furnished with the beaks of birds. But we now know that these curious vases are not peculiar to the Troad. Specimens of them have also been met with in Cyprus, and in these we can trace the development of the owl-like head into the more perfect portraiture of the human face.[1] In conservative Cyprus there was not that break with the past which occurred in other portions of the Greek world.
Cyprus, in fact, lay midway between Greece and Phœnicia, and was shared to the last between an Aryan and a Semitic population. The Phœnician element in the island was strong, if not preponderant; Paphos was a chief seat of the worship of the Phœnician Astarte, and the Phœnician Kitium, the Chittim of the Hebrews, took first rank among the Cyprian towns. The antiquities brought to light by General di Cesnola are of all ages and all styles - prehistoric and classical, Phœnician and Hellenic, Assyrian and Egyptian - and the various styles are combined together in the catholic spirit that characterized Phœnician art.
But we must pause here for a moment to define more accurately what we mean by Phœnician art. Strictly speaking, Phœnicia had no art of its own; its designs were borrowed from Egypt and Assyria, and its artists went to school on the banks of the Nile and the Euphrates. The Phœnician combined and improved upon his models ; the impulse, the origination came from abroad; the modification and elaboration were his own. He entered into other men's labors, and made the most of his heritage. The sphinx of Egypt became Asiatic, and in its new form was transplanted to Nineveh on the one side and to Greece on the other. The rosettes and other patterns of the Babylonian cylinders were introduced into the handiwork of Phœnicia, and so passed on to the West, while the hero of the ancient Chaldean epic became first the Tyrian Melkarth, and then the Herakles of Hellas. It is possible, no doubt, that with all this borrowing there was still something that was original in Phœnician work; such at any rate seems to be the case with some of the forms given to the vases; but at present we have no means of determining how far this originality may have extended. In Assyria, indeed, Phœnician art exercised a great influence in the eighth and seventh centuries B.C.; but it had itself previously drawn its first inspiration from the empire of the Tigris, and did but give back the perfect blossom to those from whom it had received the seed. The workmanship of the ivories and bronze bowls found at Nineveh by Mr. Layard is thoroughly Phœnician; but it cannot be separated from that of the purely Assyrian pavements and bas-reliefs with which the palaces were adorned. The Phœnician art, in fact, traces of which we find from Assyria to Italy, though based on both Egyptian and Assyrian models, owed far more to Assyria than it did to Egypt. In art, as in mythology and religion, Phœnicia was but a carrier and intermediary between East and West; and just as the Greek legends of Aphrodite and Adonis, of Herakles and his twelve labors, and of the other borrowed heroes of Oriental story came in the first instance from Assyria, so too did that art and culture which Kadmus the Phœnician handed on to the Greek race.
But Assyria itself had been equally an adapter and intermediary. The Semites of Assyria and Babylonia had borrowed their culture and civilization from the older Accadian race, with its agglutinative language, which had preceded them in the possession of Chaldea. So slavishly observant were the Assyrians of their Chaldean models that in a land where limestone was plentiful they continued to build their palaces and temples of brick, and to ornament them with those columns and pictorial representations which had been first devised on the alluvial plans of Babylonia. To understand Assyrian art, and track it back to its source, we must go to the engraved gems and ruined temples of primeval Babylonia. It is true that Egypt may have had some influence on Assyrian art at the time when the eighteenth dynasty had pushed its conquests to the banks of the Tigris: but that influence does not seem to have been either deep or permanent. Now the art of Assyria is in great measure the art of Phœnicia, and that again the art of prehistoric Greece. Modern research has discovered the prototype of Herakles in the hero of a Chaldean epic composed, it may be, four thousand years ago; it has also discovered the beginnings of Greek columnar architecture and the germs of Greek art in the works of the builders and engravers of early Chaldea.
When first I saw, five years ago, the famous sculpture which has guarded the Gate of Lions at Mykenæ for so many centuries, I was at once struck by its Assyrian character. The lions in form and attitude belong to Assyria, and the pillar against which they rest may be seen
- ↑ See, for example, Di Cesnola's Cyprus, pp. 401, 402.
