Page:History of Art in Phrygia, Lydia, Caria and Lycia.djvu/160

144 HISTORY OF ART IN ANTIQUITY. below. Each and all are very much worn, and the drawings by which they are known are not sufficiently minute or exact to allow us to define their style. 1 Until further details are to hand, there- fore, they cannot be considered as works executed by the subjects of the Gordioses and Midases. Some thirty yards beyond, just before reaching the summit, the road widens, and there appears straight before you a sculpture representing a personage clad in a short tunic, and grasping a kind of sceptre in his left hand, and hard by a huge two - stepped altar cut in the living rock (Fig. 101, loin map). The high an- tiquity of the figure is un- questionable; in front of it we re cogn i z e d signs of the Hittite writing; and this obliged us, so to speak, to class the bas-relief in the series of monuments of Syro-Cappadocian art. 2 In so doing there was no intention on our part to detach it from the group to which it by rights belongs ; our aim was simply to make the sequence of figures associated with ideographic characters as complete as possible. This system of ideographs preceded in Asia Minor the intro- duction of alphabets derived from the Phoenician syllabary. Both altar and bas-relief were fashioned by the same hand. The latter represented one of the tutelary gods, under whose protection the small Phrygian city was placed. Close at hand was a stone table or shelf, upon which offerings were laid. The place constituted what may be termed the temple-gate, 1 RAMSAY, Hell. Studies, "Studies in Asia Minor," Figs, i, 2. 2 Hist, of Art, torn. iv. pp. 721, 722, Fig. 363. FIG. 102. Rock-cut altai.