Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 37.djvu/804

784 all intellectual and religious creations that had any moral or artistic value. But the investigations of the last half-century have given positive bases for the ancient history of the East; and that in turn permits us to restore to their true plane in the perspective of the ages the principal centers of artistic culture which have reacted upon one another since the beginning of civilization.

There may be differences of opinion as to whether the Ionic capital borrowed its volutes from the horns of the ibex or the half-opened petals of the lotus. There may be discussion as to whether Ionia received it directly from Golgos on the Phoœician vessels, or from Pteria with the caravans of Asia Minor. But no one who has observed its presence on the monuments of Khorsabad and Koyoundjik will refuse to locate in Mesopotamia the point of its departure toward the Ægean Sea. This is only an example of the types and motives the development to importance of which is doubtless due to the autonomous inspirations of Greek genius, but the origins of which are to be sought in Phrygia, Lycia, Phœnicia, and beyond, in the valleys of the Tigris and the Nile. In India, likewise, the most ancient works of sculpture and carving—wherever they do not attest a direct influence of Greek art—associate themselves with the monuments of Persia by the adoption of motives in some way classic in the Persepolitan architecture—like the capitals formed of animals sometimes affronted, sometimes backed; which are, as a plastic signature, in the former case of Assyria, in the second case of Egypt. In fact, when we depart from Greece or India, or even Libya, Etruria, or Gaul, we always come at the end, stage by stage, upon two grand centers of artistic diffusion, partially irreducible to one another—Egypt and Chaldea; but with this difference between them: that about the eighth century before our era, Mesopotamia went to school to the Egyptians, while Egypt never went to school to any one. Now, symbols have not only, as we have shown more than once in the course of this study, followed the same routes as purely decorative themes, but they have also been transmitted in the same fashion, at the same times, and, we might say, in the same proportion. I am far from disputing that there may have been independent and autonomous centers of creation among nearly all peoples. But, besides autochthonous types, we find everywhere the deposits of a strong current whose more or less remote origins lay in the symbolism of the shores of the Euphrates and the Nile. In short, the two orders of importations are so connected that in writing the history of art we write in great part the history of symbols, or at least of their migrations—as is exemplified in the studies of MM. Perrot and Chipiez in the history of ancient art.

A distinction, however, should be observed, in researches