Page:History of Art in Primitive Greece - Mycenian Art Vol 1.djvu/41

20 we are afraid of are less lapses, always to be deplored, than a feeling of being weighted by documents, and a certain inability to making up our mind to necessary sacrifices.

The nations whose history we have surveyed up to the present hour, occupied territories which Nature had sharply parted one from the other. What we understand by Egypt is the lower portion of the long Nile valley, where, bounded by the Mediterranean and the two mountain chains of Arabia and Libya, are grouped all the monuments of her people. The growth of Chaldæo-Assyrian culture went on in the spacious basin of the Euphrates and Tigris. The scene is more vast; yet its boundaries are no less well defined; in the north by the Taurus range and the prolongation of its eastern masses, eastward by the powerful Zagros rampart, southward by the Persian Gulf and the wastes of Arabia and Syria. Phœnicia proper was that narrow strip of land inserted between the sea and Lebanon; the latter forming the mountains of Ephraim and Judæa in the south. The whole cycle of Hebrew art was confined to a much narrower area, within the walls of Jerusalem and its small kingdom. This by no means makes up the number of the territories which we had to traverse in order to follow, from the banks of the Orontes to the shores of the Ægean, the trail of those Syro-Cappadocian tribes that left behind them, as marks of their passage, very peculiar rock-cut sculptures, accompanied for the most part by signs of the ideographic writing, the employment of which preceded in that part of the world the use of alphabets derived from the Phœnician; nevertheless the centres whence these types spread to the West were Northern Syria and the uplands of Asia Minor, between which free intercourse could always be carried on through the passes of Amanus and Taurus. Some hundred years later, the great peninsula which in the west prolongs and terminates Asia, received from Europe, through the Bosphorus, new batches of emigrants. Among these the Phrygians first occupied the land which stretches between the Propontis and the chain of Sipylus, then the high and craggy table-land where the