Page:History of Art in Phrygia, Lydia, Caria and Lycia.djvu/240

 224 HISTORY OF ART IN ANTIQUITY. around Nacoleia. The decorative scheme is simpler ; and, a still surer criterion, the signs by which it is accompanied are older than any alphabetical writing. The Greek epos does not know the Gordioses and the Midases ; when it was composed the names of the founders of the Phrygian power had not yet re-echoed in the Ionian and ^Eolian cities ; hence we think we may assume that the Phrygians did not constitute themselves into a political body, under that dynasty, before the eighth century B.C. To organize themselves into a well-ordered state may well have taken in a hundred years, during which they developed the resources of the country, opened up continuous relations with their eastern neighbours, the Cappadocians, on the one side, and the Greek- speaking populations of the western coast on the other. Besides, if we are not mistaken in refusing to seek a tomb behind the fagade upon which the name of Midas may be read, it will give us one more reason for putting a pretty late date upon this con- siderable work, which was not undertaken the day after the death of the personage. The notion must have come much later, when the memory of the ancestor was productive of successes and benefits to his descendants, when the first Midas, magnified by the legend that already attached to his name, was nothing more for the new generations than the founder of the monarchy, the glorious father of a whole race of kings, an eponymous hero, to whom divine honours were rendered. Consequently, it is towards the end of the eighth or the beginning of the seventh century B.C. that we would place the Midas monument and the more important tombs surrounding it, characterised by forms imitated from carpentry work, designs borrowed from tapestry, and, above all, the use of an alphabet derived from the Phoenician syllabary. We feel greater embarrass- ment in trying to assign a date to another group of monuments, those frontispieces of the Ayazeen necropolis, in which are seen true bas-reliefs, figures of men and lions. Are these fagades older or more recent than such exemplars as exhibit a wholly geometrical decoration ? M. Ramsay is inclined to think them more ancient. He finds in them types taken from Cappa- docia, and resemblances of make to which we referred a little way back. In his estimation, real Phrygian art started into being later, when the ornamentist, shaking off the yoke in which alien tra- ditions had held him a prisoner so long a time, set himself to