Page:History of Art in Phrygia, Lydia, Caria and Lycia.djvu/228

 212 HISTORY OF ART IN ANTIQUITY. its people and the help they gave in handing on plastic types and indispensable industries. The first thing to be determined is the nature and importance of the borrowings the Phrygians made from the culture of Syro- Cappadocia, whence they seem to have derived the main elements of their beliefs and those rites which Greece long afterwards acknowledged as having received from Phrygia. The Asiatic Greeks who lived in daily intercourse with the Phrygians were content to adopt the sacred orgies they found in full swing among this people, without troubling themselves as to their cradle-land. Our curiosity is more exacting; it aims at tracing back their origin, and the evidence it finds on its path leads irresistibly to Cappadocia. If we have understood them aright, the great figured decorations carved upon the rocks of Pterium reveal concepts and represent ceremonies the main lines of which are precisely those that are supposed to characterize the religion of Phrygia. If we are unable to give a name to one of the two deities, that with the turreted head-dress, long robe, and supporting lion may unhesitatingly be regarded as the prototype of the Cybele of Sipylus and Dindymus. 1 Dances analogous to those of the Graeci-Galli are depicted in the procession ; some of the actors in the pomp bear a strong family likeness to those eunuch-priests who held the first rank in the sacerdotal order of Cybele. Be that as it may, self-mutilation did not originate with the Greeks, or with any Aryan people whose usages are known to us. It is a rite proper to Syrian cults, and was practised by the Semites, the White Syrians of Hero- dotus, established beyond the Halys, from whom it passed to the Phrygians. As much may be said of the phallus, put over Phrygian and Lydian tombs alike ; were proof required of its importance we could point to the situation it occupies in an sedicu- lum carved upon the walls of the Cappadocian sanctuary. 2 If the Thracian tribes in spreading eastwards compelled the Syro-Cappadocians to recede before them, only slowly and by degrees did they succeed in displacing them on this side of the Halys, in the course of which they became imbued with the social 1 Hist, of Art, torn. iv. vol. ii. Fig. 320. The question may be asked as to whether we should not recognize a Cybele, under a different form, in the very curious figure at lasili Kai'a, in which the arms and legs of the deity are made up of lions' muzzles and bodies respectively. 2 Ibid., Fig. 331, pp. 385, 646, 653.