Page:History of Art in Phrygia, Lydia, Caria and Lycia.djvu/38

 22 HISTORY OF ART IN ANTIQUITY. survey of the industrial products of the primitive art under notice, will form a natural introduction to the history of Hellenic art; we will call at Hissarlik on our way to Mycense and Tyrins. In the race we promise to run, we are bound to complete our study of the productions of Oriental art ere making that turn of the road where lies Greece. That thousands of years divide the civilizations of Egypt and Chaldsea from those that unfolded later on the European side of the Mediterranean, is a fact we have tried to make clear ; going back as far as possible to that mysterious past, whose far-reaching depths were unsuspected till yesterday. Thanks to recent researches and discoveries, the main results of which have appeared in our history, we are now able to measure the importance and originality of the work accomplished by the first civilized nations of the valleys of the Nile and of Europe. The course of our studies took us to the capitals where these nations had reared monuments both imposing and numerous ; to Memphis and Thebes, Babylon and Nineveh, Tyre and Sidon. We saw by what means the methods invented by these active and influential centres were disseminated in an easterly direction. It remains to trace the effect of such teachings and example upon peoples who, although they never played a leading part in the world, contributed none the less, in a greater or less degree, to work up the materials which Asia transmitted to Europe. Hence the fitness of taking up each in turn, Phrygians, Lydians, and Lycians. These people lost their independence towards the beginning of the seventh century B.C., when they became subject to the Achae- menidse. The result of this conquest was to bring democratic Greece into contact with the greatest Asiatic monarchy the world had yet seen, whose art, the youngest and the last derived from Oriental tradition, will form the larger portion of this volume. It is an art which, in the building and decoration of its monuments, could dispose of almost boundless resources ; it will, therefore, detain us longer than those provincial and secondary arts, whose claim to our early attention lies in the fact that they stand first in chronological order. In obedience to this principle we shall begin with the Phrygians, whose mythical cycle, often referred to by us, shows them as a compact political body in the days of Homer, to whom the name even of the Lydians is unknown. Our survey of Phrygian art will divide itself in two sections one devoted to the monuments