Page:History of Art in Phrygia, Lydia, Caria and Lycia.djvu/345

 GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS OF CARIAN CIVILIZATION. 329 Phrygia, and the region of Sipylus ofier countless rock-sculp- tures to the gaze of the traveller, but not one instance has been reported from Caria. The excavations that have been made in the Carian necropoles have yielded naught beyond vases and jewels ; small figures, whether of stone, bronze, or terra-cotta, that might in any way remind us of the primitive statuettes of the Archipelago are non-existent. To admit that the Carians fabricated the figures in question, we must suppose that they did so before they migrated to Asia Minor, since as soon as they were in posses- sion of the province that goes by their name, contact with the Phry^ gians on the one hand, and the Lydians on the other, was a daily occurrence. The art of these was sufficiently advanced to serve as model to the Carians, who then ceased to reproduce types puerile and barbarous in the extreme, when the same order of ideas prompted them to adopt the tumulus-type as mode of entombment a type absent in the Archipelago, but of which multitudinous specimens exist in Lydia. The hypothesis is a fas- cinating one, and has the merit to remove many difficulties; its greater or less degree of probability, how- ever, is dependent on ulterior dis- coveries which should reveal monuments in Asia Minor akin to the oldest tombs of the Cyclades. Then, and only then, we should be in a position to follow the track of this restless wan- dering people, even as we followed that of the Phoenicians, from their native coast of Palestine on to those of Spain ; then only would it be legitimate to recognize in the incipient fabrica- tors of these coarse idols the primeval inhabitants of the Greek islands on the one hand, and on the other the ancestors of those Hellenes who, in the day of Homer and afterwards, occupied the region south of the Mseander. Until this comes to pass the question under notice must at least remain doubtful. FIG. 243. Stone statuettes. Actual size. LE BAS, Voyage Arche., " Monu- ments figures," Plate CXXXIII.