Page:History of Art in Phœnicia and Its Dependencies Vol 1.djvu/253

THE PHOENICIAN TOMB AWAY FROM PHOENICIA. 233 remains on this page, because although their details are Greek their plan is very different to anything we are accustomed to see in Greek tombs. We find these rock-cut quadrangles neither in Ionia nor upon the mainland of Greece ; on the other hand, although none have yet been encountered in Phoenicia, several examples may be pointed to in the neighbourhood of Jerusalem. The Jews were near relations to the Phoenicians and were inspired by them, and in the tombs they built we find chambers giving on to these open courts, just as they did in the dwelling-houses of antiquity, and do still in those of Damascus and the rest of Syria. The sepulchres we have described and figured from Kition, Idalion, Golgos, Amathus, and Paphos, are the best, or rather the least ill, known of all those hitherto discovered in Cyprus. They 'alone demand notice here, because they alone belong to that part of the island in which the influence of Phoenicia was pre- dominant for the longest time. But even in those districts where the mass of the population was Greek, most of the types we have described are to be encountered. In the northern and western districts, for instance, the oven-shaped tombs have been found ; l at Curium, where that form of sepulchre occurs very often, shallow graves hollowed in the floors of the hypogea, and sarcophagi cut from blocks of living rock that have been left standing in the o o centre of the hollowed diameter, have also been met with. 2 On the other hand, in the whole of that part of Cyprus which was under Greek domination, neither anthropoid sarcophagi, nor those peculiar steles of which we have given so many examples, seem to have been encountered. Finally, we must not forget to note that, in the whole of what we may call Phoenician Cyprus the tomb is as mute as on the Phoenician mainland. It is often rich in potteries and miscella- neous objects of much value, but neither upon the slab with which its entrance is closed, nor upon the steles and richly ornamented sarcophagi, is there a name or an invocation to the gods. The only exception to this rule is furnished by a stele from Athieno (Fig. 54), on which appear two Greek words written on one side in Cypriot characters, on the other in the alphabet employed by the Greek race all over their world. In the absence of precise documents we cannot affirm that 1 CESNOLA, Cyprus, pp. 226 and 295. 2 Ibid. p. 295. VOL. I. H H