Page:History of Art in Phœnicia and Its Dependencies Vol 2.djvu/65

 SCULPTURE AMONG THE NATIONS IN THE INTERIOR OF SYRIA. 43 writers, was represented as a woman to the waist and a fish below. 1 She appears, perhaps, in one of her secondary forms on the flat of a rock crystal cone in the Paris Cabinet des Mddailles (Fig. 39). 2 The figure is a very complex one. The bust is certainly that of a woman and the tail that of a fish, but between the two appear the fore-quarters of a dog. On some coins of Ascalon dating from the imperial epoch we find this strange type of a woman-fish, 3 but it is there only by exception and in a subordinate place. Contact with the Greeks brought a change of taste ; the great local goddess, Aphrodite Ourania, as Herodotus calls her, whose worship had been longer established at Ascalon than at Cyprus, if we may believe Fm. 38. Bas-relief from Ascalon. Length 22 inches. Louvre. that historian, 4 was figured as a woman, crowned sometimes with lotus flowers, sometimes with a mural diadem, and holding in offt hand a dove, in the other a spear or sceptre. And the central figure in our bas-relief (Fig. 38) is purely human, while the place 1 DIODORUS, II. iv. 2. 2 The Due de Luynes, to whom this intaglio formerly belonged, classed it among the engraved stones of Phoenicia. 3 MIONNET, Description de m'edailles antiqttes, vol. v. p. 533 ; Supplement, vol. viii. p. 369. Sea horses are figured upon certain very ancient silver coins, classed by DE LUVNES as incertaines des rois de Ph'cnide (Numismatique des Satrapies plate xvi.). 4 HERODOTUS, I. 105.