Page:History of Art in Sardinia, Judæa, Syria and Asia Minor Vol 2.djvu/294

 276 A History of Art in Sardinia and Judaea. whether we see it on Pterian or Egyptian bas-reliefs, invariably consists of an indented shield, club, and single or double-headed axe, weapons which the Greeks identified with the Amazons. The fact that the axe was the attribute of "Jupiter Labranda," and the special weapon of the Carians, that some letters of their alphabet were clearly borrowed from Hittite hieroglyphs, must be ascribed to physical causes, which rendered Caria accessible to her neighbours, and consequently to the free circulation of ideas. Hittite art to the last remained poor and crude ; such as it was, however, it furnished, during the space of fivQ or six hundred years, the main types and subjects in vogue among the populations of central Anatolia ; whence, by easy stages, they penetrated among the Greeks of the seaboard. Thus, to name but an instance, the bas-reliefs in the temple at Assos, in Mysia, one of the earliest examples of the Doric order, vividly recall the Eyuk sculpture, representing a lion in deadly conflict with a ram. The Ionic order, as the name implies, had its birth in the Greek cities of Asia Minor. Now, it will be remembered that we called attention to the fluted pillar and the double volute, both distinct features of the order, in the oedicula at Boghaz-Keui. We do not deny that both may have been suggested by ivories and art-objects of Punic make; but we submit that the possibility of their having found their way through land routes, is every bit as good as through the "watery ways." If this be deemed conjectural by some, nobody will deny the Hittite origin of the noble type of the Amazons, which has yielded the loftiest and purest themes to the sister arts of sculpture, poetry, and painting. Tradition ascribed to them the foundation of the temple at Ephesus, and we think we recognize them at Boghaz-Keui, where they perform a military dance in honour of the deity. At any rate, their chief seat on the banks of the Thermodon was in this neighbourhood. The Greeks, as the heirs of all the useful activity of primitive civilization, translated their concepts of the part played by the great nations who had preceded them on the soil in writing their history; wherein the name of the Hittites does not once occur. Some have thought to see it in the icT^Vetot^ of Homer (Od. xi. 521), who figure among the auxiliaries of the Trojans; whilst others have tried to prove that the name belonged to a tribe in the immediate neighbourhood of Ilium (Mysia). But in all the ^ Gladstone, Homeric Synchronisms^ pp. 174-182.