Page:History of Art in Phœnicia and Its Dependencies Vol 1.djvu/112

g2 HISTORY OF ART IN PIKKXICIA AND ITS DEPENDENCIES. the vast repertory which we owe to the industry of M. Renan and his colleagues, ve cannot cite a single text that may be fairly compared to those inscriptions of Greece and Rome in which the voice of a great and free people makes itself heard across the ages. And in Phoenicia the form is worthy of the matter. There is nothing in the appearance of the letters to captivate the eye or to induce the mind to seriously weigh the sense. Phoenicia had no special form of letters for monumental use. Her epigraphic alphabet never lost its cursive look (Fig. 33). " In Phoenician inscriptions we find none of those expedients with which the Greeks and iJP? l(; - 33- Fragment of a sepulchral cippu>. From Cypru-.' Latins contrived to give an architectural character to their texts on stone." : There is no care for symmetry, no variation in the calibre of letters, no indication of proper names or important words by capital letters. The characters are all the same height, and their angular forms with long tails and variously sloping strokes follow each other in well drilled ranks. The lines are not always straight, and they are limited only by the field on which they are traced. It certainly never dawned upon the mind of a Phoenician scribe that an inscription might have its beauty even for those who 1 RENAN, Mission de Fhenide, p. 834. 2 Corpus Inscriptionum Semiticarum, pars i. plate 8.