, perhaps, Aryans. 1 Upon the ethnic affinities of several other tribes we are without information, but the Semitic element, represented by the tribes related closely to the Jews, such as the Moabites, the Ammonites, the Amalekites, and, in the north, by the tribes united under the supremacy of the Aramaeans, seem to have predominated. To northern Syria be- longed also the Khetas or Hittites who, from the fifteenth to the tenth century, struggled so Valiantly against the Egyptians first and afterwards the Assyrians. But the Hittites possessed an ideographic system of writing of which they may have been the inventors, which, in any case, they propagated in many different directions. This writing, like that of Egypt, was made up 1 See FR. LENORMANT, Manuel cPhistoire ancienne de F Orient, vol. i. pp. 205-206 (third edition). VOL. II. G