Bulls, for instance, are usually represented as with a single mighty horn, curving to the front (in the style of the ancient Babylonian seals), rather than with both horns showing, in Egyptian fashion. When figures of gods and men are shown, the principal groups are purely Assyrian imitations of Assyrian temple-reliefs, in fact-such as the sacred tree between the two attendant beasts, or the king engaged in combat and vanquishing a lion single-handed; while mingled with these are figures and groups purely Egyptian in style, such as the hawk headed deity, or a king slaying a whole crowd of captives at one blow. Occasionally one sees traces of the ancient Mycenaean influence, or perhaps rather of the young Ionian art which had now arisen out of the ashes of that of Mycenae. These Phoenician imitative designs are still good imitations. But a century or so later we meet with them again on the silver bowls and dishes from Cyprus, in which the imitations have become bad. The same mixture of subjects was still in vogue, but confusion has been superadded to mixture, and we find kings in Assyrian robes and Egyptian wigs slaying Syrian dragons with Egyptian wings, and so on. Fig. 2 gives a silver dish from Curium containing examples of the above-mentioned subjects. It is a characteristic specimen of this mixed Phoenician art, of which di Cesnola seems to have collated a remarkable number of examples. In addition to the numerous silver phialae some were found, with similar decoration, made of pure gold. To the same period as these bowls from Cyprus belong the similar specimens of Phoenician plate from Etruscan graves at Praeneste and Cervetri in Italy. Those from the Regulini-Galassi tomb can hardly be earlier than the 6th century, so that this peculiar Mischkunst of the later type may well be dated to the 7th-5th centuries.
References—Von Bissing, “Metallgefasse,” Cairo Museum Catalogue (1901); “Eine Bronzeschale mykenischer Zeit,” Jahrb. Inst. (1898); L. P. di Cesnola, Cyprus; Layard, Nineveh, &c. (H. R. H.)
Prehistoric Greece: “Minoan” and “Mycenaean” Periods.—In the early history of the goldsmith's art no period is more important than that of the Greek Bronze age, the period of the prehistoric civilization which we call “Minoan” and “Mycenaean,” which antedated the classical civilization of Greece by many centuries, and was in fact contemporary and probably coeval with the ancient culture of Egypt. In Greece during this, her first, period of civilization, metal-work was extensively used, perhaps more extensively than it ever was in the history of later Greek art. So generally was metal used for vases that even as early as the “Middle Minoan” period of Cretan art (some 2000 years B.C.) the pottery forms are obvious imitations of metal-work. The art of the metal-worker dominated and influenced that of the potter, a circumstance rarely noted in Egypt, where, in all probability, the toreutic art was never so much patronized as in Minoan Greece, although beautiful specimens of plate were produced by Egyptian and Phoenician artists. Also but few of these have come down to us, and we are forced to rely upon pictured representations for much of our knowledge of them. It is otherwise in early Greece. We possess in our museums unrivalled treasures of ancient toreutic art in the precious metals from Greece, which date from about 2500 to 1400 B.C., and as far as mass and weight of gold are concerned are rivalled only by the Scythian finds. These are the well-known results of the excavations of Schliemann at Troy and Mycenae and of others elsewhere. They do not by any means suffer in point of additional interest from the fact that they were made and used by the most ancient Greeks, the men of the Heroic age, probably before the Greek language was spoken in Greece.
The most ancient of these “treasures” is that discovered by Schliemann in 1873 buried, apparently in the remains of a box, deep in the fortification wall of Hissarlik, the ancient Troy. It consists of vases and dishes of gold and silver, and of long tongue-shaped ingots of silver. In consonance with the early date (perhaps about 2500 B.C.) to which they are probably to be assigned (Schliemann ascribes them to the second Trojan city) these objects are all of simple type, some of the vases being unornamented jugs with tubular suspension-handles on the sides. Here we have metal imitating stonework, as, later, pottery imitates metal. These are of silver. A unique form in gold is a boat-shaped cup with handles at the sides (Plate I., fig. 23), at Berlin, which weighs 600 grammes. One vase is of electrum (one part of silver to four of gold).
A treasure of much the same date (the second “Early Minoan” period, about 2500 B.C. or before) was discovered in May 1908 in graves on the island of Mochlos, off the coast of Crete, by R. B. Seager. This is, however, of funerary character, like part of the treasures discovered in the shaft-graves of Mycenae, and, while including diadems, golden flowers, olive branches, chains, and so forth, for the adornment of the dead, does not include much gold used by the deceased during life.
The much later Mycenaean treasures include both funerary objects of thin gold and objects of plate that had actually been used. Among the former should be especially noted the breastplates, diadems and masks which were placed on the bodies of the chieftains whom Schliemann, great in faith as in works, honestly believed to be Agamemnon and his court (and he may not have been very far wrong). Among the latter we may mention the small flat objects of gold plate, little sphinxes and octopuses modelled in relief, small temples with doves, roundels with spiral designs, and so on, which were ornaments for clothing, and the golden plate decorations of weapon-handles. The great cast-silver bull's head with the gold rosette on its forehead may perhaps have been regarded simply as a beautiful object of price, and buried with its owner. Similar protomae of bulls (of gold or silver) were brought by Minoan ambassadors as presents to the Egyptian court in the reign of Thothmes III. Gold and silver vases were found both in the shaft-graves, in the treasure-pit close by, and in chamber tombs at Mycenae. The most usual shape in the shaft-tombs is that well known to us from the vases of Vaphio, described below; among other types may be mentioned specially the δέπας ἀμφικύπελλον with doves feeding above its handles (Plate I., fig. 21, from a restored reproduction) — δοιαὶ δὲ πελειάδες ἀμφὶς ἕκαστον χρύσειαι νεμέθοντο; the golden jug with spiral decoration from the fourth grave; and the cup with lions of Egyptian appearance chasing each other round its bowl, found in grave 5. The fragment of a silver vase with a scene in high relief of slingers and bowmen defending their town against besiegers from grave 4 (Plate I., fig. 22), is an object unrivalled in ancient art. On this, as on the bull's head, we have gold overlaid on silver (with an intermediate plating of copper); on a silver cup from the same grave we find gold inlay, and on another silver cup, from a chamber-tomb, enamel and gold inlaid. How the Minoan goldsmith could combine silver with gold and the two with bronze we see on the marvellous inlaid dagger-blades from Mycenae, with their pictures in many-coloured metals of lion-hunts, cats chasing birds, and so forth, which show that he was perhaps the greatest master of all time in this art.
We speak of him as “Minoan,” because most of the metal objects found at Mycenae are, if not of actual Minoan workmanship and imported from Crete, at any rate designed in accordance with the Minoan taste of the “Great Palace Period” (Late Minoan i. and ii.) at Cnossus. They are only “Mycenaean” in the sense that they were found at Mycenae. Of the art of the gold vase maker in the Mycenaean period properly speaking (Late Minoan iii.) we obtain an idea from the pictures of golden Bügelkannen with incised designs of zigzags, &c., represented on the walls of the tomb of Rameses III. at Egyptian Thebes. The objects from the Mycenaean shaft-graves are much older than this, as are also those from the next treasure we shall mention, that from Aegina, now in the British Museum. The gold cups and other objects of this treasure, with their fine but simple decoration, are certainly to be ascribed to the best Minoan period, although when first published Dr A. J. Evans was inclined to assign them to so late a date as c. A.D. 800. They are surely some seven hundred years older, having no characteristic of the decadent “sub-Mycenaean” period, as
