Page:History of Art in Phrygia, Lydia, Caria and Lycia.djvu/346

 330 HISTORY OF ART IN ANTIQUITY. On the other hand, if we maintain a prudent reserve, and give up attempting to reach the cloudland where the insular Carians are lost to our gaze, if we forbear crediting them with works which tell us nothing as to their authors, it will simplify matters not a little, in that it will leave nothing more than a stay-at-home people, with a language and religion closely allied to those of the Lydians, from whom they are henceforth (the sixth century B.C.) inseparable. Nevertheless, the situation of many of their centres within deep bays, or at the extremity of jutting headlands, as well as their worship of a sea-god, whom the Lydians knew not, distinguished them from the latter. Then, too, even after the loss of their autonomy they still retained something of their wandering habits, which they satisfied by enrolling themselves as mercenaries and dragomans ; in which capacities they visited Syria, and especially Egypt, where many remained in respectable positions. Such expeditions imply voyages from the Nile valley to that of the Maeander, and during one of these, perhaps, the Carians may have carried to Lydia the pieces of jewellery found at Tralles. The fact that their love of adventure and turbulent disposition lived with them even when they inhabited cities they had raised, along with temples m close proximity to the necropoles in which their dead reposed, is confirmatory of the legend that told of the part played by the Carians in pre-historic times, and of their maritime sway. The historian is thus brought round to an hypothesis from which at first his prudence recoiled, and which he now refrains examining in detail until the day when he shall be in a situation to compare on the one side the monuments collected in the Cyclades with those dug up at Hissarlik and Thera, and on the other hand the instances representing the culture of Mycenae.