Page:History of Art in Phrygia, Lydia, Caria and Lycia.djvu/113

FUNEREAL ARCHITECTURE. 97 If per se these two letters have no meaning whatever, they are valuable and of great interest in that they permit us to formulate a probable conjecture in regard to the relative age of the two monu- ments we have juxtaposed. They are not found in the alphabet which the Phrygians borrowed from Greece, instances of which are given in our cut representing inscriptions met with on the rocks around Nacoleia (Fig. 2). On the other hand, they have been identified in a somewhat more complicated form one on a fusaiole from Hissarlik ; and the other, composed of two sets of parallel lines, both on fusaioles, a clay patera brought out of a tomb at Thymbra within the Troad, and in Cypriote inscriptions. 1 The deduction to be drawn from the coincidence is the following. The two characters under discussion belonged to one of the many varieties of the alphabet we called Asianic, which, by way of reduction and simplification, was derived like the syllabary of Cyprus, where the older form persisted longer, from Hittite hieroglyphs, which obtained throughout Asia Minor before the introduction of Phoenician letters. Agreeably with this hypothesis, the Delikli Tach tomb would have been excavated before the Phrygians received from the Ionian Greeks the alphabet they made use of at lasili Ka'ia and the sepulchres surrounding it, and, as a natural consequence, it is older than the tombs in the neighbourhood of Nacoleia. Our supposition is in accord with the character of the monument and its close resemblance with the Midas rock. In both there is great contrast between the rude massive rocks enframing the faade and the frontal surmounting it, whilst their shapes and architectural members exhibit intelligent proportion and symmetry. The only difference is that at Delikli Tach all was regulated on simple lines ; little or no effort was made to heighten the effect of the pediment and inner slab by ornament, which, like rich drapery, covers the whole facade at lasili Kaia. We may be permitted, therefore, to consider Delikli Tach as the first exemplar of a type invented by the Phrygians, a type they improved and per- fected in the upper valley of the Sangarius, where they had their political and religious centre for a period of two or three centuries. 1 PERROT, Explor. Arche., p. 107. Sayce, appendix written for Dr. Schliemann's English edition of Ilios. We have shown in another place that the letter on the right is not a double one, the repetition of the lines being purely ornamental ; the ligatures belong to the decadence of a system of writing, and not to its initial period. VOL. I. H