Page:History of Art in Phœnicia and Its Dependencies Vol 2.djvu/91

 PHOENICIAN SCULPTURE IN THE WEST. 69 Mycenae. However, as it is only half the size of life, and as there are three suspension holes at the top of it and two more on each side, it must have been a votive offering or emblem. It is an ancient relic from a custom followed in Cyprus, in Greece, and in Italy ; in the latter countries it was continued in the use of Bacchic oscilla and tomb masks until it degenerated at last into the employ- ment of those coarse sepulchral masks of the Graeco- Parthian epoch which have been found in the Babylonian tombs.l The British Museum possesses two terra-cotta masks from Sardinia which are also, in all probability, Phoenician ; one shows a female head with an Egyptian wig, the other a grimacing head not in the least like the comic type of the Greeks. " It is not easy to decide to which sex our Carthaginian mask belongs. The ear. lobe is pierced for a ring, while in the upper edge of the same organ there are three more holes .... in accordance with a common oriental custom which still survives in India. On the other hand, a deep groove is drawn across the cheeks at the line where the beard usually begins. The painter has, indeed, paid no attention to this line, but the red tint with which he has covered the whole face is that which was used to denote virility in the Egyptian system ; hair and eyebrows are put in in black." 2 This mask, the most careful piece of work left to us by Punic modellers, brings us back to the point from which we started ; we are again at the period when Phoenician art had not yet come under any foreign influence but that of the two ancient empires of the East. All that remains to be done is to give a rdsumd of the facts we have been considering, a task which is all the more necessary because we have not as in Egypt, Chaldaea and Assyria, encountered any of those creations of the first order which leave a strong and ineffaceable impression on the memory of the reader. 1 HEUZEY, Catalogue, Nbs. 168-182. 2 HEUZEY, Catalogue, pp. 58-59. LONGPERIER was the first to point out the interest and importance of this monument, which he first saw in a photograph sent home to him from Tunis by M. de Villefosse (Coinptes rendus de f Academic des Inscriptions, 1874, pp. 206-208).