Page:History of Art in Phrygia, Lydia, Caria and Lycia.djvu/237

GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS OF PHRYGIAN CIVILIZATION. 221 and embroideries manufactured by inland tribes, and which they despatched to the markets of the coast, helped, doubtless, to accustom the eye with the pattern ; yet the theme is so naturally suggested by the weaver and the mat-maker, as to be found among peoples that have never had any intercourse one with the other. It is as frequent on Peruvian and Mexican vases as on those of Greece ; so that the lonians may have discovered it for themselves, as they plaited bulrushes and handled the shuttle ere Phrygionic tissues served to furnish their dwellings. Differences bearing exclusively on details admit, then, of being explained without calling in the hypothesis of imitation or borrow- ings. In the same rank with the frontal shape, which we noticed for the first time when we began to visit Phrygia, should be placed a type of burial also found there, or at least in a territory occupied for a while by the Phrygians. We were careful to make tracings of the few exemplars then known. It is a type we shall meet again, both in the Lydian kingdom, where it seems to have persisted almost down to the fall of the last national dynasty, and on the other side of the ^Egean, in Greece proper, where it is represented by monuments certainly older than the tomb of Alyattes. This type is the stone tumulus, sometimes protected by a casing of well- dressed units. The internal arrangement consists of a chamber of sufficient strength to shelter the corpse, and, as a rule, of a passage leading to a doorway. But the difficulty is this : these tumuli are empty and mute, and so can tell us nothing of their history, whilst the monuments in the district of Nacoleia are signed, so to speak, and approximately dated by the people who reared them. Never- theless the Greeks, even when supreme masters of the lower valley of the Hermus, never regarded their forefathers as the creators of the tumuli which it contains ; those on Sipylus they ascribed to the quasi-fabulous Tantalidae, and they could tell the names of the kings who had reared the Lydian monuments. The sum of evidence tends to prove that the tombs with circular base are a legacy of the civilization which in this district preceded that of Hellas. The fact, moreover, that we have observed nothing like them in Egypt or Mesopotamia, Syria or Cappadocia, is another point in favour of the argument which would consider the very particular type seen in the neighbourhood of the Smyrnian bay as neither of Oriental origin nor an importation thence ; but as having been introduced by Thracian tribes, which spread under