Page:History of Art in Phœnicia and Its Dependencies Vol 2.djvu/463

TEXTILES. 423 of a colour contrasting with that of the ground, they draw fantastic beasts of every kind." The decoration was, no doubt, on the same principle as the ornament on the metal cups, on armour and on ivory carvings. There would be the same division into parallel bands, the same choice of motives ; the only differences would be in the material and the implement. In the Suppliants of yEschylus the daughters of Danaos disembark with their father and present themselves before Pelasgos. He asks them which is their native country. As descendants of lo they call themselves Argives, but Pelasgos, struck by the appearance of their robes, answers : " You look more like women of Libya than like country-women of mine ; that plant is nourished by the Nile, and the Cypriot style of your feminine adornments shows plainly that they were woven by men." " The plant to which the king alluded can only have been the Egyptian plant par excellence, the lotus, whose flowers and buds must have been embroidered upon the robes in which the actors who represented the daughters of Danaos were dressed. As for the weaving of stuffs by men, that was an Egyptian custom which astonished the Greeks by its novelty. 3 Thus, to /Eschylus, " the Cypriot style nvirpios ^apaKT^p was almost synonymous with the style of Egypt." He spoke the language of his time. Many of those who listened to his verse had been to Cyprus ; many had served on its coasts with Cimon, at the end of the second Medic war ; they had noticed these resemblances, and, for them all, the Cypriot style was closely related to that of Egypt. What the poet said about Cypriot textiles must also have applied to those of Phoenicia proper, for after the futile revolt of Ionia, Cyprus had become attached to the Achaemenid empire with stronger links than ever. Phoenician tissues were still more famous for their colour than for their weaving or the richness of their embroidered work. Tyre and Sidon owed a very large part of their prosperity to a dye of which they had the practical monopoly ; their two great the journey which ended with the abduction of Helen. IIotxi'AAw means, as a rule, to embroider with the needle, acu pingerc, as the Latins called it. It would be difficult to see how the figures that cover such things as the robes of the Assyrian kings could be woven in with the loom in use by the ancients ; with the needle, however, they would be comparatively easy, that is, they would require only skill and patience. 1 PHILOSTRATUS, Icones, ii. 31. 2 ^SCYLUS, Suppliants, verses 279-284. 3 HERODOTUS, ii. 35. SOPHOCLES, CEdipus Colonneiis, 337-340, and the Stoliasts.