Egyptians, had been brought into relation with the monarchy of the Nile at a remote date, and among the Semitic settlers in the Delta or "Isle of Caphtor" must have been natives of Sidon and the neighboring towns. After the expulsion of the Hyksos, the Pharaohs of the eighteenth and nineteenth dynasties carried their arms as far as Mesopotamia and placed Egyptian garrisons in Palestine. A tomb-painting of Thothmes III. represents the Kefa or Phœnicians, clad in richly embroidered kilts and buskins, and bringing their tribute of gold and silver vases and earthenware cups, some in the shape of animals like the vases found at Mykenæ and elsewhere. Phœnicia, it would seem, was already celebrated for its goldsmiths' and potters' work, and the ivory the Kefa are sometimes made to carry shows that their commerce must have extended far to the east. As early as the sixteenth century B.C., therefore, we may conclude that the Phœnicians were a great commercial people, trading between Assyria and Egypt and possessed of a considerable amount of artistic skill.
It is not likely that a people of this sort, who, as we know from other sources, carried on a large trade in slaves and purple, would have been still unacquainted with the seas and coasts of Greece where both slaves and the murex or purple-fish were most easily to be obtained. Though the Phœnician alphabet was unknown in Greece till the ninth century B.C., we have every reason to expect to find traces of Phœnician commerce and Phœnician influence there at least five centuries before. And such seems to be the case. The excavations carried on in Thera by M. M. Fouqué and Gorceix,[1] in Rhodes by Mr. Newton and Dr. Saltzmann, and in various other places such as Megara, Athens, and Melos, have been followed by the explorations of Dr. Schliemann at Hissarlik, Tiryns, and Mykenæ, of General di Cesnola in Cyprus, and of the Archæological Society of Athens at Tanagra and Spata.
The accumulations of prehistoric objects on these sites all tell the same tale, the influence of the East, and more especially of the Phœnicians, upon the growing civilization of early Greece. Thus in Thera, where a sort of Greek Pompeii has been preserved under the lava which once overwhelmed it, we find the rude stone hovels of its primitive inhabitants, with roofs of wild olive, filled with the bones of dogs and sheep. and containing stores of barley, spelt, and chickpea, copper and stone weapons, and abundance of pottery. The latter is for the most part extremely coarse, but here and there have been discovered vases of artistic workmanship, which remind us of those carried by the Kefa, and may have been imported from abroad. We know from the tombs found on the island that the Phœnicians afterwards settled in Thera among a population in the same condition of civilization as that which had been overtaken by the great volcanic eruption. It was from these Phœnician settlers that the embroidered dresses known as Theræan were brought to Greece; they were adorned with animals and other figures. similar to those seen upon Corinthian or Phœniko-Greek ware.[2]
Now M. Fr. Lenormant has pointed out that much of the pottery used by the aboriginal inhabitants of Thera is almost identical in form and make with that found by Dr. Schliemann at Hissarlik, in the Troad, and he concludes that it must belong to the same period and the same area of civilization. There is as yet little, if any, trace of Oriental influence; a few of the clay vases from Thera, and some of the gold workmanship at Hissarlik, can alone be referred, with more or less hesitation, to Phœnician artists. We have not yet reached the age when Phœnician trade in the West ceased to be the sporadic effort of private individuals, and when trading colonies were established in different parts of the Greek world; Europe is still unaffected by Eastern culture, and the beginnings of Greek art are still free from foreign interference. It is only in certain designs on the terra-cotta discs, believed by Dr. Schliemann to be spindle whorls, that we may possibly detect rude copies of Babylonian and Phœnician intaglios.
Among all the objects discovered at Hissarlik, none have been more discussed than the vases and clay images in which Dr. Schliemann saw a representation of an owl-headed Athena. What Dr. Schliemann took for an owl's head, however, is really a rude attempt to imitate the human face, and two breasts are frequently moulded in the clay below it. In many examples the human countenance is unmistakable, and in most of the others the representation is less rude than in the case of the small marble statues of Apollo (?) found in the Greek islands, or even of the early Hellenic vases where the men seen
