Page:History of Art in Phœnicia and Its Dependencies Vol 1.djvu/233

THE PHOENICIAN TOMB AWAY FROM PHCENICIA. 2 1 warriors ; the splendid weapons they made were for sale and export, not for use by themselves, except in the most strict defensive ; the wealth and power on which they so prided themselves were not conquered at the point of the sword. 4. The Phoenician Tomb away from Phoenicia. We began by studying, in all necessary detail, the Phoenician tomb as we find it within the borders of Phoenicia itself, at Gebal at Tyre, and at Sidon. But the Phoenicians travelled so much ? they lived and died so often outside their own boundaries, that their bones are to be found scattered on every shore of the Mediterranean. Where, indeed, should we fail to encounter their sepulchres, had it not been for the number destroyed, usurped, or put to other uses during the great movement of Graco-Roman civilization ? It is only by a happy accident that we sometimes come upon one of those isolated graves in which some sailor overtaken by death during a distant expedition has been hastily interred. We can hardly hope to discover many more of the narrow grave-yards which lay about those distant ports where a few merchants kept open shop for Celts, Africans, or Ligurians, or where a few soldiers mounted guard over a depot of provisions ; and yet it was, perhaps, in one of these outpost cemeteries that the Corsican sarcophagus with its carved head was found. The case of a city founded by Phoenicia in a country into which her influence had deeply penetrated was rather different. Wherever her supremacy was of long duration and her people formed a considerable proportion of the inhabitants, the cemeteries were too large to disappear without leaving a trace behind ; and this remark applies to places much smaller than Carthage, the great city which grew to be so much more powerful and populous than her parent state. From various circumstances it resulted that some of these cemeteries in the East and West of Europe remained unknown and unexplored down to our own day, so that their treasures were far better guarded than those of the mother country. We may therefore learn a great deal from visits to burial-places in which none but people vastly inferior in wealth and dignity to the merchant princes of Tyre and Sidon had been entombed. These provincial grave-yards, as we may call them,