Page:History of Art in Primitive Greece - Mycenian Art Vol 1.djvu/42

The Country. 21 Sangarius, Hermus, and Maeander have their beginning. The Lydian kingdom expanded around the middle course of the Hermus, whilst the Carians established themselves in the hilly district which lies between the Maeander and the thick wall-mass of the Lycian mountains. These throw out a bold arc around Lycia, making it one of the best fenced countries in the world, one of those which, from the fact that they are more or less completely isolated, seem destined to work out their independence and keep it. Persia stretched away on the Iran plateau, at least that part of it which is on the march of Susiana and Mesopotamia. The various peoples whose monuments we passed in review in the first part of this work were not content to sway their, nearest neighbours with their intellectual superiority, but they likewise brought nations dwelling far apart under their ascendency. Each constituted however a compact mass, having its seat within a sharply-outlined region of the African or Asiatic continent, whither we had to transfer and fix ourselves for a season, that we might define on the spot the genius and the work of each nationality. The Phoenicians alone counselled a different method : the starting- point of our study in regard to them was their own home, situated on that Syrian coast which had been the cradle of their trade and industrial prosperity. Our stay there was brief: we followed these traders beyond the seas, to their colonial empire on the African shore, to their factories sown from one end to the other of the Mediterranean, to every strand where their keels thrust deep in the sand, opened their sides to let out goods of every conceivable description, whether intended for luxury or common use, which a gaping and wondering crowd gathered on the beach was eager to purchase. Whilst we thus followed on the track of those adventurous skiffs, stopping where they stopped and touching land where they did, we picked up many a curious antiquity which most opportunely came to fill lacunae in the series made out of the spoils taken from the great mother-cities ; these however, first Sidon, then Tyre, and afterwards Carthage, remained for many centuries the real organic centres of the Phoenician world, the centres that drew to themselves and received all the products of the " inhabited earth," as said the Greeks, to distribute them afterwards among the nations ; in many instances having previously transformed them and affixed on them their own trade-mark.