Page:History of Art in Phœnicia and Its Dependencies Vol 1.djvu/259

THE PHCENICIAN TOMB AWAY FROM PH<EICIA. 239 from their mother-city the habit of disposing of their dead in niches cut in the living rock ; the nature of the soil allowed them to be faithful to the custom of their fathers, and they were faithful ; for five centuries the workmen whom they employed to prepare and decorate their tombs reproduced the same arrangement with unswerving patience ; we could hardly have a better proof of the poverty of the Carthaginian genius, or of the dryness of the national imagination. But if wealthy Carthage was satisfied to repeat a single type of sepulchre down to the very last days of her independent life, the Phoenician colonies in Sardinia offer more variety. 1 In that island there were towns of different origin and very different age. Some were founded by the Tyrians when they set about providing naval stations and ports of call for ships on their way to Spain, others were not born or, at least, developed until the years of the Punic supremacy. This tomb may be the property of a Syrian merchant, that of a Carthaginian ; the majority must have belonged to those colonists who left Carthage to settle in the towns of the south and west and in the country about them. In face of this variety in the population it is, then, not a thing to surprise us that the principal variants on the Phoenician tomb as we described it in Syria should be found in Sardinia, or even that a few forms should be encountered which are not to be met with elsewhere. The Phoenician tombs of Sardinia are rock-cut. As a rule they consist of a chamber reached by several steps (Figs. 167, 168) ; but in the cemeteries of Caralis and Tharros we find more than one example of sepulchres in which access to the chamber is by a rectangular well with steps cut in its sides. 2 The mouths of these 1 In speaking of Sardinia we shall take for our constant guide Signer ETTORE PAIS. His paper entitled La Sardegna Prima del Dominio Romano (4to, Rome, 1881,) is a model of sober judgment and precise science ; it will be found in the Transactions of the Reale Accademia del Lincei. The canon SPANO began to draw attention to the antiquities discovered in Sardinia, and to keep an exact note of the discoveries ; his Bulletino Archceologico Sardo (1855-1861), which has rendered great services in its time, may still be consulted with advantage. La Marmora, Elena, Cara, and Crespi, whose works we shall have to quote more than once before the end of these volumes, have also brought together many valuable data : but Pais was the first to bring a sufficient critical education to bear on the question. He makes short work of many illusions and mistakes into which his predecessors had .fallen. 2 ETTORE PAIS, La Sardegna Prima del Dominio Romano, p. 86. Those who