Phœnician art of Ialysos, - that is to say, the objects in which the influence of the East is indirect, and not direct. The discovery of metallurgy is associated with Dodona, where the oracle long continued to be heard in the ring of a copper chaldron, and where M. Karapanos has found bronze plates with the geometrical and circular patterns which distinguish the earliest art of Greece; now Dodona is the seat of primeval Greek civilization, the land of the Selloi or Helloi, of the Graioi themselves, and of Pelasgian Zeus, while it is to the north that the legends of Orpheus, of Musæus, and of other early civilizers looked back. But even at Dodona we may detect traces of Asiatic influence in the part played there by the doves, as well as in the story of Deucalion's deluge, and it may, perhaps, be not too rash to conjecture that even before the days of Phœnician enterprise and barter, an echo of Babylonian civilization had reached Greece through the medium of Asia Minor, whence it was carried, partly across the bridge formed by the islands of the Archipelago, partly through the mainland of Thrace and Epirus. The Hittites, with their capital at Carchemish, seem to have been the centre from which this borrowed civilization was spread northward and westward. Here was the home of the art which characterizes Asia Minor, and we have only to compare the bas-relief of Pterium with the rock sculptures found by Mr. Davis associated with "Hamathite" hieroglyphics at Ibreer, in Lycaonia,[1] to see how intimate is the connection between the two. These hieroglyphics were the still undeciphered writing of the Hittite tribes, and if, as seems possible, the Cypriote syllabary were derived from them, they would be a testimony to the western spread of Hittite influence at a very early epoch. The Cypriote characters adopted into the alphabets of Lycia and Karia, as well as the occurrence of the same characters on a hone and some of the terra-cotta discs found by Dr. Schliemann at Hissarlik, go to show that this influence would have extended, at any rate, to the coasts of the sea.
The traces of Egyptian influence, on the contrary, are few and faint. No doubt the Phœnician alphabet was ultimately of Egyptian origin, no doubt, too, that certain elements of Phœnician art were borrowed from Egypt, but before these were handed on to the West, they had first been profoundly modified by the Phœnician settlers in the Delta and in Canaan. The influence exercised immediately by Egypt upon Greece belongs to the historic period; the legends which saw an Egyptian emigrant in Kekrops or an Egyptian colony in the inhabitants of Argos were fables of a late date. Whatever intercourse existed between Egypt and Greece in the prehistoric period was carried on, not by the Egyptians, but by the Phœnicians of the Delta; it was they who brought the scarabs of a Thothmes or an Amenophis to the islands of the Ægean, like their descendants afterwards in Italy, and the proper names found on the Egyptian monuments of the eighteenth and nineteenth dynasties, which certain Egyptologists have identified with those of Greece and Asia Minor, belong rather, I believe, to Libyan and Semitic tribes.[2] Like the sphinxes at Spata, the indications of intercourse with Egypt met with at Mykenæ prove nothing more than the wide extent of Phœnician commerce and the existence of Phœnician colonies at the mouths of the Nile. Ostrich-eggs covered with stucco dolphins have been found not only at Mykenæ, but also in the grotto of Polledrara near Vulci in Italy; the Egyptian porcelain excavated at Mykenæ is painted to represent the fringed dress of an Assyrian or a Phœnician, not of an Egyptian; and though a gold mask belonging to Prince Kha-em-Uas, and resembling the famous masks of Mykenæ, has been brought to the Louvre from an Apis chamber, a similar mask of small size was discovered last year in a tomb on the site of Aradus. Such intercourse, however, as existed between Greece and the Delta must have been very restricted; otherwise we should surely have some specimens of writing, some traces of the Phœnician alphabet. It would not have been left to the Aramæans of Syria to introduce the "Kadmeian letters" into Greece, and Mykenæ, rather than Thebes, would have been made the centre from which they were disseminated. Indeed, we may perhaps infer that even the coast of Asia Minor, near as it was to the Phœnician settlements at Kamirus and elsewhere, could have held but little intercourse with the Phœnicians of Egypt from the fact that the Cypriote syllabary was so long in use upon it, and that the alphabets afterwards employed were derived only in-
- ↑ Transactions of the Society of Biblical Archæology, iv. 2, 1876.
- ↑ I have given the reasons of my scepticism in the Academy, of May 30, 1874. Brugsch Bey, the leading authority on the geography of the Egyptian monuments, would now identify these names with those of tribes in Kolkhis, and its neighborhood.
