Page:History of Art in Primitive Greece - Mycenian Art Vol 1.djvu/33

12 Primitive Greece: Mycenian Art. call Mycenian art. This it is which makes our present task even harder than that which has occupied us up to the present hour. In face of the old Eastern civilizations, our standpoint was not that which would have been taken by one who, previously prepared by special studies, had undertaken to write the history of Egypt, Chaldsea, or Phoenicia. The one thing that interested us with all those nations was the share each had taken, in its time and in a different way, in the collective labour whose general results we were called upon to estimate and apprize ; the particular burden laid upon us was to define the output supplied by each of the collaborators, the tools, appliances, pro- cesses, and types that each brought to the general fund. In order to make out this kind of inventory, we had no need to go back to the beginnings ; it was enough to consider these various nations in their full maturity, when they had the com- mand of all their means, and were nearest to the point of realizing, under every form, the ideal which they had conceived. To have pursued our retrospective inquiry much beyond the ages, sufficiently remote, whose relics we have described, might well have proved somewhat difficult. In Egypt, the latest effort in this domain of research has been the exhuming of monuments of the Old Empire ; but Egypt, such as the earliest pyramids and the oldest tombs have revealed her to us, already appears constituted on historical bases, already in possession of dogmas and symbols, of writing, and an art of her own. So complicated a state of affairs implies a long past during which it was slowly elaborated, but whose final result is alone known to us. For Chaldaea this difficulty is even greater, and mainly due to inadequate excavations, carried on as they were on very few sites, and nowhere prosecuted in a systematical manner. With regard to Phoenicia, we have seen through what sequence of cir- cumstances ancient works have been more completely destroyed on the Syrian coast than in any other country visited by us. What remains of the products of Sidonian and Tyrian industry has been largely preserved in lands whose dealings with Canaanite merchants began comparatively very late, in Greece, Italy, and Sardinia. Hence it comes to pass that we have no data by which we can ascend to the actual beginnings of their colonization, the time when these townships, which were destined to so brilliant