Page:Littell's Living Age - Volume 140.pdf/189

180 in the bas-reliefs brought from Nineveh. Here, at all events, there was clear proof of Assyrian influence; the only question was whether that influence had been carried through the hands of the Phœnicians or had travelled along the highroad which ran across Asia Minor, the second channel whereby the culture of Assyria could have been brought to Greece. The existence of a similar sculpture over a rock-tomb at Kumbet in Phrygia might seem to favour the latter view.

The discoveries of Dr. Schliemann have gone far to settle the question. The pottery excavated at Mykenæ is of the Phœnician type, and the clay of which it is composed has probably come from Thera. The terra-cotta figures of animals and more especially of a goddess with long robe, crowned head, and crescent-like arms, which Dr. Schliemann would identify with ßοώπις Ήοη, are spread over the whole area traversed by the Phœnicians. The image of the goddess in one form or another has been found in Thera and Melos, in Naxos and Paros, in Ios, in Sikinos, and in Anaphos, and M. Lenormant has traced it back to Babylonia and to the Babylonian representation of the goddess Artemis-Nana. At Tanagra the image has been found under two forms, both, however, made of the same clay and in the same style as the figures from Mykenæ. In one the goddess is upright, as at Mykenæ, with the polos on her head, and the arms either outspread or folded over the breast; in the other she is sitting with the arms crossed. Now among the gold ornaments exhumed at Mykenæ are some square pendants of gold which represent the goddess in this sitting posture.

The animal forms most commonly met with are those of the lion, the stag, the bull, the cuttle-fish, and the murex. The last two point unmistakably to a seafaring race, and more especially to those Phœnician sailors whose pursuit of the purple-trade first brought them into Greek seas. So far as I know, neither the polypus nor the murex, nor the butterfly which often accompanies them, have been found in Assyria or Egypt, and we may therefore see in them original designs of Phœnician art. Mr. Newton has pointed out that the cuttle-fish (like the dolphin) also occurs among the prehistoric remains from Ialysos in Rhodes, where, too, pottery of the same shape and material as that of Mykenæ has been found, as well as beads of a curious vitreous substance, and rings in which the back of the chaton is rounded so as to fit the finger. It is clear that the art of Ialysos belongs to the same age and school as the art of Mykenæ and as a scarab of Amenophis III. has been found in one of the Ialysian tombs, it is possible that the art may be as old as the fifteenth century B.C.

Now Ialysos is not the only Rhodian town which has yielded prehistoric antiquities. Camirus also has been explored by Messrs. Biliotti and Saltzmann; and while objects of the same kind and character as those of Ialysos have been discovered there, other objects have been found by their side which belong to another and more advanced stage of art. These are vases of clay and metal, bronze bowls, and the like, which not only display high finish and skill, but are ornamented with the designs characteristic of Phœnician workmanship at Nineveh and elsewhere. Thus we have zones of trees and animals, attempts at the representation of scenery, and a profusion of ornament, while the influence of Egypt is traceable in the sphinxes and scarabs, which also occur plentifully. Here, therefore, at Camirus, there is plain evidence of a sudden introduction of finished Phœnician art among a people whose art was still rude and backward, although springing from the same germs as the art of Phœnicia itself. Two distinct periods in the history of the Ægean thus seem to lie unfolded before us; one in which Eastern influence was more or less indirect, content to communicate the seeds of civilization and culture, and to import such objects as a barbarous race would prize; and another in which the East was, as it were, transported into the West, and the development of Greek art was interrupted by the introduction of foreign workmen and foreign beliefs. This second period was the period of Phœnician colonization as distinct from that of mere trading voyages - the period, in fact, when Thebes was made a Phœnician fortress, and the Phœnician alphabet diffused throughout the Greek world. It is only in relics of the later part of this period that we can look for inscriptions and traces of writing, at least in Greece proper; in the islands and on the coast of Asia Minor, the Cypriote syllabary seems to have been in use, to be superseded afterwards by the simpler alphabet of Kadmus. For reasons presently to be stated, I would distinguish the first period by the name of Phrygian.

Throughout the whole of it, however, the