Page:History of Art in Phrygia, Lydia, Caria and Lycia.djvu/208

192 HISTORY OF ART IN ANTIQUITY. sometimes threads of gold and silver, formed into picturesque designs, exquisite in tone and workmanship. It is work that will bear being looked into, where nature is reproduced with truth and great freedom of interpretation at the same time ; that is to say, the very qualities which tapestry and embroidery should possess. TOMBS IN PAPHLAGONIA. In the district whose antiquities we have described in the foregoing pages are monuments proper to it and encountered nowhere else ; they cluster around the frontispiece upon which the name of Midas is to be read, and consist of those fa9ades where forms borrowed from timber enframe ornament with forms seemingly imitated from tapestry designs. Such facades are further characterized by inscriptions, the lettering of which belongs to the syllabary we have called Phrygian. If nothing of the kind has been seen hitherto outside Phrygia, per contra, in the adjacent province of Paphlagonia, a recent explorer, M. G. Hirschfeld, reports the existence of several tombs exhibiting singular analogies with such exemplars of the Ayazeen necropolis as are adorned by a porch. 1 The name of Paphlagonia was given in antiquity to that portion of the peninsula whose boundary line was formed on the north by the Euxine, the Halys on the east, the Parthenius on the west (beyond which lived the Myrandynians and Bithynians), and Mount Olgassys on the south. 2 The latter belongs to the Olympus range, whose summits rise between the central plateau and the low valleys watered by streams discharging their waters in the Black Sea. It is emphatically a hilly, well-timbered region, albeit here and there the hills open out into plains of no great extent, but of marvellous fertility, due in part to the abundant 1 G. HIRSCHFELD, Paphlagonische Felsengraeber, etc., with seven plates (Abhand- lungen der Kaiserliche Akademie der Wissenschaften, Berlin, 1885, 410). 2 Xenophon extends further east the boundaries of Paphlagonia, beyond the Halys and the mouth of the Thermodon ; perhaps on the testimony of Heca- tonymus, the Sinopian envoy at that moment in the Greek camp. Among the many difficulties the Greeks, according to his account, would have to face, he seems to suppose that before they attempted to cross the Thermodon, they would have had to fight the whole force of the Paphlagonians (Anabasis, V. vi. 9). In another passage (Ibid., VI. i. i) Xenophon tells of a collision between Greek marauders and Paphlagonians, as having taken place in the neighbourhood of Cotyora.