Page:History of Art in Sardinia, Judæa, Syria and Asia Minor Vol 2.djvu/71

 Architecture. ' 55 tion/ Below the figure was an inscription written in Asianic characters, which the Greeks designated under the general term of 'Acroru/ota ypdfjLfxaTa, Assyrian letters. Was the legend in cuneiform writing, or signs derived from Hittite hieroglyphs, analogous to the Cypriote alphabet ? To this question it is not easy to give an answer. For if the Assyrians did not acquire a firm footing in Cilicia, the stela of Sargon, discovered in Cyprus, is sufficient proof that even where their occupation of the country was of brief duration, they left behind them traces of their art and influence. On the other hand, the native tribes of these districts belonged for centuries to the Hittite confederacy ; and the natural inference that presents itself is that during that time they adopted, like the other populations of the peninsula, a variant of the Asianic alphabet. However it may be, it is certain that the translation of the local Dry-as- Dust was purely imaginary, akin to the tales which the Egyptian interpreters at Sais and Memphis poured in Herodotus's willing ear. In no well-attested ancient epigraphy of Chaldaea or Assyria has there been found aught that even faintly resembles the gross epicurism expressed in the terminal wording of the so-called epitaph to Sarda-nat-slrpal.^ Whether Hittite or Assyrian, whether the image of a local prince or a Ninevite conqueror, the tablet has withstood the destructive changes which the hand of time wrought upon the city. The Greeks settled at Tarsus, ere long intermarried with the earlier population, and readily accepted a deity of such ancient date, with the rites and traditions attached to his name, inter- preting them after their own egotistic fashion. Hence the tablet, ^ Hf.uzey, Les Fragments de Tarse au Musee du Louvre. Reference to Figs. 233 and 306, torn, ii., Hist, of Art, will give a capital idea of the style of this stela. '■* We give the best-known version of this epitaph : " I, Sarda-nat-sirpal, son of Anaxindaraxes, founded Tarsus and Anchiales on the same day. Stranger, eat, drink, make love, all else is nought." The dramatic ending of this monarch was of a nature to exercise the ingenuity and form the theme of later poets and moralists. An inscription to Sarda-nat-sirpal was also trumped up at Nineveh, supposed to have been discovered in a ruin in one of the temples, where his tomb was also shown. But the first European scholar who saw it found that, far from being an old Assyrian epigraph, it was written in Greek verse by Khocrilos, of lassos. It runs thus : " I have reigned, and, so long as I beheld the light of day, I drank, I ate, I made love, recollecting the many vicissitudes and hardships of man, and how short is his span of life " (Amyntas, Fragment 2 ; dX^o Fragmcnta His to ricor u m de rebus Alexandria collected by Miiller, in Biblio-Greco-Latine, of Diderot, at the end of Arrian's Anabasis.