Page:History of Art in Phœnicia and Its Dependencies Vol 1.djvu/84

64 HISTORY OF ART IN PHOENICIA AND ITS DEPENDENCIES. they touched the same spectacle met their eyes, and the impres- sions they received were not of a nature to divert their faith from its ancient channels. This is the true explanation of a phenomenon which at first appears so surprising. The Phoenicians seem never to have suspected that a great religious revolution was taking place in that neighbouring country of Judaea from which they were separated neither by any great social differences nor by any natural barrier. Enterprising traders as they were, they kept themselves au courant with the inventions and progress of the world with which they traded. Nothing new could appear in any market known to them without their at once taking measures to supply it to all their clients, near or distant. But what profit could they expect from spreading the worship of a God like the God of Israel ; of a God who refused all association or rivalry ; of a God who forbade sculpture to give Him a visible personality, and in His hatred of idolatry even went so far as to proscribe the representation of human or animal forms ? ] Greece would never have obeyed such a command. Her love of fine forms was too great. When Christian societies accepted a religion that was the child of Judaism, they, too, were driven by their natural preferences to find some means of eluding these proscriptions. As for the Phoenicians, they were not like the Greeks, they were not tormented by any inborn desire to repro- duce the beautiful ; but regard for what seemed their own in- terests was enough to make them turn their backs on a creed to which such inconvenient conditions were attached. For centuries images were among their principle articles of commerce. Upon the objects of glass and ivory, of metal and terra-cotta, which they sewed broadcast over the Mediterranean basin, the figures of men and of real or fictitious animals abounded. They manufactured gods for exportation upon every island of the yEgxan, and upon all its coasts statues have been found of .their great goddess Astarte (Fig. 20), of Bes, 2 a god borrowed perhaps from the Egyptians (Fig. 21), and of those dwarf gods in whom we see the originals of the Greek pygmies (Fig. 22). 1 Exodus xv. 3-5. 2 HEUZEV, Sur quelques Representations du Dieu grotesque appele Bes par les . Egyptians (in the Comptes Rendus de F Academic des Inscriptions, 1879, pp. 140-147).