Page:History of Art in Sardinia, Judæa, Syria and Asia Minor Vol 1.djvu/378

 34^ A History of Art in Sardinia and Jud.f.a. Egypt, Assyria, and Phoenicia ; whilst, had all Greek and Roman ceramic monuments been destroyed, we should nevertheless gauge how active and widely diffused this industry had been, from the numerous metaphors having reference to it scattered up and down in Greek and Latin writers. The Hebrews do not seem to have cultivated this handicraft in remote times, for the early books of the Old Testament contain but one solitary allusion to a clay vessel (2 Saw. xvii. 28). And the prophets, whose language is usually so figurative, do not borrow their imagery from the art of the potter, if exception be made for Jeremiah, who compares Jehovah with a potter kneading the clay and turning it on the wheel, and, when marred in his hand, casting it aside to make another shape. " What the clay is in the hands of the potter, says the Lord, that are ye in Mine, O house of Israel " (jfer. xviii. 1-9). This passage is important, as proving that clay vessels were manufactured in Jerusalem in the sixth century, but to the English explorers was reserved the honour of revealing their nature, style, and forms. 1 A great number of fragments, some capable of being pieced together, with here and there a perfect or almost perfect vase, were discovered in the accumulated silt and rubbish, both under the haram, the Kedron, and Tyropceon Valleys. Not a few were found at such depths that there is every reason to look upon them as dating before the fall of Jerusalem to the hands of the Chaldees. The pieces recovered here, it is needless to say at this date, in no way resemble the notorious " Moabite pottery," which was recognized for a while as the distinctive ceramic pro- duction of a people intimately connected with the Hebrews. Although the fraud was almost immediately exposed, and no one now, even in Germany, dreams of writing up these vessels, they created so much stir in the world of archaeologists and Hebrew scholars generally, that we cannot pass them over with- out a word of mention (Fig. 234). These spurious monuments were acquired at great expense by Prussia in 1873, 2 and bolstered 1 The qualification used by Jeremiah to denote the gate opening into the Hinnom valley has sometimes been translated by " potters' gate" (fer. xix. 2), implying that a potters' guild existed here. Reuss, however, would have the term rendered by " potsherds," i.e. a place where broken vessels and refuse of all sorts were thrown 2 Those who may be unacquainted with this curious episode should read M. Clermont-Ganneau's sprightly paper, from which the annexed woodcut and accom- panying remarks are borrowed {Les Fausses Potteries Moibites de Berlin, pp. 10 1- 183, from the volume entitled Fraudes A rch'eologique s en Palestine (in-12, Leroux, 1885).