rv m '. K < .. c ' -^ HISTORY OF ART IN PHOENICIA AND ITS DEPENDENCIES. VOL. I. HISTORY OF t in flhcenidu AND ITS DEPENDENCIES FROM THE FRENCH OF GEORGES PERROT, PROFESSOR IX THE FACULTY OF LETTERS, PARIS ; MEMBER OF THE INSTITUTE, AND CHARLES CHIPIEZ. ILLUSTRATED WITH SIX HUNDRED AND FORTY-FOUR ENGRAVINGS IN THE TEXT t AND TEN STEEL AND COLOURED PLATES. IN TWO VOLUMES. VOL. I. TRANSLATED AND EDITED BY WALTER ARMSTRONG, B.A., OXON., AUTHOR OF "ALFRED STEVENS," ETC. : CHAPMAN AXP HALL, LIMITED. ork: A. C. ARMSTRONG AND SON. 1885. ILontion : R. CI.AY, SONS, ANO TAVLOK, liREAD STREET HII.I.. r\ CONTENTS. CHAPTER I. THE PHCENICIAN CIVILIZATION". PAGE i. The Situation of Syria and the Configuration of the Phoenician Coast i IT 2. The Phoenicians; their Origin and their First Establishment . . . n 56 3. Religion 5683 4. The Phoenician Writing 83 93 5. General Remarks upon the Study of Phoenician Art 93 102 CHAPTER II. ON TH GENERAL PRINCIPLES AND CHARACTERISTICS OF PHCENICIAN ARCHITECTURE. i. Materials and Construction . .' 103 113 2. Forms . . : 113 125 3. Decoration 126 141 CHAPTER III. SEPULCHRAL ARCHITECTURE. i. The Ideas of the Phoenicians as to a Future Life " 142 148 2. The Phoenician Tomb 149 179 3. Sarcophagi and Sepulchral Furniture 179 213 4. The Phoenician Tomb away from Phoenicia 213 250 viii CONTENTS. CHAPTER IV. SAC'RF.D ARCHITKCTfRK. $ i. The Temple in Phoenicia 251272 2. The Temple in Cyprus 272 301 3. The Temples of Go/o and Malta 301 --318 4. The Temples of Sicily and Carthage 318 325 5. On the General Characteristics of the Phoenician Temple .... 325 332 CHAPTER V. CIVIL ARCHITECTURE. i. Fortified Walls ... 333364 2. Towns and Hydraulic Works ... 364 384 3. Harbours . 385410 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS. PLATE. PAGE I. Three Cypriot heads To face 264 TAIL-PIECES, &c. Cypriot head, Louvre Title. Chapter I. Funerary cone, from Sidon 102 ,, II. Cone-shaped seal, French National Library 141 ,, III. Sardinian scarab 250 IV. Coin of Mallos 332 V. Sardinian scarab 410 FIG. 1. The Nahr-el-Fedar 5 2. Plan of the passes at the Nahr-el-Kelb 7 3. View of the passes at Nahr-el-Kelb 9 4. Syria in the time of the Egyptian domination 17 5. Tyre before the siege of Alexander 21 6. Tomb at Amrit 24 7. The walls of Arvad 25 8. Phoenician merchant galley 34 9. Phoenician war galley 34 10. Map of the Phoenician colonies in the Mediterranean basin 35 n, 12. Carthaginian coins 52 13. Votive stele from Carthage 53 14, 15. Votive steles from Carthage 54 16. Fragment of a votive stele from Carthage 55 17. Descent from the Pass of Legnia, in the Lebanon 58 18. The sources of the River Adonis 59 19. Coin of Byblos < 61 20. Astarte 65 21. Bes 65 22. Pygmy >. 66 VOL. I. b LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS. Fill. 1'AGE 23. Upper part of the stele of Jehawmelek 69 24 Resef 72 25. Baal-Hammon 74 26. From a bronze in M. Peretie's collection 78 27. Child god 79 28. Votive stele 81 29. 30. From a Carthaginian votive stele So 31. Egyptian writing-case 86 3^. Fragment of a bron/e cup 90 33. Fragment of a sepulchral cippus 92 34. Phoenician wall of Eryx 97 35. Carthaginian mason's mark 98 36. Phoenician platter 99 37. Rock-cut house at Amrit 104 38. Rock-cut walls at Saida 104 39. Fragment of the map of Amrit 105 40. The tabernacle of Amrit 105 41. Remains of the walls of Sidon 106 42. Substructure of one of the temples at Baalbek 107 43. Square pier from Gebal 109 44. Wall of Tortosa no 45. Masonry from the Tower of the Algerines . , . , no 46. Wall of a temple at Malta in 47. The wall of Byrsa 112 48. Entablature from a temple at By bios 114 49. Capital at Golgos 117 50. Capital from Edde 117 51. Cypriot capital 118 52. 53. Cypriot capitals 119 54. Ornament from a Cypriot stele 120 55- Cypriot capital 120 56. Cypriot capital 121 57. The Serpent Grotto 122 58. Coin of Cyprus 123 59. Egyptian coffer 126 60. Phoenician cornice 127 61. Details of a cornice 127 62. Sculptured fragment 128 63. Cornice on a tomb 128 64. Moulding from a plinth 128 65,66. Mouldings from the base of a pyramidion 128 67. Coin of Byblos 129 68. Elevation of the doorway at Oum-el-Awamid and section of the lintel . . 129 69. Winged globe 130 70. Winged globe with crescent 130 7 1 . Sidereal symbols from a Carthaginian stele 131 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS. xi FIG. 72. Marble column ........................ 131 73. Alabaster slab ........................ 132 74. Egyptian winged sphinx .................... 133 75. Phoenician scarabreoid ..................... 134 76. Alabaster slab ........................ 134 77. Alabaster slab ........................ 135 78. Altar with stepped ornament .................. 136 79. Rosettes enlarged ....................... 137 80. Stone trough ......................... 137 Si. Fragment of relief ....................... 138 82, 83. Candelabra figured on a stele ................. 138 84. Fragment of a sculptured slab .................. 139 85. Egyptian palette ........................ 140 86. Sarcophagus of Esmounazar ................... 143 87. Section of the Burdj-el-Bezzak ................. 150 88. Part of the Cemetery of Amrit ................. 151 89. Tomb at Amrit ........................ 152 90. 91. Tomb at Amrit ...................... 152 92, 93. Plan and section of a tomb at Amrit ............. 153 94. The Meghazils of Amrit .................... 155 95. Tomb at Amrit ........................ 157 96. 97. Plan and section of a tomb at Amrit ............. 158 98. Tomb at Amrit restored .................... 159 99. Longitudinal section of a tomb at Amrit ............. 159 100, 101. The Burdj-el-Bezzak ..................... 161 102. Section of a tomb at Sidon ................... 162 103, 104. Wells in a tomb at Sidon .................. 163 105. Longitudinal section of a tomb at Sidon .............. 164 1 06. Plan of a portion of the necropolis of Sidon ............ 165 107. Section through line A, B, c, of Fig. 106 .............. 165 108. Section through D, E ...................... 166 109. Section through N, M ...................... 166 no. Section through K, L ...................... 166 in. Tomb of Esmounazar ..................... 167 112. Section of the tomb of Esmounazar restored ............ 168 113. The "Tomb of Hiram" .................... 171 114. Necropolis of Adloun ..................... 173 115. Entrance to a Giblite tomb ................... 175 1 1 6. Interior of a Giblite tomb ................... 177 117. Section showing the soundings in the Giblite tombs ......... 178 1 1 8. Graves dug in the rock at Gebal ................. 180 119. Two Giblite sarcophagi ..................... 181 1 20. Sarcophagus from Oum-el-Awamid ................ 182 121. Cippus from Sidon ....... - ............... 182 122. Sandstone coffin ....................... 183 123. Leaden coffin ......................... 183 xii LIST OK ILLUSTRATIONS. KIO. I'Ar.E 124. Sarcophagus of Sidon 184 125. CotVin of painted stone from an old drawing 185 126. Sarcophagus of Sidon 186 127. Head from an anthropoid sarcophagus of Sidon 186 128. Sarcophagus from Sidon 187 129. Sarcophagus from Sidon 188 130. Fragment of an anthropoid sarcophagus in terra-cotta 190 131. Comparative sections of a Phoenician sarcophagus and an Egyptian mummy-case 191 132. Anthropoid sarcophagus from Sidon 192 133. Sarcophagus from Solunte 193 134. Marble sarcophagus found at Solunte . 195 135. Sarcophagus from Sidon 198 136. Iron holdfast and coffin handle 198 137. Lion's mask 200 138. Sarcophagus from Sidon 201 139. Alabastron 204 140. Baul-Hammon 205 141. Scarab with face of Bes 206 142. Astarte 208 143. Mother goddess 208 144. Mother goddess 209 145. Terra-cotta chariot 210 146. Silver ring with scarab in agate 212 147. Alabaster vases 216 148. Plan of a tomb at Dali 218 149. 150. Terra-cotta statuettes 219 151. Cypriot stele 223 152. Cypriot stele 225 153. 154. Tomb at Amathus 227 155. Plan of a tomb at Amathus 228 156. Section through the ravine at Amathus 228 157. Interior of a tomb at Amathus 229 158. Doorway of a tomb at Amathus 230 159. 1 60. Plan of a tomb at Nea-Paphos 231 161. Courtyard of a tomb at Nea-Paphos 232 162, 163. Plan and section of a tomb at Mall a 235 164. Cross section of above tomb 236 165. Plan of a Carthaginian tomb 238 1 66. Section of a Carthaginian tomb 238 167. Plan of a tomb at Sulcis 240 1 68. Section of a tomb at Sulcis 241 169. Tomb at Cagliari 242 170. 171. Sections of a tomb at Cagliari 243 172. Funerary Cippus from Tharros 243 173, 174. Cippi from tombs at Tharros 244 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS. xiii FIG. PAGE 175. Sandstone cippus with Phoenician inscription 244 176. Interior of a tomb at Tharros 245 177. Statuette in glazed earthenware 245 178. Amulet in glazed earthenware 246 179. Glass amulet 246 180. Scarab 246 181. Scarab in form of a sow 247 182. Amulet in white earthenware, glazed 247 183. 184. Etuis found in the tombs 247 185. The Maabed at Amrith 253 186. Ceiling of the Maabed at Amrith 254 187. The Maabed at Amrith 254 1 88. Monolithic tabernacle of Ain-el-Hayat 257 189. Plan of the two tabernacles at Ain-el-Hayat 257 190. Ruin in the neighbourhood of Sidon 260 191. Stone altar 261 192. Votive stele from Carthage 263 193. Votive stele from Sulcis (Sardinia) 264 194. Votive stele from Sulcis 264 195. Statue found near Athieno 265 196. Limestone statue from Cyprus 267 197. Artificial grotto near Gebal 269 198. Capital from Kition, cut from the local stone 274 199. Coin of Cyprus 276 200. Plan of the remains of the temple at Paphos 278 201. Plan of the remains of the temple at Paphos 279 202. Coin of Cyprus 281 203. The hill of Paphos, remains of a temple in the foreground 282 204. Plan of temple at Golgos 282 205. 206. Elevation of a cone found at Athieno, and section of its lower part . 284 207. Pedestal for two statues 285 208. Model of a small temple in terra-cotta 287 209. The Panaghia Phaneromeni. Plan 288 210. The Panaghia Phaneromeni. Perspective 289 211. The Amathus vase 290 212. Small model of a cistern 292 213. Handle of the Amathus vase 292 214. Coin of Cyprus 293 215. Stone step 294 216. Plan of the crypt at Curium 295 217. Gold bracelet 299 218. Coin of Malta 302 219. Hall in the temple of Hagiar Kim, at Malta 305 220. Doorway in the temple of Hagiar Kim, at Malta 307 221. Plan of the Giganteia at Gozo 308 222. Longitudinal section through the larger temple at the Giganteia .... 309 xiv LIST OK ILLUSTRATIONS. KK;. i> A OK 223. The cone of the Giganteia 311 224. The Giganteia 311 225. Plan of the temple of Hagiar Kim, Malta 312 226. Interior of the temple of Hagiar Kim 313 227. Decorated stone, from Hagiar Kim 314 228. Altar 315 229. Altar 316 230. Statuette 316 231. Statuette 317 232. Stele from Lilybanim 320 233. Stele from Sulcis 321 234. Lintel at Ebba 322 2 35- Capital at Djezza 323 236. View of the great mosque at Mecca 327 237. Plan of the rampart near Banias 337 238. The Phoenician wall near Banias 338 239. Plan of the Phoenician wall at Eryx 340 240. One of the towers of Eryx 341 241. Postern in the wall of Eryx 343 242. Postern in the wall of Eryx 344 243. Postern in the wall of Eryx 345 244. The temple and ramparts of Eryx 346 245. The wall of Motya 347 246. Plan of Lixus 349 247. The wall of Lixus 351 248. Map of the peninsula of Carthage 352 249. The triple wall of Thapsus 355 250. The great wall at Thapsus 359 25 1. Plan of the wall of Byrsa 361 252. Reservoirs of Carthage 369 253. Carthaginian coin 374 254. Rural cistern 375 255. Plan of cistern 377 256. Cross section of cistern wall 378 257. Elevation of part of cistern wall 378 258. Base of column from a portico at Larnaca 380 259. Detail of a portico at Larnaca 381 260. Plan of ancient house at Malta 381 261. View of ancient house at Malta 382 262. The mausoleum at Thugga 383 263. Angle pilaster 384 264. Profile of cornice 384 265. Present condition of the Carthaginian harbours 389 266. The harbours of Carthage according to Beule* 391 267. Arrangement of the berths according to Beule' 391 268. The harbours of Carthage according to Daux 392 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS. xv FIG. I'.UiE 269. Cornice moulding 393 270. Utica in the time of Caesar 397 271. Plan of the naval harbour at Utica 399 272. Admiral's palace, Utica 400 273. Restoration of the northern facade of the Admiral's palace, Utica . . . 403 274. Restoration of a lateral fagade 403 275. The mole of Thapsus 408 276. Plan of the mole of Thapsus 409 HISTORY OF ART IN PHOENICIA AND ITS DEPENDENCIES. CHAPTER I. THE riKENICIAX CIVILIZATION. i. The Situation of Syria and the Configuration of the Phoenician Coast. IN this history of art in antiquity, Egypt and Chaldsea occupy a privileged place. The length at which we have dwelt upon their art activities is justified by the fertility and originality of their genius, by the spontaneity of their development, and, above all, by their influence over that later stage in the progress of humanity of which our own civilization is no more than the sequel. Egypt -> and Chaldaea invented the methods and created the models that awoke the plastic genius of the Greeks. After a long period of probation that genius began, towards the time of Homer, to foster high ambitions, and to attempt works of art in the true sense ; but at first it borrowed more than it created ; nearly all the motives it employed may be traced to a foreign origin. We may recognize those motives both by their physiognomy and their arrangement. They were invented far enough from Corinth and Athens, far even from Miletus and Ephesus ; they were invented in the valleys of the Nile and the Euphrates; and how did they traverse the vast spaces that had to be crossed before they could arrive upon the Ionian coasts, in Peloponnesus or Attica, in yet more distant Latium and Etruria ? How did they contrive VOL. n fj - 2 HISTORY 01 ART IN PIKKNRIA AND ITS DEPENDENCIES. to fix the attention of so many half barbarous races ? Was it by their original inventors that they were carried so far a-field ? No. Neither Egyptians, nor Chaldaeans, nor Assyrians, had occa- sion to hawk their own goods over the basin of the Mediterranean. Egypt, indeed, equipped fleets and carried on a maritime commerce ; she had none of the dread of salt water that used to be attri- buted to her; but it was upon the Red Sea that she launched her vessels ; it was with the tribes of Arabia and of the Somali coasts that she had direct trade relations. There is nothing to suggest that an Egyptian vessel, either of war or commerce, ever put out from the mouths of the Nile and lost sight of the low shores of the Delta on an adventurous voyage to Cyprus or Crete. As for the Chaldaeans and the Assyrians, they did now and then succeed in embracing the coasts of Syria in their empire, but it was as conquerors only that they appeared in its maritime cities ; they made no attempts to turn them into bases for further conquests ; in modern phraseology, their flag never waved over the waters of the Mediterranean. There must, then, have been middlemen by whom the forms and motives invented in Egypt and Mesopotamia were carried to the foreign races who borrowed and used them : and these o middlemen must, by native faculties, by culture and by geo- graphical position, have been naturally fitted for the task they had to fulfil. Among all those nations of the ancient world who have left a name in history, to which especially must we award the honour of having rendered this great service to civilization ? We must not, of course, forget the claims of the tribes established in Upper Syria and Asia Minor, the Khetas, the Cappadocians, the Phrygians, and Lydians the chain of tribes, in fact, that con- nected the valley of the Euphrates with the shores of the yEgaean Sea. They received with the one hand what they gave with the other. Through them the Greeks of Ionia became possessed of certain myths and forms of worship, of certain processes, types and motives, which we can track across the whole breadth of western Asia. But Egypt could never have won its widespread influence through their means. Land communication remained slow, difficult, and uncertain throughout antiquity. A sandy desert, or a chain of inhospitable mountains inhabited by savages no less inhospitable, was enough to bar all passage to commerce. With the sea it is another matter. It appears to separate SYRIA AND THE PHOENICIAN COAST. countries and races, but as a fact it unites them. As soon as man learnt to trust to "the waste of waters" and to so combine the powers of the sail and rudder that his barque became as docile as a horse or camel, he could fix his eyes upon the sun and the stars and take himself whither he pleased. As the fertilising dust is carried by the breeze to fields far enough from that where it is shaken from the parent stem, so ideas travel much faster, much farther, and much more securely when they are carried over sea by the winds than when they have to encounter all the rubs and toils of travel by land. To establish communications between men who are separated by vast spaces there is no go-between so efficient as a maritime population, a population driven year by year, by love of gain and love of adventure, to extend the ever- widening circle of their explorations. Such a population was at hand exactly when the Egyptians and Mesopotamians required its good offices, their civilizations being ripe for expansion beyond their own borders. Driven by events that we only know by their effects, a people had established them- selves on the Syrian coast, not far from the isthmus that unites Africa to Asia, between the valleys of the Nile and the Euphrates and within easy reach of both. In order to reach the frontier of Egypt, at Pelusium, not more than three or four days of a desert in which wells were frequent had to be traversed after quitting the last town in Syria. When they began to risk themselves at sea, the voyage was no less short and easy Even in the days when sailors crept along the coast, beaching their ships every night, they did not take long to arrive at the eastern mouth of the great African river, whence they might mount at their ease as far into the heart of the country as they wished to go. To reach Mesopotamia a somewhat longer journey had to be undertaken. But the middle Euphrates throws out a great elbow westwards, which almost brings it into touch with the frontier of Upper Syria, and those making their way eastwards from the coast had only to follow the easy mountain roads which existed both north and south of the Lebanon, and to cross a well-watered plain, before they came to the valley of the great river. They had then only to abandon themselves to its current to arrive in due time in the heart of Chaldaea, on the quays of that Babylon whence numerous canals would put them in communication with every industrial centre in Lower Mesopotamia. 4 HISTORY OK ART IN* PIKKNKMA AND ITS I)KI'I:N - DI:NCIKS. A great future was thus assured to any tribes who should people the region we still call by its ancient name of Syria. That region is bounded on the west by the sea, on the south by the isthmus that separates, or rather joins, Asia and Africa, on the west by the desert of Arabia and the Euphrates, on the north by the southern slopes of Amanus and Taurus. On three sides Syria was bounded respectively by the sea, by chains of mountains and by vast stretches of barren sand, so that the industrious communities who occupied it could only be attacked from a few points ; from the south, where there was no natural barrier, by the wide passes ol the north-east, and by those narrow defiles in the north-west called the Cilician gates. In the interior of the country, strong fortresses capable of offering a long and stubborn resistance to the invader could be erected on several sites which complacent nature had provided, and as a last resource the tribes could take to their ships and retreat either to the small islets that stud the coasr, or to the large islands in the west, one of which, Cyprus, could be descried on a clear day from the heights on the Syrian shore. The teeming waters which bathed the long line of coast must soon have excited in those who dwelt there the wish to risk themselves upon the sea and to hoist their sails to the breeze. A large part of the country could only be inhabited by a sea- faring population I mean the part squeezed in between the sea and the slopes of the Lebanon. Elsewhere one encounters spacious plains like the fertile fickaa, or Coulo- Syria, like the wondrous garden that hides Damascus in its waving verdure, like the plains of Esdraelon and the country of the Philistines. But from Mount Carmel to the Cape of Tripoli the summits rise to a height of some 3,000 feet, so close to the sea shore that no room is left for agriculture, and the two great rivers that are nourished by the springs and snows of the Lebanon, the Orontes and the Jordan, flow north and south ; the rivers that flow to the coast are no more than mountain torrents. The most important of them all, that which falls into the sea between Tyre and Sidon, the Nahr-cl-Litani, was called by the Greeks the Lcontcs, or " river of the lion." The NaJir-cl-Kclb, or " river of the dog, ' joins the sea north of the roads of Beyrout. Both of these are brawling torrents and thoroughly deserve their names (see Fig. i). Between the sea and the great buttresses of the Lebanon there is seldom room for more than a narrow be-ich, a long ribbon of SYRIA AND THK PHOENICIAN COAST. 5 sand divided every now and then by high and rocky capes. In the centuries that elapsed before man learnt to modify the con- figuration of the ground, and to make roads even along cliff-faces, it was difficult in the last degree, it was at times even impossible, to follow the trend of the coast, at least by land. In the autumn Fir.. I. The Xahr-el-Fedar. rains, moreover, and when the snows melt in the spring, the mountain torrents are unfordable near their mouths, while no boats can live in them. But as civilization advanced men learnt to cut paths, or rather ladders, in the faces of the rocky spurs that had so long barred their way. These paths still exist. On my way from Sour to Saint Jean d'Acre, by the Ras-el-Abiad and the Ras 6 HISTORY ov ART IN PIUKNK IA AND ITS DKPKXDKXCIES. en-Nakourah) I made use of them, and never, even in the East, have I journeyed by a worse route, or by one on which the traveller is more at the mercy of his beast, whose sureness of foot is tried at every step. The Romans were the first to make communication easier and more certain. At the entrance to the gorge of the Nahr-el-Kelb, near Heyrout, the road they cut through the rock in order to avoid the abrupt ascents of the old pass, is still in use. The levels of this Roman road are much easier ; it doubles the cape instead of scaling its heights. It was by the old path that Assyrian and Egyptian armies found their way along the coast (see Figs. 2 and 3). 1 It was long enough, however, before the Romans appeared that the tribes whose doings we have now to study settled in the country. If they wished to penetrate into the mountains they h;id to wait till summer, and then make their way along the beds of the dried-up torrents ; if they wanted to turn them and follow the coast, they could do so in many places by a narrow strip of sand, but elsewhere the waves beat against the actual knees of the hills. At these latter points there was no road at all, or at most a giddy path along the face of the cliff, better fitted for goats than men. A pedestrian accustomed to its difficulties could make use of it with safety, but no one would dream of riding over or even of attempting to lead a string of pack horses along such a track. While the solid earth presented difficulties that must long have seemed insurmountable, the sea w r as open to all. It was upon the sea that the little plains on the coast had their outlook. In these the same configuration was repeated again and again. Here and there the mountains retire a certain distance from the sea and leave room for a few leagues of flat ground where houses could rise among fields and vineyards, or for slopes on which the vine and olive could flourish. These were sites prepared by nature for future cities, but before the latter could come into existence, easy circulation had to be provided for men and goods between one canton and another. Nothing could be more simple ; the sea was at hand ready to carry anything that would float. As soon as the elements of navigation wefe mastered, no farther embarrassment in 1 We borrow this plan and view from an interesting article contributed by Mr. W. S. BOSCAWEN to the Transactions of the Society of Biblical Arclueology (The Monu- ments and Inscriptions on the Rocks at Nahr-el-Kdb, vol. vii. pp. 331-352). SYRIA AND THE PHOENICIAN COAST. 7 the matter of locomotion between one township and another could FIG. 2. Plan of the passes at the Nahr-el-Kelb. Egyptian bas-reliefs, i. vi. viii. ; Assyrian bas-reliefs, ii. iii. iv. v. vii. ix. be felt. Except for a few stormy weeks in the year ships could come and go, driven by the winds when they were favourable, by S HISTORY or Aui IN I'IM.MCIA AND ii> DKI-KNOKNCIES. the sturdy arms of rowers when the bree/e was contrary or absent altogether ; at nightfall or at any sudden nu:nace from the sky, they could seek the nearest haven. And havens were plentiful. The mountain spurs which hindered land travelling were the salvation of the mariner. On one side or the: other of each jutting cape he found shelter from wind and wave. Here he would ride at anchor and wait for better weather, or if the worst came to the worst, he could beach his ship in some narrow creek and make all snug until the tempest should have spent its force. Many things must then have combined to lengthen a voyage ; but time was of no great value a few hours or a few days more or less made no great difference. The important thing was to be able to come and go ; to sally at will from home and to return at pleasure. In those days the mountains were clothed to their feet in forests which furnished splendid timber for ship-building, and that in inexhaustible quantities, so that it was easy to establish workshops on the shore in which the sound of the hammers should never cease. The carpenter who built and the mariner who sailed the ships furnished between them a bond of union for all the inhabitants of the coast, and prevented the isolation to which the peculiar formation of the country would otherwise have condemned each separate group. Even now it is mainly by the sea that the towns on the Syrian coast communicate with each other. The only difference is that the feluccas are now aided in the work by the steamboats that ply between the larger ports. In other ways the ancient customs have been preserved. No one wishing to go from Latakich to Tripoli, from Tripoli to Beyrout, or from Beyrout to Jaffa, would go by land, except, of course, tourists and archaeologists. In our days the profits of the traffic go chiefly to England and Austria, to Erance and Greece ; but it was not always so. For many centuries it was to Syrian ports that the vessels belonged by which the three basins into which the Mediterranean is divided were ploughed in every direction. The beginnings \vere modest enough. In their quest of elbow room, the tribes crept up and down the coast, doubling, not without trepidation, the beetling promontories with their fringe of foam. Gradually they explored the whole coast, from Carmel to Casius ; they became familiar with the set of the currents, with every secure anchorage and every sheltering bay ; they learnt to read the signs of coming " ; ; f:>' > , ; \ VOL. I. ORIGIN OF TIII-: PHOENICIANS, i i storms. To turn their ships' prows out into the open and to become a people of merchants and adventurous mariners were then only matters of time. 2. The Phoenicians ; their Origin and their First Establishment. According to all probability, it was touards the twentieth century before our era rather before that than after that the Phoenicians appeared in Syria ; and by the Phoenicians we mean, with the Greeks, the peoples who settled on the coast at the foot of Lebanon ; other tribes, their mare or less distant relations, dwelt north, east, and south of them. 1 How did they come there, and whence ? According to a tradition gathered by Herodotus from one of their descendants, their ancestors lived on the shores of the Persian Gulf,' 2 where they peopled the Bahrein Islands, two of which were still called Tyros and Arados in the time of Strabo. They passed for the mother countries of the two great towns on the Syrian coast, and we are told that they contained temples similar in appearance to those of Phoenicia. 3 Perhaps some of the resemblances between the Phoenicia of the Mediterranean and that of the Indian Ocean were after-thoughts on the part of the latter, which may have thus thought to attract curious visitors to its coasts ; but the story must have been founded on fact. The Hebrew Scriptures agree with the Greek historians in speaking of the great migrations that carried into Syria, towards the period of the first Theban empire, those 1 There are no grounds for insisting upon the Greek etymologies of the word ; which they sometimes derived from the name of the palm-tree, sometimes from that of the colour red, which was dear to a people who long had a monopoly in the manufacture of purple dye. It is now generally agreed that the word is a corruption of the name given by the Egyptians to the whole bulk of the populations of Arabia and the Persian Gulf; the country of Punt. The primitive form would seem to be better preserved in the names Pceni, Punici, given by the Romans to those Phoenicians of Africa with whom they were so long embroiled (see MASPERO, Histoire ancienne, p. 169, and PH. BERGER, La Phenicie [article reprinted from Z' 'Encyclopedic des Sciences religieuses\, p. 3). 2 HERODOTUS, ii. 89. 3 STRABO, xvi. iii. 4. PLINY, Nat. Hist. vi. 32. According to Pliny the real name of Strabo's Tvros was Tvlos. 12 IllSTokY <>F Auf IN Plld.NICIA AM> ITS DKl'ENDENCIKS. so called Canaanitish populations of which the Phoenicians formed the eastern branch. Must we suppose that,, to reach their new home, they traversed the deserts of Arabia by a line of oases, or that they mounted the stream of the Euphrates and descended from its upper stretches upon the lands to the west and south- west ? We cannot tell ; all that we know is that those districts were; conquered from the savage tribes which had occupied them, that the new-comers took possession ot all the sites they fancied from where Aleppo and Damascus now stand, in the north, to the river of Egypt and the peninsula of Sinai in the south, and that while one section threw themselves upon Egypt and founded the power of the shepherd kings, the rest, the Phoenicians of history, settled upon the Syrian coast between Mounts Carmel and Casius, and there, in situations covered on the east by a thick curtain of hills, founded many cities for which a brilliant future was in store. To what family of peoples did the Phoenicians belong ? Relying upon the genealogical table in the tenth chapter of Genesis, some have supposed them to belong to the stem of Cush ; so that they would be cousins of the Egyptians, like the Canaanites, who, according to the same genealogy, were also sons of Ham. 1 But on the other hand since the Phoenician inscriptions have been deciphered it has been recognized that the Phoenician and Hebrew languages resembled each other very narrowly so narrowly that they might almost be called two dialects of one tongue. If this be so, ought we not rather to connect the Phoenicians with that great Semitic race of which the Hebrews are the most illustrious representatives ? We cannot say how close the relationship may have been, but in any case the Phoenicians must have been much more nearly connected with the Hebrews than with the Egyptians and the other nations whom we know as Cushites and Hamitcs. The difference of religion on which so much insistance is placed by those who would derive the Phoenicians and Hebrews from separate stocks, must have resulted from differences in the material conditions and destinies of the two nations. Habits, and, after a time, religious 1 LEPSILS, Die I'o'ikcr und Sprachen Africas. Einleitung Zitr nubischen Gram- matik, Weimar, 1880, pp. xc. cxii. MASPERO, Histoire ancienne, pp. 147-8. PH. BERGKR, La Pheniae, p. 2. ORIGIN OF TIIK PHOENICIANS. beliefs, no doubt varied greatly between Jerusalem and Tyre and Sidon ; but arguments drawn from such evidence can hardly stand against the identity of language. If we accept the Cushite descent, we can only explain this identity in one way, namely, by supposing that the Hebrews exercised sufficient influence over the Phoenicians to induce them to abandon their own idiom for that of the descendants of Abraham. But there are many serious difficulties in the way of such an explanation, which is, moreover, in conflict with all that we know of Phoenician history. It was only under David and Solomon that the Hebrews won great political and military prestige in Syria, and at that time Phoenicia had been a solidly-established state for many centuries. We have no reason to doubt that she had also been long in full possession of her language and written character. Moreover it is not difficult to gather from the historical and prophetic books of our Bible that, during the whole of the period of the kings of Israel and Judah, both before and after the schism of the ten tribes, the Phoenicians acted upon the Jews rather than the Jews upon the Phoenicians. We do not find that from the coming of David to the Captivity, the Jews made any attempt to conquer Phoenicia or to bring her under their sovereignty in any way ; they do not seem to have impressed upon her either their manners or their ideas ; on the contrary, it was from Tyre that they drew the architects and master workmen who built the temple of Jehovah. In defiance of their own prophets they never ceased to borrow from the same people both the images and names of their gods and the rites in which they were worshipped. A Syrian princess, Athaliah, reigned at Jerusalem, but there is nothing to suggest that a Jew ever rose so high in the towns on the coast. If not under their kings, when could the Jews have wielded any such influence or authority over their rich and industrious neigh- bours as to cause them to throw aside the non-Semitic idiom they had brought from their distant fatherland and adopt Hebrew instead ? Search the history of Palestine from beginning to end and you will find no stage at which such a substitution was possible ; and on the other hand if you refuse to admit that the Phoenicians were of the same blood as the Jews, how do you account for their speaking and writing, not one of the idioms which we encounter at their 14 HISTORY OF ART IN PHUNKTA AND MS I)i:rr.M>K.\ effects, but none of them dispute the great importance of the Phoenicians as manufacturers and as agents of distribution. Nothing that concerns such a people is without interest, and in order properly to understand the part they played in the work of civilization we must begin by making ourselves acquainted with the mode in which their cities sprang up and developed, with their political institutions and their religious beliefs. The first Egyptian documents to mention the Phoenicians date from the eighteenth dynasty, or from a period sixteen to seventeen centuries before our era. 1 If we allow two or three centuries, which is none too much, for these tribes to explore the country, to choose sites for their towns and to build their walls, we find ourselves carried back to the nineteenth or twentieth century for their first appearance in Syria which is very near the date to which we believe the invasion of the Canaanites should be 1 The report of an Egyptian officer who visited the basin of the Dead Sea in the time of the twelfth Theban dynasty is still extant. No Canaanitish tribe is mentioned in it (FR. LENORMANT, Manud de FHisloire andenne, vol. iii. p. 9). On the other hand, in the account of an imaginary journey made by an Egyptian functionary into Syria towards the end of the reign of Rarneses II., an account contained in a precious papyrus of the British Museum, the hero, who penetrated as far as Helbon, the Aleppo of to-day, comes back by the Phoenician coast; he mentions Gebal, Beryta, Sidon, Sarepta, A vat ha, whose ruins now bear the name of Adloun, and he finally arrives at " the maritime Tyre," which he describes as a tovvnlet perched on a rock amid the waves. "Water is taken to it in boats," he says, "and the sea is full of fishes'* (FR. LKNORMANT, ibid, p. 34). Mr. Lieblein thinks he has found traces of the Phoenicians in Egypt as eaily as the sixth dynasty (Proceedings of /he Society of Biblical Archeology, 1882; p. 108) ; but the presump- tions he invokes in favour of his hypothesis do not seem to give it any high degree of probability. 1 6 HISTOXY 01- AKT IN PIKKNK i.\ AND i rs DEPENDENCIES. assigned. But no chronology that cm be called certain or even very probable can be given for the early years of Phoenicia, any more than for those of Egypt or Chalchea. 1 All that we can affirm with certainty is that when the great Theban Pharaohs began their Syrian wars, the Phoenicians were already in possession of the Syrian coast and had founded most of those cities whose names are encountered in their history (see Fig. 4)." Taking them in their order from north to south these were Aradus or Arvad (Ruad). Marath (Ann-it), Simyra, Arka, Gebal, the Byblos of the Greeks (Gcbeyl\ Berytos (Bey rout], Sidon (Satdii), Sarepta (Sarfend), Tyre (Sour], Accho (Acre or St. Jean (f Acre), and Joppa (Jaffa)- All these sites were so well chosen that hardly one of them is now deserted. Even when the country was most completely disorganized by wars of race and religion, by fanaticism and by bad government, nearly all these cities kept their inhabitants. Except at Beyrout their population is, of course, very far from being what it was in antiquity, but it has never fallen so low that Tyre and Sidon, Acre and Joppa have ceased to be markets of some importance and the chief towns of their districts. Still more significant is it that during the twenty centuries which have seen that stretch of coast pass under so many masters, not a single new centre of urban life and commerce, not a town that can be called modern, has been established. The ancient cities of the C.maanites are still all the country possesses and they are known to the modern world by names in which two thousand years have worked but little change. The national tradition, preserved in cosmogonic form by Sanchoniathon, made Berytos and Gebal the two oldest es- tablishments on the coast/' Gebal, indeed, boasted of being the 1 According to HKROUOTUS, the Syrians, when they received the visit of the historian, told him that their town had been inhabited and their temple of Hercules built for 2,300 years, which would place the founding of the city about the middle of the twenty eighth century r,.c. From this statement, however, we may bj permitted to take off something for local vanity. Tyre had become the most important city in Phoenicia, and it would endeavour to exaggerate its age in order to make people forget, if possible, that Sidon had reason to boast of a greater antiquity and of a more venerable premiership. 2 This map and the next (fig. 10) are borrowed from M. MASTERO'S Hiatoire ancienne. We have introduced some slight changes into them which our readers will readily understand when they remember the different aims of our work and M. Maspero's history. 3 Upon Sanchoniathon and his translator. Philo of Byblos. as well as upon the FIG. 4. Syria in the time of the Egyptian domination. VOL. I. D ORIGIN OF THE PHCENICIANS. 19 oldest city in the world ; it had been built, according to the story, by the god El, at the beginning of time. At first the natives of Gebal seem to have exercised a real authority over the rest of the Phoenicians, 1 but owing to events which now escape us a city farther to the south, Sidon, soon rose to the first rank ; in Genesis Sidon is already spoken of as the first-born of Canaan. 2 In the beginning it was no more than a village of fishermen, as its name Tsidon, " a fishery," proves. "It was at first confined to the southern slope of a small promontory jutting out obliquely towards the south-west. The famous harbour is formed by a low chain of rocks running parallel to the shore for some hundreds of yards and touching the northern extremity of the peninsula. The neighbouring plain is well provided with water and covered with those gardens which have given to the town the sobriquet of the flowery Sidon." Sidon soon had two rivals, Arvad on the north and Tyre on the south. Arvad was built on an island at some distance from the main land. "It is," says Strabo, " a rock beaten on all sides by the sea, and about seven stades in circumference. It is entirely covered with dwellings, and the population is still so thick that the houses are all many stories high. The inhabitants are provided with drinking water partly by cisterns, partly by a supply brought from the opposite coast." In the centre of the channel between the island and main land there was a strong spring bubbling up through the sea water. In times of siege, when the cisterns had been emptied, the inhabitants turned to this spring and obtained supplies of water from it by the help of skilful divers. 5 The people of Arvad made themselves masters of the strip of coast that faced their island ; Gabala, Paltos, Karne, Marath and Simyra were dependent upon them, and it would seem that for a time value of those fragments which have come down to our time, see M. KENAN'S Memoire sur /' Origine etle Caractcre rentable deF Histoire phcnicienne quiporte le Norn de Sanchoniathon (Memoires de F Academic des Inscriptions, new series, 1868, vol. xxiii. part ii.). Sanchoniathon (Sanchon Jathon = "the god Sanchon has given") must have written in Phoenician, in the time of the Seleucidae, about the second or third century before our era. He must therefore have been a contemporary, or little removed from it, of Manetho and Berosus-^about the time of Hadrian. Philo must have made a free translation of the work of Sanchoniathon into Greek. 1 MOVERS, Die Phonizer. vol. ii. part i. pp. 1-4. 2 Genesis x. 15. 3 MASPERO, Histoire ancienne, p. 190. 4 STRABO, xvi. ii. 13. 5 Strabo gives a description of the way in which this feat was performed. 20 HISTORY or ART IN Pun NICIA AND ITS DKI-KN-DKNCIES. their supremacy extended to Hnmath, on the other side of the mountains, in the valley of the Orontes. While the Arvaclites thus enjoyed an uncontested supremacy in the north, the Syrians dominated, in the same fashion, the: whole of southern Phu-nicia, between the mouth of the Leontes and the country of the Philistines. For many centuries the other towns of that region were hardly more than provincial branches, so to speak, of Tyre. Tsor means a rock, and the modern name Sour is therefore more like the- ancient name than the Greek Ti'pos, or Tyre, which has been put into general use by the classic writers. Like those of Arvad, the founders of Tyre chose an island for the site of their to an. When they established themselves upon it it must have been separated from the main land by about three- quarters of a mile of water, which was quite enough for defence ; it put Tyre out of reach of any enemy but one who should be master of the sea. To compare small things with great, Tyre had a geographical situation analogous to that in which so much of the strength of England lies. She could defy oriental con querors like the kings of Xineveh and Babylon, and it was not until Alexander joined the island to the main land by an artificial isthmus that she fell. The creation of this causeway had other effects than the destruction of Tyre's impregnability. It arrested the passage of the sand which the currents swept along the coast, so that the harbours of the Phoenician city silted rapidly up, and in these days there is but one left, that which used to be called the Sidon harbour, which can receive a few small vessels. As for the other, the Egyptian harbour, it is so completely obliterated that modern explorers grope for its site, and even those who have most carefully examined the peninsula are not in accord as to where it was situated. 1 A sketch that we borrow from M. Renan shows what he thinks as to the position of the two harbours' 2 (Fig. 5)- The rocky island, or rather the group of rocky islands which were afterwards united and enlarged artificially to form the soil of 1 Upon this difficult question of topography see KENAN'S Mission de Phenicie, iv. ch. i. M. Renan recites and discusses the opinions of his predecessors, MM. de Berton, Poulain de Bossay, Movers, and others who have tried to throw light upon the same problem. 1 The shaded spaces show the ground filled in by Hiram, the lines of asterisks the actual trend of the shore. ORIGIN OF THE PIICF.NICIANS. 21 Phoenician Tyre, gave but a narrow site for a town. On the south side the sea seems to have now taken back to itself a strip of ground that had been reclaimed in ancient times by embankments and retaining walls. As at Arvad, the houses were very high and packed very close. 1 Allowing for all possible economy of space it is difficult to see how the island of Tyre can ever have held more than about twenty-five thousand souls.' 2 This seems aston- ishing, but we must remember, in the first place, that the insular town had a corresponding city on the main land which bore the same name, and was no doubt at least as populous as the mari- time Tyre ; and secondly, that the highly cultivated plain in the FIG. 5. Tyre before the siege of Alexander. From Renan. neighbourhood of the former supported and employed a large population of peasants and slaves. ' In times of peace, therefore, the Tyrian population was doubled, or perhaps trebled, by this continental faubourg and its smiling environs. And again we must not forget that maritime and commercial cities on islands often have an importance out of all proportion to their extent. M. Renan cites the example of St. Malo, which resembles Tyre 1 STRABO, xvi. ii. 23. It is said that the houses there are very high and have more stories than in Rome." '- The surface of this island has been estimated at 576,508 square metres. 3 Mission de Phenicie, iv. ch. ii. 22 HISTORY OF ART IN PHOENICIA AND ITS DEPENDENCIES. very much in situation, and at one time was a maritime centre almost of the first order, while it managed to give house room to more than 12,000 people on a surface less than that of the Syrian island by more than two-thirds. 1 As we reflect upon all the advantages offered by the site of Tyre, at once close to the main land and separated effectively from it, we are tempted to believe that it must have been one of the first points occupied by the Phoenicians, who had already, in the Persian Gulf, learnt the safety that attends life on an island. Tyre was perhaps as old, then, as Sidon, but Sidon was the first to rise into prosperity. Neither in the tenth chapter of Genesis nor in Homer do we hear a word of Tyre." \Ve have now glanced rapidly down the Phoenician coast from Arvad to Joppa ; we have called the attention of our readers to its principal cities, to those which have left the most conspicuous traces in history, and in doing so we have, we hope, given them some idea as to what 'Phoenicia really was. It was not a compact nation occupying a large and continuous territory. It had no resemblance to such countries as Egypt, Chaldaea and Assyria. To describe it accurately, it was no more than a series of ports each of which was set in a more or less narrow frame of cultivated land. These towns, situated one or two days' march from each other, were the centres of a life wholly municipal, like that of a Greek city. \Yhen their independence was menaced by the formidable monarchies of Egypt or Assyria, of Babylon, Persia or Macedonia, even the pressure of a common danger could not make them unite for common defence. The only bonds between the different townships were those due to identity of origin, language, and written character, and those arising from community of interests in business, from similarity of social habits and religious beliefs. It would seem that there were three distinct Phoenician communities until the Macedonian conquest, and especially the 1 Afission de Fhcnicie, p. 553. Perhaps a more apt comparison, at least to English readers, would he one with Venice, which, thanks to a situation similar in all essentials to that of Tyre, was in the middle ages enabled to hold a position in the world differing very little from that enjoyed by the Syrian city fifteen hundred years before. ED. 2 STRABO notices this in the case of Homer, xv. ii. 22. ORIGIN OF THE PHOENICIANS. 23 diffusion of Greek culture, came to efface all differences. First there was that of Arvad, which is hardly mentioned by the Greek and Roman historians at all ; it was, however, very ancient, for the Arvadites figure among the sons of Canaan in the genealogies of Genesis, 1 but we know hardly anything of its history. The oblivion in which it has rested is explained by the situation of this group of towns. It was masked, so to speak, by the Lebanon, which cut it off from lower Syria and the valley of the Orontes. It was thus a little aside from the path of those Egyptian and Assyrian conquerors whose disputes for the possession of the country were so often renewed. Moreover it appears that the Arvadites leaving to others the risks and profits that attended voyages to very distant countries, were contented with a coasting trade to Cyprus and Rhodes, and along the southern shores of Asia Minor. Thanks to this prudent commerce the whole district of Arvad became very prosperous. To the south of the island the coast described a wide gulf or bay, not unlike that of Genoa, and bordered with many rich villages and small towns, of which Marath was the chief. 2 The rich shipowners of Arvad had their country houses, their farms, and their tombs upon the main land (see Fig. 6). According to Strabo their island was no more than seven stades, or about 1,416 yards, in circumference; it was therefore small enough for the crowded masses of human beings who found shelter behind its formidable walls (Fig. /) ; there was no room in it for the dead. Gebal, or Byblos was the centre of another Phoenician community which preserved its own individuality until the last days of antiquity. There religious sentiment seems to have been more intense and to have played a more important part than anywhere else in Phoenicia. "Byblos," says M. Renan, "appears more and more to me to have been a sort of Jerusalem of the Lebanon.'' 3 Both in language and in bent of mind the Giblites seem to have been more like the Hebrews than the rest of the Phoenicians. In the great Byblos inscription, which is one of the most precious monuments of Semitic epigraphy, the King Jehawmelek (about 500 B.C.) addresses his great goddess, the lady Baalat-Gebail, in terms which might well, with some exceptions, have issued from the lips 1 Genesis x. 15-18. 2 RENAN, Mission de Phenicie, p. 21. 3 Ibid., p. 215. 24 HISTORY OK ART IN PHIKNICIA AND ITS DEPENDENCIES. of a pious Jew. lie speaks of himself, in the Bible words, as "a Fir.. 6. Tomb at Amrit. From Kenan. just king, and fearing God." In later times it was at Byblos and 1 Corpus Inscriptionum Semiticaruin, vol. i. part i. no. i, and plate i. M. PH. BERGER has given a translation of the Jehawmelek inscription into French ; it will be found in the lecture he gave at the Sorbonne under the title " Les Inscriptions Semitiques et PHistoire " (Bulletin de I Association, zyth February, 1883, p. 13). ORIGIN OF THE PHOENICIANS. in its dependent valleys, that the mysteries of Astarte and Adonis were celebrated, as well as the licentious rites of Tammouz, which were so popular in Syria throughout the Grseco-Roman period. Finally we come to the Phoenician community par excellence, that of Tyre and Sidon, the southernmost of all. We there find the peculiar genius of the race at its greatest development, its taste for trade and industry, its love of maritime adventure, its readiness to accommodate itself to new conditions, its marvellous skill in opening relations with the most savage tribes and in implanting new wants in their breasts. In all that we shall have to say of the FIG. 7. The walls of Arvacl. From Rcnnn. rapid expansion of Phoenicia and of the influence it exercised over the peoples of the west, we must be understood to speak of these two great cities, and especially of Tyre. The other Phoenician cities may have supplied sailors for the Tynan ships and cargoes for their holds, 1 but it was Sidon first, and then, with increased decision and enterprise, it was Tyre, that took the initiative and 1 Addressing Tyre, EZEKIEL says (xxvii. 8): ''The inhabitants of Zidon and Arvad were thy mariners : thy wise men, O Tyrus, that were in thee, were thy pilots," which confirms what we say as to the division of the work. Tyre recruited her marine along the whole coast, but she herself furnished it with officers. VO1. I. !; 26 HISTORY OF ART IN PIKKNICIA AND ITS DEPENDENCIES. general direction of the movement. The captains of those two great cities were the earliest to press on towards the setting sun, till first the pillars of Hercules and afterwards still more distant points were left astern of their ships. We know very little of the institutions of the Phoenician cities ; we know practically nothing of their political and social life. So far as we can guess they had a political system analogous to those of several cities of modern Europe in which similar ambitions and habits of life found a place, such as Genoa, Venice and the Hanse towns. Wherever the exigencies of a great maritime commerce tend to concentrate capital in a few hands, and to enable the more capable citizens to accumulate huge fortunes, there we always find a powerful aristocracy. This aristocracy sometimes leaves an appearance of power to popular assemblies or hereditary princes, but by right of its great wealth and superior intelligence it always keeps the reality of power in its own hands. Between such cities as those we have named, the chief difference lies in the varying exclusiveness of the aristocracy by which they are ofoverned. In some it closes its ranks to new-comers and o tends to oligarchy ; in others it opens them and welcomes a certain measure of democracy. It is difficult to say to which side Sidon and Tyre inclined. We are better informed, or rather we are a little less ill informed, as to the great African colony of Tyre, Carthage, and perhaps we may venture to assume that the daughter inherited a good deal of the mother's constitution. In the light of such an analogy we should say that the system of the Phoenician cities tended strongly to oligarchy. The inscriptions and the Greek historians, tell us, however, that they had kings. At Arvad we find a dynasty in which the names of Aniel and Jerostratus alternate with each other. At Sidon there was an ancient royal family whose origin must have been coeval with that of the city ; its reign was interrupted more than once ; but at moments of crisis its existence was remembered, and some member of the ancient house was sought out to put an end to intestine quarrels and the contests of pretenders. The life of Tyre seems to have been more troubled than that of Sidon. Tradition has handed down to us the names of several of her kings, but as a rule she seems, like the Carthaginians and the Jews before the time of Saul, to ORIGIN OF THE PHOENICIANS. 27 have preferred suffetes or judges, two of whom held power at once. But whatever title they enjoyed, whether they were hereditary princes or consuls appointed for a time or for life, their power must always have been more than a little precarious. Remember the doges of Venice and Genoa ! the true masters of the city were the heads of the principal families, or, to speak more accurately still, of the chief commercial houses. In Phoenicia, as at Carthage and in the Italian republics, the creators of the national wealth and the employers of the national labour formed, under one name or another, a species of senate. 1 They all had ex- perience of affairs and habits of command. Each of them counted his ships by dozens, and his sailors, workmen, and agents by hundreds. One of these merchants would have a monopoly of trade to some country far larger than Phoenicia ; another might work tin or gold mines in some distant island of the north or west. The interests of the nation were therefore bound up with those of the shipowners, who offered it a continually widening field for its energies, and with those of its manufacturers, who provided the materials for profitable exchanges. There was no question bearing upon the future prosperity of the people in which the rich merchants and shipowners of the country who knew per- sonally every shore and every nation of the Mediterranean were not the best guides, and a council composed of such men could not fail, in time, to gather all real power into its hands. It was in such a council that all questions of importance were discussed and decided. Even when they had kings the Phoenician cities were in reality small aristocratic republics. It w T as in Phoenicia that municipal liberty made its first appearance in the ancient world and that it first gave evidence of its inherent power. It created what the great oriental states, or rather agglomerations of men, had never known, namely, the citizen, the individual citizen, full of pride in the independence of his narrow fatherland, full of ambition for 1 ARISTOTLE, who was a great admirer of Carthage, insists upon the oligarchic character of her constitution and upon the importance it gave to wealth and to those who possessed it (Politics, ii. viii. 5). " It was the opinion of the Carthaginians that he who should exercise public functions should have not only great qualities but also great riches ; they thought that a man without fortune would not have the leisure necessary to make him successful as a governor of men." 28 HISTORY ov ART IN PIKKNICIA AND ITS DEPENDENCIES. himself and for her. By enforcing on each individual a sense of his own personal value, this regime made him capable at certain critical moments of extraordinary devotion and energy. " Tyre was the first town to defend its autonomy against those redoubt- able monarchies which, from their seats on the Tigris and Euphrates, threatened to extinguish all life on the shores of the Mediterranean. When all the rest of Phoenicia had bent to the tempest, the dwellers on this isolated rock alone held the mighty Assyrian machine in check, and after supporting hunger and thirst for years had their reward in seeing the hosts of Shalmaneser and Nebuchadnezzar decamp from the neighbouring plain. A modern traveller cannot stand upon the mole which has made Tyre a peninsula without remembering with emotion that she was once the last bulwark of liberty." 1 Thanks to this heroic resistance Tyre appears to the eyes of the historian the chief representative of the ambitions of Phoenicia and of the part she was called on to fill in the world ; but she was not the first to open the sea routes ; and even when every distant harbour was filled with her ships, even when her sailors excelled all their rivals in courage and enterprise, they were never alone in the work. Phoenicia never had what we should call a capital. During the Roman period Tyre and Sidon disputed the title of metropolis, that is, of mother city and foundress of Phoenician civilization. 2 Tyre could boast of the more glorious services, Sidon of the greater antiquity. The earliest maritime enterprises and the first factories established in foreign countries dated from the hegemony of Sidon. Like all the rest of Phoenicia, Sidon had accepted without resistance the sovereignty of the Theban Pharaohs, when they were masters of Syria ; but the tribute paid to them by the Phoenicians was no heavy price to pay for the right of frequenting the Delta ports. The relations thus established with Egypt secured, in fact, a double monopoly to the Phoenicians. Almost everything drawn by Egypt from the markets of Asia, whether raw material or manufactured articles, passed through their hands ; while, per contra, the export trade of the Nile valley was carried on almost entirely through them ; from such a state of things, clever traders like the Phoenicians must have reaped enormous profits. Moreover the empire of 1 RENAN, Mission de Phenide, p. 574. - STRABO, xvi. ii. 22. ORIGIN OF THE PHOENICIANS. 29 Thothmes and Rameses was then the first military power of the world, and it must have been a great advantage for the Phoenicians to be able to claim at need the protection of those princes or of their generals. On the high seas they might, as we should phrase it, fly the Egyptian flag, and cover themselves with its prestige. 1 Favoured thus by a vassalage which hardly affected their freedom, the Sidonians began by visiting all the eastern coasts of the Mediterranean. In the north they established themselves upon the southern littoral of Asia Minor ; they took up strong positions in the islands of Cyprus and Crete, whence it was easy to make the coasts of Rhodes and the Sporades on the one hand, and of the Cyclades on the other, without losing the last glimpse of land. 2 They seem to have appeared very early at Thera (Santorini), at Melos (Milo), and at many other points in the archipelago. They may even have mounted thence to the Thracian islands, to Thasos, whose mines they worked so long. :i We may even believe that they passed the Hellespont and penetrated to the Euxine, to bring from its farther shores the copper and iron of the Chalybes, and the tin of the Caucasus. In no part of the Hellenic main-land was their influence more strongly felt than in Bceotia. This is proved by the myth of Cadmus, or " the Oriental " (from kedem, east), who is said to have imported the alphabet into Greece, and to have founded the city of Thebes. 4 In the Peloponnesus, their presence is to be traced in Argolis ; but it was in the island of Cythera, off Laconia, that they were chiefly established. There they set up 1 On the presence of the Phoenicians in Egypt and the part they played there, see the interesting observations of BRUGSCH (Histoire de CEgypte, pp. 142-150). He shows that the Tyrians were something more than stranger merchants kept outside the ordinary framework of Egyptian society. In papyri dating from the nineteenth dynasty there are many examples of Semitic names borne by officials of Pharaoh's court. The same writer shows that a certain number of gods of Asiatic origin were then introduced into the Egyptian pantheon. Of these the chief were Reshep, Bes, Kadesh, and Anta. 2 DIODORUS has preserved the tradition of these relations between Rhodes and the east. He makes Danaus and the Egyptians, Cadmus and the Phoenicians visit that island (v. Iviii. i, 2). According to his story Cadmus left there a great bronze lebes, or cauldron, covered with Phoenician characters, as a mark of his visit. 3 HERODOTUS, ii. 44 ; vi. 4 Upon the establishment of the Phoenicians in Boeotia, see especially M. FR. LENORMANT'S paper entitled La Legende de Cadmus et les Etablissements phcnidens en Grece (8vo, 1867, Levy). 30 HISTORY OF ART IN PIKKNICIA AND ITS DEPENDENCIES. factories whence their merchandize could flow readily into all the markets of the neighbouring peninsula. Emboldened by success the Sidonians ventured to brave the terrors of the open sea, and penetrated into the second basin of the Mediterranean, the basin bounded on the west by Italy and Sicily. In Africa they built Utica and Kambc, on the site that was afterwards to become famous as that of Carthage ; they braved the long rollers of the Adriatic, they touched at certain points in southern Italy and Sicily, and they took possession of Malta and Gozo, where they found excellent harbours of refuge in which their ships could rest and refit. 1 About 1000 or 900 B.C. the supremacy passed from Sidon to Tyre. 2 Taken by the Philistines and sacked, the former town received a blow from which she took long to recover, but she had done so much for the interests and glory of Phoenicia that for a long time, both in Syria and in the east, the words Phoenician and Sidonian were looked upon as convertible terms. In their official acts the princes who reigned at Tyre called them- selves kings of the Sidonians. 3 The first Tyrian kings of whom history says anything are Abibaal, the contemporary of David, and his son Hiram, the friend of Solomon. We find the names of several more in the Hebrew Scriptures and in the writings of the Greek and Roman historians, but their probable dates and sequence are often difficult to establish. It is certain, however, that Tyre continued the work of Sidon, and that, with greater energy and on a wider scale, the Tyrian colonies multiplied on the more fertile parts of the North African coast, and became rich and populous cities ; among them were Hippo, Hadrumetium, Leptis, and, towards the year 800 B.C. " the new city," Kart-hadast, which the Greeks called Carchedon and the Romans Carthage. o Thanks to her splendid situation Carthage developed rapidly ; but she never forgot that she was the daughter of Tyre. Every year a solemn embassy left the colony to sacrifice in the temple of Melkart, the most august of the metropolitan shrines. 4 After a successful war Carthage sent a tithe of the spoil to the same 1 DIODORUS tells us that Malta and Gozo were colonized by the Phoenicians, but he does not tell us when (v. xii. 3, 4). 2 JUSTIN, xviii. 3. 3 PH. BERGER, La Phcnicie, \\ 7. 4 POLYBIUS, xxxi. xx. 9, 12 ; CfKiiis, iv. ii. 8; DiODORUS, xx. xiv. i. ORIGIN OF THE PHOENICIANS. temple. 1 If the two cities never combined for any great political action or even to resist a common enemy, their abstention was due to the distaste of the Phoenicians for such methods of work ; but between the merchants of Tyre and those of Carthage close and intimate relations sprang up wherever they met. They were in continual correspondence, and at a word or glance they would combine to defeat the rivalry of foreign traders, such as the Greeks and Etruscans, and to keep profitable transactions to themselves. There was no necessity for agreements in writing or for binding oaths. Their co-operation was founded upon community of blood, of language and religion, of habits; and, above all, on that strongest of all ties, community of loves, hates, and interests. In spite of the increasing prosperity of Carthage, Tyre remained for two centuries more the richest and most powerful of Phoenician cities. By the time its great African colony was founded Tyre had already begun to pervade the westernmost basin of the Mediterranean ; she had visited all its shores and multiplied naval stations upon them. The great antiquity of the commercial relations between Italy and Tyre is proved by the words Serranus, SarraniLs, which survived in the Latin language down to the classic period ; 2 they are a corruption of the true Semitic form of the word Tyre, Tsor. Tyrius, a corruption from Serranus, did not begin to come into general use at Rome till much later, when the Latins had come under the influence of the Greeks, who had turned Tsor into Tyros (Tvpos}. The presence and persistence of the form Serramis proves that the former people had been in close connection with Phoenicia, through the maritime trade of Tyre, ' before intimate relations had sprung up between the natives of Italy and the Greeks. In the course of their movement west- ward the ships of Tyre put into the ports of the great island of Sardinia, where they found several useful metals in abundance. Their harbour was the magnificent anchorage of Caralis, now 1 JUSTIN, xviii. 7 ; DIODORUS, xx. xiv. 2. 2 VIRGIL, Georgic II. 505 : " Hie petit excidiis urbem miserosque Penates Ut gemma bibat et Serrano dormiat ostro." 3 We take this observation from W. Helbig's interesting paper on the discoveries made a few years ago at Prseneste (Cenni sopra Varte fenicia, p. 210, in the Ann ales de t Institut de Correspondance Archeologique, 1878, pp. 197-257). 32 HISTORY or ART IN PHOENICIA AND ITS DEPENDENCIES. Cagliari, and they founded stations on the western coast which afterwards became the towns of Nora and Tharros. From these ports the coasts of Spain could be easily reached, either by hugging the shores of Mauritania* or by way of the Balearic Islands. To the Phoenicians the chief attraction of Spain lay in its mines, of which the more accessible seams had already per- haps been worked by the indigenous races. By following the coast southward and westward the Tyrian seamen would at last arrive at Calpe, whence they would look out on a boundless and unknown sea, suggesting that they had at last reached the end of the habit- able world. The fears that seized them have sent an echo down even to our times. They could not repress the misgivings they felt at the long rollers of the Atlantic and at the swing of its tides ; they hesitated on the threshold of the unknown. According to a tradition long current at Gades, it was only after having twice retreated that they at last nerved themselves to pass the straits and to land on the other side. 1 A third expedition, led by a bolder captain, founded on a small island close to the main-land the colony which was afterwards to become famous as Gadira, Gades and Cadiz.' By its situation and its houses tightly packed into a narrow space, Gadira must have reminded its founders of Tyre and Arvad. It became a fruitful nursery of hardy sailors and rapidly attained a prosperity that still excited the admiration of Strabo in the first century of our era. 3 Its insular site made this advanced post secure enough, while its proximity to the main land made business easy. The Phoenician merchants soon established intimate relations with the people of Betica, the Turtes, Turditani or Turdules of the Greek and Latin historians. It has sometimes been suggested that a connection should be sought between the name of these people and the word Tarshish, which was certainly borrowed by the Hebrew writers from the Phoenicians. 4 We have some reason to believe, however, that at first the word Tarshish was applied by the Syrian navigators to southern Italy ; with time it became 1 STRABO, iii. v. 5, 2 From the Phoenician word gfidir, a "closed and fortified place." Sec FR. LENORM ANT'S Manuel de FHistoire aticienne, vol. iii. p. 58. 3 STRABO, iii. i. 8 ; v. 3 ; DIODORUS, v. xx. 2. 4 Genesis x. 4 ; i Chronicles \. 7; Psalms Ixxii. 10 ; ISAIAH xxiii. 6, 10, 14; Ixxi. 19; EZEKIEL xxvii. 12. ORIGIN OF THE PHOENICIANS. 33 displaced, and as the horizon of the Phoenicians retired westwards so did the shores known to them by that name, which was never, in truth, very definite in its application. At the period when Phoenician power was at its zenith it signified generally the lands by which the Mediterranean was bordered on the west, just as to Europeans the West Indies meant for centuries the whole conti- nent of America, north and south, with the islands which cluster about it. 1 But whatever the origin of the name may have been, it is certain that Tarshish occupied a very large space in the minds of the Phoenicians. " They called those vessels that went long voyages ships of Tarshish, just as the English called theirs Indiamen even when they did not go near India." These ships must have been more solidly built and of greater tonnage than those engaged in the coasting trade with the ports of Syria and the ygaean, but unfortunately it is not their portraits that we must recognize in those sculptured reliefs of the Sargonid period in which Phoenician galleys are represented. 3 Some of these by their rounded stems and sterns seem to be cargo-carriers (Fig. 8), while others, with a sharp beak or ram, are " men-of-war " (Fig. 9) ; we can point to no monument on which the form and aspect of 1 FR. LENOTJMANT, Tarschisch, Etude d' Ethnographic et de GcograpJ.ie liblique (Revue des Questions historiques, 1882, ist July). 2 PH. BERGER, La Ph'enicie, p. 32. The phrase "ships of Tarshish " is thus employed in several passages of the Bible (i Kings x. 23; 2 Chronicles ix. 31) where actual voyages to Tarshish cannot be referred to, as the question of the moment is the traffic with Ophir, which was carried on by the Red Sea. We may conclude that the expression has the same generic force in this verse from EZEKIEL (xxvii. 25) : " The ships of Tarshish did sing of thee in thy market ; and thou wast replenished, and made very glorious in the midst of the seas." 3 We are enabled to recognize Phoenician galleys in these sculptured ships by the words of the inscription known as The Annals of Sennacherib, where it is related that in order to reach the rebels from Lower Chaldasa, who had taken refuge in the land of Elam, Sennacherib crossed the Persian Gulf in vessels of Syria. The truth of this is, in all probability, that he caused a flotilla to be built by Phoenician carpenters, on the Lower Euphrates, whence he could descend towards the "great sea of the rising sun." The bas-reliefs discovered by Sir Henry Layard must be understood as dealing with the return of the rebels as captives. " The men of Bit-Yaken with their gods and the men of Elam, I captured them, says Senna- cherib, I did not leave one. I embarked them in vessels and transported them to the opposite shore." M. Oppert has furnished us with a translation of this text, which appears in Cuneiform Inscriptions of Western Asia, vol. i. p. 40, line 31 et seq. VOL. I. 1'" 34 HISTORY OK ART IN PIUKNICIA AND ITS DEPENDENCIES. the ship of Tarshish, the PluL-nician Indiaman or clipper, has been preserved. The profits of the trade with Spain were so large and so nimble that the whole eastern coast of the peninsula was soon studded FIG. 8. Phoenician merchant galley. From Layard. with Phoenician settlements. The chief of these were Malaca (Malaga], Sex (Motril), Abdera (Almcria), and Cartei'a (Al- %eciras) ; others of less importance might be named, or, at least, ^yiJffiij^i^ JlO I-IG. 9. Phoenician war galley. From Layard. their situation guessed. The valleys of the interior and the fertile plains of the province we now call Andalusia supplied merchandise of various kinds to the Tyrian venturers, but the chief staple of the i*~r^ f r^a^ . $* Vflii , u >-^s v^vic^-^ 1 \ i -> c i^ O:ho^r^vr., - t v rC = c- **J>M\ < ORIGIN OF THE PHOENICIANS. 37 trade was metal. " Tarshish," says Ezekiel in his address to Tyre, 1 " Tarshish was thy merchant by reason of the multitude of all kind of riches ; with silver, iron, tin, and lead, they traded in thy fairs." Of all these metals doubtless the most important to the Phoenicians, and the most profitable, was tin. In the ancient world no sub- stance was more universally employed than bronze, and without tin there can be no bronze. It was therefore an enormous advantage to the Phoenicians to have made themselves masters of the source whence that metal was to be obtained. The length of a sea voyage has far less effect upon the cost of merchandize than that of a land journey, so that throughout the Levant the tin brought over sea from Spain could be sold cheaper than the same metal brought over-land from central Asia. Such an advantage gave Phoenicia the control of the market and insured the fortune of her merchants. 2 We give a map which will enable the reader to see at a glance how far the Phoenicians had carried their commerce in the eighth century B.C. The names of their principal settlements and naval stations are given, with every indication necessary to help to a clear comprehension of the several parts played by Tyre and Sidon in the creation of a great chain of colonies, of which some of the less important links have faded altogether from history 3 (Fig. 10). The Tyrians were well inspired to seek these new outlets for their energies in the west of Europe, for in the other direction they saw markets closed to them in which they had once had a monopoly. Greece was developing fast ; her population was growing and beginning to give evidence of a love for maritime commerce. In the two or three centuries which followed the supercession of Sidon by Tyre the Phoenician merchants had every day to struggle harder to maintain their position in the 1 EZEKIEL xxvii. 12. 2 As to the profits accruing to the Phoenicians from their control of the mines in the Iberian peninsula, see DIODORUS, v., xxxv. 3-6 ; xxxviii. 2-4. He is speaking chiefly of silver, but he adds that " tin was found in many parts of the peninsula." In these days the chief metallic products of Spain and Portugal are iron, copper, and especially argentiferous lead. Veins of tin are known, but they are not rich enough to pay for the working. 3 We borrow this map from M. Maspero. The letter G at the end of a name indicates a colony from Gebal, S one from Sidon, and T one from Tyre. But some of these attributions are by no means certain. 3S HISTORY OF ART IN PIM.NICIA AND ITS DEPENDENCIES. /Egruan. Their goods were still bought, but they were no longer the sole purveyors of all those things by which life is made comfortable and luxurious ; they could no longer add the profits of piracy to those of trade ; the practice of kidnapping girls and boys and selling them into slavery l had to be given up as soon as the people of the islands learnt to build ships for themselves, and to retain the mastery of their own ports. The rich silver mines of Siphnos and Cimolos were no longer worked for the benefit of strangers to the soil. The isolated situation of o Thasos enabled the Phoenicians to maintain themselves there to a later period, but at the beginning of the eighth century they were chased even thence by a colony of Parians.- Long before this Miletus and her colonies had closed the straits to them, and under the Saite princes the lonians began to compete with them for the trade of Egypt. About the same period the Greeks established themselves first in Italy and soon afterwards in Sicily. Archias, at the head of a numerous band of Corinthians and Corcyrans, founded Syracuse in 733 ; the rest of the same coast was almost monopolized by other Greek settlements. All the Phoenicians had left to them was the western extremity of the island, with the three towns known to the Greeks as Motya, Kepher, afterwards called Solunte, and Machanath, or Panormus. And, as if all the world were banded against Phoenicia, life became at the same time more precarious on the Syrian coast. After the disappearance of the Ramessids, Egypt, enfeebled and divided, retreated within herself, and her armies no longer appeared in Syria. Phoenicia lost much by the removal of that Egyptian suzerainty which had been a protection to her rather than a hindrance ; its disappearance left her without defence against the daily increasing ascendency of Assyria. From the ninth century onwards she paid annual tribute to the kings of Nineveh. Why did she fail to accommodate herself to the domination of Assyria as she did to that of Egypt, and afterwards to that of the 1 HERODOTUS, i. i ; HOMER, Odyssey, xv. 415-484. 2 We have no good reason for doubting the date given by DIONYSIUS OF HALICARN. -\ssus as that of the establishment of the Parian colony, vi/., the Fifteenth Olympiad, 720-717 (Conf. CLEM. ALEXAND. Stromata* i. 21, p. 398). See G. PERROT, Mhnoire sur /'//e de Thasos, in the Archives t/es Missions, vol. i., 2nd series, 1864. ORIGIN OF THE PHOENICIANS. 39 Achcemenids ? The reason is to be sought no doubt in the fact that the Assyrian conquerors were imbued with a religious fanaticism, a sternness of tyranny and a greediness, which hurt both the interests and the pride of the Tyrians ; the tribute claimed was too heavy, and the gods who had guarded the Phoenician mariners for so many centuries saw their temples dishonoured by the truculent votaries of Assur. But however this may be the fact remains that, although the other Phoenician cities submitted as a rule to the Assyrian generals as soon as they appeared in the country, Tyre held out against them again and again. More than once, and for years at a time, she defied the whole power of Sargon and Shalmanezer V. Sennacherib, indeed, succeeded in forcing a king of his own choice upon her, and, under the last princes of his dynasty, she seems to have accepted her lot as a vassal. After the fall of Nineveh, when a Babylonian empire succeeded to that of Assyria, Phoenicia made haste to secure the alliance of Judsea, and still more of Egypt, against the new masters of the east. At this moment a new life was breathed into the Nile kingdom by the princes of the Saite dynasty, and the desire to reconquer her ancient ascendency in Syria took hold upon her. But unhappily her Pharaoh, Apries, was defeated and Jerusalem taken, while Tyre was blockaded for thirteen long years by the armies of Nebuchadnezzar.' But as the island city still retained command of the sea, she in the end compelled the Chaldseans to treat with her and raise the siege 1 (574 B.C.). A blockade so prolonged must have had a destructive effect upon Tyrian commerce. No merchandize could reach the city over land, her factories must have stood idle, her sailors must have been drawn from their proper trade to the work of war. The less stubborn Sidon must have profited by the enforced idleness of her rival to resume her ancient supremacy. But it was, indeed, a critical period for the whole of Phoenicia. While she was engaged in military and political resistance to the Ninevites and 1 Governed by the wish to show that prophecy was fulfilled, most ecclesiastical authors have tried to make out that Nebuchadnezzar took and sacked Tyre ; but Phoenician annals deny in the most formal manner that Tyre was ever taken by the Chaldaeans (MASPERO, Histoire ancienne, p. 503, No. 2). M. BERGER inclines to the same opinion. " The issue of the siege seems doubtful. The allusions to it in the sacred writings are ambiguous. But from certain other evidence it would seem that on this occasion also Tyre foiled her enemies, and that Nebuchadnezzar was obliged to come to terms " (La Phenicie, p. 10). 40 HISTORY 01 ART IN PIKKNICIA AND ITS DEPENDENCIES. Babylonians, her merchants were supplanted in many markets by those of Greece and Etruria. After the fall of Babylon Cyrus became sole master of western Asia, and the Phcunicians, like the Jews, made haste to accept the Persian rule. The Achsemenids had no religious fanaticism ; they left a large measure of liberty to the subject peoples of their empire, and their monetary exactions were moderate. 1 They were especially tender with the Pruunicians. The Persians had no navy, and they required one for their contest with Greece ; they could not reckon on any cordial co-operation from the cities of Ionia, but two strong inducements led the Phoenicians to give the help required. In the first place the direct profit was great ; a never-ceasing stream of darics poured into their ports to pay for their ships of war and their hardy crews. Secondly, they had an opportunity for taking some kind of revenge on those enterprising rivals who had for centuries past been narrowing the field of their commerce. Down to the time of the Macedonian conquest the kings of Persia had no subjects more faithful than the Phoenicians. History mentions but one case of refusal to co-operate with the Persians on the part of the Syrian coast towns ; and that was when Cambyses, fresh from the conquest of Egypt, wished to undertake an expedition against Carthage. The Phoenicians, says Herodotus, declared that it was quite impossible that they should take part in any such campaign, " because the most sacred oaths bound them to the Carthaginians, and in fighting against their own children they would be violating both ties of blood and scruples of religion." Such a scruple did honour both to their heads and hearts. At the end of the sixth century Carthage was on the high road to the foundation of a colonial power in the Mediter- ranean of which the mother city might well be proud, and it was impossible that the latter should help to nip it in the bud or to hinder the development of a commercial prosperity in which, thanks to the intimate relations that subsisted between the ports of Africa and those of Syria, Tyre and Sidon would be certain to share. The fortune of Carthage was made by her distance from the 1 HERODOTUS (iii. 91) does not tell how much of the tribute of 350 talents which the fifth satrapy (Syria and the island of Cyprus) had to pay, fell to the share of Phoenicia. 2 HERODOTUS, iii. 19. ORIGIN OF THE PHOENICIANS. 41 principal centres of Greek civilization. While the t\vo eastern basins of the Mediterranean became Greek seas, at least in their northern portion, as early as the end of the eighth century, Carthage had the western basin pretty well to herself; in it the Greek colonies were at no time either very numerous or very powerful ; they were too far from their base. The supremacy Carthage then acquired she was not to lose until, in the third century before our era, the Roman people entered upon the full political inheritance of Greece ; and before the hour of her fall arrived she had time to play a part in the world whose importance and originality deserve to be brought into strong relief. " By its geographical situation the city of Dido belonged to Africa and the west ; by its manners, by its language, by its civilization and the descent of its inhabitants, it belonged to Asia and the east. It was an outpost of Asiatic civilization pushed forward into the western Mediterranean ; it was through Carthage that, in Africa, in Gaul, in Spain, even in the British Islands, oriental modes of life and thought preceded those of Greece and Rome." } The country in which Carthage and those other Syrian colonies whose names we have mentioned were established, was after- wards the African province of the Romans, and is now Tunis, a province de facto of France. Its fertility is well known. The Phoenicians found it inhabited by a mixed population in which a race of Egyptian blood, the ancestors of the modern Berbers, are supposed to have predominated. The superior intelligence and higher skill of the Syrians soon gave them an influence over the native tribes an influence which came all the easier, perhaps, by reason of some distant affinity of blood. They introduced better methods of agriculture, an industry which, like all others, had been carried very far on the Syrian coast. In the neighbourhood of Tyre and Sidon M. Renan found abundant evidence that the Phoenicians carried on their tillage with far better tools than those now in use in the country. 2 In Africa the plains were very different both in size and in quality of soil from those on the narrow shores of Palestine. Wheat soon became an important article of export ; and the peasants of the interior rapidly learnt the language spoken by the merchants to whom they carried their 1 FR. LENORMANT, Manuel de fHistoire ancienne, vol. iii. p. 153. 2 E. RENAN, Mission de Ph'enicie, pp. 633, 634 and 639 ; plate xxxvi. VOL. I. <* 42 HISTORY OF ART IN PIKKNICIA AND ITS DEPENDENCIES. grains and fruits in exchange for the stuffs, tools and jewellery sold in the city bazaars. These relations continued for centuries without interruption, and in time produced the mixed but strongly Semitic race of men whom the Greeks called Liby-Phomicians. It was by the help of these half breeds that Carthage succeeded in an enterprise which Tyre had not even attempted. In two hundred years, from the end of the ninth to the end of the seventh centuries, she conquered, foot by foot, the whole of the region stretching from the Lesser Syrtes to the frontier of Numidia ; and her occupation was not confined to the littoral ; she founded, in the interior, a number of towns and fortified villages whose fidelity to the metropolis, like that of the Roman colonies in Italy, was secured by the enjoyment of important privileges. 1 The earlier Tyrian colonies had been nothing more than factories with supre- macy over the land in their immediate neighbourhood, while the skilful policies of Carthage soon made her the mistress of a wide and fruitful territory supporting several millions of inhabitants. As for the other Tyrian and Sidonian cities on the same coast, they preserved for the most part the dignity implied by the name of allies, but Carthage was the permanent mistress of the confederacy and the disposer of its forces. Neither Tyre nor Sidon ever had an army. In most cases they founded their settlements in islands to which the sea was a sufficient protection, and nothing more than a few ships to guard the straits was required. When they were compelled to raise factories on the main land, they surrounded them with a wall strong enough and high enough to defeat a coup-de-main, while they paid an annual subsidy to the chiefs of the nearest tribes, 2 just as our modern merchants did on the coast of Guinea when- ever they wished to set up their establishments on the lands of some negro king. In these days the subsidies take the form of beads, barrels of rum or gunpowder and old muskets. The Phoenicians can have had no difficulty in supplying the natives 1 " It is thus," says ARISTOTLE, " that Carthage guards against the dangers of an oligarchy she sends periodically colonies made up from among her own citizens into the countries round about, and insures them an easy existence." Politics, ii. viii. 9. 2 "Statute annuo vectigali pro solo urbis" says JUSTIN (xviii. 5). He even says that Carthage herself paid such a subsidy for more than three centuries, which hardly seems likely (xix. i and 2). ORIGIN OF THE PHOENICIANS. 43 with such things as they prized. Wine, for instance, must have been as greatly sought for as spirits are now. True to their national habits, the Tyrians preferred to buy a few acres of land in this fashion, than to take them by force and defend them with the sword. Carthage found herself compelled by events to take another line ; as soon as she had conceived the desire to possess the sur- rounding country an army became necessary, and she found the first elements of it in the very native tribes for whose subjection it was intended. The liberal pay which she could so easily offer attracted recruits from all the races by which her own territories and those of her neighbours were peopled. She enrolled Liby- Phcenicians, Numidians and Moors, while her own citizens fashioned the rough material thus provided into efficient fighting units. Her army was at first purely African, but in later years, when she embarked on her great conflicts with the Sicilian Greeks and the Romans, she had to turn for help to all who chose to live by the profession of arms, and of all the people who dwelt on the Mediterranean coast, there was not one, speaking broadly, that was unrepresented in the great regiments of mercenaries with which Hamilcar, Hasdrubal and Hannibal disputed the empire of the world with Rome. But long before she could put these great hosts into the field, that is, at the beginning of the sixth century, Carthage had what no Phoenician city had possessed before her, namely, a wide territory and a standing army. She was, therefore, in a condition to make the best of her opportunities when the long duel between Tyre and Babylon prevented the former city, for ten years and more, from supporting her stations beyond the sea. Disquieting events were taking place in every direction. In Betica the Turdetani had risen, had attacked the Phoenician settlements, and had massacred the African colonists whom Tyre had established in the valley of the Betis. And the gravity of the crisis was increased by the fact that the hand of Greece was felt behind it. As early as 640 Coleos of Samos had pushed a hardy prow as far as these distant coasts, and, favoured by fortune, had returned to vaunt the wonders of Betica and the treasures of Gades in his native island. From that day every Ionian captain had burned to reach Tartessos, as the Greeks called Tarshish. In making for Spain, a Greek of Phocsea, Euxenes by name, had landed in southern Gaul, not far 44 HISTOKV OF ART IN PIKKNICIA AND ITS DEPENDENCIES. from the mouth of the Rhone, and founded Massilia. In 548 the Khodians and Cnidians made the same attempt, and, landing on the north-east of the peninsula, founded Rhoda, now Rosas. But it was by the Phocxans that these explorations were most energetically carried out. It seems probable that the story told by Herodotus of the sudden affection for his foreign visitors that seized the king of Tartessos, 1 whom he calls Arganthonios, must date from the period of inaction forced upon Tyre by the blockades of Nebuchadnezzar. The Greeks perhaps were less greedy and more easy to get on with than their Syrian rivals, while fortune smiled here on their rising ambition as she did everywhere else. In Sicily the three cities still left to the Pruenicians were already threatened. From one end of the Mediterranean to the other every Phoenician colony and every Phoenician merchant began to turn beseeching glances towards Carthage ; if Carthage refused to take up the broken policy of Tyre the whole fabric of Phoenician commerce was threatened with rapid extinction. Carthage re- sponded to the appeal and proved herself equal to the work that had to be done. She understood that the times had changed. As long as the Tyrians and Sidonians were confronted on every coast by nothing but savage and scanty populations, it was easy enough to insure the safety of their settlements. But the world had be- come peopled ; the indigenous tribes had learnt the use of bronze and iron ; finally a civilization, that of the Greeks, was to be encountered on every shore, was developing rapidly, and had already surpassed that of the Phoenicians in all matters of art and thought. A new situation called for new modes of action. Carthage did not hesitate a moment. She was not content with a defensive programme, by which she would have lost ground from year to year ; she chose the aggressive. The time of monopolies was past, but by her energetic action she secured for three centuries more a privileged situation over the whole western basin of the Mediterranean. " A great expedition was sent to Spain which relieved the coast cities, reconquered the valley of the Betis, and resumed those mineral districts whose possession was of such capital importance. A large number of Liby-Phcenicians were transported into the country and there established as colonists, to keep the native 1 HKRODOTUS, i. 163. ORIGIN OF THE PIKKNICIANS. 45 tribes in check. The system of government and colonisation which had been put in action in Zeugitania and Byzacenia was applied to Betica. In order to keep open their strategic and commercial communications with Spain by land as well as by sea, the Carthaginians occupied and fortified the towns, called Meta- gonites by the Greeks, which formed an unbroken chain along the whole coast of Mauretania as far as the pillars of Hercules. They had been founded by Tyre in the first instance as harbours of refuge and victualling stations for ships on their way to Gades and back. An intimate alliance was entered into with the Numidians, who were engaged to respect the ports established on their coasts ports which served as recruiting stations for the Carthaginian armies among the warlike tribes in their neighbourhood." Encouraged by these first successes, the Carthaginians deter- mined to cast an army into Sicily which might win the co-opera- tion of the tribes in the interior, the Siculi and Sicani. These tribes were beginning to feel some apprehension at the rapid growth of the Greek colonies, which encroached yearly upon their narrow territory. The Carthaginians soon succeeded in making themselves masters of the western part of the island and of the interior, throwing the Greek colonists back on the northern and eastern coasts. 2 The towns which still belonged to the Syrian stock were relieved by the success of this bold policy ; garrisons were thrown into them and they were put in an efficient state of defence. Where the Tyrians had left only watchers and ware- house-keepers, there the Carthaginians put soldiers. A no less successful effort was made to reconquer the Phoenician supremacy in the waters that lie between Sardinia and the north-eastern coasts of Spain. In 556 the Phocaeans founded the town of Alalia, or Aleria, on the eastern coast of Corsica, in a situation well chosen for the desired purpose of counter- acting the advantages given to the Phoenicians by their possession of a part of Sardinia ; it enabled its founders to command the whole of the Tyrrhenian Sea and the Ligurian Gulf. The capture and destruction of Phocsea by Harpagus in 547, at the time of the conquest of Ionia by the Persians, instead of ruining the Ionian possessions in the west, really added greatly to their importance. 1 FR. LENORMANT, Manuel cTHistoire antienne, vol. iii. p. 187. 2 This we learn from a few short and rather vague sentences of JUSTIN (xviii. 7). 46 HISTORY OF ART IN PIKKNICIA AND ITS DEPENDENCIES. From a colony Massilia rose to be a metropolis j 1 fugitives from Phoauu, energetic men and skilful sailors, took refuge with the wealth they had saved, some in Massilia, others at Aleria. The effect of this reinforcement was soon felt. The Ionian colonists captured and destroyed the stations established by the Phoenicians on the coasts of Liguria and north-eastern Spain, while in more than one encounter their squadrons defeated those of Carthage. The superiority thus won they enjoyed for some time. 2 The Greeks were, then, in a fair way to gather the trade with Spain into their own hands, and, tempted by the mines of Sardinia, they would be likely in time to wish to add that island to the colony they had begun to form in Corsica. Carthage could not be indifferent to such ambitions as these, and she determined to resume, if possible, her ascendency in the north, as she had resumed it in Betica and Sicily ; and in the new enterprise she had the good fortune to rind allies. At this moment the Etruscans, that strange people whose origin and language are still a mystery, were at the height of their prosperity. Their nation as a whole had its seat in Tuscany, but Campania also had a few Etruscan cities, and as these two groups of a single people were separated by Latium, where the power of Rome was gradually extending itself, they required the com- mand of the sea to enable them to communicate freely with one another. This freedom was compromised by the existence of the Ionian colony on the opposite coast of Corsica. It was natural then that Carthaginians and Etruscans, in both of whom similar apprehensions had been awakened by a single foe, should unite their forces against him. In 536 an Etruscan fleet sailed from Populonia, the chief port of Etruria, and, being joined by a fleet from Carthage, the combined squadrons turned their heads to- wards Aleria. The ensuing battle was won by the lonians, but their numbers were so scanty that even victory was fatal. They abandoned Aleria and fled, some to Massilia, others to southern Italy, where they founded the colony of Velia. 3 Corsica had neither the fertile plains nor the mineral wealth of Sardinia. The Carthaginians, after establishing a few naval 1 LENORMANT, Histoire ancienne, vol. iii. p. 191. THUCYDIDES, i. 13; PAUSANIAS, x. viii. 4. 3 HERODOTUS, i. 165-7 ; DIODORUS, v. xiii. 4. ORIGIN OF THE PHOENICIANS. 47 stations, abandoned the rest of the island to the Etruscans. 1 But on the other hand they razed to the ground most of the towns built by the lonians on the coast of Spain ; they re-established themselves in Liguria, where the rock of Monaco was one of their fortresses. Massilia lived a precarious life until the great victory, won by Hiero, tyrant of Syracuse, over the Etruscans in 474, re- stored freedom of movement to the Greek colonists in the Gulfs of Lyons and Genoa. The Massilians seem never to have resumed the great enterprises of a century before ; they were content to make the most of southern Gaul, and to leave Spain and the islands to the Phoenicians of Africa. By the force of events a tacit convention or formal agreement was entered into between these various commercial races ; in the rapid multiplica- tion of transactions there was profit for them all. The discovery at Marseilles of a table of charges, in the Punic language, for sacrifices in the temple of Baal, seems to prove that Carthage had a factory at Massilia. The tablet must have been engraved at Massilia, for the stone of which it consists has been recognized as that of a neighbouring quarry. 2 Freed from the uneasiness inspired by the enterprise and armed competition of the lonians, the Carthaginians set to work to complete their network of strategic positions in the western Mediterranean. After a check or two they finished the conquest of Sardinia, and, as in Africa, they favoured its agricultural development. " Under their rule the island reached a prosperity it has never seen since. Sardinia, which is now so thinly peopled, so wild, so unhealthy, was, when the Romans took possession of it after three centuries of Carthaginian domination, a rich and flourishing garden, with a large rural and urban population." Mago, the general who had brought the conquest of Sardinia to a happy conclusion, also succeeded in taking full possession of the Balearic group. In Minorca he founded a city which after- wards became one of the chief naval stations of the republic a city which has preserved the name of its founder with but little 1 DIODORUS, v. xii. 3, 4. 2 Corpus Inscriptionum Semiticarum, part i. No. 164. 3 FR. LENORMANT, Manuel cFHistoire ancienne, vol. iii. p. 197. According to DIODORUS (x. xv. 4) a few savage tribes continued to maintain their independence in the mountains, but the whole of the plains were occupied by the Carthaginian colonists. 4^ HisTuKY OF ART IN PIKKNICIA AND ITS DEPENDENCIES. alteration down to our own day, for Port Ala/ton is but a form of Port Jlfa?t>* Towards the end of the sixth century, Carthage had established her supremacy over at least half the Mediterranean, but already her merchants and captains were beginning to find the boundaries of that land-locked sea too narrow for their energies. Her ships were every year becoming more ready to pass the Pillars of Hercules and to navigate the Atlantic. There the Tyrians had preceded them, but with less boldness. With a commission from the Carthaginian senate, a certain Hanno explored the coast of Africa as far as the eighth degree of south latitude.' 2 As a result of that expedition the whole African coast from the straits to Cape Nun was colonized, more than three hundred settlements being established there, of which a few, such as Tingis (Tangier] and Sala (Rabat) are now represented by Moorish towns. Although most of these were abandoned, some retained a con- siderable commerce, such as Cerne (the island of Arguin), where great annual fairs used to be held. :! In the course of these explorations the Carthaginians discovered the Canaries and touched at Madeira. 1 " From a passage in Scylax, it would even appear that they attempted to push still farther west, and got as far as the Mcr dcs Sargasscs (?), but the quantity of weeds with which the surface of the waves was covered made them think it would be dangerous to venture farther, and they retraced their steps. 5 If the wars against the Sicilian Greeks and the Romans had not come to distract the 1 According to DIODORUS the Balearic Islands supported a large Phoenician population by the side of their indigenous tribes. J The official report of Hanno's voyage, which was deposited in the temple of Baal-Ammon at Carthage, has been preserved to us in its entirety by a Greek translation. See the Geographi Grcvci Minores, Muller's edition (I)idot, vol. i. part i.), and the two maps prepared by that learned editor for the illustration of the text. 3 SCYLAX, Periple (?), 112. 4 This we may infer from many texts which it would take too long to discuss. Among them is a passage in DIODORUS, in which he gives a brilliant description of a fertile and well-watered island, with a delicious climate, which was situated " opposite Africa, in the ocean to the west, and separated from the main land by several days' sail" (v. xix.). After its discovery by the Phoenicians they paid periodical visits to it, he tells us, down to a very late period (v. xx.). 5 FR. LENORMANT, Manuel (THistoirc ancienne, vol. iii., p. 200 ; SCYLAX, 112. ORIGIN OF THE PHOENICIANS. 49 attention of Carthage, a Phoenician Columbus might have dis- covered America twenty centuries before that event actually took place. We know that a Tyrian captain, subsidized by Nechao, king of Egypt, anticipated Vasco de Gama and circumnavigated Africa about the year 600 B.C. 1 While Hanno steered towards the South Atlantic, another commander, Himilco, made his way north, reconnoitring the western coasts of Spain and Gaul and touching the British Isles. 2 It has been said that the Tyrians also reached those coasts, but no evidence that they did so has been adduced. On the other hand we know that, during the Carthaginian period, ships of Gades went to an archipelago which they named the Cassiteridcs, or " tin islands." These were the Scilly Islands, to whose inhabitants they gave salt, bronze vases, arms and pottery in exchange for hides and metal. 3 No doubt they landed at several points on the coast of Cornwall and Ireland, but according to their usual habits, they preferred to establish themselves on small islands, where their safety was more assured. There they would set up markets to which the tribes on the main-land could bring any merchandize they had to dispose of. 4 This Atlantic trade was a monopoly. The Carthaginians spared no pains to keep away competitors. Their pilots jealously guarded their knowledge of the prevailing winds, of the currents and anchorages, while they spread such reports as to the difficulties and dangers of the navigation as would discourage any but the most dauntless souls. When a foreign captain refused to be frightened and attempted to follow the track of a Carthaginian ship, the crew of the latter were ready for any extreme, either of cruelty or enterprise, to choke him off and preserve the national secrets. If they felt themselves to be the stronger party, they would turn upon their pursuer and put him and his crew to death ; 5 if inferior strength made this impossible they would risk 1 HERODOTUS, ii. 42. 2 The report of Himilco has not been preserved, but some of its facts appear to have been utilized in the Latin poem of Festus Arienus. 3 STRABO, iii. v. n. 4 Without naming the Carthaginians, DIODORUS tells us that the inhabitants of the south-western extremity of Great Britain had their habits and manners much softened by their intercourse with the strangers who came to their shores for tin. 5 APPIAN, Punica, 5 ; STRABO, xvii. i. 19. VOL. I. ir 5O HISTORY OF ART IN PHOENICIA AND ITS DEPENDENCIKS. tlieir own existence to mislead their rival. Strabo tells us of the Phoenician captain who, seeing himself followed by a Roman ship along the western coast of Spain, deliberately steered upon a shoal, where his ship perished and with it the Roman galley. The Phoenician captain managed to swim ashore, and on his return to his own country he was rewarded for his heroism and ready resource with the full value of his lost ship and cargo. 1 Such proceedings would not do in Italian waters. There the Carthaginians had to be content with admission to the ports on equal terms with Greeks and Etruscans. At a very early hour they had been compelled to renounce all idea of retaining a footing on the soil of the peninsula, and to content themselves with taking up positions which gave them ready access to it, as, for instance, on the island of Lipari, whence they could keep a watch upon the Straits of Messina and the whole coast of Southern Italy. These advanced posts they could make the bases both of trade and piracy. From the former very large profits were still to be won, as Carthage had a practical monopoly in the supply of African and oriental objects to European markets. They entered into commercial treaties. Aristotle had heard of treaties concluded between the Etruscans and the Carthaginians, 2 and Polybius has preserved for us the text of the first convention signed between Carthage and Rome, the latter signing for her Latin allies, and the former for her own metropolis ; this was in 509, the year of the expulsion of the Tarquins. 3 The excavations made in Etruria and Latium are continually affording evidence in support of these historical statements. In the cemeteries of both countries a large number of objects have been found which, speaking figuratively, bear the stamp of Carthage. It was at about this period that the wealth and greatness of Carthage were at their zenith, and that her affairs were most skilfully managed. We shall not follow her into her wars against the Greeks of Sicily, which went on at the same time as the Medic wars in the East ; still less shall we dwell upon that long duel with Rome in which she at last succumbed. Long before the day of her fall, long before the day of that great 1 STRABO, iii. v. n. 2 ARISTOTLE, Politics, iii. v. 10. 3 POLYBIUS, iii. 22. ORIGIN OF THE PHOENICIANS. 5 1 disaster which recalled to Scipio and Polybius the melancholy lines of Homer, the supremacy of the Greek civilization was assured. The art of Greece had arrived at perfection by the middle of the fifth century. From that date onwards the Hellenic world drew from the East nothing but raw material, to which it gave forms so superior to those hitherto known that they soon imposed themselves on every neighbouring people. Carthage no more escaped the action of this powerful rivalry than the Phcenician towns of Syria. In the middle of the fourth century the throne of Tyre was occupied by that Strato whose passion for all that was Greek gave him the name of the Phil-Hellene. Something of the same kind went on at Carthage. The Carthaginians waged a murderous war against the Greeks of Sicily, but in the sequel they carried off the statues from their enemy's shrines, and set them up in the temples and public places of their own city. 1 They even copied the money of Greece, or rather they caused coins to be struck by Greek artists for their use (Figs, ii and i2). 2 Finally, Greek architects found their way to Carthage long before Scipio and his legions. The temples which disappeared in the great conflagration, the shrines of Baal-Hammon and Tanit, cannot have preserved the look of Phcenician sanc- tuaries, they must have been reconstructed in the style made fashionable by the Greek artists of the time of Alexander and his successors ; at least we may fairly conclude that it was so from the fact that the military harbour was decorated with columns of the Ionic order. 3 Not the slightest fragment of these structures has come down to our time ; but we find a trace of Greek influence even in the ornaments with which those steles 1 APPIAN, Punica, 133 ; CICERO, In Verrem, De Signis, xxxv. 2 For the chronology of the Carthaginian coinage see FR. LENORMANT, Essai sur la Propagation de V Alphabet phenicien dans F ancien Monde, vol. i. p. 156-161. The two specimens which we reproduce are thus described by DE SAULCY (in the notes to M. Duruy's Histoire romaine, vol. i- p. 419 and 420, and from which we borrow these two figures) : n. Obv. Head of the nymph Arethusa ; Rev. Pegasus. The legend BARAT signifies the wells, or perhaps more accurately Bi ARAT, at the wells, the Punic name for Syracuse, which possessed the famous well of Arethusa. Large silver piece, certainly struck in Sicily, and probably at Syracuse. 12. Obv. Head of Arethusa. Rev. A horse supported by a palm-tree ; an especially Cartha- ginian type. Sub-division of No. n. The inscription on both has the same signification, so that the two coins must have originated in Sicily. Electrum. 3 Kioves 8' cKacrrou vewo-otKou Trpov^ov 'law/cot St'o. . . APPIAN, Punica, 96. HISTORY OK ART IN PIKKNICIA AND ITS DEPENDENCIES. consecrated to Tanit, of which such vast numbers have been discovered within the last few years, were decorated. 1 In these curious monuments we find architectural motives thoroughly Greek in character reproduced side by side with forms and symbols that can only be explained by the Phoenician religion. Pavilions in which the figure of a worshipper (Fig. 13) I'"IG. ii. Carthaginian coin. Silver. or a collection of sacred emblems (Fig. 14) are inclosed have triangular pediments supported by fluted pilasters, the latter crowned with Ionic capitals. There are acroteria at the three angles of the pediment. These acroteria appear again at the angles of a pediment in which we find the tympanum occupied by a mother-goddess (Fig. 15). Here the proportions of the FIG 12. Carthaginian coin. Liccirum. pediment are not Greek, but, on the other hand, the cornice below is decorated with a well marked egg-moulding. In one of the most curious of these little monuments we encounter a clearly defined Ionic capital surmounted by a crescent moon, which supports in its turn a bust of Tanit. Above the face of the 1 PH. BERGER, Lettre a M. Fr. Lenormant stir ks Representations figurces des Steles puniques de la Bibliothcque nationale (Gazette archcologique, 1876-7). ORIGIN OF THE PHOENICIANS. goddess a row of oves and arrow-heads may be distinguished (Fig. 1 6). None of this is very pure either in form or proportion, but except in such symbols as the crescent moon, it includes nothing to remind us of Egypt or Assyria, nothing in fact that we can call Phoenician. In order to follow the history of Carthage in the west and to trace her career down to the moment when her civilization became blended in that of Greece and Rome, we have for the FIG. 13. Votive stele from Carthage. French National Library. moment lost sight of Tyre and Sidon. We must now return to them, for neither the Persian nor even the Macedonian conquest crushed the genius and prosperity of the industrious race by which they were inhabited. The Persian sovereignty had been accepted as a deliverance, and to the Persian kings the Phoenicians had given the assistance of their fleets in suppressing the revolts which broke out, every now and again, in Ionia, Cyprus, and Egypt. But their fidelity began to waver towards the middle 54 HISTORY OF ART IN PIICKNICIA AND ITS DEPENDENCIES. of the fourth century, when the empire of the Achajmenids seemed on the point of dissolution. In 316, under Ochus, Sidon ~ FIG. 14. Votive stele from Carthage. French National Library. rose and massacred its Persian garrison. Betrayed by her king Tennes, she was retaken, reduced to ashes, and her inhabitants sold for slaves. 1 FIG. 15. Votive stele from Carthage. French National Library. Again, after the battle of Issus (B.C. 333), Byblos, Arvad, Sidon, 1 DIODORUS, xvi., 41-45. Diodorus places these events three or four years too soon. According to him, the submission of Egypt and Phoenicia took place between ORIGIN OF THE PHOENICIANS. 55 and the other cities of the coast hastened to submit to the con- queror. Tyre alone listened to her pride rather than to her interests. She was ready to acknowledge herself the vassal of Macedonia on the same terms as those granted by Persia, but she refused to allow Alexander to march at the head of his guard through those gates which had never yet been passed by a conqueror. She paid dearly for her resistance. After a siege of FIG. 1 6. Fragment of a, votive stele from Carthage. French National Library. seven months she was taken and sacked. The mole by which the besiegers joined her to the mainland changed her situation for ever. She was no longer an island. To be mistress of the seas no longer sufficed to make her impregnable, 351 and 348. But GROTE gives us very good reasons for believing that neither Egypt nor Phoenicia can have been reduced before 346 and 345 (History of Greece. vol. xi. p. 4-43, n. 3, and 441 n. 3). 56 HISTORY OF ART IN PIKKNICIA AND ITS DEPENDENCIES. Thenceforward Tyre also had to abandon the great ambitions renounced long before by the other cities of the coast, and the Phoenicians, as a whole, had to be content with the status of merchants ; merchants better informed, readier at a bargain, at once more enterprising, more wary, more economical, and richer than their rivals, but still only merchants ; subjects now of the Ptolemies, now of the Seleucidae, and, finally, of the Roman emperors, they had stations everywhere, at Alexandria and Athens, at Corinth and Antioch, and later at Puteoli in Italy. In all these towns they dwelt in their own quarter, they used among them- selves their native Semitic language, they had their own temples and forms of worship ; like the Jews and Armenians in modern Turkey, they formed a nation apart, devoted to gain. From the time that Greek art imposed itself upon all civilized nations they ceased to play a useful part as the disseminators of plastic types and industrial methods ; but in other respects their mission was not yet fulfilled. During the two first centuries of our era their dis- persed but strongly cohesive communities were among the most active agents in the diffusion of Christianity. 1 3. Religion. Our knowledge of the Phoenician religion is still very imperfect. The numerous inscriptions that have been found in recent years they are for the most part dedications and fragments of ritual have revealed the names of several deities previously unknown. A certain amount of information has also been gleaned by the study of onomatology, as nearly all the Phoenician proper names are what is called theophori, that is to say, composite words in which the name of a deity is included. Finally, we have a few fragments of Phoenician writings, and a considerable mass of information sprinkled over the works of Greek and Roman authors. 2 But, 1 RENAN, Les Apotres, pp. 295-303. 2 MENANDER, who wrote a history of Phoenicia, was a native of Ephesus; but according to Josephus, to whom we owe the few fragments of his work which survive, he consulted Phoenician documents in the original (Fragmenta Historicum Gracorum, C. Muller, vol. iv. pp. 445-448). The remains of Sanchoniathon are to be found in the same collection, vol. iii. pp. 560-576. For the corrections that require to be made in the Greek text of these fragments, see several ingenious RELIGION. in spite of the industry of modern criticism, many points are still obscure. The epigraphic texts are dry and short ; they explain nothing, and the analysis of proper names gives little after all but the titles of gods ; the existing fragments of Sanchoniathon bear traces of the syncretism of the decadence, and can only be utilized with considerable caution ; and when we turn to the materials left us by the classic authors we must do so with no less prudence and reserve. The latter only knew Phoenicia in its decline, when it was already more or less Hellenized. Moreover, they did not always comprehend what they saw and heard. Finally, they were content with comparisons which were often forced and inaccurate. 1 Traces of that bent of thought which we encounter in all pri- mitive societies and call fetishism may be found in the Phoeni- cian religion. The mountains had their gods, or, to speak more exactly, they were worshipped as gods. Their imposing mass, the majesty of the black forests with which they were clothed, the voices of their torrents, their snowy summits and the depths of their narrow gorges, gave them a mysterious power over the imaginations of the people (Fig. 17). The worship of the mountain gods dates certainly from the first days of the Phoenician occupation ; its persistence is attested by the epithets we meet with in the Semitic texts, such as Baal-Lebanon, Baal- Hermon, and in Greek transcriptions like Zeus-Casios? In the same spirit prayers and sacrifices were offered to rocks, to grottoes, to springs and rivers. The cavern whence the stream of the Nahr Ibrahim makes its " sudden sally " has been for thousands of years one of the most sacred spots in Syria. The temple of Astarte, developed into the Aphacan Aphrodite, was overthrown by Constantine, but it was restored after his day was past. The rites there performed doubtless dated back to the commencement of the Phoenician occupation. We cannot wonder that a religious senti- ment was excited by this scene, one of the loveliest in the world conjectures by J. HALEVY, in his paper entitled : Les Principes pheniciens IIo(9os et Mwr (in the Comptes Rendus de V Academic des Inscriptions, 1883, p. 36). 1 Upon the nature and the inadequacy of our materials for the study of the Phoenician religion, see BERGER, La Phenicie, pp. 17-19. 2 The Baal-Lebanon is mentioned in the oldest Phoenician inscription we possess, viz., the dedication engraved upon a bronze cup the fragments of which are now in the French National Library {Corpus Inscriptionmn Semiticarum, part i., No. 5). VOL. I. I HISTORY OF ART IN PHOENICIA AND ITS DEPENDENCIES. (Fig. iS). 1 Certain trees received homage of the same kind. Under the Zeus-Demarous of Philo of Byblos we may recognize the Phoenician form Baal-T/iamar, " the Lord of the Palm-tree." The worship of betyta, which we encounter in every country reached by Phoenician influence, may be traced to the same FIG. 17. Descent from the Pass of Lcgnia, in the Lebanon. source. The word we have used above comes to us from the Greeks, and they took it with some slight alteration from the 1 RENAN, Mission de Phcnicie, pp. 296-301. Fig. 18, like i and 17, is borrowed from M. LORTET'S beautiful work, La Syrie d'Aujourdhui (Hachette, 1884). 2 BERGER, La Phenicie, p. 25. PHILO OF BYBLOS, Fragment i., 16-22. M. Berger's explanation of the Zeus A^/zapou? of Philo is probable and ingenious, but the group Baal-Thamar has never yet been found in a Phoenician text. FIG. 18. The sources of the River Adonis RELIGION. 61 Semitic group Beth-el, which means, "the house of God." This was a generic term used to denote all sacred stones, that is to say, all stones credited with the possession of any special and peculiar virtue. The form of these stones and the degree of respect in which they were held varied greatly. As a rule they were either conical or ovoid, but sometimes they were pyramidal, and, in a few sanctuaries, they were squared shafts with smooth faces. We are told that some were aerolites, a circumstance which greatly enhanced their credit. The diffusion of Greek arts and ideas did not cause the worship of these stones to fall into disuse. Under the Roman emperors FIG. 19. Coin of Byblos ; enlarged. From Donaldson's Architectura Numismatica. it was more popular than ever. In the time of Tacitus, Astarte, then called Aphrodite, was figured on a cone in the chief temple at Paphos, 2 and so, at Byblos, was the great goddess of that place. This we may see from the reverse of a coin of Byblos, struck under Macrinus. The sacred stone rises in the middle of a court surrounded by a portico (Fig. 19). Another instance was 1 This etymology has been contested by M. HALEVY (Revue de t Histoire des Religions, vol. iv. pp. 392-3), but his alternative proposal has not met with general acceptance. See also a dissertation by M. FR. LENORMANT, entitled, Les Betyles {Revue de t Histoire des Religions, vol. iii. pp. 31-53), as well as M. HEUZEY'S paper: La Pierre sacree d'Aniipolis (Me moires de la Soriete des Antiquaires de France, 1874). 2 TACITUS, History, ii. 3. 62 HISTORY OF ART IN PIKKMCIA AND ITS L)KPKNI>ENCIKS. the black stone of Emcsus, of which Heliogabalus was priest before he was raised to the purple. 1 It was, then, not only on the coast, it was over all Syria that these stones were worshipped, and that down to the last hours of paganism. It is a form of worship as old as the religious senti- ment, and never, it would appear, has it flourished more than during the decline of the antique civilization. Societies, like individuals, have their periods of dotage, and this was one. In the centuries to which we are transported by the oldest known monuments of Phoenician art and fragments of o writing, the Phoenicians were no longer in the stage when the sole divinities are rocks, trees, and stones. Towards the close of the Sidonian period, when the ships of Tyre and Sidon were ploughing the Mediterranean in every direction, the rites and beliefs of Phoenicia, taking them as a whole, represented a con- dition of religious thought in advance of that we have studied in Egypt. There were no sacred animals ; men were less pre- occupied with the worship of the dead. Their adoration was chiefly addressed to the stars and to those great phenomena of nature which seemed to them to be the results of deliberate action on the part of some powerful and mysterious god. Their polytheism was more abstract, more advanced, even than that of Chaldaea ; it was farther removed from the phase to which we give the name of polydemonism ; their pantheon was less numerous, and its members were more concrete. Already, perhaps, the idea of a single supreme being was beginning to disengage itself from the conception of a crowd of distinct divini- ties, and the latter to sink into the condition of mere embodiments of the different moods and phases of a god in whom they were all summed up. It has been sometimes thought that this supreme god should be recognized in the Baal-Samdim or " Baal of the skies," to whom the great inscription of Oum-el-Awamid is dedicated ; - but when we meet him elsewhere, in the island of Sardinia, for instance, it is 1 " In the temple there is a large stone, rounded at the base, pointed at the top. conical in form, and black in colour; they say it fell from heaven." HERODIAN, v- 5- 2 MERGER, La I'hcniiie, p. 19; Corpus Inscriptwnum Scmiticarum, part i. No." 7. RELIGION. 63 with a geographical epithet that takes away much of his general and superior character. 1 In the immediate neighbourhood of Phoenicia, i.e. among the Jews, monotheism had, by the time of the Assyrian triumphs, reached its logical conclusion. The Phoenicians lived in intimate relations with the Jews, especially with those belonging to the kingdom of Israel ; they spoke almost the same language ; a native of Gebal or Sidon would have no difficulty in understand- ing the passionate invectives of an Elijah, an Elisha, or an Isaiah ; and yet there is no evidence to prove that the words of those orators and poets ever found an echo in the cities of the Phoenician coast, or that the inhabitants of the latter associated themselves, even for a moment, with the great religious movement that was going on so near at hand. If certain expressions in the Phoenician texts seem to hint that, at Tyre as at Thebes, men sought now and then to raise themselves to the notion of a first o cause, it is none the less true that in the Phoenician spirit, which did not take kindly to metaphysics, the notion in question was never anything more than a vague and fleeting aspiration. The example set by the Greeks must have counted for much in this indifference. Certain gods and goddesses disembarked with the Phoenicians on all the coasts of Europe ; it was to the Phoenicians that the antique world owed many of the divine types to which it was most attached. These types the Greek imagination clothed in more definite shapes and imbued with a warmer life than they had ever known before. As soon as the plastic genius of the Greeks arrived at its full development, the Phoenicians found themselves confronted, on every shore, by the gods whom they worshipped and whom their fathers had wor- shipped before them ; and they found them transfigured by an incomparable art and lodged in temples which compelled admira- tion by the unequalled grandeur of their lines. Merchants and sailors, the greater part of their lives was passed away from their native country, and wherever they went they were met by the rites of a frankly polytheistic religion. In every foreign sanctuary they saw presentments of the chief gods of their own pantheon, but saw them beautified and enlarged. In every country at which 1 In the Sardinian inscription to which we here allude he is called " the Baal-Samai'm of the isle of Hawks." Corpus Inscriptionum Semiticanun. par.t i.. No. 139. 64 HISTORY OF ART IN PHOENICIA AND ITS DEPENDENCIES. they touched the same spectacle met their eyes, and the impres- sions they received were not of a nature to divert their faith from its ancient channels. This is the true explanation of a phenomenon which at first appears so surprising. The Phoenicians seem never to have suspected that a great religious revolution was taking place in that neighbouring country of Judaea from which they were separated neither by any great social differences nor by any natural barrier. Enterprising traders as they were, they kept themselves au courant with the inventions and progress of the world with which they traded. Nothing new could appear in any market known to them without their at once taking measures to supply it to all their clients, near or distant. But what profit could they expect from spreading the worship of a God like the God of Israel ; of a God who refused all association or rivalry ; of a God who forbade sculpture to give Him a visible personality, and in His hatred of idolatry even went so far as to proscribe the representation of human or animal forms ? ] Greece would never have obeyed such a command. Her love of fine forms was too great. When Christian societies accepted a religion that was the child of Judaism, they, too, were driven by their natural preferences to find some means of eluding these proscriptions. As for the Phoenicians, they were not like the Greeks, they were not tormented by any inborn desire to repro- duce the beautiful ; but regard for what seemed their own in- terests was enough to make them turn their backs on a creed to which such inconvenient conditions were attached. For centuries images were among their principle articles of commerce. Upon the objects of glass and ivory, of metal and terra-cotta, which they sewed broadcast over the Mediterranean basin, the figures of men and of real or fictitious animals abounded. They manufactured gods for exportation upon every island of the yEgxan, and upon all its coasts statues have been found of .their great goddess Astarte (Fig. 20), of Bes, 2 a god borrowed perhaps from the Egyptians (Fig. 21), and of those dwarf gods in whom we see the originals of the Greek pygmies (Fig. 22). 1 Exodus xv. 3-5. 2 HEUZEV, Sur quelques Representations du Dieu grotesque appele Bes par les . Egyptians (in the Comptes Rendus de F Academic des Inscriptions, 1879, pp. 140-147). RELIGION. 65 The scattered mode of life in which the Phoenicians perse- vered helped to make them indifferent to the higher faith of their immediate neighbours. Cities in which the municipal life is intense will not allow themselves to be absorbed in the unity of a vast and powerful State ; they resist what to them seems a degradation, and thus we often find that small countries, in which the feeling of patriotism is strong, are a hindrance to the formation of great States. The same remark applies to the growth of religious conceptions. Among a people with whom FIG. 20. Astarte. From a Phoenician terra-cotta in the Louvre. P'IG 21. Bes. From a Phoenician terra- cotta in the Louvre. Height 8 inches. these jealous political habits have prevailed, each city has its own god or gods, and a combination of many exceptional circumstances is required before they can break their narrow moulds and enter upon a course of evolution by which they may, in time, become fused into a national god, and finally into a god of humanity. The Greeks, indeed, succeeded in rising to a spiritual unity unknown to the Phoenicians. With them too the notion of a State was confounded with that of a city, but the lofty intellectual gifts of their race led them at a very early date to endow their gods with powers far above those of mere protecting divinities of a VOL. i. K HlSToKN ART IN I'll"] \iri\ .\M ITS 1 >KI'IN1)KNCIKS. city or tribe. Greece had great poets, a llesiod, and above all a Homer, whose words every Greek knew by heart; she had great festivals, such as those of Delphi and Olympia, where all the natives of Hellas could meet as brothers for at least a few days ; she had an art which, in its desire tor a universal audience, gave fixed types to each of the dwellers on Olympus. Phoenicia was not so fortunate. The. efforts she made to counteract the separating influence of her modes of life, and of the configuration of her soil, were slight, and consequently we find the particular municipal character much more strongly marked in her divinities than in the gods of Greece. All this must have had a great effect I'ygmy. l-'ruin a I'liu-nidan teira-cotta in the I.mivre. Height 9^ inches. in retarding the development of the religious idea, and of the plastic arts. Among certain races, of which the Greeks were one, plurality of gods has been a direct result of the infinite variety of divine attributes imagined by the national intellect. The Hellenic polytheism implies a profound analysis of the qualities of man and of the laws of life ; it embodies the theology of a people who were in later days to give birth to philosophy. The second- ary deities of Phoenicia represent no such systematic effort of the intellect ; they correspond mainly to geographical and political divisions. RELICIOX. 67 In the Phoenician texts, in Phoenician proper names, and in the historical books of the Old Testament, the divine name which crops up oftenest is that of Baal. Baal means tlic master ; a title of honour which seems to have been applied to all divinities ; hence the term in the Bible, Baalim, or Baals. There were as many Baals, that is to say, masters, as cities or places devoted to the rites of any particular worship. The Baal adored at Tyre, at Sidon, on Lebanon, on Peor, became Baal-Tsoitr, Baal-Sidon, Baal-Lebanon, Baal-Pcor. But even behind these local dis- tinctions, a confused notion of primordial unity may be traced, as in the terms Astoret-sem-Baal, or Astarte, name of Baal, in Phoenicia, and Tanit-Pene-Baal, or Tanit, face of Baal, at Carthage. In these formulae and a few others the term Baal -is put, by a kind of abbreviation, as the proper name of the supreme deity, but it never quite lost its wider and more general sense, which was completed by the apposition of the name of a town or mountain. Thus we find that Melkart, the great god of Tyre, whose name and fame were carried so far by the Tyrian colonists, was neither more nor less than the Baal of the Metropolis. " To the Lord Melkart, Baal of Tyre",' runs a dedication found at Malta. 2 In this name Melkart, handed down to us by the Greeks, is included another of those epithets with which the Phoenicians loved to honour their gods, namely, the word Moloch, or Melek , "the king." 3 As an isolated divine title this word has never yet been encountered, but it is often found in composition in proper names of people, and its importance is proved by its use in the title borne by the chief god of Tyre, that Melkart whom the Greeks called " the sea-god Melikertes." Melkart is a contraction of yJ/ vol. iii. p. 127; DE VOGUE, Mcmoires sur les Inscriptions phenidennes de /'/ Clucntio 43). A Phoenician inscription found at Eryx, related, in all probability, to an offering or donation made to this goddess ; but the stone has been lost, and it is impossible to re-establish the text from the bad copy by which alone it is now represented (Corpus Inscriptionum Scmiticarum, part i. No. 135). :i The ancients were fully alive to this identity of Astarte and Aphrodite ; it will here suffice to quote the testimony of Pmr.o of Byblos : TT/I> An-rdprrjv SWvocc? rryv .\(f>po?>i-rr)v eivat Ae'yowi (Fragm. Hist. Grcrc., ed. C. Mri.LKR, vol. iii. p. 569). See also MOVERS, Die Phcenizicr, \. p. 606, where many analogous passages are cited. RELIGION. 7 1 completed by the birth of a son, who is often made the lover of his mother. Like Egypt and Chaldaea, Phoenicia had its triads, but they appear to have been less clearly fixed and defined than in the valleys of the Nile and the Euphrates. It would seem that at Sidon there was a bond of this nature between Baal-Sidon, Astarte, and Esmoun, 1 a god whom the Greeks in later days assimilated to their own ^Esculapius. The female element in these triads was nearly always embodied in Astarte, at least, among the oriental Phoenicians. As a rule her name was preceded by the honorific title Rabbat, " the Great Lady," which was, moreover, applied sometimes to other goddesses.' 2 Anat, or Anahit, the Anaitis of the Greeks, was another name for the same deity ; under this title also she was worshipped in Syria, whence her cult passed into Egypt. We know from a Phoenician inscrip- tion that she was domiciled in Cyprus. 3 The name changed with the place, but the conception remained. Beside these great gods Phoenicia had several minor divinities, with whom we are as yet very imperfectly acquainted. Reshep, Resef, or Resef-Mikal, was the Phoenician Apollo. At least a bi-lingual cypriot inscription identifies him, in its Greek part, with the Amy clean Apollo. 4 Resef penetrated into Egypt, and judging from the way he was figured there we should be tempted to see in him a god of war, an Ares or Mars (Fig. 24). Other deities, Semes, or "the sun," Sakon, and Powiiai. the pygmy god of the Greeks, have been revealed to us by the proper names of men. It is among such gods as these and others of the same class that we must, no doubt, look for the seven Cabeiri, or " powerful ones," whose worship was imported by the Sidonians into Thrace, there to endure until the very last clays of paganism. The Cabciri were planetary gods, as their number alone is enough to show. Esmoun " the eighth," if we may accept the Semitic origin of his name was their chief. He was the third person of the triad which we encounter, under different names, in every Phoenician city. Esmoun was, in fact, the supreme manifestation of the divinity, 1 Corpus Inscriptionum Semiticarum, vol. i. part i. No. 3. 2 BERGER, La Phenicie, p. 22. 3 Corpus Inscriptionum Semiticarum, part i. No. 95. It is in speaking of this inscription that M. DE VOGUE has presented us with those keen remarks on the Phoenician religion that we quote so often in these chapters. 4 Corpus Inscriptionum Scwiticarum, part i. No. 89. 72 HISTORY F.NDENCIFS. FlG. 31. Egyptian \\riting-c.ise. I low were the Phoenicians themselves led to embark on the path which ended in their alphabet ? They borrowed her arts and industries from Egypt, why did they not borrow her writing' also ? It was no doubt because they found it too inconvenient, too complex, too diffi- cult to master. The Egyptian writing included ideographic symbols, some of which were taken in their natural, others in a metaphorical, sense. These were combined with phonetic signs represent- ing sometimes syllables, sometimes iso- lated consonants. The same word or idea might be rendered here by a single ideogram, there by a combination of various figures. This led to confusion, and finally to the embarrassment of the reader and to the possibility on his part of continual mistakes. The people who invented such a system, and persevered in its use for thousands of years, did not suspect its defects. There is no instru- ment of which long hereditary custom will not make man a complete master. Scribes of the Ptolemaic and Roman times sometimes arranged their symbols as if they were amusing themselves by making the inscriptions with which they covered the temple walls as obscure as they could. Was this because, as some have declared, they did not want to be understood ? Not at all ; they were merely showing their skill by playing with a difficulty, just as a modern virtuoso plays with a difficult passage on the pianoforte. Drilled by constant practice from in- fancy upwards into the use of this delicate machine, the lettered Egyptian might THE PHOENICIAN WRITING. 87 well have a genuine admiration for it, and speak of jt as a present to men from Thoth, the ibis-headed god ; but to strangers wishing to master it its merits would be less evident. To them the task would be facilitated neither by native predisposition, nor by the effects of a professional education begun at an age when the freshness and elasticity of the memory allow much to be asked from it. I doubt very much whether any man of foreign race, either Greek or Syrian, ever managed to work his way into the ranks of the Egyptian scribes, or even entertained such a hopeless ambition. And yet to the Syrians w r ho frequented the ports and principal towns of Lower Egypt it must have been very tantalizing to see the king's overseers and the nome princes taking account of frontier dues, of the quantities of grain, and of the heads of cattle and game which were sold in the markets. 1 Such a sight must have roused their envy much more readily than the pompous inscriptions on the pylons and temple w T alls. Their ambition was not of the grandiose kind. In this world, where other men thought so much of gaining battles, their only wish was to gain money. For their purposes it was all-important that they should master some form of cursive writing. What an advantage it would be to be able to write down day by day, or rather hour by hour, all transactions begun or ended, and every engagement entered into ; what a pleasure to have something to trust to beyond memory, and especially beyond the memory of a debtor ! But the cursive writing of Egypt \vas hardly less difficult for the stranger than the hieroglyphs. Like the latter it included characters of very different values, and before it could be used with any ease, the hieroglyphs themselves, of which it was in fact an abbreviation, had to be learnt. Before a foreigner could manage such a machine it required to be simplified ; the multitude of symbols had to be reduced to a comparatively small number ; and there was only one way of doing this with any success. In any ideographic system of writing the symbols are no doubt less numerous than the objects and ideas to be symbolized, but the difference is comparatively small, and it is clear that any figurative method requires a very large number of signs. The different vowel-sounds in their union with the various consonants also give rise to a good many combinations, so that a writing founded on the notation of syllables requires a great many characters there 1 Art in Ancient Egypt, \Q\. I. Figs. 19 and 21. 88 HISTORY OF ART IN PHOENICIA AND ITS DEPENDENCIES. are a hundred or so in the cuneiform syllabary. But it is a different matter if each separate character stands for nothing beyond one of the elementary articulations of the human voice. In no existing alphabet are there more than about twenty letters corresponding to sounds between which the ear will make a real distinction. Among the phonetic elements of Egyptian writing there were signs of this kind, real letters. The thing to be done was to separate them from the signs of syllables, of objects, and ideas, to take these letters and to leave to the scribes of Memphis those other modes of notation which only served to complicate and encumber their graphic system. How did the necessity for such an operation suggest itself? Was it seen from the beginning that only a portion of the Egyptian signs should be borrowed ? Were there long periods of probation, or was the alphabet constituted at once, on the principle which has given it such a prodigious success, by the genius of a single man ? This question we shall never be able to answer. The date of the invention of the alphabet, if it had a date, is still more important in the history of civilization than that of the invention of printing. To resolve a word into its primitive elements certainly required a much greater effort of the brain than to invent movable letters and print with them by pressure. W T e can hardly look without emotion upon the Forty- two-line Bible, which was printed at Mayence in 1456, but how much more deeply should we be moved could we have placed before our eyes the first inscription in which a Syrian scribe made use of those twenty-two letters that, by a long series of insen- sible changes, have taken the forms they bear on this page! Gutenberg has his statues everywhere, the work of sculptors such as Thorwaldsen and David d'Angers. Those honours are well deserved, and yet the Phoenician who presented his country with this marvellous instrument deserved them better ; but his name was forgotten even by his countrymen. If we could catch a glimpse into the profound darkness of the past, and recognize the inventor of the alphabet among the innumerable ancestors of our race, should we not lead him from the crowd and place him at the head of the long procession of benefactors to humanity ? One of the chief merits of the Phoenician alphabet lies in what we may call its universal character. The elementary articulations of the human voice are much the same among all peoples. Every THE PHOENICIAN WRITING. national keyboard lacks, indeed, one or two notes, but the chief difference between one language and another can hardly be ex- pressed in written characters ; it lies in the timbre, in the intona- tion, or, if we may use the term, in the colour of the sounds. Nothing is easier than to note, either by means of the Phoenician alphabet, or of others founded upon it, the various articulations that make up a local dialect or language. Any race in whom a sight of this alphabet and of what it could do aroused a desire to write on the same principle themselves could, no doubt, invent an alphabet for their own use ; but, in those long ages of gradual progress whose results are summed up for us in the word civili- zation, the human intellect worked on no such lines. Man under- stood how to utilize the discoveries of his ancestors, and to make them points of departure for new adventures ; he did not waste his time in doing over again what had been done, and well done, already ; he set himself rather to revise and perfect. To this rule the alphabet was no exception. All those peoples who were in communication with Phoenicia by sea or land bor- rowed her characters and adapted them by a few additions and retouches to the notation of their own idiom. The Phoenicians took the forms and values of their symbols from the cursive writing of Egypt. By slow stages these symbols passed to the Hebrews, to the northern Semites, or Aramaeans, to the Libyans through Southern Arabia, and even to the Hindoos ; westwards they spread among the Greeks, the Italiots, and even the distant tribes of Spain. We cannot be surprised that in travelling so far their aspect was greatly modified. To these changes many things con- tributed ; different habits of hand, different materials, and different social conditions among those who wrote. It is when we go back to the oldest forms of the Phoenician alphabet itself, and of its direct issue, that we find resemblances so strong that all doubt as to their original identity is dispelled. Compare, for example, the characters in the oldest Greek inscriptions from Thera with those on the stele of Mesa or on the bronze cup inscribed with the name of Hiram (Fig. 32). l The student of these early alphabets will soon find, too, that it was not only the shapes of the characters that changed, but also, though in comparatively few cases, their phonetic values. The Phoenician alphabet had no vowels. The reader was left 1 Corpus Inscriptionum Semiticarum, pars i. No. 6, and plate iv. VOL. I. N 9O HISTORY OF ART IN PIUKNICIA AND ITS to fill them in according to the sense of the phrase. Such a want of definition must have been very inconvenient to the Greeks. We know how great a part is played by vowels in their methods of derivation, in their declensions and conjugations. " To provide themselves with vowels the Greeks took the semi- vowels of the Phoenicians, and as even these were not enough. o ' they turned to the gutturals, so numerous in the Phoenician alphabet, and there only used to make the language clear and sonorous ; ioa and vav became I and Y ; alepk became A, ht E, hctk H, ain O. Over vav the Greeks seem to have hesitated; they took it up again and again as if they found it difficult to exhaust the possibilities of a letter whose value, as in Hebrew, was somewhat vague and floating. Thus we find that vav gave birth successively to the Greek digamma and upsilon, and in Latin to four letters : F, answering to the digamma, U, V, and Y." * Fi<;. 32. Fragment of a bronze cup French National Library. By these observations we are enabled to form a fair judgment of the services rendered to phonetic writing by the Greeks ; at the first attempt they solved a problem which had always puzzled the Semites. The latter tried now and then to note the vowel sounds with precision, but during the whole existence of their idiom they never quite succeeded ; the system of their primitive alphabet was, in fact, unequal to the task. The vowel-points of the rabbis of the sixth century of our era were applied, in a very artificial way, to a language which was then dead. We have complete proof that those signs give a false idea of the way the words of the Old Testament were pronounced at the time they were first written. 2 1 BERGER, L ' Ecriture et les Inscriptions scmitiques, p. 17. - Ibid. THE PHOENICIAN WRITING. 91 The Phoenicians were very far from exhausting the uses of the admirable instrument they had invented. They used it for " keeping their books," but not for expressing their higher thoughts ; they had no literature in the true sense of the word. They seem to have written by preference on precious stones, where there was room only for very short texts, and upon bronze, most of which has long ago disappeared. " Before the discovery of Mesa's inscription, one might have doubted whether epigraphy was made use of by any Canaanitish people. Steles like those of Mesa must have been rare, and as for the habit of putting inscriptions on monumental buildings, on tombs, on coins, it cannot have dated back beyond the day when imitation of the Greeks began. It is so with the Phoenician coinage. There is no Phoenician money anterior to the coinage of Greece and Persia. The inscription of Esmounazar is equally modern ; and the awkward, laboured way in which it is turned differs widely enough from the firm and simple style of men who have written much upon stone. In place of the grand manner of Greece and Rome, the only considerable inscription that has yet been found in Phoenicia is nothing but the long-winded verbiage of a narrow-souled individual oppressed by terrors as to the fate of his own bones. 1 . . . The very execution of the inscription betrays a little-practised hand. The carver has begun twice over, and the second time he has altered his process. There is, too, something very strange in the monotony of the Carthaginian epigraphy. Of two thousand five hundred known inscriptions from Carthage, all but three or four are practically identical. 2 In short, the inventors of writing do not seem to have written much, "and we may at least affirm that the public monuments of Phoenicia were without inscriptions down to the Greek period." Since attention was turned to this question by the action of the Acadtmie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres, the number of Phoenician texts has increased with great rapidity ; and yet, in the whole of 1 When M. Renan wrote these lines, in 1874, the stele of Jehawmelek had not been published. There is nothing in it, however, to modify the judgment we have quoted. 2 We may now be permitted to modify the figures given by M. Renan twenty years ago. When he wrote the page we have quoted, M. de Sain te- Marie had not yet collected and despatched to France those hundreds of steles on all of which homage to " Tanit, face of Baal," is rendered in identical terms. 3 RENAN, Mission de P/ienicie, pp. 832, 833. g2 HISTORY OF ART IN PIKKXICIA AND ITS DEPENDENCIES. the vast repertory which we owe to the industry of M. Renan and his colleagues, \ve cannot cite a single text that may be fairly compared to those inscriptions of Greece and Rome in which the voice of a great and free people makes itself heard across the ages. And in Phoenicia the form is worthy of the matter. There is nothing in the appearance of the letters to captivate the eye or to induce the mind to seriously weigh the sense. Phoenicia had no special form of letters for monumental use. Her epigraphic alphabet never lost its cursive look (Fig. 33). " In Phoenician inscriptions we find none of those expedients with which the Greeks and iJP? '' l(; - 33- Fragment of a sepulchral cippu>. From Cypru-.' Latins contrived to give an architectural character to their texts on stone." : There is no care for symmetry, no variation in the calibre of letters, no indication of proper names or important words by capital letters. The characters are all the same height, and their angular forms with long tails and variously sloping strokes follow each other in well drilled ranks. The lines are not always straight, and they are limited only by the field on which they are traced. It certainly never dawned upon the mind of a Phoenician scribe that an inscription might have its beauty even for those who 1 RENAN, Mission de Fhenide, p. 834. 2 Corpus Inscriptionum Semiticarum, pars i. plate 8. GENERAL REMARKS UPON THE STUDY OF PHOENICIAN ART. 93 could not read its words. All he thought about was to cut his texts correctly on the stone. In its writing, as in its colonial system, its art, and its industry, the Phoenician genius thought only of the immediate practical result ; it was essentially utilitarian. 5. General Remarks upon the Study of Phoenician Art. The study of Phoenician art is surrounded by quite peculiar difficulties.. When we had to explain the arts of Egypt, Chaldaea, and Assyria, and to form a judgment on their merits, we had only to transport ourselves in imagination to the valleys of the Nile, the Euphrates, and the Tigris ; it was enough to explore the ruins of their buildings, and to examine the series of remains of every kind which have been collected into public and private museums. Phoenician art is not to be studied under such con- ditions as these. Upon its native soil it has left but feeble traces. Its debris must be sought for from one end of the Mediterranean O to the other. In that great collection of Phoenician texts in which every inscription should at last find a place, there are only nine from the Syrian coast ; ' Athens and the Piraeus have given nearly as many, namely seven ; 2 Cyprus has furnished eighty-six ; 3 Malta and Gozo twelve ; 4 and Sardinia twenty-four. 5 Those from Carthage are counted in thousands. The same observation applies to the remains of Phoenician art ; these are nowhere so uncommon as in Syria. M. Renan, who devoted a whole year to the exploration of Phoenicia, insists upon this curious fact and explains it historically. " The ancient civilization of Phoenicia has been more thoroughly broken up than any other. A reason for this is to be found in the fact that its habitat has always been very thickly peopled. During the Greek, Roman, Byzantine, Crusading, and Mussulman periods, they have never ceased to bufld, to re-work old stones, to beat the great blocks left from ancient days into smaller units. We may say that, for the last fifteen or sixteen centuries, very few 1 Corpus Inscriptionum Semiticarum, pars i. 1-9. 2 Ibid, pars i. 115-121. 3 Ibid. Nos. 10-96. 4 Ibid. Nos. 122-132 (including 122 bis and 123 bis). Ibid. 139-162. 94 HISTORY or ART IN PHOENICIA AND ITS DEPENDENCIES. stones have been cut from any quarry in Syria. The old blocks have been made to serve again and again, until nothing of their original physiognomy is left. The Crusades especially were disastrous in this respect. The Templars, the Hospitallers, the whole of the great feudal bodies of Syria, built gigantic walls for their own defence, and as they were good builders and seldom used a stone without having it first re-worked, the evidences of the early civilization were widely obliterated. Hence the archaeo- logical destitution of the coasts of Syria and Cyprus " The situation of Phoenicia has Ind a great deal to do with the destruction of its antiquities. Buildings near the seaboard run a much greater risk of destruction than those hidden away in the interior, especially in a country like Syria, where there were neither roads nor vehicles, and where anything that was too heavy for a camel had to stay where it was. But on the Phut:nician coast a ship could be brought up close to any ancient building and its stones removed with ease. It was thus that the pagan Ephesus (which is distinct from the Christian Ephesus or A'ia- Solo2tk) served as a marble quarry for the builders of Constantinople. The enterprises of Djezzar, of Abdallah Pacha, of the Emir Beschir, and, at an earlier period, those of Fakhreddin, had an analogous effect in Syria. Similar causes have led to the rapid disappearance of Athlith in our own days " In Syria religious reactions were no less fatal to the monuments. Christianity, so tender to antique works in Greece, was a great destroyer in the Lebanon. 1 The natives of the Lebanon, both Mussulman and Christian, are, if I may venture to say so, quite without the sentiment of art ; their feelings cannot be reached by plastic beauty ; their first impulse at the sight of a statue is to break it Finally, the greed of the natives has also been the cause of wide destruction. They have broken up tombs and destroyed inscriptions in their haste to get at the treasures within ; every sepulchre that was not hidden has been broken to pieces. .... Political anarchy and the absence of all public control have contributed to the same result When we reckon up all these conditions, and add to them the zeal of those modern searchers for antique wealth who overrun the whole country, we 1 See the Mission de Phenicic, pp. 220, 287; and M. A.MKDKK THIERRY'S account of the destructive missions of St. John Chrysostom, in the Rente des deux Monties of ist January, 1870, pp. 52 et seg. GENERAL REMARKS UPON THE STUDY or PHCENICIAN ART. 95 are surprised that a single vestige of the past remains in it. We can hardly understand how it is that a few points on the coast, such as Oum-cl-Aiuamid and Amrit,s\.\\\ preserve a few fragments that have come down from a very remote antiquity." Like the philologist and the epigraphist, the historian of art would condemn himself to know very little indeed of the work accomplished by this industrious people if he confined himself to what he could learn within the narrow limits of Phoenicia proper, a country of which we may say in the words of the poet that "its very ruins have perished." The lives of the Phoenicians were passed anywhere but at home. Many of them were born in the colonies, and many no doubt lived and died without visiting their mother city. If we wish to become well acquainted with the people, and to trace out the various directions in which their ac- tive intelligence made itself felt, we must imitate them in these particulars ; we must take passage on their ships, and disembark on all the shores they so long frequented. We must stay for a time in their company, wherever they rested longest, and where consequently there is the best chance of finding evidence of their action and presence. Acting on this plan we shall, in the first place, follow them to Cyprus. Cyprus was not Phoenicia. At a very early date Greek colonists landed on the island, and, establishing themselves side by side with the Semites, soon contrived to divide the whole country with them. But the chief maritime city, Kition, preserved its almost exclusively Syrian character down at least to the prrtition of Alexander's empire ; it was situated on the eastern coast of the island, and formed a pendant to Tyre and Sidon. In other parts also, as at Paphos on the southern coast, and in the interior at Idalion and Golgos, Phoenician ideas had taken such deep root that all the progress of the Greeks did not efface their traces. We have already noticed the large number of Phoenician inscrip- tions found in Cyprus, and, as might be expected, the number of Phoenician objects made either in those Syrian towns with which the island was in such constant communication or in the colony itself, is also very great. At Kition, and in other towns, manu- factories existed which were in fact no more than branch houses of 1 RENAN, Mission de Phenicie, pp. 816-819. See also pp. 154 and 155 in the same book, where M. Renan gives details of the destruction by the modern vandal of the antiquities of Byblos. 96 HISTORY OK ART i\ PIKKMCIA AND ITS DEPENDENCIES. those at Tyre and Sklon. It was the same at Carthage. As her commerce and political importance developed, it became more and more necessary that she herself should be in a position to produce the objects with which she trafficked in the markets of the West ; all the industries of the metropolis must in time have been acclimatized within her walls, with their hereditary secrets and their accumulations of motives and models. In most cases we are quite unable to distinguish between a Phoenician vase made in Syria and one turned out from an African workshop. But Carthage is as bare as the Syrian coast of the works of Phoenician architects and artisans. The real Carthage, the Punic city, was twice destroyed by conquerors, who burnt, dismantled, and demolished as soon as the place had fallen, and the ruins they left were finally removed by the rebuilders of a few generations later. Old materials were used again, and their original features destroyed. The few monuments that may have escaped destruction are now buried under such heaps of debris that modern explorers of the site have hardly touched them at any point. It is in Sicily, in Sardinia, and in Italy, that we shall find the products of Carthage, just as we find those of Syria in the islands and on the mainland of Greece. The remains of antiquity are everywhere better preserved in Greece and Italy than in Syria or Africa. Their vast cemeteries have handed down to modern curiosity great collections of sepulchral furniture, in which Phoenician art is largely represented both by works which really belong to it and by the imitations which it provoked. But it may be asked, How do we recognize this art in the absence of examples found in Syria itself, or at least at Carthage, which might give us types of the style and taste of Phoenicia ? To this we answer, in the first place, that such examples are not entirely wanting. Exhausted as it is, the soil of Phoenicia has yielded a certain number of monuments by the careful examination of which we can arrive at certain well defined conclusions. By comparing these one with another, we obtain at least the rough outlines of the formula we seek, and these outlines become clearer in the light of Phoenician history. Phoenicia was the vassal successively of Egypt and Assyria, and in the objects that left her workshops she must have mingled elements taken from both those great civilizations. Phoenicia alone was in a position, by her geographical situation and the part GENERAL REMARKS UPON THE STUDY OF PHOENICIAN ART. 97 she played in the antique world, to produce all those objects, now so numerous and so well known, which are neither frankly Egyptian, nor frankly Assyrian, and yet contain no important elements from any other source. Finally, the Phoenicians now FIG. 34. Phoenician wall of Eryx. 1 and then signed their works. In the ramparts of the great city of Eryx, so famous for its shrine of the Syrian Astarte, the marks of the Carthaginian masons have been found quite lately on the stones of the lower courses (Fig. 34). This is almost always 1 Corpus Inscriptionum Semiticarum, pars i. plate 29 (p. 96). VOL. I. O 9^ HISTORY OF ART IN PIKKNICIA AND ITS DEPENDENCIES. the same letter, a belli, usually from five to twelve inches hitf h ( I; 'K- 35)-' Our readers will remember the bronze platters which were found at Nineveh ; many like them were found at distant points on the Mediterranean, and from the first archaeologists have never hesitated to ascribe them to a Phoenician origin. But that which after all was no more than a very probable conjecture was changed into certainty by the famous discovery at Palestrina : upon one of these platters, found in 1876 in the necropolis of the ancient Prameste, in the interior of Latium, a short but very clearly engraved Phcenician inscription was discovered and read ; " in all likelihood it gives us the name of the first owner of the dish, rather than that of its maker :! it runs Esmunj air-ben- A sto (Fig. 36). This point, however, is of slight importance; the value of the discovery lies in the fact that vases, diadems, jewels, etc., were found in the same tomb ; that they were made in IMC. 35. Crmhayiiiian mason's mark. 1 the same way and decorated in the same spirit as the platter, and that no reason can be named for giving them a different origin. Here then we have a whole collection of objects, with the 1 Corpus Inscriptionum Semiticarum, pars i. No. 136. Beside beth, plic has been tound once and ain seven times. 2 Corpus Inscriptionum Semiticarum, p. i. No. 164. At the head of the article devoted to this inscription by the editors of the Corpus will be found a list of all the writings to which its discovery has given birth. The original of our reduction (Fig. 36) is plate 32 of vol. x. of the Monimenti of the Jnstitut de Correspondancc archeologique ; but aided by a fine photograph, for which we are indebted to the kindness of M. Fiorelli, our draughtsman has endeavoured to give his figures a sharper contour and to mark their relief with more accuracy. 1 M. RLNAN suggests that the name is that of some person deceased, to whose memory the dish was consecrated, and whose person was symbolized by the hawk which occupies the centre. We find it difficult to admit this explanation for an object which was destined, by its very nature, to pass from hand to hand, and, as the place of the discovery proves, to become an object of commerce. 4 Corpus Inscriptionum Semiticarum, pars i. plate 29. GENERAL REMARKS UPON THE STUDY OF PHOENICIAN ART. 99 label, if we may use the word, of a Phoenician agent attached to them. If we take them one by one, we may surely arrive at an idea of the taste and methods of the Carthaginian worker in precious metal ; I say Carthaginian because philologists have marked a peculiarity in the text of this platter which suggests an African rather than a Syrian origin. FIG. 36. Phoenician platter; silver. Diameter 7f inches. Drawn by Wallctt. It will be seen, then, that the method we propose to follow is less uncertain than it seems. No doubt we shall take our examples from points very far apart, but that does not mean that we shall take them at hazard. When we refer some object found in a tomb at Mycense, in Etruria, or Sardinia to ioo HISTORY <>i- ART IN PIKKNICTA AND ITS DEPENDENCIES. Phd-nician workmen, \ve do so because its treatment is different from that of any known local workshop, and because the salient features of its decoration harmonize at all points with those with which we have become familiar in our study of monuments drawn from Phiunicia proper and with the few pieces that bear Semitic inscriptions. In order to widen our field of choice we shall bring back to the quays of Tyre and Sidon the objects carried by their commerce to the four corners of the ancient world ; but, before admitting a vase or a trinket into our museum, we shall look at every side of it, and reject it unless it bears the undoubted stamp of some industrial centre of the Phoenicians. The Greek genius soon emancipated itself from the precepts and example of Phoenicia ; it created an art far superior to that of its masters, an art of great and commanding originality ; but it was otherwise with some of the pupils of Tyre and Sidon. Neither the Cypriots nor the Hebrews succeeded in shaking off the ascendency of the Phoenician types. At Jerusalem, as at Golgos, types were modified to a certain degree, for in the one place the faith of the people was different, in the other their social habits and the materials of which their artists and artisans made use ; but in neither country did they examine nature closely enough, in neither were their inventive faculties sufficiently alive, for their art to win a really national and original physiognomy. Cypriot art and Jewish art are no more than varieties, or, as a grammarian would say, dialects, of the art of Phoenicia. We shall therefore include them in the art history of the famous nation on the Syrian coast. We shall also have to devote a short chapter to some structures and bronze figures of a quite peculiar character, which are found only in Sardinia. The fantastic statuettes and other objects which have been met with in the ruins of the Sardinian towers are, no doubt, the products of a local and indigenous art, but that art was only developed on contact with the Phoenicians and while they were masters of the seaboard. As we shall have no occasion to revert to these rude works in the sequel of our history, our examination of them will be given in the form of an appendix to the present volume. From all that we have said, our readers will perceive that our present task is less easy than either of the two which have preceded it. The art history of Phoenicia has many divisions and subdivisions, and it presents another difficulty : its limits are GENERAL REMARKS UPON THE STUDY OF PHOENICIAN ART. 101 hard to define ; it is difficult to fix upon a date at which our labours should close. Egyptian art always remained faithful to itself and to its principle. Down to the appearance of the Ptolemies every change was made on the sole basis of its own past ; it had never come under foreign influence. Of the art of Chaldaeo- Assyria we may say the same. It had produced all the works we have described 1 before the development of the Greek genius had gone far enough to penetrate those distant countries and to impose its own models upon their inhabitants. With Phoenicia, and still more with Cyprus, it was otherwise. The plastic genius of their inhabitants was not very pronounced, and the example of Greece began to have its effect upon them at a very early hour. As they had imitated Egypt, Chaldsea, and Assyria in their order, so they began to imitate Greece as soon as the latter had created her architectural orders and had learnt to give the human form a truth and nobility unknown before her time. And as generation followed generation, and the art of the Greeks mounted higher and higher, the influence they exercised over the whole Mediterranean basin, with the one exception of Egypt, became more and more decisive. After a certain date Cyprus and Phoenicia hardly fashioned an object in which a knowledge of Hellenic types is not betrayed in some detail of form or ornament. It may be thought that such objects should be left for discussion when we come to treat of the art of Greece, or should be disregarded altogether. But the remains cf the primitive and purely Oriental period are too scanty both in Phoenicia and Cyprus ; certain methods of production and certain ornamental motives are only known to us through these monu- ments of the transition. It is of great importance that motives taken from Egypt and Mesopotamia and the local practices of the Syrian workmen should be traced even in things governed as a whole by Greek taste ; we have no other means of showing how closely long practice and hereditary predisposition had attached these Oriental artists to methods and types which they continued to employ long after all their surroundings had changed, and after they themselves had begun to prefer Greek to their own national 1 History of Art in Ancient Egypt, 2 vols. 8vo (1883), and History of Art in Chaldcea and Assyria, 2 vols. 8vo (Chapman and Hall, 1884). iO2 HISTORY OK ART IN PIKENICIA AND ITS DEPENDENCIES. idiom. The question as to how far we should go in this direction and what criterion we should use in deciding that this or that monument deserves a place in a history of Phoenician art is one of tact and appreciation. The threat tiling is to make sure that every fragment of sculpture or architecture mentioned in these! pages is capable of adding to our knowledge. CHAPTER II. ON THE' GENERAL PRINCIPLES AND CHARACTERISTICS OF PHOENICIAN ARCHITECTURE. i. Materials and Construction. PHOENICIA is a country of mountains. The whole territory is cut up by the Lebanon and by the spurs it throws out westwards to the sea. Consequently there is no lack of stone, but its quality is mediocre. Neither marble nor sandstone are to be found. Near Safita, as in certain cantons of Galilee, a few quarries exist, but their produce has hardly been taken beyond the immediate district. The common material of the country is a rather soft calcareous stone, which crops up through the surface of the soil. The first idea of the tribes who came to settle in the coun- try must have been to cut the living rock where they found it. Wherever it did not stand above the qround in ridges or isolated o o masses, it was to be encountered at a very slight depth under the thin stratum of vegetable earth which was deposited in the valleys, at the feet of the cliffs, and on the less abrupt slopes from the hills to the sea. From one end of maritime Syria to the other, tombs were hollowed in the rock down to the last days of antiquity ; and such labours were undertaken for the living as well as the dead. o In the beginning, perhaps, the settlers took up their abode in natural grottoes, which could be easily enlarged and made more convenient, and even in later days, \vhen their ideas had outgrown those humble dwellings, they continued to profit by the accidents of their rocky territory. Thus " one of the most curious of the remains at Amrit is a monolithic house, cut entirely from a single mass of rock (Fig. 37). The material was cut away in such a fashion that only thin walls and partitions were left adhering to iO4 HISTORY OK ART IN PHOENICIA AND ITS DEPENDENCIES. the soil. The principle facade, which faces westwards, is one hundred feet long. The depth of the house is also about a hundred feet, the height of the walls is about twenty feet and their thickness about thirty-two inches. The interior was divided Fit;. 37. Rock-cut house .it Anirit. From Kenan. into at least three chambers by partitions left in the same way. The external wall to the north was artificial ; its lowest courses are still to be found hidden in the soil, the south wall was partly rock, partly masonry." In the island situated to the north of the FIG. 38. Rock-cut walls at Saida. From Kenan. modern town of Saida the rocky soil still bears traces of similar works. The lower parts of walls are shaped as they stand ; we find them pierced in many parts with niches and rectangular or 1 REN AN, Mission de P/ienide, p. 92. MATERIALS AND CONSTRUCTION. 105 roundheaded doorways ; in a few instances even partition walls are rock cut. (Fig. 38). 1 FIG. 39. Fragment of the map of Amrit. Fr We find the same contrivance in a curiously arranged temple, which must have been one of the earliest of the shrines of Marath. FIG. 40. The Tabernacle of Amrit. From Renan. A large quadrangle, 192 feet by 160, has been cut in the living rock (Fig. 39). In the centre has been left a block some twenty feet 1 RENAN, Mission de Phenicic, p. 363. 2 Ibid. pp. 62-68, and plates viii. and x. VOL. I. P io6 HISTORY OK ART IN PIKKNICIA AND ITS DEPENDENCIES. square and ten high. Upon this cubical mass, which is one with the actual floor of the temple, has been built a small tabernacle which we shall have to examine in detail in our chapter on religious architecture (F"ig. 40). A similar mingling of the two processes is to be found in the remains of the formidable ramparts with which the island of Arvad was surrounded. The built part of the wall rests upon a rock-cut plinth some twelve or fourteen feet high (Fig. 7) ; the same arrangement may be traced in the debris of the Phoenician walls at Sidon (Fig. 41). Like the temple court at Marath the ditch is cut in the rock. Another example of this is to be seen at Semar-Gcbeyl, where a castle built in the middle ages has profited by the gigantic works undertaken for the guarding of an old Giblite fortress against a sudden assault. 1 Finally, at Arvad and many other places we find cisterns, silos and the containers of Fir.. 41. Remains of the walls of Sidon. From Rcnan. wine-presses hollowed in the soft rock, the surface of which was rendered fit for its purpose by a coat of stucco. 2 We may here quote a text from an old historian which proves that these habits of the Phoenicians excited remark even from their contemporaries : " When the Phoenicians began to settle in great numbers on those rocky shores to which they were attracted by the richness of the purple dye, they built houses for themselves and surrounded them with ditches ; as they cut the rock for this latter purpose, they used the material removed for the walls of their towns, and so protected their ports and jetties."' 1 RENAN, Mission, p. 244, and plate xxxvii. - Ibid. p. 40, and plate iii. 3 CLAUDIUS IOLAUS, quoted by Stephen of Byzantium, s.v. Aw/>a. This method of extracting the wall, so to speak, from its own ditch, was used at Arvad, at Tortosa, at Anefe', and at Semar-Gebeyl. MATERIALS AND CONSTRUCTION. 107 Building proper was only turned to in the last extremity, when there was no rocky site available. But by its very nature rock could only be used for the substructures of buildings ; it broke off short at the level of the soil, while its irregular and capricious forms put great difficulties in the way of those who tried to make excessive use of it. The idea of finishing the work by means of cut blocks must soon have occurred to the builders. At first it was a mere question of adding a little here and there to the rock-cut walls, and the larger the applied masses the better were those early FIG. 42. Substructure of one of the temples at Baalbek. From Lortet. constructors pleased with their work. Their point of departure was what has been called monolithism? and from it Syrian and Phoenician builders never entirely shook themselves free ; traces of it may even be found in the Roman period, in the substructures of the temples at Baalbek (Fig. 42). 2 1 REN AN, Mission de Phenicie, p. 315. 2 Our readers will remember the famous trilithon of Baalbek, the three stones which crown the platform of the Temple of the Sun ; they are respectively 63 feet 8 inches, 60 feet 3 inches, and 64 feet 2 inches long. On the northern face, the face shown in our woodcut, six blocks of hardly less astonishing size form by themselves io8 HISTORY OF ART IN PIKKNICIA AND ITS DEPENDENCIES. The effects of this propensity are to be most clearly traced in the wall which still exists on the south and west of the island of Arvad (Fig. / ) " Carried on the outer edges of the rocks, it is composed of quadrangular prisms ten feet high and from about twelve to sixteen feet long ; these prisms are fixed sometimes with skill and care, sometimes with strange negligence ; in some places joints are allowed to vertically coincide, in others they are alternated with great elaboration. Sometimes the courses are regular, with their interstices closed by small blocks ; elsewhere they are not even dressed to an even front, although the lines of the courses are always horizontal. The ruling idea of the builders was to make the best possible show with the finest blocks. A huge stone com- manded its own place. No sacrifice of its mass was made, it was put wherever its size would be most imposing, and the hollows about it were filled in with smaller stones. . . . There was no cement .... I do not think there is any ruin in the world more imposing, more characteristic. There can be no doubt that it is a relic from the ancient city of Arvad, a really Phoenician work, and affording a criterion for other buildings of the same origin. It is entirely built of the indigenous stone of the place ; its materials were taken, in fact, from the great ditch which separates it from the modern town." ' The solidity of this architecture was not in due proportion to the size of its units. 2 To obtain the height they required the builders were often obliged to bed the stone the wrong way ; the slightest "vent" was then fatal to the structure. And the limestone of those coasts is apt to crumble, so that small stones when asked to support great blocks were crushed by their weight ; this we find a wall 60 feet long. M. DE SAULCY believes that these enormous substructures date from an epoch much earlier than the temples they support (Revue Archeologique, 2nd series, vol. xxxiii. p. 267) ; other travellers think the same, notably M. G. REY (Rapport snr une Mission en Syne, in the Archives des Missions, 1866, p. 329). To me, however, the hypothesis in question is rendered very doubtful by the simple fact that these gigantic stones rest upon courses of well-jointed masonry in which the single stones are of comparatively small size. Taken by themselves, we should hardly refer these courses to an earlier epoch than that of the Seleucidae. More- over, we find that in the undoubtedly Roman parts of the work units of extraordinary size have been used, as, for example, in the monolithic jambs of the doorway of the round temple, which dates from the decadence. Se M. KENAN'S reflections on this subject and the doubt he expresses as to the theory of M. de Saulcy (Mission, pp. 3 1 4-3 1 6). 1 RENAN, Mission de Fhenicif, pp. 39, 40. and plate ii. 2 //>/,/. p. 67. MATERIALS AND CONSTRUCTION. 109 has happened in the temple at Amrit to the blocks interposed between the monolithic base and the huge slab which forms the roof. These smaller stones are greatly frayed away, and will in time be reduced to powder. Add to all this that the inequality in the materials and the method of filling in renders these Syrian structures very sensible to the shocks of earthquakes, and it will be understood that they are farther removed from the solidity of native rock than those Greek structures in which smaller units were used, but used with a skill that endowed them with a high power of resistance. The habits contracted in its early years never entirely dis- appeared from Phoenician architecture. In Greek construction each stone had its own part to play in the work to which it FIG. 43. Square pier from Gebal. Height 35 inches. From Rermn. belonged ; it was the member of an organic body, and the Greeks understood at a very early date that not more than one member should be combined with each constructive unit. In Syria the architectural idea and the constructive units did not preserve this logical connection ; when the Phoenicians made use of the column, they, like the Assyrians, carved it all, shaft and cap, from a single block. We take an example of this from the ruins of Gebal (Fig- 43)- 1 To their fondness for using the stone as it came from the quarry may be traced the Phoenician habit of employing what is called rustication ; it seemed natural to their masons to be content with dressing the edges of the joints and to leave the rest of their wall- 1 RENAN, Mission de rhenidf, p. 175, and plate xxv. i io HISTORY OF ART IN PIKI.NK IA AND ITS DEPENDENCIES. faces in their native rudeness. For a long time, in fact, this arrangement was looked upon as the distinctive peculiarity of Phoenician masonry, as the stamp by which it could be most easily and most surely recognized. The rampart of Tortosa, the castle at Gebal, and certain parts of the " Tower of the Algerines " at v : V FlG. 44. Wall of Tortosa. From Kenan. Sour, where the irregular courses are made to fit by the intro- duction of L-shaped stones (see Fig. 45) were looked upon as standard examples. 1 This notion must now, however, be aban- doned. M. Thobois, the architect who accompanied M. Renan examined all these structures very carefully, and the result of his FIG. 45. Masonry from the Tower of the Algerines. From Renan. observations caused the latter to reconsider his first ideas. It now seems to be clearly proved that the walls of Tortosa and those of the castle at Gebal both date from the middle ages. 2 The masons employed by the great military orders in the con- struction of these walls went to the quarry for no great proportion of the blocks they used ; they made the stones of the old buildings with which the Phoenician coast had been fringed for so many generations serve again in the new, and the narrow, smoothly 1 RENAN, Mission, plate xxv. 2 See M. KENAN'S observations on this subject (Mission, pp. 47-54 and 164-172). The question was one of great importance. Upon its resolution in one sense or the other depended, in no slight degree, our notions upon the habits and processes of the Phoenician architect. MATERIALS AND CONSTRUCTION. 1 1 1 chiselled border in which the hand of the Giblite masons was formerly seen is no more than the signature of those who worked for the Hospitallers and Templars. On the other hand, many examples of channelled masonry may be found among the antique monuments of Judaea, of that Judaea which was the scholar of Phoenicia in all the manual arts. It appears difficult to allow that the Jews made use of methods un- FlG. 46. Wall of a temple at Malta. known to the Phoenicians, but it is none the less certain that the only really ancient building in Phoenicia in which this channelled masonry has been encountered is the tomb at Marath, known as the Burdj-el-Bezzak, or " Tower of the Snail " (Fig. 6). There we find a very strongly marked rustication, but only on the sub- structure. 1 To find another example we have to come down to a 1 See RENAN, Mission, pp. 80-90, and plate xiv. ii2 HISTORY OF ART IN PHOENICIA AND ITS DEPENDENCIES. temple dating from the reign of Augustus, the ruins of which are to be seen at El Belat, in the neighbourhood of Byblos. 1 No rustication is to be found either at Arvad, or in those parts of the walls of Sidon which are believed to be Phoenician (Fig. 4i). 2 We must then, at least for the present, give up the notion of seeing a characteristic of Phoenician architecture in this way of finishing a wall. On the other hand, all the examinations that have been made, outside Syria, of buildings ascribed to the Phoenicians on one ground or another, confirm what we have said as to their love for materials of great size, often but roughly dressed and laid one upon another without cement. Sometimes, as for example in FIG. 47. The wall of Hyrsa. From Bculc the monuments of Malta and Gozo, there are no regular courses ; the walls look like the primitive Cyclopean walls of Greece. We give an instance of this in Fig. 46, which shows one entrance to the building whose still unexplored ruins are to be seen at Malta, at Burdj-en-Nadur, above the port of Marsasirocco, and about 280 yards from the sea. 3 At Carthage, on the other hand, in those walls of Byrsa which were disengaged at several points by Beule only, however, to be 1 REXAN, Mission, p. 223. 2 Ibid. p. 362, and plate Iviii. figs, i, 2, and 3. 3 A. CARUANA, Report on the Phoenician and Roman Antiquities in the Group of the Islands of Malta (8vo, Malta, 1882), pp. 17-19. FORMS. 1 1 o very soon covered up again by the fall of the excavated earth a masonry hardly inferior to that of the Greeks may be recognized ; but the blocks are larger as a rule than those employed in Greece ; some of the stones are five feet lono^, more than four feet hieh, and O O ' between three and four deep, measurements which give a cube of considerable size (Fig. 47). l Having thus an abundant supply of easily worked rock close at hand, the Phoenicians of Syria seem to have made no use of artificial stone, at least before the Roman period. No brick structure has been found in the country. Elsewhere, however, they did not refuse to employ a material which must have be- come well known to them during their voyages into Egypt and Mesopotamia. It has been asserted that some of the Cyprian temples ascribed to the Phoenicians have been been built on a system often followed in Assyria. They have crude brick walls standing on a substructure of masonry. 2 2. Forms. The monuments of which the soil of Phoenicia can still show some traces may be divided into three classes : 1. Old monuments, dating from a time anterior to the first glimmerings of Greek taste ; as, for example, the remains at Amrit (Figs. 6 and 40). 2. Mixed monuments, on which the ideas, habits, and style of Phoenicia have left their trace, but which date from the Greek or Roman periods and bear the mark of Graeco- Roman influence; of such is the stone in the baptistery of Gebal (Fig. 48). 3 3. Monuments purely Greek or Roman, such as the theatre at Batroun. 4 Here we have nothing to do with monuments in the last-named c> category ; as for those in the second they afford many useful points of comparison, and the persistence with which motives quite Oriental in character hold their ground proves how dear they were 1 BEULE, Fouilles a Carthage (4to, 1861, 6 plates), pp. 59-62. 2 G. COLONNA CECCALDI, Revue Archeologique (2nd series, vol. xxii. p. 362). 3 REN AN, Mission, pp. 157, 158. 4 M. RENAN was the first to establish this classification ; its foundations appear sound (Ibid. pp. 835, 836). VOL. I. Q ii.| HISTORY OK ART IN PIM.NICIA AND ITS DEPENDENCIES. E. A to the Syrian ornamentist and how hard he found it to abandon their use. Thanks to the collateral evidence furnished bv the * numerous buildings which mari- time Syria erected during the period of the Seleucida: and the Roman emperors, we ought to be able, with sufficient ease and certainty, to formulate the governing theory of her archi- tectural forms and decorative principles, but the present miserable condition of the re- mains both of ancient Phoenicia and of Phoenicia after classic art began to affect her, is the cause of very great embarrass- ment. The works of Syrian artists had no protecting gar- ment like the sands of Egypt or the crude brick crumbled of the Assyrian palaces. Neither had the ruins on the Phoenician coast the good fortune to stand in a district almost devoid of population, like the Haouran and the north-west of Syria. The desert is the most faithful of all curators, but in the narrow lands of maritime Syria, which have never ceased to be well peopled, to be washed by the rains of winter and by mountain torrents, only those works of man could subsist which were either hidden in the bowels of the earth or, when raised above its surface, were protected by FORMS. 1 1 5 the unwieldy size of their materials and by the equilibrium that results from extreme simplicity of plan. It would then be futile to expect anything in Syria that could be compared to the hypostyle halls of Egypt and Persia or to the Assyrian palaces. The chief remains, and those in very bad condition, are sepulchral pits, small buildings resembling not a little both in solidity and in appearance the rocks of which their bases form a part, fragments of walls, cones and pyramids raised upon tombs, and monolithic chapels. Our hopes of new discoveries are not very sanguine, and meanwhile we must do the best we can with those already made, and endeavour to define what appear to have been the characteristic forms of Phoenician architecture. Our aim is to give a true description of its spirit and general methods. If we succeed, the surprises which the future may, after all, have in reserve, will enable our successors to fill in our definitions and to enrich them with details now beyond our grasp, but our framework will remain in spite of all retouches. In all the really ancient fragments of Phoenician buildings that remain to us the shape of the stones is rarely, if ever, determined by the functions they have to fulfil. Each block did not become, as in Greece, a separate unit with an individuality of its own. If there be any one mode of construction that leads more surely to this individuality of the unit than another it is the vault, where each voussoir has its own special form and is only fitted for that particular spot in the curve for which it has been prepared. But the vault is generally the result of a desire to employ small materials, to cover a void with stones too small for use in any other fashion ; and we have seen that the Phoenicians had a strong- predilection for large stones, which they could obtain everywhere at the very foot of any work on which they might be engaged ; so that the habits and preferences of their builders did not predispose them to make use of the arch. They must have been acquainted with its principle, seeing how incessantly they travelled in Egypt and Mesopotamia ; but hardly a sign of it is to be found in any building which we have good reason to ascribe to them either upon the soil of Syria or in any of the colonies. The only monuments in which that system of covering a void has been used, so far as we know, are two or three sepulchres in the necropolis of Sidon, among them that of Esmounazar, and these are scarcely older ii6 HISTORY OK ART IN PIKKNICIA AND ITS DEPENDENCIES. than the time; of Alexander. 1 Nowhere else do we find the slightest trace of a voussoir. This well-ascertained fact confirms v> the hypothesis to which our reasoning has been directed. If the Pha-nicians made use of the vault at all, it was at long intervals and on quite exceptional occasions. It is difficult to see how any arch whatever could be introduced into such walls as those of Arvad or of the temples of Malta and Gozo, among blocks which the mason set in place exactly as they came from the quarry. On the other hand, nothing could be easier than to cover any open- ing, lintel-wise, with the longest stone that might happen to be at hand. Other blocks of the same nature furnished the horizontal lines of the cornice, which, moreover, they soon learnt to chisel into ornamental forms. Every building must have ended in a flat roof, a covering which is almost universal in Syria at the present day." 2 Another characteristic of Phoenician architecture is to be ex- plained by its early predilections. Born of the living rock, which it fashioned in a hundred ways, on which it reposed, which it con- tinued and prolonged, it had no liking for any kind of open construction, and especially made slight use of the pier and column. Very few fragments of columns, and those very small, have been found among the ruins of truly Phoenician buildings. A study of these remains brings out the fact that columns were almost always used as ornamental motives in the form of pilasters. They did not support the roof and framework of the building as in Egypt, Persia, and Greece. Reduced thus to play the part of a mere accessory, the column was not divided into different members, as it was among people who made a wider use of it. It was not turned into a kind of organic being by separating and clearly defining its different parts. We do not possess a single Phoenician base, but the capital, as in Assyria, was in one piece with the shaft. The column was, as a rule, a monolith, and on those few occasions when it was made up 1 In our chapter on " Sepulchral Architecture " we shall give a section of these tombs, taken from the Corpus Inscriptionum Scmiticarnm. See also in M. GAIL- LA ROOT'S journal of his excavations (A fission, p. 437) the mention of another arched tomb chamber. It contained an anthropoid sarcophagus. 2 "The early Phoenicians were unacquainted with the arch," says M. RENAN (Mission, p. 408). FORMS. 1 1 of several pieces, as in some of the Cyprian remains in the Louvre, the sections occurred at random, being governed only by the shape and size of the stones, and not by the natural articulations of the support as a whole. This being their general character, we have now to distinguish the peculiarities, I can hardly say of the Phoenician column, FIG. 49. Capital at Golgos. From Ceccaldi. 1 because that had no constant and well-marked features of its own, but of those columns which have been found in Phoenicia and Cyprus. As a rule, their shafts are smooth and without fluting. The forms of the capitals have much variety. In some we find the FIG. 50. Capital from Edde. From Kenan. elements of the Grecian Doric capital, but with different curves and proportions. The nearest approach to the classic type has been found at Golgos (Fig. 49). The slight salience of the echinus and the great thickness of the abacus give a more peculiar physiognomy to one from Edde, near Byblos (Fig. 50). 1 Monuments antiques dc Cypre, p. 42. ii8 HISTORY OF ART IN PIKI.NICIA AND ITS DEPENDENCIES. The Tuscan capital, as described by Yitruvius, must have been very much like this. In the same group we may place the capital of a square pier at Hyblos (Fig. 43), which has a quite peculiar profile. The shaft ends in a bold torus, which, again, is allied to the abacus by a scotia. 1 In some other examples we recognize the principle of the Ionic capital. Several have been brought from Cyprus, where they crowned columns which once, in all probability, formed parts of tombs. They are very ornate. The simplest, which was found at Trapeza, near Famagousta, has two large volutes rising from a single base and crossing each other at the foot, and surmounted by an abacus divided into three fascias. It is ornamented on FIG. 51. Cypriot capital. Louvre. 2 both faces (Fig. 51). A capital from Athieno is still more curious in its arrangements. Above the chief pair of volutes there are two more turned the other way up. The space between their curves is filled up with a graceful ornament of lotus flowers and stems. A less happy note is struck by the sharp point of the triangle which rises between the tw r o large volutes. The three fascias of the abacus have perpendicular markings or grooves (Fig. 52). In a third capital we find the same design carried out in a slightly more elaborate fashion. There are three pairs of volutes instead of two ; the lotus bouquet is a little fuller and more complex, and the abacus is decorated with chevrons instead of 1 REN AN, Mission, p. 175. - Height, 30 inches ; length of abacus, 49 inches : thickness, 12 inches. FORMS. 119 vertical strokes (Fig. 53). Unfortunately this capital is in much worse condition than the other two ; both the "Teat volutes have o been broken off, and it has suffered in other respects. When FIG. 52. C \priot capital. Louvre. 1 perfect, it may perhaps have been the chef d 1 oeuvre of the Cyprian decorator. It shows both invention and richness of taste, but as a whole it is a little heavy ; it is the outcome of an art which, FIG 53. Cypriot capital. Louvre. though not content with the first thing that comes, has not yet learnt to choose, to refine, to carry out with a light and discrim- inating hand. At Cyprus this heaviness of terminal forms was 1 Height, 42 inches ; length of abacus, 47 inches ; thickness, 8 inches. i2o HISTORY OF ART IN PIKENICIA AND ITS DEPENDENCIES. sometimes still more marked, as, for instance, in the ornament from a funerary stele which we reproduce in Fig. 54. The lower part of this monument has disappeared, but judging from the shape of its crown it must have seemed poor and meagre in comparison with the tablet and the two lions crowded on to it. 1 ''; "jt A v Y FIG. 54. Ornament from a Cypriot stele. Louvre. 1 The Cypriot capitals had, then, plenty of variety. There are one or two among them in which we seem to recognize a first sketch for the Corinthian capital. We have its skeleton, so to speak, in a fragment from Athieno which is only known to us in a mediocre FIG. 55. Cypriot capital. From Cecealdi.- drawing here reproduced (Fig. 55). Its principal member is a calatkos, as the Greeks called it, a mass in the form of an inverted 1 Extreme width, 38 inches. 2 Monuments antiques tic C\pre, p. 43 The longest side of the abacus measures 23 inches. FORMS. I 2 1 bell with a flat bottom and a decoration of sinuous vertical streaks. Upon this rests a thin abacus standing out far beyond the cap it covers. Another capital from the same place is rather less far removed from the Greek type we have mentioned. The calathos is ornamented with leafy branches, reminding us of the acanthus leaves on the same part of the Corinthian capital. A very thick abacus is decorated with three rows of chevrons, each row separated from those above and below it by fillets (Fig. 56). The worst fault of this design lies in its bad proportions, but, as a whole, it is more fantastic than the capitals with volutes, whose curves, suggested to the architect by the behaviour of copper or silver under the hammer, are never without a certain grace. FIG. 56. Cypriot capital. From Ceccaldi. 1 It must have been in capitals of this latter form that metal supports, or wooden columns overlaid with metal, terminated. In Phoenicia, as in Egypt and Chaldsea, these slender shafts must sometimes have been used, as, for instance, in the support of the salient parts of a building or of porticoes. The penthouse of the Amrit tabernacle seems to have been thus upheld by bronze columns of which traces have been found on the entablature. 2 Not that the latter requires any supports, but the probability of their having nevertheless existed is rendered very strong by the ar- rangements of the hypogeum near Cagliari, known as the Serpent The greatest width of the abacus is 1 Monuments antiques de Cypre. p. 44. \2\ inches. 2 RENAN, Mission, pp. 63, 64. VOL. I. R 122 HISTORY OF Aur IN PIKI.NK i.\ AM> ITS DEPENDENCIES. Grotto (Fig. 57). This monument seems to date from the Roman decadence, hut there are peculiarities ahout it which deserve attention. To the under surface of the architrave the remains of one or two capitals still cling, which, by their sixe, must have belonged to very slender shafts indeed, so slender that it is in the last decree unlikely that their material was stone. 1 Phoenician O J was still spoken and written in Sardinia after the Roman conquest," and there is nothing- surprising in the fact that architects and ornamentists should also have preserved their taste for arrange- ments with which they had become familiar during the long Pruimician supremacy. Fit;. 57. The Serpent (Jrotto. From Chipiez.' 1 Besides the columns we have just described, which served either as real or make-believe supports, the temples of Phoenicia and of the countries over which her influence extended seem to have possessed others which upheld nothing, but played a part not un- like that of the Egyptian obelisks. No examples of these columns have come down to us, but they may be recognized on several of those coins whose types show the fronts of Phoenician or Cypriot temples, on those, for instance, which preserve the appearance of 1 CHIPIF.Z, Histoire critique de rOrigine et de la Formation des Or if res grecs, p. 121. - See Corpus Itiscriptionum Semiticarum. pars i. Nos. 143 and 149. 3 Histoire critique de rOiigine et de la Formation des Ordres gf'trs, p. 121. FORMS. I 2 the famous temple at Paphos as it was in the time of the Roman supremacy (Fig. 58). Moreover, in speaking of the Syrian and Phoenician temples, classic authors often mention the tall pillars which rose in couples before the sanctuary. In the temple of Melkart at Gades they were of bronze, eight cubits high, and bore a long inscription. 1 In the shrine of the same deity at Tyre the admiration of Herodotus was stirred by the sight of two shafts, one of pure gold, he says, the other of emerald, that is, of lapis- lazuli or coloured glass. 2 These shafts or steles probably stood in similar places to those occupied, at Jerusalem, by Jachin and Boaz, the two famous bronze columns which rose at the threshold of FIG. 58. Coin of Cyprus. Enlarged. a building also erected by a Phoenician architect. 4 Finally we must recognize forms of the same nature in the two " very large phalluses" erected on the threshold of the temple at Hierapolis, in Upper Syria, where the goddess Atergatis was worshipped. 5 These pillars were perhaps in the beginning emblematic in 1 STRABO, iii. v. 5. 2 HERODOTUS, ii. 44. The historian uses the word o-nyAat, which could hardly be applied to pillars as high as those upon the coin of Paphos. 3 From DONALDSON'S Architectura Nnmismatica. 4 We shall have occasion to return to these columns when we come to speak of Solomon's temple. 5 PsiiUDO-LuciAN, The Syrian Goddess, 16; STRABO, xvi. i. 27. 124 HISTORY OF ART IN PIHKNICIA AND ITS DEPENDENCIES. character. This \ve may gather from an expression used by the author of the curious work i 'pon the Syrian Goddess. It is possible that they were, in fact, symbols of the creative power as represented by the male organ of generation. The fork at their summit may have something to do with the double tongue of a flame blown about by the wind, which may account for their name of Kkam- ))ia)iii)i, which often occurs in the Hebrew books of the Old Testament, and has been referred to the root khani, which means " to be warm, burning". * Whatever the truth may be as to the origin of these things, it is unlikely that any great stress was laid on the exact imitation of forms which had nothing architectural about them. In time the primitive sense of these piers was lost to sight, and their shapes modified by the ornaments placed at the top of them. The earliest Phoenician columns of any size of which the memory has come down to our times were not supports but, like the Egyptian obelisks, at once symbols and decorative elements. At first we may feel some surprise that the Phoenicians, who were the pupils of Egypt rather than Chaldrea, and had in abundance the stone denied to the latter country, should have taken the Mesopotamian architects as their models in this matter of the column, rather than those of Memphis and Thebes. The true explanation of this singularity is to be found perhaps in the general poverty of Phoenician architecture. If Phoenicia did not build hypostyle halls like those of Egypt, it was because she never dreamt of undertaking any such gigantic works as those on which the Pharaohs employed armies of their own subjects and every prisoner they could take in war. Phoenicia was unable to indulge in such luxuries. Her largest cities were villages beside Memphis and Thebes and Sais ; her population even at the time of her greatest prosperity was not more, perhaps, than a million souls, including slaves ; it was hardly more than enough to carry on her industries, and to man her vessels. To have attempted anything that could be even remotely compared to the 1 The name of Hammon, the solar god, the god of lire, seems to come from the same root To my mind some doubt is cast upon this explanation, however, by the fact that in all the best specimens of the coinage in question, which I examined in the Cabinet des Mcdailles, the round knobs at the ends of the two forks are never absent. But whether a flame is quiet or blown by the wind it has nothing that can be compared to these globes, which were, in all probability, o/' bronze gilt. FORMS. 125 wonders of Luxor and Karnak would have been to squander her vital forces. The Phoenicians were too economical, their intellects were too practical, for such ambitions as these. The only great works to which they turned with real good will seem to have been such as were of public utility ; the embankments, for instance, by which they increased the actual superficies of Tyre, and made it better fitted for the storage of merchandise, for the loading and discharging of ships. 1 The same readiness was shown when the question was one of dredging the harbours or closing their entrances against an enemy, of providing a supply of water, either for maritime Tyre or for the town on the mainland ; but, so far as we can tell, temples and palaces remained comparatively small ; they were distinguished rather by wealth of decoration than by magnificence of plan. The apparent anomaly is to be accounted for by the utilitarian character which distinguished Phoenician civilization from the beginning to the end. But although the Phoenician merchants refused to follow the lead of the Egyptians in the matter of splendid architecture, none the less do we constantly encounter proofs of the dominating influence exercised by Egyptian art over that of Phoenicia. To be convinced of this we need only glance at their details. The tufa and shelly limestone of Syria was less well adapted to receive and preserve the work of the chisel than the marble of Greece ; it was even excelled by the fine limestone from the Mokattam and the sandstone from Gebel-Silsilis of Egypt, while the stucco under which the coarseness of its grain was mostly disguised has now disappeared, at least from those monuments which are really ancient. But in what little remains to us of the works of Phoenician builders it is the taste of Egypt that is to be recognized in the choice and arrangement of the ornamental motives. 1 MENANDER, quoted by Josephus (Fragm. Hist. Grcec., Muller, vol. iv. p. 446, fragm. i.). Another historian, DIGS, mentions the same works, and his testimony has also been preserved for us by Josephus (Apion. i. 17). 126 HISTORY 01- ART IN I'IKIAICIA AND ITS DEPENDENCIES. vj 5. I^ccoration. So far as we can tell from the remains, the Phoenician architect, like his brother of Egypt, had but one way of finishing his buildings at the top. His entablatures were composed of .<.., (,,!. FIG. 59. Eg)-ptian Coffer. I.ouvre. Drawn by St. Elme-Gautiei. an architrave and a cornice, the section of the latter almost always the same as that Egyptian gorge which is to be found on every ancient building from one end of the Nile valley to the other. To recall its form to our readers, we here reproduce an Egyptian coffer of painted wood, in which the general appearance of a stone DECORATION. 127 building is copied in small (Fig. 59). Its cornice is practically identical with that of the tabernacle at Amrit (Fig. 40) ; we find the same sections in a stone beam surmounting a wall near Saida (Fig. 60), which is certainly not the place for which it was originally made. 1 FIG. 60. Phoenician cornice. From Renan. In one of the tabernacles at Amrlt the cornice proper is crowned by a row of ursei, each with a solar disk upon his head (Fig. 61). This is the richest and amplest entablature to be found upon a Phoenician building, and it is nothing but a varia- tion upon an Egyptian motive. 2 It must have been in frequent FIG. 61. Details of a cornice. From Renan. use in Phoenicia. We find it again in a small object found at Saida, on which is carved a small seated god (Fig. 62). The figure has been almost destroyed by blows with a knife, but the row of asps at the top of the stone may be easily recognized. 1 RENAN, Mission, pp. 507, 508. 2 History of Art in Ancient Egypt, vol. ii. p. 152, Fig. 136. 128 HISTORV OF ART IN PIUKXICIA ANM> ITS DEPENDENCIES. A cornice simpler in its decoration, but with a good section, is that on the tomb at Amrit known as the Bordj-el-Bezzak (Fig. 6). It is composed of a cyma-reversa surmounted by a deep fillet (Fig. 63). \Ve may also cite as showing some interesting features, the mouldings on a little building in which one of those tombs of KlCi. 62. Sculptured fragment. From Kenan. ]'!<;. 63. Cornice on a tomb From Kenan. Adonis, which appear to have been so numerous in the district about Byblos, has been recognized. 1 The principal fragment was found in place. It ornamented the foot of the external wall of the cella, of which only the lower courses have survived (Fig. 64). The torus and cavetto, which were found among the ddbris heaped FIG. 64. Moulding from a plinth. FIGS. 6$ and 66. Mouldings from the base of a pyramidioa. From Kenan. about the celia, belonged, according to the architect by whom they were studied, to the base of the pyramidion with which the monument was crowned (Figs. 6$ and 66). Again, on a piece of money struck at Byblos in the time of 1 RENAN, Mission, pp. 285 288. In his plate xxxv. M. Thobois proposes what seems to be a very plausible restoration of this monument. DECORATION. 129 Heliogabalus, there is figured a building with a cornice of very peculiar design (Fig. 67). Some of its elements are pure Greek, but the cornice with its convex segmental section and its vertical FIG. 67. Coin of Byblos, enlarged. From Donaldson. grooves has nothing classic about it. So far as we can judge from the representation given by the engraver it is more like some of the Assyrian entablatures than anything else. 1 FIG. 68. Elevation of the doorway at Oum-el-Aivatnid and section of the lintel. From Kenan. The openings of doors were surrounded by flat architraves, that which formed the lintel being adorned with the winged disk. The best preserved example of the Phoenician doorway which has come 1 See A History of Art in Chaldcea and Assyria, Vol. I. Figs. 41 and 42. VOL. I. S 130 HISTORY >i ART IN PIIO-.NH IA AND ITS Dr.i'i-.NnKNc IKS. down to us is that studied by MM. Kenan and Thobois at Oum- cl-Ai<.aniid (Fig. 68). The two little people at the angles of the architrave should be noticed. Their head-dress resembles the Egyptian f>schcnt. The figure on the right holds a star-shaped flower, supported on a tall stem ; it is more difficult to make out what his companion on the left has in his hand. In Phoenicia the winged globe is generally flanked by those two long wings which always accompany it in Egypt, but here the importance of the motive is sometimes diminished. In one of the fragments found at Ouni-cl-Awaniid the wings are suggested merely by a few feathers appearing from under the disk (Fig. 69). In another variety of the type, from the same place, the ornament is complicated by the introduction of a crescent and subordinate disk (Fig. 70). By this the meaning of the group is rendered Fit;. 60. Winged glol>e. From Renan. IMC.. 70.- Winged globe with crescent. From Renan. even more obvious than it is in the Egyptian form ; the least educated eye is able to see that it forms a symbol and relic of that star worship to which the Assyrians made, continual allusion when they placed the sun, moon, and stars on their steles and cylinders. 1 The peculiarly Phoenician element in this group is the combina- tion of a disk and a crescent. Does the disk stand for the sun or a star ? or, does the combination refer to the two states of the moon, new and at the full ? It is difficult to say ; but whatever the real explanation may be this particular form of the winged globe is to be met with in a great many of those votive steles erected at Carthage in honour of Tanit, of which we have already given more than one example (Fig. 71). It is peculiar to Phoenicia ; we find it on all kinds of objects issued from the workshops of Tyre and Carthage ; it becomes, in fact, a kind of trade mark by which 1 History of Art in ChaLltra and Assyria, Vol. I. pp. 70-75. DECORATION. 131 we can recognize as Phoenician all such objects as bear it, whether they come from Etruria or Sardinia, from Africa or Syria. 1 Take for instance a little marble column in the Louvre (Fig. 72) ; even if we did not know that it was brought from Tyre in 1852 byde Saulcy, we should not hesitate to declare its Phoenician origin. Its summit is crowned by an ornament made up of four petalled flowers, divided in the centre by a bud like that of the lotus. All this is Egyptian, but beneath the winged globe which appears rather lower down the shaft we encounter the disk and FIG. 71. Sidereal symbols from a Carthaginian stele. French National Library. FIG. 7-- Marble column. l.ou\re. Height 26 inches. crescent, and all doubt as to the provenance of the monument is al once removed. We may say, in fact, that it is signed, A conventional form whose Egyptian origin is no less certain is that of the sphinx. The Phoenician decorators seem to have made frequent use of it ; in almost every case they gave it wings. The Phoenician sphinxes, like those of Egypt, were often sculptured in the round and placed at the entrance to buildings. An instance of this is to be seen at Oum-el-Awamid, among the ruins of what 1 These groups of globe and crescent are found in the cemeteries of Sardinia in great numbers. See Bollettino Archeologico Sardo, vol. ii. p. 56 ; and vol. iii. pp. 105-107. 1 32 HISTORY OF ART IN PIKKNICIA AND ITS DEPENDENCIES. was once in all probability a temple. 1 The arms of a throne whose fragments were found on the same spot seem also to have been formed of sphinxes. 2 Elsewhere we find the same creatures chiselled in bas-relief. An alabaster slab from Arvad, on which ^^J^^^^^^J^, fcM^ Fie.. 73. Alaba.-ter slab. Louvre. Height 24^ inches. the carving is very minutely carried out, is an example of this (Fig- 73)- The sphinx is there couchant on a pedestal similar to 1 RENAN, Mission, pp. 701-702, and plates xxxii. i. ; li. k. ; and Ivii. i. 5 M. THOBOIS gives a restoration of this throne (Mission, pi. liii.). We do not reproduce it here because it is, by his own confession, very conjectural, and because the sphinxes of his version are very conventional in form, recalling works of the time of Hadrian rather than the sculptured imitations from the Saite epoch of which M. Renan speaks. DECORATION. those which lined the avenues of the Pharaonic temples ; l it has the uraeus on its brow, and the double crown, or pschent. Judging from these features it must have been copied from those Egyptian monsters whose heads were portraits of the kings by whose orders they were raised. 2 But although the pose and head-dress speak of Egypt, the wings of this sphinx, both by their shape and presence, recall the winged monsters of Assyria. Winged sphinxes were very rare in the Nile valley, 3 but whenever the great composite animal of Egypt was imitated in Assyria it was endowed with wings, 4 and in every example to which we can point they were rather short and turned upwards at the end. This motive occurs on a large number of objects which we have every reason to ascribe to FIG. 74. Egyptian winged sphinx. From Prisse. Mesopotamia, on a stone plaque carved with a very fantastic monster 5 on a fine cylinder, 6 upon a cone inscribed with Aramaean characters. 7 In all these the wings are more or less decidedly curled back on themselves. The Phoenician artists seem to 1 History of Art in Ancient Egypt, Vol. I. Fig. 205. 2 See Kenan's observations upon this slab and upon another of the same class (Fig. 76) ; Mission, pp. 23-25. The lithographic reproductions given in his plate iv. are so wanting in clearness that we have been compelled to have these objects re-drawn from the originals, which are now, happily, in the Louvre. 3 WILKINSON, The Manners and Customs of the Ancient Egyptians, vol. iii. P- 3i- 4 Art in Chaldcea and Assyria, Vol. I. Fig. 83 ; Vol. II. Figs. 58 and 59. 5 Ibid. Vol. II. Fig. 87. 6 Ibid. Fig. 141. 7 Ibid. Fig. 157. 134 HISTORY OF ART IN PIKKNICIA AND ITS DKPKXIM-LNCIKS. have universally adopted the same form ; it is to be found both on their metal platters and on their engraved stones (Fig. 75). Like the group of crescent and globe it may be looked upon as a ! IG. 75. -Phoenician *caral>;voui. (iix-y lapis. Twice the si/c of the original. From the Danicourt Collection. trade mark whereby to distinguish .between a scarab made in Phoenicia and one of true Egyptian origin. We again find these upturned wings on another slab belonging to the same architectural whole as that reproduced in Fig. 73. .'-XirXi ,.S. \k.^.,__-jr_N-. ^ff' 1 ^J , F'IG. 76. Alahastei slah. Louvix-. 1 Here we see two creatures fronting each other (Fig. 76) ; from the feathers on their heads they seem to be meant for griffins. It will be remembered that the taste for figures put face to face 1 Height 20 inches. Drawn by Bourgoin. DECORATION. '35 is Assyrian rather than Egyptian ; l the Egyptian decorator loved to place his figures back to back ; - the converse arrange- ment, as we may see by turning over the pages of any work on Mesopotamia!! art, was preferred by the Assyrian. 3 He was continually using pairs of human figures and of real or fictitious animals, and he always made them face each other, but with a barrier between in the shape of a vase, an altar, a column, a rosette, or a palmette. 4 This palmette is also to be commonly met with in Phoenicia, but, true to its character as a borrowed motive, it is there even more conventional in form than in Assyria. Its stem is a kind of archi- tectonic column, with rudimentary volutes ; its four or five leaves Vie,. 77. Alabaster slab. Louvre. are very symmetrical, even rigid ; and on the whole it is much farther removed from the vegetable world than its Mesopotamian original. Another favourite motive of the Assyrian ornamentist may be recognized in the cable which here divides the field of the lower relief from the compartment above. 5 1 Art in Chaldaa and Assyria, Vol. II. page 338. 2 Art in Ancient Egypt, Vol. II. Figs. 288, 311, 314, 327, 328. 3 Art in Chaldcea and Assyria, Vol. I. Figs. 8, 124, 138, 139 ; Vol. II. Figs. 120, 123, 141, 152, 153, 158, 209, &c. 4 Ibid. Vol. I. Figs. 8, 81, 137, 138, 139 ; Vol. II. 253, 254, 255. 5 Ibid. Vol. I. Figs. 126 and 137 ; Vol. II. plate xiii. 136 HISTORY OF ART IN PHOENICIA AND ITS DEPENDENCIES. Finally, the Mesopotamia!) origin of the stepped ornament (Fig. 77) is no less certain. \Ve have seen that it was employed at Nineveh as a border for enamelled bricks and frescoes ; l we have also met with it about the summit of an altar. 2 In Phoenicia it was used in the same way, to vary the aspect of a wide surface of stone and to give it a fitting crown. 3 Two slabs of alabaster now in the Louvre, but once in all probability part of the great temple at Byblos, are thus adorned (Fig. 77). This feature came into such universal use that we find it persisting even to the Roman period FIG. 78. Altar with stepped ornament. From Renan. on such things as the altar inscribed with the name of the goddess Nesepteitis, which we reproduce (Fig. 78). 4 The rosette, too, which appears beneath these steps is of Assyrian origin. We give it on a larger scale in Fig. 79, so that the elegance of its lines may be better seen. 1 Art in Chaldaa and Assyria, Vol. I. Fig. 118 ; Vol. II. plate xiv. 2 Ibid. vol. i. fig. 107. 3 RENAN, Mission, pp. 72, 162-164, I 75> &c., and plates xi., xii., xiii., xx. and xxii. 4 Ibid. p. 201, and plate xxii. No. n. DECORATION. 137 We are again reminded of a motive we have met in Assyria by the balustrade-like ornament which occurs on some stone troughs found at Oum-el-Awamid (Fig. So). 1 They are very like the little columns on one of the finest of the Ninevite ivories. 2 We find the same contrasts in both, between the expansive width of the Fu;. 79. Rosettes enlarged. Louvre. flower-like capitals and the neck which seems strangled by the cords which make several turns about the shaft. The same forms occur on a fragmentary relief found in the neighbourhood of Tyre, not far from Adloun, and now in the Louvre (Fig. 8i). 3 On this little slab we can distinguish the left hand and knees of an o enthroned personage, who grasps an object which we can hardly Fir,. So. Stone trough. From Kenan. define. Before him rises a kind of standard with a censer at the top, which must have been of bronze. In its construction it 1 Ibid. p. 708. 2 Art in Chaldcea and Assyria, Vol. I. Fig. 129. ''' REX AN, Mission, p. 654. VOL I. T 138 HISTORY OK ART IN PIKFNICIA AND ITS DEPENDENCIES. reminds us of Assyrian furniture. 1 The pschcn /-covered head in the lower left-hand corner forms part of the throne. It is Fie;. 8l. Fragment of relief. Height 6J inches. quite Egyptian in character. On the other hand the frame of the picture is formed of the Assyrian palmette. Some candelabra of the same kind have been recognized on the votive steles of FIGS. 82 and 83. Candelabra figured on a stele. French National Library. Carthage (Figs. 82 and 83). - In one of the two the flame at the summit is very clearly indicated. 1 Art in Chaldaa and Assyria, Vol. II. Pigs. 193, 195, 196, 200. -' BKRGKR, Les Ex-voto du Temple de Tanif () Cartilage, p. 29. DECORATION. Finally we may cite a last monument which has unhappily suffered even more than the one we have just described. It comes from the same district. In the only feature of the decoration that is now recognizable, we see a stem supporting a head of falling leaves, which, again, is surmounted by a globular fruit (Fig. 84). ] But the condition of the stone is such that we can form no probable conjecture as to its purpose. We have tried to make this catalogue of the elements of Phoenician decoration complete, but nevertheless we should have a very imperfect conception of it if we forgot to take account of the part played by metal sheathings and by paint. The calcareous tufa of the country was not susceptible of any very delicate orna- ment, and it was quite by exception that granite, alabaster, or FIG. 84. Fragment of a sculptured slab. From Kenan. marble, brought from Egypt or the Greek islands, was used to case buildings constructed of inferior material. As a rule they were content with commoner stone, in spite of the unkindly way in which it lent itself to the work of the chisel and they could always disguise its poverty under a casing of wood or metal. This casing has everywhere disappeared, but in the curled volutes and leafy decorations of the Cypriot capitals, we seem to recognize motives suggested to the ornamentist by the elasticity of bronze and by its behaviour under the hammer. In the temple at Jerusalem, which was built and decorated by Phoenician artists. the naked walls were nowhere left visible, at least in the interior. 1 REXAN, Mission, p. 658. \.[O HISTORY OK AUT IN PihKNKiA AND ITS DEPENDENCIES. The stone was overlaid with panelling of cedar, with brass, silver, and gold. 1 In this work of decoration colour could help, and sometimes, at least, it would give as good a result as a more costly lining. The few fragments we possess from buildings anterior to the Greek conquest have been so hardly treated by man and the weather, that no trace of stucco is now to be found upon them, but the remains of paintings have been encountered upon the walls of rock-cut tombs ; - steles, too, have been found on which the orna- ments, the inscription, and even the portrait of the deceased are carried out in paint. 3 The Phoenician workman must have made good use of the palette and cups we find so often in Egyptian tombs (Fig. 85). The frescoes in the tombs and on the steles belong, it is true, to the Roman period, but while we explain their preservation to our own day by the shorter space of time I-'ic.. S5. Kgyptian palette. Louvre. through which they have existed, we have no reason to suppose that such an obvious device for covering the porous stone walls of a hypogeum had not been used long before. In the two countries with which their intercourse was most intimate and continuous, in Egypt and Mesopotamia, the Phoenicians saw decoration in colour applied to vast surfaces with much taste and art. On those anthropoid sarcophagi which have been found wherever the Phoenicians established themselves, vestiges of paint still exist, some of which were very brilliant at the moment of discovery. The work of the brush is also conspicuous on one of the sepulchral 1 I Kings vi. 15, 16, and iS: "And the cedar of the house within was carved with knops and open flowers; all was cedar; there was no stone seen." 2 REMAN, Mission, pp. 209, 380, 395,408, 510. 3 RLNAN, Mission, pi. xliii., and Ci.KRMOXT-dANNKAr, Steles peintes de Sidon ( Gazette archeologique, 1877, p. 102, and plates 15, 16). The steles described by M. Clermont-Ganneau are now in the Louvre, in the Salic des J\intnres antii/ues. DECORATION. 141 steles brought from Cyprus by Cesnola. It once had a band of colour all round it, and this can still be traced across the bottom of the monument. Thanks to the judicious employment of all these subordinate means of adornment, the buildings of Phoenicia, while far inferior in their dimensions to those of Egypt and Mesopotamia, must have had a certain decorative beauty of their own. Herodotus speaks with admiration of the great sanctuary of Tyre, but if he had been an archaeologist he would have been chiefly struck with the fact that all the elements of the decoration he saw about him were already known to him. Neither there nor in any of the buildings to which his Phoenician hosts took him in Syria could he have encountered a form or motive that did not recall some- thing already seen at Memphis and Babylon. CHAPTER III. SEPULCHRAL ARCHITECTURE. i. 77/6' Ideas of the Phoenicians as to a Future Life. THE Phoenicians have left us no literature in which to learn their ideas and sentiments upon death and its consequences, and there is nothing in the inscriptions on their tombs to fill up the void. Of these we possess a certain number, but, on the one hand, they are not very old, on the other, they are singularly short and dry. They give us the names and titles of the deceased, but not a hint of his beliefs and hopes. To this there is but one exception, in the text engraved on the sarcophagus of Esmounazar, king of Sidon (Fig. 86). l This text runs to twenty-two long lines, and yet it tells us hardly anything of what we most want to know. It proves that the defunct had a very lively dread of violation for his tomb. It begins by declaring to all possible tomb-breakers and robbers that they will find nothing to reward their trouble. " Do not open this coffin for the sake of treasure ; there are no treasures in it ! " This is all very well, but the tomb-breaker may answer as he applies his crowbar, " Never mind ; we will just see whether you speak the truth." Esmounazar foresees this peril, and he employs another means to stop those \vho may refuse to take him at his word. He in- vokes the aid of Astarte and other gods and goddesses against all who may disturb his rest, and prays that the latter may die child- less, and may in their last sleep be denied that repose which they had refused to him. This solemn imprecation is repeated twice over, in almost identical terms, as if the author of the prayer thought by such means to give it a more certain efficacy. 1 Corpus Inscriplionum Semilicarnm, part i. No. 3. THE IDEAS OF THE PHOENICIANS AS TO A FUTURE LIFE. 143 This horror of all interference with the tomb or disturbance of its inmate proves that the Phoenicians did not believe that all was FIG. 86. Sarcophagus of Esmounazar, Louvre. 1 over when the breath left the body. Like the Egyptians and Chaldaeans, they thought the dead man was sleeping in his 1 Length, 8 feet 5 inches ; greatest width, 4 feet 3 inches. 144 HISTORY OF ART IN PIKKNICIA AND ITS DEPENDENCIES. sepulchre, that in it he continued to live that imperfect and pre- carious life which we attempted to describe in the case of Egypt. One is, therefore, surprised to find no reference, direct or indirect, to any provision of funerary offerings such as those for which every Egyptian, were he never so humble, prayed perpetually in the words engraved on his stele. 1 No Phoenician tombs have been discovered in such a state that the silence of their inscrip- tions could be made up for by an inventory of their contents. Cords and bandages have sometimes left traces upon sarcophagi and tomb chambers, whence it has been concluded that certain practices in which the Egyptians excelled had their followers in Phoenicia. 2 Embalmed with more or less care and tied up in linen bandages, Phoenician corpses when ready for burial must have had much the look of mummies, but of mummies prepared with less scrupulous care and refinement than those of Egypt. When the corpse was placed in its human-headed sarcophagus, the opening of the ear was sometimes carried through the whole thickness of that stone envelope, as if to leave a free passage for the prayers of the living to the ears of the dead. 8 The sepulchral furniture differs little from what we found in Egypt and in Chalda^a. It comprises amulets, statuettes of tutelary divinities, and objects for the use of the dead. But so far as we can discover, no eatables, either real or figured, have yet been found in Phoenician tombs ; perhaps, however, this apparent difference between the practice of Syria and that of Egypt and Chaldaea is to be accounted for by the fact that in the first mentioned country no sepulchre has been found so intact as many of those in the valleys of the Nile and the Euphrates. Tombs were less carefully hidden in Phoenicia, and cemeteries were far less extensive. As a result of this we find that even in antiquity many sepulchres were used at second hand by those who had no right to them. These usurpations must have led to the dispersal of the original furnishing of any tomb in which they took place. 1 Art in Ancient Egypt, Vol. I. pp. 140-145. 2 DE LONGPERIKR, At u see Napoleon ///., notice of plate xvii. RKNAN, Mission, pp. 78 and 421. It would seem that the Jews sometimes embalmed corpses, in imitation of the Phoenicians. The Hebrew Scriptures tell us that this was done in the case of King Asa (2 Chronicles xvi. 14). 3 DE LONGPERIER, Afusee Napoleon III., observations on plate xvii. An instance of this practice may be seen in a woman's sarcophagus which has been brought from the necropolis of Arvad to the Louvre. THE IDEAS OF THE PHOENICIANS AS TO A FUTURE LIFE. 145 In later years, too, seekers for treasure came to disturb the cemeteries in every direction. A virgin tomb is very rarely encountered on the Syrian coast. On the few occasions \vhen such a burial-place has come under the eye of the explorer it has as a rule contained nothing but objects of the Grseco- Roman period ; it may have been originally made much earlier, but in the course of centuries its occupant had been changed. Under such conditions can we be surprised that the tomb preserved no traces of a rite which carries us back, by the beliefs it implies, to the very childhood of humanity ? There are, however, some indications which lead us to believe that Syria practised that worship of the dead which is based entirely upon the notion that in their subterranean homes the latter live a real life, a life sustained by the meat and drink furnished in perpetuity by pious survivors. Consult Deuteronomy, that collection of religious prescriptions which seems to have been .published at Jerusalem under the last kings of Judah, when those monotheistic tendencies of the Jews which finally triumphed in the days of exile and captivity first began to show their strength. 1 In those days prophets and priests were struggling passionately against the gods who had disputed the hearts of the people with Jehovah for so many centuries. They were proscribing the Syrian worship and doing their best to bring its rites into disrepute, and nothing found less favour in their sight than this worship of the dead. Of this we have an indirect but certain proof in the form of confession imposed upon the worshipper of Jehovah when he brought his gifts to the altar. " I have not eaten thereof in my mourning, neither have I taken away ought thereof for any unclean use, nor given ought thereof for the dead." 2 The practice of giving food to the dead certainly implies a belief that the latter can make use of it, and that they are capable of rendering services to all who gain their favour. Among the Jews and among those peoples from whom they only separated 1 According to M. E. REUSS, Deuteronomy is the code promulgated under Josiah in 623 (La Bible, V Histoire Sainte et la Loi, vol i., Introduction, p. 160). 2 Deuteronomy xxvi. 14. M. HALEVY calls attention to this text in a remarkable study entitled De I'Ame chez les Peuple semitiques, in the Rente Archeologique (1882, vol. xliv. p. 44). In the sequel we shall have frequent occasion to borrow from M. Hale'vy's paper, making use sometimes of his own words, but more otten abridging them so as to keep within the space at our command. VOL. I. U 146 HISTORY OK ART IN PIKKNH IA AND ITS DEPENDENCIES. themselves at a very late date, the notion \vas therefore general that death did not put an end to existence, and that a dead man continued to interest himself in the affairs of the world. They ascribed to him even higher powers than these ; they believed he could see into the future, ami that he could explain the most difficult secrets. Of this we have evidence in the often-repeated proscription of necromancy in the Mosaic law ; the insistence with which they are forbidden proves the high favour of such divinations among the Hebrews. 1 But in all this we are not left to mere conjecture ; the account of the visit of Saul to the witch of Endor is direct proof of what we have said. The king wished to learn what would be the issue of the battle of Mount Gilboa, and as the best way to the desired result he made the witch raise the shade of Samuel, who, after complaining of being brought up again to earth, told the king that he and his sons should be with him on the morrow. 2 The words of this account seem to hint that the writer of these passages believed the dead to be assembled in a single place, the s/ieo/of the Hebrews. This idea explains the phrase which occurs so often in the Bible "He was gathered to his own people," or " to his fathers." Looking at it merely as an allusion to the grave o j O its meaning is obscure, but it must rather be considered as referring to a posthumous life passed in a subterranean abode like that of the Greek Hades ; and here we may quote those words in Job's complaint of life in which he describes the dwelling of the dead. 3 " For now should I have lain still, and been quiet, I should have slept, then had I been at rest, with kings and counsellors of the earth, which built desolate places for themselves ; or with princes that had gold, who filled their houses with silver; Or as an hidden untimely birth I had not been ; as infants which never saw the light. There the wicked cease from troubling ; and there the weary be at rest. There the prisoners rest together ; 1 Among those people that were " an abomination unto the Lord " figure "a charmer, or a consulter with familiar spirits, or a wizard, or a necromancer'' (Deuteronomy xviii. n ; see also Leviticus xix. 31, and xx. 6, 27). In a chapter of Samuel, to be quoted presently, we are told that Saul had put away diviners and necromancers out of the land (this is the translation given by M. Reuss \dcrins tt necromanciers~\ of the Hebrew text, i Samuel xxviii. 3). - i Si mn el xxviii. ;! foB iii. 13-19. THE IDEAS OF THE PHOENICIANS AS TO A FUTURE LIKE. 147 they hear not the voice of the oppressor. The small and great are there; and the servant is free from his master." It will be seen how closely this description resembles that of the Assyrian under-world as given in the Descent of Istar. 1 Analogies of the same kind abound in other expressions applied toskeolm the Hebrew writings. It is painted as a place where men " make their beds in the darkness ; " the way thither is spoken of as a " way whence I shall not return." : Shcol had its barriers/ like the hell of Istar. When a great conqueror passed through them, the shades (re/aim] of the kings rose from their couches to see whether it was really he who had made the earth tremble, and when they had recognized him they amused them- selves by mocking at him. The data we have here brought together are sprinkled over the works of historians, poets, and other writers, who, in their mono- theistic ardour were, one and all, bitterly hostile to the beliefs on which the worship of the dead was founded, and looked upon its rites as mortal sins. It was, then, only on rare occasions that they referred to sheol and its inhabitants, while their tendency was always to transform into a mere poetical image that which the people took in its literal sense. And yet even these fugitive allusions, I may even say these reticences, allow us to catch a glimpse of those popular conceptions which had in the end to give way before monotheism. In fact, the true national beliefs of Israel were not those set forth by the Hebrew prophets. 6 The more strongly an idea or custom was reprobated by the Hebrew legislators, the more deeply, we may take it, had its roots sunk into the imagination of the Jewish race. The Jewish nation was distinguished from those by which it was surrounded in Syria by its gradual abandonment of polytheism for the worship of a single God. The lofty beliefs which it ended by embracing were its own peculiar glory, but it was not so with the notions they expelled. Homage rendered to the sun, to the moon and the rest of the celestial army, sacrifices offered in the sacred groves of the Baals and their corresponding goddesses, invocations of the dead and offerings of food on their tombs, all these are forbidden in the Bible, where they are spoken of as 1 Art in Chaldcea and Assyria, Vol. I. pp. 345-347- 2 JOBjcvii. 13. 3 Ibid. xvi. 22. 4 Ibid. xvii. 5 ISAIAH xiv. 9-15. Cf. EZEKIEL xxxii. c J. HALEVY, he. cit. p. 50. 1 48 HISTORY OF ART IN PHOENICIA AND ITS DEPENDENCIES. abominations borrowed by the Jews from their neighbours on the East, West, and North. The constant endeavour of the Hebrew prophets was to compel their countrymen to leave off thinking, feeling, or acting like the Canaanitish tribes among whom they found themselves placed ; it is obvious, therefore, that from the rites and beliefs they forbade, we may form some idea of the common characteristics of the Syrian religions ; we may sup- plement the meagre evidence of Phoenician inscriptions by the testimony of the Hebrew writers. Of all the western Semites the Jews alone had a literature, or, to speak more correctly, the Jewish literature alone has come down to our own time. Thanks to its extent and variety, this work has the merit of telling us a great deal more than the history of the Jewish mind ; it makes us familiar with many of the thoughts and customs of other nations belonging to the same family. By the latter, few monuments have been sent down to posterity in which we can recognise the real tones of their voice and the sense of their words. > But happily we have the Bible the Bible of the Jews from which we may gather so much authentic information upon a world from which they only emerged under their later kings and after they had returned from the captivity. It is, then, from the sacred writings that we shall draw the most valuable testimony as to the ideas of the men of Tyre and Siclon on death and the life after death ideas which must be understood before we can explain the usual methods of sepulture and the common forms of funerary architecture among these people. The ideas in question do not differ greatly from those we have already encountered in Egypt and Chaldaea. Like the Egyptians, the Phoenicians called the tomb the eternal dwelling, 1 and the most important documents they have left us are the cemeteries of Marath and Sidon. 1 This expression is to be found in a sepulchral inscription at Malta (Corpus Inscriptionum Semiticaruni, pars i. No. 124). THE PIKENICIAN TUMI;. 149 2. The Phoenician Tomb. In Palestine and Phoenicia, in a country where the soil but slightly covers rock which can be readily cut with the most inferior tool, the cave must have been the first sepulchre. This is confirmed by Genesis. We there find that to the oldest in- habitants of Palestine a sepulchre meant a cave large enough to accommodate all the members of a single family. When Abraham lost his wife Sarah, he acquired from Ephron the Hittite, at the price of four hundred silver shekels, the cave of Macpelah, with the field which surrounded it, and all the trees in the field. There the bodies of Sarah, of the patriarch himself, of Isaac and of Jacob, were deposited. l At first natural caverns were used, and used in their natural state. Then art was called in to enlarge them and to make them more convenient for their purpose. The use of these caves was so thoroughly rooted in the national habits that it persisted long after men had learnt to dress and fix stone. Nearly all the Phoenician tombs are hypogea. It is quite by exception that we find a few sepulchres of a different kind, such, for example, as one of the most curious monuments at Amrit, the Burdj-el-Bezzak (Fig. 6). The chambers it contains, which are obviously sepulchral in character, are certainly built above the ground, but in reality it is nothing more than a trans- position. The rooms are, so to speak, artificial grottoes reserved in the mass of masonry, as if the building had been modelled literally upon a natural cave (Fig. 87). 2 Thanks to the thickness of its walls, a cavern like this kept excellent guard over its contents when once the opening had been closed by a huge stone. But men were not satisfied with having their own bodies, or those of their relations, put beyond reach of disturbance, they also wished to put something a ar^a as the Greeks called it upon the tomb to keep green the memory of its occupants. 3 As soon as writing was invented an inscription was 1 Genesis xxiii. xxv. xliv. 2 RENAN, Mission, pp. 81 and 86. 3 Our readers will remember the expression of Homer. T7//xa ^even' = to spread a signal, that is, to heap up earth in such a way that the site of a sepulchre should be clearly proclaimed. 150 HISTORY 01 ART IN PH but feeble Kiu. 87. --Section of the Bunlj-el-Htvzak. From Kenan. traces, but still we have grounds for believing in its almost universal existence. Whether the tomb chamber was excavated, as it was in most cases, in the depths of the soil, or whether it occupied the interior of a block of masonry, a sort of artificial rock, it was as a rule accompanied by an external and salient feature of some kind.-' It has been suggested that this salience had an emblematic significance of a nature which to us may appear gross, but which, nevertheless, was admitted and held sacred by every antique religion as a symbol of living nature and its inexhaustible fertility.'* 1 Genesis xxxv. 19. 20. The Greek text has o-n'jXrjr im-rjac. 8 RENAX, Mission, p. 75. 3 GERHARD. Ufber die Kitnst der Phfcnizier. p. 4 and note 18 (in the Gesammelte dkademischc Abhandlungen, No. xi.). THE PHOENICIAN TOMB. There is one particular form of cippus which may be quoted in support of this idea, as it does, no doubt, bear a certain resemblance to a phallus ; but, on the other hand, some tombs are surmounted by a pyramid (see Fig. 6), a motive which can hardly have had the significance imputed to the cone. On the whole, perhaps, it would be better to put aside all such explanations of these forms and to look upon them as dictated purely by architectonic notions. 1 The only complete tombs yet found in Phoenicia are those which stand in that plain of Amrit, in which the Arvadites buried their dead. Our plan of a portion of that necropolis will show how the tombs were arranged in relation to each other (Fig. 88) ; but the largest and best preserved sepulchres, those to which FlG. 88. Part of the Cemetery of Amrit. From Rennn. our attention will be devoted in the first place, are situated outside this map. 2 Taking it as a whole, we find in this necropolis the characteristics of the sincerest and the most remote antiquity. In every way, therefore, it deserves to be studied first. The tomb chambers at Amrit are higher, more spacious, and better cut than any others in Phoenicia. They are reached some- times by a vertical well, as in Egypt, sometimes by a staircase. According to the explorers, the older tombs have a well ; in a few it seems to have been replaced at a later period by steps, 3 but 1 .M. Renan will have nothing to say to Herr Gerhard's theory, which, he says, is suggested by the want of accuracy in the drawings upon which it was based. 2 See the general map of Amrit in plate vii. of Kenan's atlas. 3 RENAN, Mission, p. 76. 152 HlSloRV O! AUT IN PllU.Mt 1A AND ITS DEPENDENCIES. wherever it still exists, its walls are notched at regular intervals to facilitate ascent and descent. One of these wells widens out at the bottom, giving it a kind of bottle shape. 1 Of this tomb rt'i I.I 1- ic,. 89. TmnI) at Ainrit. Perspective of interior. From Kenan. we give a view in perspective of the interior (Fig. 89), a plan (Fig. 90) and a section (Fig. 91). - y o FIGS. 90 and 91. Tomb at Amrit. Plan and section. From Renan. At the bottom of the well, low doorways give access to chambers varying in number according to the importance of the sepulchre. These chambers communicate one with another by doorways and flights of steps, so that those farthest from the entrance are buried 1 RKNAN, Mission^ pp. "8,79. THE PHOENICIAN TOMB. most deeply beneath the surface. There are sometimes t\vo storeys connected by a shaft sunk from one to the other (see Figs. 92, 93)- 1 In many of the chambers the roof is flat, in others it is slightly arched ; sometimes its section consists of two slight curves meeting in the centre at a very obtuse angle. 2 Every chamber in which no trace of Grseco-Roman ornament is to be seen is rectangular and with one axis much longer than the other. No rule is followed in the number or arrangement of the rooms ; FIGS. 92 and 93. Plan and section of a tomb at Amrii From Kenan. it is easily to be seen that in many cases room was added to room as death followed death in the family to which the tomb belonged. That these tombs were family burial-places is proved by the fact that they were all made for the reception of many occupants. The bodies were placed in niches hollowed out of the rocky walls ; the dimensions of the niches, which varied very slightly, being determined by the average stature of the human body. The corpses were wrapped in shrouds ; but sometimes, it appears, they were placed in wooden coffins. In the centre of the farthest wall of the principal chamber, a niche higher and wider than 1 REN AN, Mission, p. 75. ~ Ibid. p. 76. VOL. I. X 154 HISTORY OF ART IN FIICENICIA AND ITS DEPENDENCIES. the rest seems to indicate the place reserved for the head of the family. 1 The mode of entombment here described was the most usual, but a few dish-shaped coffins of calcareous alabaster and terra- cotta have been found. They are very low and simple ; they have hump-backed lids with a ridge along the middle, but with no ornament. These sarcophagi are not found in niches, but in plain chambers cut expressly for their reception. Round them on the floor a groove is cut to carry away any moisture, and thus to give the coffin a better chance of duration. The body, too, was sometimes protected against damp by being imbedded in a thick and strong envelope of plaster. 2 As soon as it was occupied the niche was closed up with a stone slab, and when all the niches were full the door of the tomb was fortified in the same fashion. Large stones were sealed down over the mouth of the well or on the first step of the staircase. 3 The outward appearance of tombs, especially of those of the rich, was in harmony with the elaboration of the interior ; it, too, bears its testimony to the respect that was felt for the dead. The best instances of this are afforded by those monuments which the people of the country call El awamid-el- Meghazil, ''spindle- shafts," or more briefly El-Meghazil, " spindles." Placed one beside the other on the apex of a mass of rocks, two of these monuments dominate all the surrounding country (Fig. 94). A short way off there is another almost equally well-preserved monument of the same class, and near that again the remains of a fourth. " One of these monuments," says M. Renan, is " a masterpiece of proportion, elegance, and majesty," 4 an opinion confirmed by the restoration given by M. Thobois (Fig. 95). The total height of the building is thirty-two feet. It stands upon a circular plinth, flanked by four lions, whose heads and fore-quarters alone stand out beyond its face. Above this plinth rises a cylinder crowned by a hemi- sphere. The whole except the plinth, which consists of four blocks being cut from a single huge stone. The double cylinder is decorated round the summit of each of its parts with a row of carved crenellations standing out about four inches from the general surface. We have already referred to the Assyrian origin of this motive. The dressing of the stone and the execution of these 1 RENAN, Mission, p. 76. " Ibid. p. 78. :i Ibid. pp. 77, /8. 4 Ibid. p. 72. FIG. 94. The Meghazils of Amrit. Actual state. Frcm Renan. THE PIKK.NICIAN TOMT.. 157 mouldings is very careful ; on the other hand, the four lions seem to have been left unfinished ; their hasty execution is in strong con- trast with the careful workmanship of the architecture. Perhaps, however, their comparative roughness may have been intended to add to their effect when seen from a distance. The tomb chamber ^7%^ZZ^ rN >*""'"' -^ wQggz^fe-- FIG. 9$ Tomb at Ami-it. Restoration in perspective. l-'r.>m Rennn. beneath is reached by a flight of fifteen steps. We give a plan and section of it in Figs. 96 and 97. l The design of the monument which stands at a distance of about twenty feet from that just described is less happy (Fig. 93). 2 It is 1 RENAN, Mission, pp. 71-73, and plates xi., xii., xiii. - Ibid. p. 73, and plates xi. and xii. 158 HISTORY OK ART i\ PIKKMCIA AND ITS DKPKNDKNCIKS. composed, iirst, ot ;i cubical block with a salient band at top and bottom ; secondly, of a monolithic cylinder about thirteen feet high and twelve feet in diameter ; thirdly, of a five-faced pyramidion. The base is rough, the stone apparently left as it came from the quarry, and the work as a whole looks unfinished. The faces of the plinth of the second monument are parallel to those of the first. The chambers they cover also lie in one direction. It would seem, therefore, that the two monuments were made at the same time, and that one is a pendant to the other. They rise high above a large inclosure hollowed out of the rock about fifty feet to the south. The ruins of various buildings are KlGS. 96 and 97. Plan ami section of tomb al Ainrit. From Renan. sprinkled about this inclosure, among them, those of a thick wall built of large stones, traces of which are also to be found westwards at the foot of the rock upon which stand the two tombs. To the north-west of these same tombs, there are some rock-cut chambers. The whole may perhaps have formed the burial-place of some important section of the population. The third of the better-preserved monuments is much simpler than the other two. 1 Its chief feature is a monolith resting upon a double-stepped base ; it terminates in a moulding composed of a cyma recta and a fillet, above this rises a block squared 1 Ibid. p. 74 and plate 17. THE PHOENICIAN TOMB. 159 below and shaped like a truncated pyramid above. At present the whole erection is about thirteen feet hiofh. It is more than FIG. 98. Tomb at Amrit restored. From Renan. probable that the pyramid was originally complete, as we see it in the restoration of M. Thobois (Fig. 98). The peculiarity of this tomb lies in the fact that the entrance to the staircase is FlG. 99. Longitudinal section of tomb at Amrit. From Renan. covered by a ridge roof, cut from a single block and supported laterally by a course of huge stones (Fig. 99). 160 HISTORY OK ART IN PIKKMCIA AND ITS DK.I'KNDKNXTKS. Of the fourth monument nothing remains but two blocks which seem to have belonged to a kind of obelisk the rest of which has disappeared. There are no signs of any plinth. 1 Finally, the Burdj-cl-Bczzak^ of which we have already had occasion to speak, is also crowned by a pyramid (Figs. 6 and 87)." \Ve have already explained that it is distinguished from other Arvadite tombs by the fact that it is not built, like them, on the top of a chamber. Its blocks have been shaken and dis- placed by earthquakes ; the soldiers and brigands who have inhabited it at various times, have done much to hasten its ruin, and yet it is still the most important and the best preserved building that has come down to us from ancient Phoenicia, for the o other tombs at Amrit are little more than monoliths. Its present aspect is that of a cubical mass of masonry built with horizontal courses and vertical joints ; the stones are more than sixteen feet long, and are laid without cement. On exploring the heap of debris gathered at its foot, it was discovered that this tomb was originally surmounted by a pyramid, of which nearly all the materials were found. It is likely that when the building was turned into a fortalice the pyramid was demolished for the sake of obtaining a Hat roof, which would be useful for defence. The tomb as it stands is thirty-seven feet high. Judging from the angle of the facing stones the crowning pyramid must have been a little more than sixteen feet high. Its former appearance may be gathered from M. Thobois's restoration (Fig. 6) ; its present state is shown in Fig. 87. In the interior there are two chambers, one above the other, and each opening to the outer air by a narrow door, or rather window. On their walls there are marks where the partitions between the -niches have been torn away. It is difficult now to decide whether these partitions were attached after the tomb was finished, or whether they formed an integral part of the stones of which it was composed. In any case, both chambers were honey- combed with niches, the upper one having twelve (Fig. 100) and the lower three. Our view of the lower chamber (Fig. 101) shows a hole like the opening of a sepulchral pit in the middle of the floor. This was made, however, by the workmen of Dr. Gaillardot, one of the 1 RKNAN, Mission, pp. 80-90. - Ibid. p. 75. THE PHOENICIAN TOMB. 161 assistants of M. Renan. 1 Several blocks of stone were here removed, and the wet mud on which the floor rests was reached. So that it appears certain that the monument stands upon the sand, and does not, like its neighbours, cover a subterranean chamber. It forms, therefore, a unique variation upon the type of Phoenician tomb we FIG. 100. The Burdj-el-Bezzak. Upper chamber. From Kenan. have described above, a type we shall encounter in other cemeteries besides that of Arvad. The next most important necropolis in Syria is that of Sidon. The most curious discoveries have been made in it. As might be guessed, it is larger than the cemetery of Arvad, Sidon and its suburbs were far richer and more populous than the FIG. loi. The Burdj-el-Bezzak. Lower chamber. From Kenan. group of cities of which Arvad was the head. If, in spite of its wide extent, this cemetery is hardly so interesting to the archaeologist as that of Amrit, it is because none of its tombs o have preserved their upper members the part that rose above the 1 Mission, p. 87. VOL. I. 162 HISTORY OF ART IN PIKI.NH IA AND ITS DEPENDENCIES. soil and represented the primitive cippus. Saida has never ceased to be a town with several thousands of inhabitants ; and by them the stones of the visible monuments have been carried off and used for their own purposes. 1 The necropolis of Sidon was cut in a bed of calcareous rocks, which stand but slightly above the plane.' The arrangement of its tombs was like that of Amrit, according to Gaillardot, who spent several years in exploring this cemetery. The features by which the most ancient sepulchres may be distinguished from those of the Greek and Roman period are these : by vertical wells, rectangular on plan, cut in the living rock ; at the bottom of these 'i. 102. Section of a tomb at Sulun, From Rcnan. wells one of the short sides, and sometimes both, is pierced by a square doorway giving access to the tomb chamber (Fig. 102). :i This doorway was kept walled up, and was opened only for burials. The wells themselves were closed sometimes by slabs placed athwart the opening below the layer of vegetable earth with which the rock was covered (Fig. 103), sometimes lower down, 1 The summit of the mass of rock which incloses the great chamber called Mu^haret-Abloun^ is carefully planed, as if to receive a pyramidal structure (RENAN, Mission, p. 477). ' 2 See plate Ixii. of M. Rerun's work. It gives a detailed plan of this cemetery. 3 REN AN, .]fissi(>n. p. 481. Tin-; PHOENICIAN TOM 15. just above the walled- up door of the coffin chamber (Fig. 104). In the first case the wells are, of course, found empty, but as a rule they are filled with earth. They had apparently to be cleared every time a burial took place. 1 Compared to those of Egypt, these Sidonian pits are shallow, because the stratum of rock in which they are excavated has an average thickness of hardly more than thirty feet, while it rests upon sand impregnated with sea water. Sometimes, as at Amrit, a tomb has been re-arranged and a flight of steps added (Fig- 105). These tombs have neither sarcophagi nor niches. In some the dead are placed on the floor of the chamber, in others arranged in FIGS. 103 and 104. Wells in a tomb at Sidon. From Rtnan. a. Vegetable earth. b. Dcor of tomb chamber. c. Well. d. Slab. e. Sand. large and carefully-excavated graves. In both cases they rested upon beds of sand, the pelvis raised ten or twelve inches above the head and feet by a little heap of pebbles carefully arranged. Next come the tombs in which the chamber is surrounded by niches for coffins, and those in which the more important people, the heads of the family perhaps, repose in sarcophagi placed in graves cut in the floor of the sepulchre. 2 The fine series of anthropoid sarcophagi in the Louvre was found in tombs of this kind. Judging from the style of the heads on these marble coffins, we are inclined to ascribe the oldest among them to the 1 REXAN, Mission, pp. 496, 497. 2 Ibid. p. 482. 164 HISTORY OF ART IN PIHKNKTA AND ITS DEPENDENCES. time of the Persian domination, while the most recent may date from the Seleucido.'. Lastly, to the Grojco- Roman period belong- a large number of sepulchres that were made or enlarged at the expense of others of much earlier date. These are always reached by flights of steps. Their chambers are very large and pierced with recesses in which many sarcophagi have been found, whose approximate date is given by the style of their ornamentation. All doubt on this point is removed by the style of the paintings on the stuccoed walls, and by the fragmentary inscriptions which are still to be found at many points. Fir,. 105. Longitudinal section of a tomb at Sidon. From Renrm. The tomb of Esmounazar deserves to be specially studied, both for its arrangement and on account of the peculiar form of the sarcophagus it inclosed. And first I must draw attention to the plan of that part of the necropolis in which the king's sepulchre was placed (Fig. 106). The sections through the lines A, B, c ; D, E ; N, M ; and K, L (Figs. 107-1 10), give even a better idea than the plan of the aspect and formation of the ground. A salient mass of rock has been excavated in such a way as to accommodate several burial-daces. Those to which the attention A. of explorers was first called were found arranged round a large chamber known as the Mugharet-Abloun t or "grotto of Apollo " (R), THE PHOENICIAN TOMB. 165 where there were also several graves excavated through the floor. 1 In this chamber the fragments of one of the most interesting of FIG. 106. Plan of a portion of the necropolis of Sidon (Mugharet-Abloun). From Renan. the anthropoid sarcophagi were collected. It was broken into so many pieces that it has been found impossible to restore it (s). 2 6 a 7 5 5 FIG. 107. Section through line A, B, c, of Fig 106. From Renan. By the side of this chamber a well descended entirely through the mass of rock and tapped the water beneath (v) ; it was used, 1 Upon the arrangement of this chamber and the discoveries made in it, see M. GAILLARDOT'S Journal des Fouilles (Mission, pp. 436-440.) 2 It is now in the Louvre. 106 HISTORY OF ART IN PIUKNICIA AND ITS DKI-KNUKXCIES. perhaps, in the ceremonies which accompanied the introduction of a body into the tomb. To the north-east of the rock in which this great chamber was excavated, the tomb of Esmounazar, King of Sidon, was dis- covered in 1856. A sketch made on the spot by M. de Vogue, and here presented in the form of a section, will serve to show / - J FIG. 108. Section through D, E. the arrangement of the parts (Fig. 1 1 1). 1 The sarcophagus which had already been removed from the monument when his sketch was taken, is here restored to its place. " The sarcophagus is a ponderous coffin of black amphibolite ; it is composed of two pieces, a body and a lid (Fig. 86). It rested in a grave measuring ten feet by five, excavated in the FIG. 109. Section through N, M. m a i t j 5 ^ FIG. no. Section through K, L. living rock. Hollows cut in the floor of the grave permitted the ropes to be withdrawn with which the sarcophagus was lowered, 1 DE Vocui, Note sur la Forme du Tombeau o the sea (Fig. 114); but the chambers are small, narrow, and low ; there is only room in each for about three corpses. 1 It is the burial-place belonging to the small neighbouring city. Vaults and arches, which in Phoenicia are a sign of comparative lateness, FIG. 114. Necropolis of Adloun. From Lortet. continually occur in it. Doorways, with arches springing direct from their thresholds, and benches within, hollowed out like troughs and covered, as in the Roman catacombs, with an arcosolium, betray the Grseco-Roman epoch. Many of the chambers are even decorated with paintings in which Christian emblems may be recognized. At Gebal and in its neighbourhood there are, on the other hand, hypogea whose number and size bear witness to the importance of 1 Ibid. pp. 656-661. The interest and importance of this necropolis has been much exaggerated (DE BERTON, Essai si/r la Topographic T(in]. From Rcnnn. summits which have been found in the necropolis of Sidon served a purpose of the same kind ; they were most likely erected either on the top of sepulchres or in front of their entrances (Fig. 121). The ornamentation of the trough-like sandstone coffins, which are found in considerable quantities in the necropolis of Sidon, is also of the most rudimentary kind (Fig. 122), but, nevertheless, a few of them have been found marked with Greek letters, which, unless they have been added afterwards, point to a late period of the decadence. 2 This seems to show that these patterns escaped from the influence of fashion by their very simplicity ; invented 1 RENAN, Mission, pp. 706, 707. - Ibid. \\ 504. SARCOPHAGI AXD SEPULCHRAL 181 early, they seem to have preserved their vogue more or less down to the very last years of the antique civilization, so that they are, in themselves, insufficient to give a date to a sepulchre. But the case is different when \ve encounter sarcophagi decorated \vith FIG. 119. Two Giblite sarcophagi. From Renan. lions' heads or ox-skulls united by heavy garlands. 1 The execu- tion of these matters is heavy, belonging, in fact, to provincial Roman art. Another kind of coffin, dating from the same period 1 RKNAN, Mission, pp. 411 and 422, and plate xlv. fig. i ; plate Ix. Several of these are in the Louvre. iS2 HISTORY <>F ART IN PIKK.NICIA AND ITS I )I-:I > K\DK\CIKS. of the decadence, is the leaden sarcophagus which is found chiefly in the necropolis of Sidon. 1 It is made up of leaden plates cast Kir.. 120. Sarcophagus from Oum-el-Awamiil. Kmm Kenan. in a mould and then soldered one to another (Fig. 123). The myth of Psyche is very often represented on these leaden coffins, Kir,. 121. Cippus from Salon. II 'iglit 14 indies. From Kenan. which are to be found, so far as we know, only in Phoenicia. In ' RF.NAN, Mission, p. 427, and jilate lx. fig. r. SARCOPHAGI AND SEPULCHRAL FURNITURE. iS;, the same necropolis pieces of coffins in terra-cotta are often encountered ; l being so easily broken, they have in most cases been reduced to fragments by the treasure-hunters. The monuments to which it is possible to give at least an approximate date are the sarcophagi called by M. Renan an- tliropoid, after the expression made use of by Herodotus when he speaks of the Egyptian mummy-cases." Like the leaden coffins, FIG. 122. Sandstone coffin. From Kenan. these anthropoid sarcophagi are peculiar to Phoenicia. \\'ith a single exception, that of Tyre, every necropolis in Phoenicia has furnished examples of them. 3 In the sarcophagus of Esmounazar both material and work- manship are Egyptian (Fig. 86). It was, in fact, imported into Syria, where nothing was added to it but the long inscription, in FIG. 123. Leaden coffin. From Lortet. which, however, most of its value consists. But the anthropoid sarcophagi belong to Phoenician art. Their form is the result of one of those efforts of adaptation which were characteristic of the 1 RENAN, Mission, p. 496. 2 SrAivov TVTTOV av^pwTroetSea. HERODOTUS, ii. 86. 3 See RENAN, Mission, pp. 403-405 and 412-427, plates lix. and Ix. Cf. LONGPERIER, Mus'ee Napoleon ///., notices of plates xvi. and xvii, HISTORY <>F ART IN PIM.NH i.\ AND DKPKXDENCIKS. clever, rather than inventive, artists ot Phoenicia. It was cer- tainly suggested by the shape of the wooden mummy-cases with which her merchants were so familiar in the land of the Pharaohs. We are sure of this, not only because the coffin is made to follow the general lines of the body, or because there is anything impro- bable in two races having independently determined to figure the dead man couched on the lid of his tomb ; but because the Egyptian convention which represents the head and neck of the dead man on the lid of his sarcophagus while all the rest of him is left in a state of abstraction is followed. The peculiar physiognomy given by a custom like this to a mummy-case is to be found in these Phoenician sarcophagi and nowhere else out Fu;. 124. Sarcophagus of Sidoii. Louvre. of Egypt. Equally significant is the fact that as the wooden coffins of Egypt were decorated with brilliant colours so were these stone receptacles. All those who have had the chance of seeing any of them before they were disturbed, or soon after- wards, are unanimous in declaring that the traces of colour were still very marked. On the hair dark blue and red have been distinguished ; the latter colour spreading even over part of the face. The body of a sarcophagus of this kind which was found in 1/25, near Palermo, was ornamented round its sides with pictures in panels (Fig. 125) ; the colouring substances stained the hands of those who touched it. 1 When they were new these 1 RENAN, Mission, p. 416. DE LOXGPERIER, Mus'ce Napoleon ///, description of plate xvii. In the Phoenician cemetery at Cagliari, in Sardinia, where the dead SARCOPHAGI AND SEPULCHRAL FURNITURE. 185 sarcophagi with their brilliant colours must have looked very like the Egyptian mummy-cases ; perhaps, as in Egypt, the lips and hair were gilded. The' resemblance between the two kinds of coffins is completed by the salience at the lower extremity of the lid, corresponding to the feet (Fig. 126). That mummy-cases should have been finished off in this way was natural enough. They were light and movable, and in certain cases were set upright against a wall, 1 and the enlarged foot was given to add to their stability. But in the heavy stone envelopes of Phoenicia there was no such necessity ; they were intended to lie on their backs as they have been found in all those tombs at JMugharet-Abloun for instance in which they had preserved their proper places. This appendix is, therefore, quite useless in the Phoenician coffins ; FIG. 125. Coffin of painted stone from an old drawing. From D'Orville. 3 it is the literal reproduction of a detail which had a raison d'etre in the model, but has none in the copy. Whether, then, we look at the general idea, at the accidental forms, or at the external decoration of these sarcophagi, we are were buried in wooden coffins, it has been ascertained that when those coffins were first discovered their surfaces showed clear signs ot having once been painted. On one -of them bands of red, blue, white, and green were clearly discernible (Fu. ELENA, Scari nella necropoli occidentale di Cagliari, Cagliari, 1868, 4to, p. 19). 1 In the Egyptian tombs the mummies have always been found lying down, but in the funerary ceremonies they were, during the celebration of certain rites, set up on end. This we know from a large number of pictures and reliefs (WILKINSON, Ancient Egyptians, second edition, vol. iii. cap. xvi. figs. 624-626, plates xvii. and Ixviii., &c.). The Greeks and Romans were mistaken in supposing that the mummies were set up in the tomb in a vertical position (HERODOTUS, ii. 86 ; DIODORUS, i. xcii. ; SILIUS ITALICUS, xiii. v. 474-476). 2 Journal des Fouilles of GAILLARDOT, in RENAN, Mission, pp. 434 and 435, 3 Sici/la, vol. i. plate B, p. 43. VOL. I. B B 1 86 HISTORY OK ART IN PIKKNICIA AND ITS DEPENDENCIES. always brought to the same result ; everything tells us of a borrowing from Egypt by Phiunicia. Must we conclude from this that the borrowing took place at a very remote period, during the early days of the commerce between the towns on the Syrian I'll'.. 126. Sarcophagus oi Si. 87. THE PHOENICIAN TOMB AWAY FROM PHOENICIA. 2 19 stomach (Fig. 150). This figure seems to have been reserved for the tombs of women, while those of warriors were placed by the coffins of men. 1 Some tombs, like those of Alambra, from their furnishing and general arrangement and from the more advanced artistic style of the objects found in them, may be ascribed to a later date. The ornament is still carried out in lines, but is painted as well as engraved, and skilfully-made trinkets are found as well as bronze weapons. 2 Metal cups, too, have been found decorated with concentric zones round a central rosette or medallion. 3 FIG. 149. Terra-cotta statuette. Cyprus. 4 FIG. 150. Terra-cotta statuette. Cyprus. 4 We have no hesitation in recognizing in all these tombs, whether the pottery they contain is incised or painted, those of Phoenicians established in the island, or at least of a population which received from them the first elements of political life. One of the vases ornamented with geometrical desiens bears a <-* O Phoenician epigraph, which, we are told by General di Cesnola, 1 CESNOLA, Cyprus, p. 93. Upon the cemetery at Alambra see also FROHNER, preface to the Catalogue de la Collection Bar re (4to, 1878). 2 CESNOLA, Cyprus, pp. 68-79, ar "d plates i. and ii. 3 Ibid. p. 77, and G. COLONNA CECCALDI, Monuments antiques da Chypre, chapter iii. 4 Drawn by Benedite from the originals in the Feuardent collection. 22O HISTORY ov ART IN PIKKNICIA AND ITS DEPENDENCIES. was engraved before the vase was fired. 1 Metal cups with figures cut upon them are among those objects whose Phoenician origin is best established. In the oldest of these tombs we find types already encountered in Syria, such as horsemen and chariots in terra-cotta. The naked deity with large hips, in which archaeolo- gists agree to recognize a goddess of generation, is certainly of Chakkean origin, 2 and who but the Phoenicians could have carried her to Cyprus ? The very plan of the tomb is identical with that of some burial-places we have noticed at Amrit, Tyre, and Sidon. Before he knew anything of the discoveries in Cyprus, Gaillardot came to the conclusion that the oldest of the Sidonian tombs were those in which a chamber of moderate size had a ledge across the back of it. On that ledge, or on the floor, the bodies were placed without coffins of any kind.^ None of these primitive tombs were found in a virgin state in Phoenicia itself; they had all been pillaged and used a second time ; but the Cypriot hills had guarded their deposits better than the rocks of the Syrian coast. The necropolis of Alambra furnished the oldest Phoenician sepulchres which have yet been discovered ; we should not be astonished were it proved that they date from the first settlement of Sidonian colonists in the island, before the beginning of the eleventh century B.C. Other parts of the cemetery of Dali, those in which the painted vases and metal cups have been found, must also be very ancient ; on these objects no trace is to be discovered of the influence which Greek art began to exercise over Phoenician industry towards the seventh or sixth century. East and north-east of Dali and nearer to Larnaca lies the village of Athieno, in the neighbourhood of which a fane almost as celebrated as that of Idalion, namely, the temple of Golgos, is supposed to have stood. 4 But whether Golgos was at Athieno . ' CKSNOLA, Cyprus, p. 68 : " Vase with Phoenician inscription burnt in on the clay." 2 History of Art in Chaldiea and Assyria, vol. i. p. 83 and fig. 16, vol. ii. p. 92 and figs. 41, 4 2. 3 REN AN, Mission de PJieniae,^pp. 481 and 483. 4 This site was proposed by M. DE Vooi'E, and accepted by M. KIEPERT for his excellent map of the island (New and Original Map of the Island of Cyprus, to the scale of i 400,000 ; Berlin, 1878, Dietrich Reimer). It has been disputed by M. RICHARD NEUBAUER in a paper entitled : Der angebliche Aphrodite-tempel zu Golgoi und die daselbst gefundenen Inschriften in Kyprischen Schrift (in the Com- mentationes philologies in honorem Theodori Mommseni, i vol. 8vo, p. 173). M. Neubauer attempts to show that Golgos was only a suburb of Paphos, and he supports his idea with texts, some of which appear to deserve serious attention. THE PHOENICIAN TOMB AWAY FROM PHOENICIA. 221 or elsewhere is not of much importance to us at present. What is certain is that in a canton which formed part of the Phoenician kingdom of Kition there was a centre of population which kept its importance through many long centuries. None of the tombs seem to belong to a period so remote as the sepulchres of Dali ; at Athieno the bodies were, as a rule, buried in sarcophagi, some of which were adorned with elaborate sculptures, and these sculptures illustrate some of the favourite myths of the Greek poets, such as the murder of Medusa by Perseus, and the birth of Chrysaor. 1 But although the ideas and arts of Greece are to be traced to the subjects and execution of these carved pictures, although a Greek inscription may here and there be found upon them (Fig. 54), and although the majority may be no earlier in date than the sixth or even the fifth century B.C., it is none the less true that all these sarcophagi and the steles by which they are accompanied bear signs of Phoenician influence. Upon most of the steles which stood, as a rule, in front of the two narrow faces of the sarcophagus 2 the winged globe, sometimes of the Egyptian type, sometimes of the form peculiar to Phoenicia, appears just below the crowning ornament. 3 This ornament consists sometimes of two lions or sphinxes placed back to back (Figs. 54 and 151), sometimes of one of those curious and complex capitals of which we have already figured more than one specimen (Figs. 51, 52, 53). Sometimes the sphinxes are used in the decoration of these capitals. The way they are introduced may be seen in our reproduction of one of the steles, by which the fine sarcophagus already mentioned was accompanied (Fig. 1 52).* At each angle of the lid of this sarcophagus there is a lion couchant. We have already noticed the frequent use made of these lions and sphinxes in the decoration of Phoenician buildings, motives which came to Phoenicia from Egypt by way of Assyria, and underwent certain modifications on the way. In its own way this stele is one of the most careful works that the Phoenicians have left us ; it is also one of the best preserved. 1 CESNOLA, Cyprus, pp. I'op-uy and plate x. G. COLONNA CECCALDI, Monu- ments antiques de Chypre, pp. 65-74 and plate vi. 2 CESNOLA, Cyprus, p. 114. 3 Ibid. p. 109. 4 The knotted ribbon, painted in red, which hangs about the stele reproduced in our Fig. 151 should be noticed. 222 HISTORY OF ART IN PIKKNICIA AND ITS DEPENDENCIES. The workmanship is Greek, but the motive is thoroughly oriental. As a last proof of the close connection between Phoenicia and the occupants of these tombs, in one of them a silver patera with figures upon it has been found ; it is beyond a doubt the work of some artisan of Tyre or Sidon. 1 Were these decorated steles always used as pendents to stone sarcophagi ? Were they always shut up in the tomb chamber, or were they sometimes set up above the grave so that at least their upper part was visible above the ground and acted as a sign like the pyramid in Phoenicia proper ? On these points Cesnola tells us nothing. Neither does he satisfy our curiosity as to the necropolis of Amathus. 2 That town was on the southern coasts, and its situation, its myths, the part it played in history, its worship of Astarte, and the monuments that have been found in it, all combine to convince us that Amathus was one of those towns in which the influence of their Phoenician founders endured the longest. 15 As at Golgos and Idalion, most of the tombs belong to the decadence, but careful excavation soon brought to light a group of sepulchres, finer and more carefully constructed, according to General di Cesnola, than any others he found in the island. They are at the foot of the inclosure and outside it in - a narrow valley to the north-west of the low hill upon which the town was built. They are about a hundred in number, and represent, in all probability, the burying-place of the kings and high priests of Amathus. They are now covered with earth to a depth varying between forty and fifty-four feet, and are built, paved, and roofed with large stones set in regular courses. Some of the stones are as much as twenty feet long by five feet nine inches wide and three feet four inches deep. Some of the tombs have flat (Fig. 153), others ridge (Fig. 154) roofs ; all are paved with great slabs of limestone. Some have one, others two, chambers ; while there are four, at least, in which the arrangement shown in our Fig. 155 has been followed. These sepulchres must have been originally built on the surface of the ground at the bottom of the valley, and then, after the corpses were put in place, deliberately buried in earth in order to render access more difficult. The 1 CESNOLA, Cyprus, plate xi. 2 Ibid. pp. 255-283. 3 The very name of the town, which lias only come down to us in its Greek form of Ap.a@ov<;, is, perhaps, Semitic in its origin, and identical with that of Hamath, the Syrian city in the Valley of the Orontes. FIG. 151. Cypriot stele. Limestone. Height 33 inches. Metropolitan Museum of New York. FIG. 152-Cypriot stele. Metropolitan Museum of New York. it 4 VOL. I. inc THE PHOENICIAN TOMB AWAY FROM PIKKNICIA. work thus begun by their constructors was finished by the rains, which carried down stones and sancl from the flanks of the neigh- bouring hills and heaped them upon the necropolis. The deposit FIG. 153. Tomb at Amathus. From Cesnola. 1 is thickest towards the head of the valley, where the hollow is deeper and more confined than elsewhere (Fig. FIG. 154. Tomb at Amathus. From Cesnola.' Here all the corpses seem to have been placed in sarcophagi. The number of the latter varies ; in some chambers only one is to 1 Cyprus, p. 256. 2 I take these details from a letter of General DI CESNOLA'S, who has been good enough to give us, from his notes and his memory, much of the information for which we looked in vain in his book. The shafts shown on his page 255 and in our Fig. 156 form no part of the tombs they were dug by the explorers in the course of their search. A young German savant, Dr. Sigismond, who helped to decipher the Cypriot inscriptions, visited the necropolis in 1875, and met his death by falling down one of these pits. 228 HISTORY OK ART IN PIKKNICIA AND ITS DEPENDENCIES. be found, and that placed in the middle of the floor ; in others there are three one on the left, another on the right, and a third opposite to the entrance (Fig. 157). In tombs with two chambers as many as ten and even fifteen sarcophagi have been encountered. When there was no room on the floor the last comers were heaped FIG. 155. Han of a tomb at Amalhus. From Ccsnola. 1 on the first, so that in some cases there were two and three tiers of coffins. 2 In the sarcophagi themselves there was very great variety. In one tomb was found an anthropoid marble sar- cophagus, the head on which was apparently female, and a perfectly plain limestone coffin. 3 In one of the four-chambered FIG. 156. Section through the ravine at Amathus. sepulchres, in the centre of the chamber opposite the door, a fine marble sarcophagus with each of its four faces covered by reliefs within a richly carved border was found. It was broken into many pieces, but into pieces which were easily fitted together. 1 Cyprus, p. 260. 2 CESXOLA, Cyprus, pp. 259 and 272. 3 Ibid. pp. 270 and 288. THE PHOENICIAN TOMB AWAY FROM PIKKNICIA. 229 The two long sides were carved with a kind of procession ; four chariots drawn by horses with fan-like plumes upon their heads, and between the chariots foot-soldiers armed with lances and round shields, and a couple of horsemen. Upon each of the two short faces a single figure was repeated four times. At one end this figure was the naked o-oddess with bent arms and hands o o displaying her breasts and about her throat a double necklace ; at the other the god Bes, recognizable by his feather head-dress, by his large face, and the deformity of his thickset little person. 1 The lid, too, is sumptuously decorated ; 2 at each end of the central ridge a graceful palmette acts as an acroterion, while winged sphinxes face each other at the four angles. FIG. 157. Interior of a tomb at Amathus. From Cesnola. 3 The doorway of the tomb in which this fine monument was found is surrounded by four grooves (Fig. 158). The height of the opening is four feet ten inches, the width three feet nine ; in several more of these tombs we find doorways of the same dimensions and decorated in the same fashion. 4 The opening was closed by means of a huge and heavy stone which rested against the jambs. 1 CESNOLA, Cyprus, plates xiv. and xv. 2 Ibid. p. 267. The lid, like the body of the coffin, was broken into many pieces. The drawing which we reproduce farther on, following Cesnola, is almost a restora- tion, but thanks to the exact symmetry of the design, there is nothing doubtful about it. 3 Cyprus, p. 282. 4 Ibid. pp. 256 and 270. 230 HISTORY OK ART IN PIIU.NICIA AND ITS DEPENDENCIES. Even from the little we know about it, it is clear that the necropolis is Phoenician in character. The anthropoid sarco- phagi borrowed by Phoenicia from Egypt are found in it, and side by side with them the smooth stone troughs of Sidon ; while on the only decorated coffin it has yielded we encounter Bes and I star. Neither is there anything Greek among the objects found in the tombs ; as on the Syrian coast, these are alabaster bottles, amulets of Egyptian fayence, terra-cotta statuettes of the naked goddess, clay vases with geometrical decorations, a wooden box with bronze incrustations, fragments of a bronze shield decorated with fights of animals and those of a silver cup with figures upon it. 1 Upon the cup the imitation of Egyptian motives may be FIG. 158. Doorway of a tomb at Amathus. From Cenola. J plainly traced ; as for the shield it recalls objects of the same class found in Assyria. 3 We do not think, however, that this assemblage of tombs dates from a very remote period ; on one of the vases we find an attempt at representing figures, the figures of two people in a chariot ; on the sarcophagus with bas-reliefs and still more on that belonging to the anthropoid class, we can trace the influence of Greek sculpture. The latest of these tombs can hardly be earlier than the fifth or even the beginning of the fourth century. The last type of Cypriot tomb is furnished by those in the neighbourhood of Nea-Paphos, in the south of the island, in a region in which religious- rites preserved their marked Oriental 1 CESNOI.A, Cyprus, pp. 275-281, and plates xviii. xix. and xx. 2 Cyprus, p. 260. 3 Art in Chaldaa and Assyria, vol. ii. pp. 330-347, fig. 225. THE PIICENICIAN TOMB AWAY FROM PIKENICIA. 271 and Semitic character down to the last days of paganism. These monuments have attracted the attention of travellers ever since the beginning of the century. 1 The tombs are hollowed in the flank of a rocky hill which rises in the centre of the plain and is crowned by a plateau. Some of them have a series of chambers FIG. 159. Plan of a tomb at Nea-Paphos, From Ross. in the sides of which are cut niches for bodies (Fig. 159). These are perhaps the oldest. In some more important tombs we find a very curious arrangement (Figs. 160 and 161). Each group of chambers is connected with a rectangular court, open to the sky and surrounded by square shafts and circular columns. FIG. 160. Plan of a tomb at Nea-Paphos. From Ross. The court, the surrounding colonnade, the chambers attached, and the corridor by which the court is reached, are all cut in the 1 Ross, Reisen nach Cypern, pp. 187-189. Archaologische Zeitung, 1851, plate xxviii. figs. 3 and 4. POTTIER, Les Hypogees doriques de Nea-Paphos dans Vile de Cypre {Bulletin de Correspondance h'elleniqne, 1880, pp. 497-505). 2^2 HISTORY OK ART i\ PIKKNICIA AND ITS DEPENDENCIKS. living rock. Under the colonnade are openings into chambers surrounded by niches, each niche made to hold a single body. It has also been thought that platforms for sarcophagi were to be recognized, but no fragment of coffin or sarcophagus, or of any sepulchral furniture, has been found in any one of these. hypogea. This is not surprising, for they have for many centuries afforded a shelter to the shepherds and herdsmen of the neighbourhood from the sun and rain ; the ceilings are blackened by the smoke of their fires. Their comparative architectural magnificence for their fa9ades have always been visible must also have been a source of danger. They have no inscriptions to show, but what Fir,. 161. Courtyard of a toml> at Nea-Taphos. From Ross. is known of the fame and wealth of the Paphian sanctuary suggests a very probable explanation of their existence ; they are most likely the tombs of the high priests who ministered in the neighbouring temple, and profited by the piety of its visitors. None of these tombs can be older than the fifth century B.C. The columns with their capitals and the entablature they support are Greek in the details of their architecture ; it is the Doric order, as we find it in Greece. There is even one detail which seems to hint that these colonnades are later than Alexander ; the frieze is deeper than the architrave, a proportion which is not, as a rule, to be met with in buildings anterior to the Parthenon or contemporary with it. But we are justified in mentioning these THE PHOENICIAN TOMB AWAY FROM PHOENICIA. 233 remains on this page, because although their details are Greek their plan is very different to anything we are accustomed to see in Greek tombs. We find these rock-cut quadrangles neither in Ionia nor upon the mainland of Greece ; on the other hand, although none have yet been encountered in Phoenicia, several examples may be pointed to in the neighbourhood of Jerusalem. The Jews were near relations to the Phoenicians and were inspired by them, and in the tombs they built we find chambers giving on to these open courts, just as they did in the dwelling-houses of antiquity, and do still in those of Damascus and the rest of Syria. The sepulchres we have described and figured from Kition, Idalion, Golgos, Amathus, and Paphos, are the best, or rather the least ill, known of all those hitherto discovered in Cyprus. They 'alone demand notice here, because they alone belong to that part of the island in which the influence of Phoenicia was pre- dominant for the longest time. But even in those districts where the mass of the population was Greek, most of the types we have described are to be encountered. In the northern and western districts, for instance, the oven-shaped tombs have been found ; l at Curium, where that form of sepulchre occurs very often, shallow graves hollowed in the floors of the hypogea, and sarcophagi cut from blocks of living rock that have been left standing in the o o centre of the hollowed diameter, have also been met with. 2 On the other hand, in the whole of that part of Cyprus which was under Greek domination, neither anthropoid sarcophagi, nor those peculiar steles of which we have given so many examples, seem to have been encountered. Finally, we must not forget to note that, in the whole of what we may call Phoenician Cyprus the tomb is as mute as on the Phoenician mainland. It is often rich in potteries and miscella- neous objects of much value, but neither upon the slab with which its entrance is closed, nor upon the steles and richly ornamented sarcophagi, is there a name or an invocation to the gods. The only exception to this rule is furnished by a stele from Athieno (Fig. 54), on which appear two Greek words written on one side in Cypriot characters, on the other in the alphabet employed by the Greek race all over their world. In the absence of precise documents we cannot affirm that 1 CESNOLA, Cyprus, pp. 226 and 295. 2 Ibid. p. 295. VOL. I. H H 234 HISTORY or ART IN PIKKNKTA AND ITS DEPENDENCIES. among the very ancient tombs found by Salzmann in the island of Rhodes, at Camirus and lalysus, there were any of certain Phoenician origin ; and yet some of these sepulchres reminded their finder of the tombs of Egypt. " They are composed," he tells us, "of a square well, from one side of which opens the doorway into the coffin chamber itself." In this arrangement they resemble the oldest of the tombs we have noticed on the Syrian coast. In any case, the Greeks never colonized Malta or Gozo, so that in their case we are in no danger of mistaking archaic Greek sepulchres for Phoenician burial-places. 1 The tombs of Malta and Gozo have never yet been studied as they deserve to be, but an inscription has come down to us which proves that there were Phoenician tombs in Malta.- It was found in a hypogeum with walls whitened with chalk. The slab on which it appears was set in the rock ; it is now in the Cabinet des Medailles, at Paris. We thus have fair grounds for ascribing a Phoenician origin to the many anepigraphic tombs which have been found in other parts of the island. 3 No vessel or trinket of certain provenance has been found in them to which we might turn for the date ; but their general arrangement agrees with what we have learnt as to the sepulchres of Phoenicia. In one, however, the chamber to which the well gives access is not rectangular, as it usually is in Cyprus and Phoenicia, but round, a form we have not hitherto encountered (Figs. 162, 163, and 164). Nothing could be simpler or less varied than the tombs of which the vast necropolis of Carthage is composed ; they are all subter- ranean, and are carved in the soft limestone of the Djcbel kawi. The main tomb consists of a rectangular chamber, varying in size according to the wealth of its proprietor or the number of his family, but always arranged on the principle shown in our Figs. 1 The manuscript journal of Salzmann's explorations is preserved in the British Museum, but the information it contains is very summary and vague, if we may judge from the fragment which has been published in the Bulletin archeo- logique du Musee Parent (Xo. i, October 1867, folio, the only number of that publication which ever saw the light). Unfortunately Salzmann's paper, entitled Une Ville homerique (Rente archeologique, 2nd series, vol. iv. p. 467), has no illustrations. It is from this article (p. 468) that we quote above. 2 Corpus. Jnscr. Semit. pars i. No. 124. The eponymous magistrate was no doubt a local suffete. 3 Description of Ancient Rock Tombs at Gha'in TiffiJia and Tal Horr, Malta, by Captain JOHX S. SWANN (Archceologia, vol. xl. pp. 483-487). THE PHOENICIAN TOMB AWAY FROM PHOENICIA. 165 and 1 66, which represent a tomb chosen as a type by Beule after having visited, as he tells us, many thousands of these sepulchres. 1 A staircase about a yard wide, and consisting of nine rather steep steps, leads down to the doorway of the chamber, which is nearly seven feet high and slightly arched at the top. The walls of the staircase, like those of the tomb chamber, are covered with a hard and fine white stucco ; they are, in fact, the whited sepulchres to which Christ compares the Pharisees. 2 The chamber FIGS. 162 and 163. Plan and section of a tomb at Malta. From the Archaologia. itself, in the tomb we have taken as a type, is 22 feet 4 inches long by 10 feet 10 inches wide, and 7 feet 6 inches high. "The chief characteristic of the Carthaginian tombs is not only sim- plicity, but economy. All the arrangements are made so as to take up the least possible space. Only one person at a time can 1 BEULE, Fouille s a Carthage, 4to, Paris, 1861, pp. 121-143. 2 ST. MATTHEW, xxiii. 27. Saint Chrysostom explains the phrase of the evangelist by these words : ra. 236 HISTORY OF ART IN PIKF.MCIA AND ITS DFPENDENCIKS. pass through the doorway or clown the steps ; the ceiling is but little above the head of a man, and we shall see that the bodies themselves had no room to spare. Right and left the rock is cut into three shallow arches; these are 5 feet 10 inches wide, \vhile the pilasters between them are from 29 to 30 inches wide at the base and stand out about 14 inches from the wall. 1 .... In the space embraced by each of these arcades two rectan- gular tunnels are cut, each 6 feet 10 inches deep, 2 feet 10 inches high, and i foot 10 inches wide. Such measurements just give room for a corpse to lie at length. The bodies were put in head first, as we know from the positions of the bones in the FIG. 164. Cross section of above tomb. few niches that have been opened." In all this we may recog- nize the rock-cut niches, the fours a cerciicil or corpse-ovens which we have already encountered in Phoenicia. Their number is here increased to seventeen by the three pierced in the farthest wall of the chamber and the pair that flank the entrance. A sepulchre here and there has no more than three niches, and one or two have twenty-one ; while a few have neither staircase nor doorway, properly speaking ; they are reached by a mere perpen- dicular hole, barely large enough to admit the passage of a man's body. 1 BEUL, Fouilles a Carthage, p. 132. 2 Ibid. p. 135. THE PHCENICIAN TOMB AWAY FROM PHOENICIA. 237 No trace of anything in the shape of a door, of hinges or sealing holes, was found. The tomb was closed in all likelihood by a heavy slab fitting exactly to the opening and kept in place by the lowest step of the staircase (Figs. 165 and I66). 1 The niches for the bodies must also have been closed as soon as occupied. They were built up with small stones imbedded in mortar and covered either with stucco like that upon the rest of the walls, or with a smooth slab. All these niches are now open and empty. The necropolis of Carthage has always been so accessible that it has been more completely sacked than even the cemeteries on the Syrian coast. It was pillaged in antiquity by the legionaries of Scipio and the Roman colonists of Caius Gracchus and Csesar ; for many centuries past it has been used as a quarry for lime. Everything has been carried away, both objects deposited in the niches and chambers, and sepulchral inscriptions. It would seem that formerly the latter were very numerous ; it is said that beneath each niche a little slab was fixed giving the name of the occupant. We are told that the holes by means of which these slabs were fixed are still quite visible, and that they are so small in diameter and so precisely cut that they could hardly have been used for anything but bronze plaques. The use of that valuable material would account for the total disappearance of the slabs. 2 Until more complete excavations or some fortunate chance brings one of the slabs to light, we cannot affirm that these niches bore the names of those by whom they were occupied, an arrange- ment which never existed, or at least which has left no trace of its existence, in the cemeteries of Phoenicia proper. The great peculiarity of the Carthaginian necropolis is its freedom from those differences which are so striking when we pass from one town to another, or from one period to another, in a cemetery on the Syrian coast or in Cyprus. Here we find no pyramids or other salient features rising above the ground, as at Arvad and 1 BEULE, Fouilles a Carthage, pp. 129-131. 2 Ibid. p. 137. BEULE'S evidence on this point is very clear, but it is curious that among so many plaques not one should have been recovered, either in place and under some fall of earth, or upon the floor and hidden by the debris with which most of the chambers are so deeply encumbered that it is impossible to stand up in them. Here is an opportunity for some explorer with more time at his command than Beule could afford. 238 HISTORY OK ART IN PHOENICIA AND ITS DEPENDENCIES. in the country about Tyre ; no mummy-cases as at Sidon, or sarcophagi covered with reliefs, as at Amathus ; no moulded steles, or winged lions and sphinxes, as at Golgos ; nothing but the nudity of well-whitened walls and the monotony of arrange- ments that never varied in any essential particular. In all this we FIG. 165. Plan of a Carthaginian tomb. From Beule. must not see the effect of police regulation or of hieratic prescrip- tion ; it is sufficiently explained by the very history of Carthage. In comparison with the cities of Phoenicia and the island of Cyprus, Carthage was a modern town ; she had no archaic period. Add to this that she was in Africa, far enough away from Egypt, FIG. 166. Section of a Carthaginian tomb. From Beule. Assyria, and Greece ; the influence of the great national arts of those three countries did not press upon her too closely and directly ; she had fewer types and motives offered to her for imitation than Phoenicia, and took even less pains to invent. The Tyrian colonists, by whom Carthage was founded, brought THE PHCENICIAN TOMB AWAY FROM PH;.-,-.-:, ' FIG. 167. Plan of a tomb at Sulcis. From La Marmora. - the shores of the fine anchorage of Calaris, now Cagliari. This harbour opens to the south-east close to the southernmost point of desire more circumstantial details of these Sardinian tombs may consult the following works with advantage : A. DELLA MARMORA, Voyage en Sardaigne et Itincraire de Vile de Sardaigne pour faire Suite au Voyage dans cette Contree, 5 vols. 8vo, 1839- 1860, and folio of plates without date. The part dealing specially with antiquities is vol. ii. with the forty plates in the second part of the Atlas. On many pages of the Itineraire, too, information of more recent date is given. V. CRESPI, Catalogo Illustrate della Raceolta di Antichita Sarde Possedute da I Signor Raimondo Chessa (4to, Cagliari, 1868, 157 pp. and 8 plates), pp. 114, 115, i47> *5- l 57- ELENA, Scavi nella Necropoli . Occidental di Cagliari (Cagliari, 410, 1868, i plate). It is unfortunately difficult to procure these curious and interesting works outside the island. I owe my ability to refer to them to the kindness of MM. Pais and Crespi. 1 ELENA, Scari, &c. p. 15. 2 Atlas, part ii. plate 35. THE PHOENICIAN TOMB AWAY FROM PIKKXICIA. 241 the island. It was directly in the way of ships steering towards Spain from Sicily or Africa. Nowhere else could a safer anchorage or a finer stretch of country in its neighbourhood be found. When the Tyrians began to visit Sardinia it was here, no doubt, that their first foot was planted, and that they founded a city which has remained the capital of the island ever since. As for Tharros, we know nothing of its history, 1 but its situation too was very- advantageous ; the broad haven that lies beneath it looks out to the Balearic Isles and the distant coast of Spain. It was here, perhaps, that the ships of Tarshish broke their long voyages both outwards and homewards, and took in food and water. We are FIG 168. Section of a tomb at Sulci> - . From La Marmora. inclined, therefore, to believe in a high antiquity for Tharros ; in any case, the extent of its cemetery and the richness of the deposits it inclosed prove that the city had a long and brilliant period of prosperity. Down to 1851 the chambers in which its dead took their rest were almost untouched, but in that year the excavations began, and in the necropolis of Tharros most of the objects which fill the museums of modern Sassari and Cagliari were found. Private collections in the island can show many more objects from the 1 Before the recent discoveries the town of Tharros was only known from Ptolemy's geography, and from the existence of a Roman milestone on which the distance between Tharros and Cornus is marked. In Ptolemy's manuscripts the word is written Tharras ; the form Tharros appears in the Latin text. VOL. I. I I 24-2 HISTORY OK ART IN I'IKI.NK i\ AND ITS DEPENDENCIES. same place, and sonic have found their way into the great museums of Kurope. Unhappily Sardinia, like Cyprus, has not been ex- plored on any strict system, so that it is now impossible to find out which things came from which tomb. 1 The cemetery of Tharros was pillaged rather than explored or studied ; now that it has been placed under the guardianship of zealous and competent men, few discoveries are made in it ; it is, in fact, exhausted, or nearly so. In the absence of drawings made on the spot and of circum- stantial narratives, it is very difficult to form a clear idea of the I-'tc,. lot). -Tomb at Cusjluri. I 1 ' mm I'.lcna. tombs from which so many interesting monuments have been taken. Thus we know that many of the sepulchres at Tharros have an external salient member, which is sometimes a pyramidion (Fig. i 72), sometimes a small hemispherical dome (Fig. 143), but 1 ETTORF, PALS, /.a SarJe^tm, pp. cS6, 87. SPAXO tells us th.it the chambers excavated in the rock were from 6 to 10 feet below the surface, and from 6 to 10 feet high (Sullettino, vol. vii. p. 184). The most complete work on the ruins of Tharros is SPANO'S Notizie sull' antica Citta di T/iarros, reprinted at the end of the seventh volume of the Bulletlino. See also LA MARMORA'S Ifiticraire, pp. 574-609. Care must be taken, however, to reject all the statements borrowed by Spano and La Marmora from those Codici d* Arborea of which the authenticity is now generally denied. THE PIKENICIAX TOMB AWAY FROM PHOENICIA. we are tolcl nothing as to the size of these features ; we are allowed to gather that they stood before the tombs, the entrances to which were closed generally by a slab of sandstone, but sometimes by a brick wall. We are no better informed in the case of a curious FIGS. 170, 171. Sections of a tomb at Caghari. From Crespi. monumental group discovered in the same cemetery (Fig. 174), a large rectangular stele, decorated on its face with a disk and crescent moon in relief; right and left a pyramidal cippus with a double FIG. 172. Funerary Cippus from Tharros. From Spano. moulding about its summit. All three of these columns stand upon a single base. The central stele is crowned either by a pediment or a pyramidion which stands out slightly beyond the line of its face. This same triangular crown appears on those cippi on which J44 HISTORY <>!' ART i\ l J ii Hi>TokY )! ART iv PHF.MCIA A\I> ITS I )I:I'I.M>FNVIFS. Among amulets we shall place those figures of tutelary deities, those statuettes of terra-cotta or gla/ed earthenware which, as a rule, suggest Egyptian types. 1 As examples we figure the hawk- headed deity with his arms close to his sides and the small elongated cube with figures on three of its faces. Of these one resembles Bes, another the pygmy god who has been identified with Ptah, while the third presents a rarer type ; that of a nude and winged goddess with her legs ending in the body of a serpent. Above Fie.. I/S. Amulet in gla/cd earthenware. From Crespi. her head appears the solar disk between two pendant wings (Fig. 1/8). We may also note a woman's head with an Egyptian head-dress (Fig. 1 79), which formed part of a necklace, and a great variety of scarabs (Fig. 180) ; sometimes a so\v < takes the place of a scarab, but even here the under side of the base on which that animal stands is engraved with Egyptian symbols (Fig. 181). Even the oudja, or mystical eye of Osiris, is not absent (Fig. 182). On the reverse of this latter amulet a group is FH;. 170. - f ilas Fnn C i Fi<;. iSo.- Scnrah. From Spam carved which was a favourite in Egypt, namely, a cow suckling her calf. 2 Finally, the necropolis of Tharros has afforded several specimens of those light gold and silver sheaths, or etuis, in which 1 CRESPI (Catalogo, p. 28) tells us that these amulets of glazed or white earthen- ware, of glass, of ivory, and of soft or hard stone, were found in the tombs in thousands. 2 LKPSIUS, Denkmccler, part ii. plates 31 and 77. Else-vhere (plates 12 and 46) one finds a goat with a fawn's head. THE PHOENICIAN TOMB A WAV FROM PIKKNICIA. were inclosed thin plates of the same metals rolled round cylinders of gilded bronze. These plates are engraved with texts which have not yet been deciphered ; the plates are to some extent disfigured, and the writing upon them is extremely fine, as if written with the help of a magnifying glass. The characters on * r> _' o ?5 one of these metal bands are certainly Phoenician ; on others they FIG. 181. Scarab in form of a Sow, From Spano. FK;. 182. Amulet in \\hite earthenware, glazed. From Crespi. belong apparently to that alphabet of Saffa which was used by the southern Shemites, the Arabs, towards the commencement of the Christian era. In time, no doubt, all these inscriptions will be deciphered ; it is probable that they will be found to be magic formulse intended to protect the dead against the attempts of demons or the violence of tomb-breakers. We figure two of the ttuis (Figs. 183 and 184). One is decorated with a lion's head, FIGS. 183, 184. Etuis found in the tombs. From Spano. the other with that of a hawk. The ring that appears on them both suggests that these sheaths were hung round the necks of the corpses ; it is even possible that they were worn in that fashion during life. 1 1 Upon these little sheaths and their contents see SPAXO, Bullettino, vol. iv. pp. 33-36. CARA, Iscrizioni fenicie sopra Monumenti delta Sardegna che appartengono al R, Museo in Cagliari, p. 29. Another 'dm found at Tharros is crowned by a 24^ HISTORY or ART IN PIKKNICIA AND ITS DEPENDENCIES. As for things meant for use, such as jewels and earthenware vessels, we shall find another opportunity for describing them. The cemetery of Tharros has furnished several fine vases painted in the Greek style, and a considerable number of black glaze vases which seem to be of Etruscan manufacture. 1 But these are fewer in number than the vessels of grey pottery decorated with stars and parallel bands of red paint. This decoration recalls that of the Cypriot vases, which the vessels on which it is used also greatly resemble in shape." Asiatic art is again suggested in the motives and executive details of the jewelry. The more closely we examine the objects found in the grave- yards of Sardinia the more certain do we become of the profound influence exercised by the Shemites of \Yestern Asia over their production. Sardinia became, and remained for ages, more thoroughly Phoenician even than Cyprus, in spite of the situation of the latter island close to the coast of Syria. The Greeks never won a footing in it. About the fifth and fourth centuries B.C. commerce may, indeed, have introduced a few objects of luxury bought in Greece or Etruria ; but such imports were few and far between, and had little or no effect upon the tastes and habits of the Sardinian population. All that the latter had of civilization, of art and industry, they drew, first from Tyre, secondly from Carthage, and these intimate relations endured for a thousand years. The important place we have here given to Sardinia need, therefore, cause no surprise ; she would, indeed, have filled a much larger space in our inquiry had we possessed more copious and more accurate information. Down to the Roman conquest Sardinia was hardly more than a dependency, a prolongation, so to speak, of Asiatic Phoenicia. And this character she only lost very slowly under the rule of the Roman praetors. Even now, we are told, human head. It is published by EUTING, in plate xxxvii. of the important study contributed by him to the Mcnwires de r Academic de Saint-Petersbourg, seventh series, vol. xvii. An object of the same kind was found at Malta (P,\is, La Sai-Jt-gna, &c., p. 88, No. 3). RKNAX mentions some very similar objects found at Saida. " On these," he says, " Hebrew characters of a debased period may be read ; they repeat the names of the deity, probably with some Cabalistic intention" (Mission, p. 393). Even at Rome objects very like these, at lenst in external shape, have been discovered (Bullet tino di Correspondenza Archeologico, 1880, p. 114). Their use seems therefore to have been very widespread, and to have lasted very long. 1 PAIS, La Sardegna, p. 90 and No. 3. - Ibid. p. 90. THE PHOENICIAN TOMB AWAY FROM PIKI.NK i.\. 249 the customs and superstitions of the peasantry show traces of the habits and beliefs which ruled during the period whose monuments we have just been describing ; the Syrian cult of Adonis has left its mark, it is thought, on more than one popular Sardinian festival. 1 Some day, perhaps, the remains of the hardy mariners of Phoenicia will be found on coasts which at present seem to have preserved no souvenir of their visits. Such discoveries may help us to a solution of some minor problems, but they will hardly modify the results already obtained in any material degree. \Ye are now well acquainted with the Phoenician tomb. Ill preserved as it is in nearly every instance, it allows us to point out certain permanent features, which we may here recapitulate. The Phoenicians never burned their dead ; from first to last they placed them underground. With the passage of time natural grottoes were superseded by artificial chambers cut from the rock ad hoc. In these every variety of sepulchral bed is to be found ; a ledge raised a few inches above the floor of the chamber or a trough sunk in its centre, sarcophagi, both fixed and movable, plain and decorated, and sometimes like the Egyptian mummy cases in form ; finally and especially, the oven-shaped niche excavated in the chamber wall, a receptacle which combined the great advantages of requiring no coffin and of leaving the chamber itself free for the celebration of funerary rites, and for the easy passage of future corpses to the places reserved for them in the family sepulchre. The marked predilection shown by the Phoenicians for this method of entombment was in strict harmony with their practical and utilitarian genius ; they sought for economy in every thing they did ; they hated all unnecessary expenditure of time, effort, or money. It is, perhaps, to this trait in their character that the absence of funerary inscriptions is to be traced. What was the use, they may have said, of engraving epitaphs in those secret and walled up chambers, which would never again be entered after the last niche was filled ? When the Phoenicians found themselves in a country where sepulchres on the surface of the soil were used, and attention called to them by an external tombstone, they conformed to that usage. Look, for instance, at the epitaphs of the Sidonian merchants who died at Athens. These are often engraved both in Greek and Phoenician. The Semitic reticence is exchanged for 1 PAIS, La Sardegna, p. 97, and No. 5. VOL I. K K 250 HISTORY OF ART IN* PIKI.NICIA AND ITS DEPENDENCIES. tin- frankness of the Greek ; the marble tells us the names of the. dead, of his father and of his country, sometimes his quality or profession, as in the epitaph which reads : " 1 am Ascpta, daughter of Ksmounchillem, and a Sidonian. This monument was raised to me by latanbel, son of Ksmoun- silleh, hi!' ART IN PII ITS I )l-:i'KNI )ENCIKS. indications ol the r ligious habits <>! these peoples. The arrange- ments of the building clearly point to an ark or tabernacle analogous to the ark of the Hebrews and destined to hold sacred objects, a sort of /vw/w, 1 with its harain, or reserved inclosure, in which all the precious objects ol the nation were grouped. Perhaps steles, or metal slabs, inscribed with the religious laws of the nation, were deposited there. ... In any case, we may guess that these cellar were called Ihcba '' ark " by the Phoenicians, as well as by the Hebrews, and that all the more because this word, like the object itself, appears to be Egyptian in its origin. . . . Here, as in the tabernacle of the Jews, metal ornaments and precious stuffs seem to have been lavished." The Maabed has been seen by all the travellers who have visited that part of the Syrian coast, but the minute exploration which M. Renan made of the whole site of Amrit led to the discovery of the remains of two more tabernacles previously unknown. They stand in a laurel brake near the spring known as the A'in-cl-IIayat, or fountain of serpents'! 1 The better preserved of the two is broken into seven or eight fragments. After having measured the pieces and made a separate drawing of each, M. Thobois succeeded in making a restoration, in which nothing was left to conjecture (Fig. iSS). The chapel in question was a monolith. It was carried on a cubical block ten feet square, which, in its turn, stood on a base composed of two huge stones, which raised it above the level of the marsh. The surface of this base was considerable smaller than that of the block of stone it supported ; so that the latter overhung it on all four sides to the extent of about a yard. On two sides of the larger rock the remains of a flight of steps, leading to the platform of the cella, mi^ht be traced. The cella itself, which was about eighteen feet o o high, was crowned with one of those cornices made up of urxi of which we have already given the details (Fig. 61). The ceiling of the tabernacle was a flattened arch like that of the Jlfaabect, but its plainness was relieved by two great pairs of wings sculptured upon it ; the one having for centre the globe flanked by two unci ; the other, apparently, an eagle's head. About five-and-thirty feet to the east of the tabernacle just 1 Kaaba means a building in the shape of a cube. 2 RKNAN, Mission. p. 67. 3 Ibid. pp. 68-70, and plate ix. THE TEMPLE IN PHCEXICIA. 257 described stand the base and lower parts of another ; of this enough has not been recovered to justify a complete restoration, but there is sufficient to dispel all doubt as to the strong- re- semblance that must have existed between the two monuments. FIG. 188. Monolithic tabernacle of Ain-el-llayat. From Kenan. 9 The general Egyptian character, the small flights of steps giving access to the cella, are conspicuous in both. Their position, too, face to face and not far apart, shows that they formed parts of a single whole ; one of the two may have been consecrated to a god, and the other to his corresponding goddess. It is likely that in FIG. 189. Plan of the two tabernacles at Ain-el-IIayat. From Kenan. antiquity, as now, the feet of both monuments stood in water. They would thus be protected from profane hands, which could only reach them by means of a boat, which we may be sure would not be at the order of the first comer. May we not even suppose VOL. i. L L HISTORY OF ART IN PIKKNICIA AND ITS DEPENDENCIES. that in this arrangement a souvenir of those lakes which were so conspicuous in the temples of the Nile valley is to be traced ?* The most interesting rites and religious buildings in Phoenicia were those of Byblos.- Byblos was a holy city, a city of pilgrimage rather than a mercantile centre/' She came under the influence of Egypt more than any other town in PhaMiicia, and her rites had at once a singular resemblance to the rites of the Hebrews and to those practised in the Nile valley. They involved, for instance, the use of a portable temple, or ark, dragged by oxen, which seems to have been quite similar to that of the Jews, 4 while it reminds us not a little of the portable shrines of the Egyptians/' The temples of Byblos must have been among those which, towards the end of the second century of our era, seemed to the author of the treatise, On the Syrian Goddess, to have a very ancient look. 6 The most important of them all was that in which those mystic and sensual rites of Adonis were celebrated which became so popular in the East under the successors of Alexander ; unfortunately we only know its plan from medals of the Roman epoch, but a few figures of animals, fragmentary reliefs, and decorative details have survived to our time (Fig. ig). 7 The building as shown on these medals is composed of two distinct parts. On the left there is a cella surmounted by a triangular pediment, the whole differing in no way from what Vitruvius calls a temple /;/ ant is ; on the right there is a vast courtyard surrounded by a portico. In the centre of this court rises the conical stone, in which the god is symbolized ; it is sur- rounded by a protecting balustrade. The area of the courtyard, which is higher than the surrounding country is reached by a wide 1 See Art in Ancient Egypt, Vol. X. p. 348 and 438. 2 We make use of the two forms Gebal and Byblos indifferently. Bi'/3Ao? results from an alteration in the Greek period, by which y was changed into (3 (ft^t^apor = yXcopovp.fvov ei' &OIVIKTJ. PHILO of BYRLOS, p. 20 of Orelli's edition. 5 Art in Ancient JZg\pt, Vol. I. p. 352, Figs. 209, 210. r> The writer in question quotes, in fact, the temple of Aphrodite at Byblos as appearing almost as old as the Egyptian temples ( 2-9). 7 Lions seem to have been numerous at Byblos. See in Corpus Inscriptionum Sewiticantm, pars i. p. 2, those found with the stele of Jehaw-Melek. THE TEMPLE IN PIKENKIA. 259 flight of steps ending in a pillared propykeum. The lateral temple must date from the Seleucid epoch, or even later ; the really old and primitive part of the whole structure, the part which justifies the words of the Pseudo-Lucian, is the cloister with its cone. It will be seen that the general arrangement is similar to that at Amrit. The chief difference lies in the fact that the arcade is backed by a wall and not by rock ; the massive chapel of Amrit is replaced by the symbolic cone ; the principle is the same, but at By bios the sacred emblem is set in the open air, while at Amrit it is protected by a shrine. The Pseudo-Lucian speaks also of a building which he reached " after a day's journey into the Lebanon from Byblos," as one of the oldest of Phoenician temples. 1 This excursion its chronicler was only able to make by following the waters of the River Adonis, now the Nahr-IbraJiim, up their valley, which was then "a sort of territory sacred to Adonis, filled with shrines and temples devoted to his worship." 2 At many points between Byblos and Aphaca " tombs of Adonis " were pointed out, cenotaphs analogous to those " holy sepulchres," which were so common in Catholic cities in the middle ages. But in spite of what this intelligent and attentive traveller tells us, it is doubtful whether any of these buildings date back to a really very distant age. The upper valleys of the Lebanon do not appear to have been opened to Phoenician civilization till very late. M. Renan, indeed, found some interesting ruins in the gorge of the Nalir- Ibrahim, but they all date from the Roman period. 3 At MacJmaka, at Gineh, at Afka, the ancient Apkaca (Fig. 18), at Sanou/i, both sculpture and architecture bear unmistakable marks of the decadence. Perhaps some of these buildings were copied in their plan and general arrangements from some of the oldest temples on the coast, a proceeding which would, of course, be likely to lead a foreign traveller to wrong conclusions. 4 Among the great temples which he calls ancient and thinks to 1 Upon the Syrian Goddess, 9. 2 RENAN, Mission, p. 295. 3 Mission, 1. ii. ch. iii. 4 After declaring that the Egyptians were the inventors both of the religion and of the temples, the writer adds : Kcu eo-riv Ipa KOL ev 2,vpir) ov Trapa TTO\.V TOIS AtyvTTTtoicri wroxpoj/eovra, ran/ e'yw TrActora oTrwTra. He then enumerates the buildings which appeared to him to belong to that category, and he concludes with these words : TaSc /AO/ earl TO, ey TTJ ^vpi-y ap^aia KCU /u,eydAa ipa ( 2-9). 260 HISTORY OF ART IN PIKMNICIA AM> ITS DKI'KNDENCIES. be as old as those of Fgypt, the Pseudo-Lucian also counts those of Astarte at Siclon and Melkart at Tyre, the latter the temple admired by Herodotus; ' but nothing now remains of either one or the other, and archaeologists are not even agreed as to where they stood. And here we must find space to mention a ruin which is to be found in the immediate neighbourhood of Sidon (Fig. 190), near the village of Roumeli. Part of it the villagers have turned into a stable for cattle:, by filling up the space under a wide lintel and between two curiously-carved piers with a rough stone wall. The forms of these piers and of the lintel are shown in our woodcut. The lintel is about fifteen feet long. The sculptured objects which stand in the niches are too worn and broken to permit any conjecture as to what they originally represented. From FIG. 190. Ruin in the neighbourhood of Sidon. From Rcnan. certain appearances it is clear that the present arrangement of these objects is not of any great antiquity. Most likely the two piers and the lintel originally belonged to some temple now- destroyed, and, if we may accept that hypothesis, they afford another proof of the influence of Egyptian examples. We know very little of the internal arrangement and furnishing of the Phoenician temple. In the fifteen-line inscription on the stele of Jehaw-Melek, king of Byblos (Fig. 23), the works he undertook in the temple of the " mistress of Gebal," for the purpose of conciliating her favour, are mentioned apparently ; - but unhappily the text has suffered greatly, and most of the suggested restorations are open to grave doubt. Three things alone appear to be certain. In the first place there was, either in 1 HKRODOTUS, ii. 44. 2 Corpus Inscriptionum Semiticanun, pars i. No. i. THE TKMPLK IN PIKKXICIA. 261 the temple itself or its precinct, a bronze altar. 1 Secondly, gold was largely employed in the decoration of the building ; - thirdly, it had a portico and columns/' As for whether Jehaw-Melek boasts of having raised these supports or only of their embellish- ment we cannot say. All that we can clearly deduce from this much injured inscription agrees perfectly well with what we have learnt elsewhere as to the religious architecture of Phoenicia. The o bronze altar reminds us of all those works in the same metal which were carried out for Solomon by the Tyrian founders under the direction of Hiram, and particularly of the " brazen sea ; " the temple at Jerusalem shone with gold in mass and in thin leaves laid upon ornaments and panels ; and even at Tyre itself, did not Herodotus find his admiration stirred by a great stele of pure gold on the threshold of the temple of Melkart ? 4 and accord- FIG. 191. Stone altar. From Kenan. ing to all appearances the portico to which Jehaw-Melek alludes in his inscription is identical with the structure represented on the imperial coins of Byblos (Fig. 58). Jehaw-Melek says nothing about the form of his bronze altar, but perhaps we may be permitted to guess that it was the proto- type of an altar of peculiar form of which many examples have been encountered at Gebal and in its neighbourhood (Fig. iQi). 5 In the same district altars have been found with an ornament round their summits which recalls the crenellations of Assyria (Fig. 78) ; as for the columns which rose in pairs, like the Egyptian obelisks, at the doors of the Phoenician temples, it is easy to understand why they have left no traces. Even when of stone they were fragile and defenceless, while when they were 1 Line 4. 2 Lines 4 and 5. 3 Line 6. 4 HERODOTUS, ii. 44. 5 REN AN, Mission, p. 229. 262 HISTORY ov ART IN PIKKNK IA AND ITS DEPENDENCIF.S. made of bronze, or of wood cased in bronze, they were predestined to certain destruction. Their existence, therefore, is only known to us through the ancient writers and their forms through coins and reliefs; we may say the same of the tripods, candelabra, and other objects of the same kind which made up the furnishing of the temples (Figs. 8 1, 82 and 83). This furnishing must have been rich The crowded cities and narrow territory of Phoenicia left no room for colossal constructions like those of Egypt and Mesopotamia, but, on the other hand, a nation of skilful workers and of merchants through whose hands passed all the commerce of the Mediterranean, had every facility for accumulating precious objects of every kind in her sanctuaries. The Phoenicians were very pious. When we attempt a classification in order of subject of the epigraphic texts they have left us, we find that by far the fullest category is that which is made up of votive inscriptions. These all conclude with the same formula, they are all constructed after the following model, which comes from the Maltese monument represented in our Fig. 28. " To our Lord Melkart, master of Tyre ; the offering of thy servants Abdosir and his brother Osirsamar, both sons of Osirsamar, who was the son of Abdosir ; because he has listened to their voice ; may Jie bless them" These steles, like the stele of Jehaw-Melek (Fig. 23) and more than one stele from Carthage (Figs 13, 15, 16 and 192) often bear on their upper part, above the inscription, a bas-relief representing sometimes a group of worshippers making offerings to a god, sometimes a worshipper alone ; in most cases, however, the latter is understood and the sculptor has been content to figure the deity only. 1 At the apex of the stele appears an open hand, the symbol of prayer. Some of these steles have no inscriptions (Figs. 193 and 194). Sometimes they were not content with a simple stele. The discoveries which have been made in Cyprus in these latter years have furnished the elements of instructive comparisons and have helped us to come to a right opinion on certain monuments which have been found at intervals on the coast of Syria. In 1873, m a small grotto near the Maabed of Amrit, among the remains of a con- struction in which M. Renan recognised all that was left of a 1 One of the most interesting monuments of this class is the stele of Lilybaeum. Corpus Inscriptionum Semiticarum, pars i. No. 138. THE TEMPLE IN PHOENICIA. 263 temple, a considerable number of broken statues were found, their heads separated from their bodies. These figures were cut from the white limestone of Amrit. 1 Some of them appear to be figures of gods. The only torso to which a head still adheres has been recognised as one of a Hercules with lion-skin o FIG. 192. Votive stele from Carthage. From the Gazette Archeologiqiie. head-dress. But this is quite an exception. The iconic character of most of the figures is beyond a doubt. As these statuettes were found in a grotto within the precincts of a temple, there is every reason to believe that they once 1 Such details as we possess on the subject of this find arc furnished by a letter from M. GAII.LARDOT inserted by M. Renan among his Additions et Corrections (Mission, p. 850). 264 HISTORY OF ART IN PIKKNU i.\ AND ITS DEPENDENCIES. formed part of the contents of the temple itself. Most likely they represent people of distinction princes, perhaps, and priests who, in raising their images close to the sanctuary, wished to FIG. 193. Votive stele from Sulcis (Sardinia). Height 28 inches. From Crespi. perpetuate evidence of their piety. This hypothesis is confirmed by the fact that on the site of the temples of Golgos and Amathus, a great number of statues, often very well preserved, have been found, and that their attitude is only to be explained Fa;. 194. Votive stele from Sulcis. From Crespi. in one way. They are both male and female ; their heads are bound about sometimes with a veil, sometimes with a crown of flowers ; the pendant hair and beard are dressed with FIG. 195. Statue found near Athieno. Limestone. Height 3 feet n inches. In the New York Museum. M M THE TEMPLE IN PHOENICIA. 167 care, and in their right hands they hold a votive offering a patera, a dove, a flower, the branch of a tree, or some other object of the same nature (Figs. 195 and 196). Several in- scriptions found in Cyprus give us the formula used at the FIG. 196. Limestone statue from Cyprus. Height 27^ inches. In the National Library, Paris. consecration of these figures. 1 It has been suggested 'that perhaps the statues represent the deities to whom these gifts were offered, rather than the worshipper ; but all doubt appears 1 Corpus Inscriplionum Semiticarum, pars i. Nos. n, 88, 89, 92, 93, 94. 268 HISTORY OK ART IN PIKF.XICIA AND ITS DEPENDENCIES. to be dispelled by a bilingual dedication, in Phoenician and in Cypriot Greek, in which the Phoenician word meaning statue is rendered not by dyaX/ta, which would be the right one in speaking of a divine image, but by dvSptas, which always denotes the figure of a man. 1 In speaking of another figure found at Amrit M. Renan has already pointed out the connection between the scanty monu- ments of Phoenician sculpture and the numerous iconic statues which have been found during excavations at Cyprus, and this is how he explains the sentiment which led to the creation of these votive statues : "Must we agree with the hypothesis that would take these figures for a series of portraits of priests and priestesses continued through more than one century ? I think not. The personage represented in each figure seems to me to be the author of a vow, the donor of an offering made to the divinity of the temple, the baal haz-zdhakh, or master of the sacrifice, according to the expression used in the tariffs of Marseilles and Carthage. This vow, or sacrifice, was soon over, and its author might fear that it would be soon forgotten. An inscription would do something to keep its memory green, but a statue would be much more certain. In causing himself to be set before the eyes of the god in a material and in an attitude that would recall unceasingly the sacrifice made and homage rendered, the worshipper perpetuated the memory of his piety in the surest way. Such an idea was quite in keeping with the materialistic and almost commercial religion of Phoenicia, where a vow was a sort of business transaction, in which a clearly understood bargain was struck, so to speak, on both sides. We have, then, in these statues, the figures of pious men who came in their order to fulfil their vows, and took every precaution to insure that the liquidation of their debts should be remembered. The size, material, and workmanship of the statues, depended upon the circumstances of those by whom they were set up." 2 For the safe guarding of these statues, and of the other contents of the temple and its precincts, a numerous personnel was required. In a curious inscription recently discovered at Larnaca we find succinct but authentic information as to how this personnel was 1 Or/ us Inscriptiomtm Semiticamm, pars i. No. 89, and see especially the observations of M. Ren.in, at page 106, referring to line 2 of the inscription. - REX.\y, F.erue Arch'colo^i^ue, 2nd series, vol. xxxvii. p. 323. THE TEMPLE IN PHOENICIA. 271 composed. 1 The inscription is written in ink on both sides of a slab ; it seems to be a fragment from what we may call the ledger of a Phoenician temple at Kition, which appears to have been dedicated to Astarte. There are some gaps in it, but, as a whole, it gives the expenditure for two months, the sums paid to work- men, to builders and decorators, and the wages or salaries paid to the officers of the temple. The latter are not arranged in the order of their dignity, for the inscription is rather a memorandum than a formal record. The chief officials must have been the sacrificers and those masters of the scribes who are mentioned in other texts ; besides them, there were figure porters and men charged with the care of the veils, or curtains, of the sanctuary, barbers who shaved the priests and to whom certain incisions and amputations, which formed part of the rites, were entrusted, parasites, or people who lived at the table of the god, singing women, and women whose persons were the vehicles of worship ; for the sacred prostitutions to which we have already alluded were practised here as in all Astarte's temples. Traces of this rite are to be found in several artificial grottoes in the neighbourhoods of Gebal and Tyre, which are dubbed by M. Renan " prostitution caves." These have in their further wall a niche for the statue of the goddess, and along each side seats and benches cut in the rock. Their purpose is shown by the existence of numerous little triangles cut in the walls, in which archaeologists agree to recognize a summary representation of the female pudenda, which Herodotus tells us he himself saw cut on the rocks in this very neighbourhood. 3 In spite of the licentious nature of their rites the Phoenicians were an orderly and far-seeing people. Among the longest and most interesting documents they have left us, we may point out especially those texts engraved upon stone slabs which are known among epigraph ists as the Tariffs of Marseilles and Carthage? 1 Corpus Inscriptionum Semiticarum, pars i. 86, A and B. 2 Mission de Phmicie, pp. 648-652 and 662. 3 HERODOTUS, ii. 106. 4 The Marseilles Tariff is No. 165 in the Corpus Inscriptionum Semiticarum. That of the Tariff of Carthage is not yet fixed (December, 1883). The latter, however, is nothing but a repetition, with a few slight alterations, of the former. It would appear that an identical tariff was adopted for all the temples of the Phosnician rite, whether they were in the metropolis or in one of the colonies. The Tariff of Marseilles runs to 21 lines; that of Carthage has but n, and those considerably mutilated. 272 HISTORY or ART IN PHOENICIA AND ITS DEPENDENCIES. The ritual and the cost of each of the customary sacrifices are there minutely regulated. Such tables must have been fixed up at the entrance to the temple, where they would at once show the merchant who landed from some weary voyage what it would cost him to keep the vows he had made to Melkart, Astarte, or Tanit, as the case might be. While neglecting nothing that might content the g ( >d, he could then take care that he was not cheated by the priest ; the Marseilles Tariff specifies, for instance, that the skin of the animal sacrificed was reserved to the worshipper. The fees, on the whole, seem to have been high enough, but it is ex- pressly stipulated that the very poor, who could not afford to provide a living victim, either bird or quadruped, should have nothing to pay. 1 This shows that every facility was given to the poor to bring their gift of bread, or of those figured animals in stone and terra-cotta of which so many were found by Cesnola in the ruins at Golgos. 5 2. The Temple in Cyprus. However slight may be his smattering of classic letters, every reader has heard of those temples of Cyprus in which the vague but imposing image of the great Nature goddess of the Syrians was, as it were, gradually condensed into the definite personality of the Greek Aphrodite. 3 The names of the famous shrines of 1 Line 20. 2 CKSXOLA, Cyprus, p. 158. 3 Xo one has yet succeeded, or seems likely to succeed, in explaining the word Aphrodite by a Greek or Aryan derivation. Its etymology must be sought for in another quarter, and therefore we have the less hesitation in repeating a conjecture recently given out by Herr FRITZ HOMMEL, one of the best Assyriologists of Germany. According to him, Aphrodite is no more than a kind of anagram on Astarte, through Ashtoret, the name given by the Western Shemites to the Chaldreo-Assyrian Ishtarit. The Greeks have never had such consonants as sh or/, so that even now they are quite incapable of pronouncing them, and when they had to adapt their vocal organs to the name of the Syrian goddess they substituted, perhaps unconsciously, the labial < for the sh. It was at the price of this change that the name of the goddess entered their language and she herself their pantheon. Ashtoret became Aphtoret, then by an easy permutation Aphrotet. In much later times, again, they deliberately adopted a new transcription of the Syrian form of the name, and, like their modern descend- ants when they take words from the Turkish, they replaced the lingual letter by a pure sibillant, so that Astarte is one of those derivatives due to educated people which are never so faithful to their prototype as the natural and unconscious modifi- cations set up by the crowd. It is not uncommon to find terms like this, which, THE TEMPLE IN CYPRUS. 273 Paphos and Amathos, of Idalion and Golgos, occur again and again in the works of the Greek and Latin poets ; it is to them and to other temples founded by the Phoenicians, such as those at Cythera and Eryx, that the goddess of Homer and the lyric poets Owes her principal Surnames, Kv7rpi:S,Kv7rpta, Kv7rpoyev)]S,Kv7rpoyeveia. Her temples were frequented down to the very last days of paganism, and antiquity is better preserved at Cyprus than on the Syrian coast. With the exception of Larnaca which stands on the site of Kition neither the chief modern towns in the island, nor its feudal fortresses, were built in the neighbourhood of the old religious centres, and if the excavations had been undertaken in the same spirit as those of M. Renan in Phoenicia, and with equal re- sources, it is likely that important remains of those buildings would have been found, or, at least, that their plans might have been re- covered. Even now, and in spite of the confusion caused by those whose chief aim in exploring was the collection of things for sale to museums, systematic researches directed by a thoroughly trained architect would, perhaps, have good results, and we can only express our surprise that the British Government, now absolute master of the island in which it has forbidden all private enter- prise of the kind, should have so long delayed its thorough ex- ploration. At present our knowledge of the religious architecture of Cyprus is very slight. At Kition little has been found ; but recent excavations allow us to determine the site of that temple which was, perhaps, the first built by the Syrian merchants on that coast which they were to frequent so long. Until quite recently there rose at Larnaca a mound or hillock known as Bamboula ; it stood on the confines of the town, on the edge of the marshy basin which was all that remained of the ancient port. 1 In though originally descended from a single term, have come to have quite different meanings. We have no space to quote certain facts pointed out by Herr Hommel which appear to support his hypothesis ; we must be content with referring our readers to his note on this subject in the Neue Jahrbucher fur Philologie (Fleckeisen, 1882, p. 176 No. 30), under the title Aplirodite-Astarte. He reserves to himself the right to treat the subject at greater length on some future occasion. We have not here quoted his words, and we have suggested some points for consideration on which he is silent, but we have said nothing which appears to us to militate against his idea. We confess that it seems to us very well founded. It is certain that the Aphrodite of the Greeks came from the East, and it is reasonable enough to suppose that she brought her name with her, as well as her rites and attributes. 1 See the plan of Larnaca and its neighbourhood given in Corpus Inscriptionum Semiiicarum, pars i. p. 35. VOL. T. N N 274 HISTORY OF ART IN PHOENICIA AND ITS DEPENDENCIES. 1 880 the English governor caused the hillock to be removed in order to fill up the marshy hollow beside it, and during the opera- tion the substructures of buildings with many antique fragments, and especially terra-cotta figures, strewn about them, were brought to light. Many signs were present to suggest that the mound had once supported a temple of Astarte, a temple to which two marble tablets found in the neighbourhood may have belonged. These tablets were inscribed with tariffs in the Phoenician language. 1 Some Ionic capitals which were sketched by a French architect, M. Saladin, in the course of a voyage in the East, seem to have belonged to this temple. We reproduce below his drawing of the best preserved among them. This fragment belongs, of course, to a date much later than that of the first temple ; it dates, in fact, from a time when Greek art had already won a preponderating FIG. 198. Capital from Kition, cut from the local stone. Height 18 inches. Drawn by Saladin. influence at Kition ; but yet it preserves a certain originality. There are no oves, and the volute is very deeply hollowed, peculiarities which decided us to reproduce M. Saladin's drawing, although the capital cannot be presented as an example of Phoenician art. It may be looked upon, however, as the last of the series which commences with the far more strange-looking caps reproduced in our Figs. 51, 52, 53. The classic style was near its universal triumph, but at the time when this temple was restored it had still to lay its account with certain local habits and traditions, The only temple in the island of which we know anything from the old writers is the most famous of all, the temple of Paphos. 1 See M. KENAN'S paper on these inscriptions in the Rwue arcJieologique, 2nd series, vol. xli., 1881, p. 29, and the Corpus Inscriptionum Serniticarum, pars i. p. 92. Cf. HEUZEY, Catalogue des Figurines, &c., p. 168 and above, p. 271. THE TEMPLE IN CYPRUS. 275 During the Jewish war, Titus, as we are told by Tacitus, "was seized with a desire to visit a sanctuary so frequented by native and foreign pilgrims." And here the historian digresses for a moment to describe in a few words " the origin of the worship, the rites practised in the temple, the form in which the goddess is adored, a form which is to be found nowhere else." What he says on the first of these points is insufficient and obscure, but he gives us a few precise details upon the rules for sacrifices and upon the image of the goddess, " who is not represented in human form, but in that of a circular cone-shaped block of stone. The reason for this shape is unknown." Tacitus adds that "the emperor took pleasure in contemplating the wealth of the temple and the gifts which had accumulated in it under the ancient kings, as well as many antique objects to which the vanity of the Greeks gave an exaggerated age." But this can have been no Greek temple in which, towards the end of the first century of our era, the eye encountered no better substitute for a statue of the goddess of beauty than a rude block of stone, perhaps a phallic emblem. Those altars of which Tacitus speaks, on which, although sacrifices were offered on them under the open sky, no drop of rain ever fell, were a survival from that form of worship in the open air which was the first practised by the Canaanitish tribes. In the temple at Paphos everything must have borne marked traces of its Syrian origin. The presence of a conical stone in the place of honour in the sanctuary was, if we may use such a metaphor, the dominant note ; but the observant visitor would certainly perceive it echoed in the general arrangement of the temple, in the costumes of the priests, and in the rites they imposed on the people. Elsewhere we find plenty of confirmation of what Tacitus has told us. Upon a whole series of bronze coins struck under the Roman Emperors, from Augustus to Macrinus, in the name of the 1 TACITUS, History, ii. 3. 2 "Simulacrum deae non effigie humana ; continuus orbis latiore initio tenuem in ambitum, metse modo, exsurgens, et ratio in obscuro." M. HALVY believes that he has unravelled the puzzle that baffled Tacitus. At one of the recent sittings of the Societe asiatique (October i2th, 1883), he expounded the idea that one of the Semitic names for the divinity, !, is to be explained by its other primitive signifi- cance, column ; and the columns which we find in Phoenician temples would be nothing more than summary representations of the mountain, the earliest fetish worshipped by the Syrian populations. 276 HISTORY or ART i\ PIKKXICIA AND ITS DHPHNDENCIES. union of Cypriot towns (*o FIG. 201. Plan of the remains of the temple at Paphos. According to Cesnola. same deity ; now, in the views of the latter temple which we find upon coins (Fig. 19), the sacred stone is standing in the open air, in the middle of a peristylar court. W T hy should it not have been the same at Paphos, where the climate was certainly dryer than on the Syrian coast ? Two things confirm this idea. One is the mention by Tacitus of those altars which were never moistened by a drop of rain although they stood in the open air. Secondly, the dimensions of the temple accord ill with the notion of a covered building. In order to carry its roof a number of internal supports must have been introduced, and of these some traces would be sure to exist, either bases still in situ, or capitals strewn among the ruins. On the other hand, the dimensions 280 HISTORY OF ART IN PIKKNICIA AND ITS DEPENDENCIES. given would do very well for a large courtyard with an idol in the middle and a portico about it. \Ye should, then, be inclined to guess the temple at Paphos to have been something like this : in the centre the conical stone, surrounded by a balustrade, and perhaps raised on a pedestal ; around it a double Trept/SoXr/, as the Greeks called it. The smaller and more richly decorated of these inclosed a court into which, so far as we can gather, the faithful were only allowed to penetrate under the guidance of a priest, after having paid certain fees and accomplished certain rites. On the other hand the external court, with its wide doorways, was open to every coiner. In both courts, but especially in the inner one, would be ranged those votive monuments whose richness and variety made such an impression on Tacitus. We know that votive statues were not wanting, although they have nearly all been consumed in the limekiln, for both Hammer and Cesnola found numerous pedestals, on some of which inscriptions were still traceable. 1 On lower ground and nearer the sea, Cesnola found the remains of a smaller rectangular temple, which may, as he suggests, have been raised to mark the spot where the goddess first set foot on the island ; in that case it would have been the first station for the pilgrims who came to Cyprus to visit the greater sanctuary. The only remains of the building are two pyramidal monoliths of a brown granite which is nowhere to be found on the island. Their bases are very deeply sunk, and their total height is about nineteen feet. They are each pierced about half way up with a hole of considerable diameter. 2 In presence of these monoliths, we are struck by a resemblance between them and certain objects on the money struck by the union of Cyprian towns. The building represented on the coins in question is simpler than the one we have described above. It is nothing but a pair of uprights supporting a roof or architrave, beneath which stands the betyle with a dove on its summit. On each side of the doorway, and on the same stylobate, stands a conical stone (Fig. 202). May not the monoliths which now stand on the sea-shore at Paphos have afforded a model for these 1 HAMMER, Topographische Ansichten, pp. 179-183. CESXOLA, Cyprus, p. 212. 2 CESNOLA, Cyprus, p. 214. See also p. 189, where some more cippi of the same form are mentioned. It is curious that even among the modern peasants there subsist certain superstitious beliefs as to the power of these ancient stones. THE TK.MPLE IN CYPRUS. 281 latter objects ? It is difficult to say ; but at least the motive is the same in both cases. Neither from medals nor ancient authors do we learn anything about the temples at Idalion and Golgos, but as they were smaller than the great building at Paphos, and as they left no ruins standing above the ground to draw the attention of destroyers, they have been preserved to our own clay, and when they were disinterred by MM. Lang and Cesnola in 1866-1869, they gave up to science a splendid booty in statues, bronzes, terra-cottas, Greek and Phoenician inscriptions, coins, jewels, &C. 1 Unhappily these excavations were made in such a way that they are of very little use to the historian of architecture. Mr. Lang discovered a temple at Dali (Idalion) and does not give its plan ; he does not even tell us anything as to the condition of the site on which he found such a treasure. As for Cesnola, who seems to have ransacked two separate temples at Golgos, his FIG. 202. Coin of Cyprus. From C.erhanl. attention never seems to have been turned to the remains of antique construction. In spite of all probabilities and the formal declaration of an intelligent witness, namely, Mr. Lang, who watched the labourers of his friend and rival at work, he denies the very existence of what seems to have been the older of the two temples. 2 As for the other, we certainly have a sketch of its 1 In Mr. LANG'S book (Cyprus, its History, its Present Resources and Future Pros- pects, i vol. 8vo, London, 1878), excavations and archaeology occupy but very, little space; most of his attention is given to questions of agricultural and political economy. Most of the monuments disentombed by him have gone to enrich the collections in the British Museum. See also an account of Mr. Lang's discoveries in G. PERROT, Lllede Cypre (Revue des deux Mondes, ist Fe'vrier, 1879, pp. 579, 580, 584, and 585). 2 This temple must have been circular according to Mr. Lang. The great statue of Hercules which was found in it suggests that it was consecrated to a god, Melkart, no doubt, who came in the course of ages to be confused with the Greek Herakles. See Mr. LANG'S letter in the Revue archeologique, and series, vol. xxiii. p. 366. Ceccaldi accepts all his conclusions. VOL. I. O () 1 1 [STORY OF ART IN PIKKNMCIA AND ITS DEPENDENCIES. plan (Fig. 204). but one made in such a way that it leaves many questions unanswered which might have been set at rest once for all bv a few accurate observations taken at the right time. IMC;. 203. The hill of Paphos, remains of a temple in the foreground. From Cesnola. From this sketch and from the evidence of G. Colonna Ceccaldi, evidence which would be more valuable than it is, but for the fact a a a a a a a E3 I'K;. 204. I'lan of temj>le at Golgos. From Cesnola. that at the time of his visit many of the exploring trenches had become filled up, we gather the following data. 1 1 On the whole question of this temple see CESNOLA, Atti della reale Academia delle Srienze di Torino, vol. vi. 1870, 1871, pp. 534 et seq., and Cyprus, ch. v. See too CECCALDI, Monuments, pp. 39-51. THE TEMPLE ix CYPRUS. 283 Like that of Paphos, this temple was rectangular. It was about sixty-one feet long by thirty wide. 1 Neither here nor at Paphos was the temple oriented as it was in Greece. The two narrow sides of the rectangle faced north and south. We cannot tell through which side the principal door was pierced. Two large doorways, one slightly larger than the other, may, however, be traced in the northern and eastern walls ; the upper parts of all the walls have disappeared ; it would seem that, as in Assyria, stone was only used for the lower parts. No trace of an outside inclosure has been found. A broken cone found by Ceccaldi, in the middle of the temple, seems to indicate that the goddess was here represented by a symbol like that of Paphos (Figs. 205 and 206). No remains of columns but a few capitals in the stone of the country were encountered. At several points within the site, votive figures carved from the same material were picked up. Some of these represented women suckling children, others cows performing a like office for their calves. One much damaged group is composed of four figures ; one of these holds a new- born child, while the mother lies stretched upon a sort of couch, her face still drawn by the agonies of childbirth, and her head upheld by an attendant.' 2 The community of subject which links together most of these little sculptures confirms the idea suggested by the presence of the cone, that the goddess of the sanctuary was one of love and generation, that is to say, a form of the Semitic Astarte. She must have been invoked with no less frequency than the deity who gave health and prolonged life. In the same place detached members of human bodies modelled in clay or carved in stone have been found ; these, of course, are thank- 1 We reproduce Cesnola's plan, but without any desire to exaggerate its authority ; it differs from the plan given by the same explorer in the account of his explorations at Athieno addressed to the Academy of Turin. If we test the two by the same scale none of the measurements coincide. In the plan presented to the Academy, which is reproduced by DOELL (Die Sammlung Cesnola in the Memoires de V Academic de Saint- Petersbourg, yth series, vol. xix. No. 4), there are columns against the door jambs which have disappeared in the map given in his Cyprus. A much simpler plan than the latter is given by CECCALDI (Monuments antiques de Cypre, p. 41) ; it shows fewer column bases in the interior, and no shafts or pilasters against the wall. To which of all these documents is our confidence due ? We prefer that given in our Fig. 204, because it best corresponds to the double description given by Cesnola and Ceccaldi. 2 CESNOLA. Cyprus, p. 158. 284 HISTORY OK ART IN PHOENICIA AND ITS DEPENDENCIES. offerings for cures wrought by the divinity. Among them occur arms and hands, legs, feet, and the reproductive organs. 1 FIGS. 205, 206. Elevation of a cone found at Athieno and section of its lower part. The sacred cone did not have this inclosure all to itself. There were numerous pedestals, each supporting a statue. Most 1 The Cesnola Collection of Cypriote Antiquities, a Descriptive and Pictorial Atlas (3 vols. folio, James Osgoocl, Boston, 1884), vol. i. plates xxvii., xviii. and xix. We have borrowed freely from this fine work, in which all the monuments brought from Cyprus by General di Cesnola are reproduced with a care and fidelity which does honour to the American publisher. We can never thank Messrs. Cesnola and Osgood too much for the liberality with which they put their plates at our service, long before they were published. The work comprises 450 plates, a third of which THE TEMPLE IN CYPRUS. 2S; of these were set against the walls ; as many as seventy-two were counted along the eastern side. 1 Other larger pedestals, each supporting two statues placed back to back (Fig. 207), divided the hall lengthwise into five parallel aisles. The pave- ment consisted of slabs of Cyprian limestone. The statues were found lying on the earth, face downwards for the most part, under a thick covering of rubbish, which appeared to consist chiefly of the washings of crude brick hardened into a kind of cement, out of which it was difficult to disengage the broken sculptures. Ceccaldi, who studied all that was left of the structure both on the actual site and at the American consulate, gives the following ideal restitution of the Golgos temple : " The temple was built mainly of sun-dried bricks, which formed four walls standing on Fu;. 207. Pedestal for two statues. Height I5i inches ; length 46 inches. stone foundations. These walls were lined, like those of the modern Cyprian peasant's house, with a white or coloured water- proof stucco. . . . Wooden pillars with stone capitals upheld a ridge roof, of which the slope was so slight as to form practically a fiat terrace, like the roofs still in use in the island. This roof consisted of pieces of timber carefully jointed ; over these mats and reeds were spread, and over those, again, a thick layer of beaten earth, which offered a thorough resistance both to are in colour, while the rest are heliogravures. Each plate will be accompanied by a descriptive notice. The price of the whole is 150 dollars. According to the prospectus, the first volume should contain the objects in marble, stone, and alabaster, all statues colossal and otherwise, statuettes, busts, heads, bas-reliefs, votive offerings, and sarcophagi. In the second will be found objects in bronze, silver, gold, rock- crystal and glass, and precious stones. The third will be reserved for ceramic objects and inscriptions. 1 CESNOLA, Cyprus, p. 10. 286 HISTORY OF Airr IN PIKKNICIA AND ITS DEPENDENCIES. wet and he.it. The outside ot the temple of Golgos must, then, have been very simple to look at. In the inside, which was lighted only from the wide doorways, stood a silent population of statues, their cheeks and robes heightened with colour, and in their midst the symbolic cone. Pavilion-shaped lamps of stone cast a dim light into the darker corners, where the long lines of ex-votos hung upon the painted walls. 1 ' Purely conjectural as this description must be in many of its details, as a whole it is probable enough ; but the chief question after all never seems to have suggested itself to the explorers, and that is whether the building discovered by Cesnola was the temple itself, or only one of its dependencies. PhcL'nicia, no doubt, like Greece and Egypt, may have had temples built on different models, but it is singular that this temple of Golgos, as it is described to us, should afford so wide a variation from all the types of Semitic temple with which we are acquainted. There is neither a great courtyard surrounded with porticoes, as at Amrit, at Byblos, and Paphos, nor a building in which, as in the temples of Jerusalem and the Nile valley, we may distinguish a sanctuary and a pronaos, a holy place and a holy of holies. Finally, taking the plan given as correct, where, in this nave encumbered with statues, are we to rind a place for the divinity of the temple, a place where she would be well in view, as she appears to have been in the sanctuaries of Byblos and Paphos ? We are scarcely inclined to see the goddess in the cone we have figured (Fig. 205) ; the latter is little more than a yard in height, and must have been altogether crushed by the statues, some ot them seven feet high, which stood in serried ranks about it. Where, then, are we to look for the real representative of the goddess, and for its place ? There is one way of getting over the difficulty, and that is by supposing that the building in question was not the temple itself, but one of its dependencies, a covered hall raised for the express purpose of receiving the votive offerings and securing to them a greater degree of safety than they could enjoy in the open air. Thus we find on the coin of Byblos, side by side with the great court in which the cone stands, a small closed cella which certainly belongs to the same 'whole (Fig. 19). The temple itself may well have been so constructed that it has left 1 Monuments antiques de Cvfre, pp. 47, 48. THE TEMPLE IN CYPRUS. 287 fewer traces than the thick- walled treasure-house in which these votive statues were protected from the weather, but even now, after De Vogue, Duthoit, and Cesnola, and the peasants of Athieno, have each and all turned over the soil, remains may yet exist which, if rightly questioned, would confirm or confute the hypothesis we have here ventured to put forward. The temple is generally accompanied by its diminutive, by what we should call a chapel. In a curious little terra-cotta model found at Dali (Fig. 208) we may, perhaps, be allowed to recognize a copy of one of these chapels. It represents a small square building with a doorway ornamented by an isolated, lotus-headed shaft on each side, and a flat shelf, or rudimentarv I'n;. 208. Model of a small temple in terra-cotta. Louvre. Height Si inch*. pent-house, above. In the doorway stands a kind of w T oman- headed bird, and two more women's faces peer from small windows in the sides of the model. The occurrence of the anthropoid bird suggests that the little building is funerary in its character, but there are things about it which also hint that the artist modelled his work on some building with which he was familiar. These are the shafts already mentioned and a number of small circular cavities which can hardly represent anything but holes for pigeons, the sacred bird of Astarte. We are also inclined to recognize Phoenician chapels in two chambers built of huge, roughly-dressed blocks, which still exist at Larnaca and in the neighbourhood of the prison of Salamis, the HISTORY 01 ART IN PIICKNKTA AND ITS DEPENDENCIES. most powerful ot the Greek cities in the island. The first-named is known as the Panaghia Phancromcni and is used as an oratory ; the latter is called St. Catherine s Prison. The first travellers who mention these buildings thought they were tombs, 1 but that idea has been discredited by the results of excavations at the Panaghia Phancromcni ;- the floor of the little building has been completely cleared, and in our Figs. 209 and 210 we give a plan and per- spective of it as it is now. It consists of a vestibule (v) and a covered chamber (11). In the vestible the huge blocks used in the rest of the structure (M) are replaced by smaller stones (T). It is impossible to say whether the building was originally underground, I-'iu. 209. --The I'anujliin I'lumeromeni. Plan. or whether the earth about it is the result of later accumulations (c). The covered chamber had a door to it, for the grooves into which it fitted are still to be clearly traced. The roof was formed of two huge masses of rock whose lower surfaces were cut into a flat arch. In all this there was nothing to militate against the idea of a tomb, but on clearing the floor of the chamber from the masses of earth and stone with which it was encumbered a circular basin appeared in the middle, in which a spring of water began to rise as soon as the beaten mass which held it down was removed. Now, what could a spring have to do in a tomb ? Where is such a 1 Ross, Reise auf den Griechischen Inseln., vol. iv. p. 119. CESNOLA, Cyprus, p. 49- - MAX OHNEFALSCH RICHTER, Ein altes Bauwerk bei Larnaca (Archaologische Zeitung, 1881), p. 311 and plate 18. THE TEMPLE IN CYPRUS. 289 thing to be found in any known necropolis ? It is more natural to suppose that this was a public fountain, perhaps with a religious prestige. From the neighbouring port women and sailors could come to fill their amphorae, to gossip in the coolness of the heavy roof, and, before they went, to offer up their prayers to the kindly deity, the nymph of the spring, who caused the pellucid water to bubble up just where its freshness would be most welcome. Even now, in spite of all the centuries that have rolled away, the old Phoenician oratory is a place of pilgrimage for the Greek peasants ; FIG. 210. The Panaghia Phaneromeni. Perspective. they seek it as an oracle, and the Virgin mother of Christ plays a part in their popular superstitions which would better suit Astarte. " A rough oil lamp and a few matches are placed in the middle of the little apartment. When a lover wishes to know whether his love is returned, he lights the lamp at nightfall ; if it be still burning at daybreak, his trouble is at an end ; if not, he must console himself as best he can." In all the temples water was placed within easy reach of the 1 DE MARICOURT, Saint-Cyr et Jerusalem, 8vo, p. 145. VOL. I. P P 2oo HISTORY OK ART IN 1'im NICIA AND i rs DKI-KNMM.NCII.S. faithful. Like lire, water purifies ; it takes away blemishes. The vessels which held the water required for the ritual ablutions was placed near the temple doors, like the beuiticr in a Romish church. Close to one entrance to the buildings which he describes as the temple of Golgos, General Cesnola found one of these vessels still in place. It was surrounded by a wreath of ivy, and its diameter was seven feet one inch. But the most curious object of the kind is the vessel known as the Amathus vase. This is a great basin of porous limestone, a depressed spheroid in shape, with a small Kir.. 21 1. --The Amathus vase. Louvre. Height 6 feet 2 inches. Greatest diameter 9 feet 2 inches. base and a very low neck about a circular mouth (Fig. 211). Four ornamental handles rise at regular intervals near the upper edge of the vessel. All four of these handles are shaped like moulded arches ; they each rise from two palmettes and inclose the figure of a bull turned to the spectator's right. The heads of these bulls have been intentionally mutilated. This monument, which has been in the Louvre ever since 1866, is not the only one of the kind. 1 Another was found close beside it ; this second 1 M. Vocui took possession of the Amathus vase in the name of France in 1862. In the same year a ship of war was despatched at the instance of the Directeur des Tin-; TKM'PLE IN CYPRUS. 291 example is higher than the first by sixteen inches, but it is narrower at the base, and its handles are decorated only with a simple moulding. The upper lines of both vessels were originally on the same level ; the rock on which they stood was cut so as to make up for the inferior height of the one we have figured. The taller vase was so much broken that it was left where it was found, and its fragments still point out to travellers the site of what was once, no doubt, the chief temple of Amathus. The \veight of the smaller of these two cisterns, that is, the one in Paris, is estimated at 14,000 kilogrammes, or rather less than fifteen tons. They must both have been shaped where they stand out of some block of limestone rising up above the plain. Even under such conditions the task would be no light one, but it is easy to understand why the effort was made. The hill on which the temple stood is destitute of springs, and as far as the eye can reach on every side there is no running w r ater ; and yet the purifications of the law had to be accomplished. 1 In the wet season these cisterns were filled with rain-w r ater, but during the rest of the year water had to be carried from the nearest spring or from the city reservoirs, on the backs of horses and donkeys. Large amphorse, hung on each side of the beast and stopped with a plug of grass or leaves, were used for the purpose, just as they are to-day. The mouth of these vessels was often placed so high th^t it could hardly be reached without steps, which might be either detached, and movable, or adherent to the basin, and cut out of the same block. The latter arrangement is shown in a small model o in the Louvre (Fig. 212), which is, no doubt, a votive offering presented by some faithful worshipper to whom the cost of a larger vessel was prohibitive. 2 Musccs to bring it away. Thanks to the care and skill of an officer named Magen, the difficult operation of its removal was accomplished with perfect success, and the vase, after a visit to Marseilles and Havre, whence it travelled by a flat barge on the Seine, was placed in the Louvre on July 13, 1866. See MAGEX, Le Vase cTAma- thonte, Relation de son Transport en France in the Recueil des Traraiix de la Socieie a" Agriculture, Sciences et Arts d Agen. 1 In the ceremonies attending a pilgrimage to Mecca the water of the well Zemzem plays no inconsiderable part. The pilgrims both drink it and wash in it ; a number of people gain their living by drawing the water and distributing it among them. 2 Attention has already been called to this little object by M. HEUZEV (Bulletin de la Societe des Antiquaires de France, 1871, pp. 45, 46). The Greeks called such a vessel as this 2Q- HISTORY OF ART IN PIIU.NICIA AND ITS DEPENDENCIES. There can he little doubt but that some cisterns were of bronze. The famous brazen sea, made for Solomon by Phoenician work- men, was neither more nor less than one of these vessels ; ' moreover, in the very cistern on which we have been dwelling it is easy to recognize the imitation of a bronze original. The Fir.. 212. Small model of a cistern, 3^ inches high. Louvre. handles especially are characteristic (Fig. 213). As they were only for ornament they are not pierced so as to allow the passage of the hand, but in their details it is not difficult to trace what may be called the true spirit of metal design. Look for instance at the two palmettes and the quasi-volutes which Fi<;. 213. Handle of the Amathus vase. unite them to the ends of the handles ; they embody one of the favourite motives of the worker in metal. Bronze handles from vessels that have disappeared are common in all the great museums of Europe, and if we cast our eyes over any of the series thus formed we shall find more than one example of this 1 i KIN<;S, vii. 25; 2 CHROMCI.I.S. iv. 4. THE TEMPLE IN CYPRUS. 293 very palmette. In this instance the imitation is so faithful that upon the stone (between the palmette proper and the volute) we may distinguish the rounded head of the rivet which, in the bronze, was used to attach the handle to the body of the vessel. 1 The appearance of the bull in the hollow of the handle is natural enough. Both in Egypt and Assyria he was a favourite object for the beauty of his form and for the ideas he symbolized. At Jerusalem the brazen sea was supported on the backs of twelve bulls. It is in its proportions and in the motives of its decoration that the oriental character of the Amathus vase resides, for it does not date apparently from any very remote antiquity. By their execution, the bulls in the handles offer a marked analogy with the animal engraved on the fine Cypriot coins attributed by the Due de Luynes to Salamis, and to about the year 500 B.C. ;' 2 we reproduce one here so that our readers may judge of the resemblance for themselves (Fig, 214). FIG. 214. Coin of Cyprus. Among the contents of those Cypriot temples whose treasures excited the admiration of Roman travellers, thrones were certainly included ; chairs of stone or of bronze incrusted with eold and o silver. One of the former was found by Cesnola on the site of the temple of Golgos ; 3 he gives no drawing of it, but he figures two steps of the same material which were found close to the chair. Both are ornamented on their anterior faces with bas-reliefs 1 DE LONGPERIER had already called attention to this ; we have made considerable use of his paper on the Amathus vase and have borrowed his drawing {Musee Napoleon ///.), pi. xxxiii. 2 DE LUYNES, Numismatique et Inscriptions Cypriotes, 1852, p. 19, and plate iii. I-I2. 3 CESNOLA, Cyprus, p. 159. The remains of a bronze throne were found by Cesnola in one of those chambers in which the treasure of the temple of Curium was stored (Cyprus, p. 355). Lions' heads and paws and bulls' heads formed part of its ornament ; their arrangement may be easily divined from the analogy of Assyrian pieces of furniture of the same kind (Art in Clialdwa and Assyria, Figs. 193, 199, 200, 203). 294 HISTORY OF ART IN PIKF.NKTA AND ITS DEPENDENCIES. enframed between two large rosettes ; the smaller of the two shows a lion bringing down a stag ; the larger, the fabulous Chinucra, whose home was placed by the Greeks in Lycia, the country that- faced the northern shore of Cyprus 1 (Fig. 215). Here too both animals and rosettes are of oriental aspect. The wealth accumulated in the Cyprian temples is proved not only by the words of Tacitus and the variety of objects discovered at various points in the island, but also by the famous Treasure of Curium, which was found intact by General Louis Palma di Cesnola, a discovery which is enough by itself to render his name illustrious. Never, perhaps, has explorer been more fortunate or more skilful in making the best use of his Ood fortune. We have inven an O O O account of the explorations elsewhere, and we must wait till we come to speak of Phoenician jewelry and work in the precious metals before we describe many of the objects in detail ; at FIG. 215. Stone step. F'rom Cesnola. present we have only to draw attention to a curious architectural arrangement which should be studied by all future explorers in the island. One of the temples at Curium had a true crypt (Fig-. 216), which was reached by a staircase leading to a low and narrow corridor (A A) ; the latter gave access to four semi-circular chambers (c, i), E, F) hollowed in the limestone rock and communicating with one another by doorways (B B). Beyond the last of these chambers there was another narrow^ corridor, but the air in it was so bad that the excavators had to retire without exploring it to the end. The first three chambers were all the same size ; i -\ feet 8 \j inches high, by 23 feet 3 inches long, and 21 feet 4 inches wide. The fourth (F) was a little smaller. The booty found in these 1 See HOMER, Iliad, vi. 181. THE TEMPLE ix CYPRUS. -95 four rooms surpassed all hope. Never had so many jewels, in which the materials were so rich and the styles so varied, been before encountered. There were bracelets of massive gold, two of them weighing each but little short of a pound ; several others weighed from ten to twelve ounces. Gold was found, indeed, in profusion and in all kinds of forms : rings, ear-rings, amulets, little boxes and bottles, hair-pins, necklaces ; silver was still more abundant in jewelry and in dishes ; neither was electrum, the alloy of gold and silver, absent ; objects of rock crystal, of carnation, of onyx, of agate, of every variety of hard and precious stone, and of glass, were found, as well as soft stone cylinders, statuettes of terra-cotta, earthenware vases and bronze lamps, candelabra, FIG. 216. Plan of the crypt at Curium. Erom Cesnoln. chairs, vases, weapons, &c. A certain order was perceptible in the way this treasure was stored. The jewels of gold were found chiefly in the first chamber ; in the second the silver dishes were ranged on a shelf cut in the rock about eight inches above the floor. Unhappily these were much more seriously injured by oxidization than the gold, and from the mass of metal that fell into dust as soon as touched, only a small number of those bowls or cups, which have lately roused so much curiosity among archae- ologists, were saved. The third room contained a few bronze lamps and fibulae, some alabaster vases, and a great number of earthenware vessels and statuettes. In the fourth there were bronze utensils, with several of copper and iron among them, and, "96 HISTORY OF ART IN PIKKNK IA AND ITS DEPENDENCIES. in the partly explored passage at the end seven bronze kettles or cauldrons. Even more precious, however, than the materials employed is the great variety of methods in \vhich they are used, showing that all these objects are by no means identical in their local origin. 1 Some scarabs in steatite seem to be of Egyptian provenance ; upon one of them we may recognize the oval of Thothmes III. A certain number of cylinders are certainly Assyrian and Chal- dajan. Several, by their symbols and cuneiform inscriptions, appear to belong to the epoch of the Sargonids, that is, to the seventh century before our era. Others, to which by their execution, symbolism, and mounting, a Phoenician origin may be certainly ascribed, are very numerous. Many of the intaglios may fairly be placed among the oldest and most curious produc- tions of the glyptic artists of Greece. The jewels proper often show much invention, combined with an astonishing finesse and delicacy of execution ; some of them are so graceful that they deserve a place among the masterpieces of the oriental goldsmiths, and of those of Greece in her archaic period. We shall have an opportunity hereafter of studying these things more carefully. Our present object is to give an idea of the number, value, and variety of the treasures contained in this curious depot. They were not placed there to amuse amateurs or to edify archaeologists, but none the less do they constitute a veritable museum, in which artists may compare the styles of various schools, may admire fine workmanship and grasp the secret of the processes by which it is turned out. Until these chambers were explored we only knew the temple treasures from those documents engraved upon marble, in which an inventory of the votive objects contained in some of chief Grecian sanctuaries, at Athens for example, and Delos, is drawn up. Succinct as they are, these lists enabled us to realise how greatly those sacred collections must have favoured the development of art and taste ; how much more, then, should we be able to learn from the objects themselves, now that they can be closely examined, weighed, and described ! The value of the temple collections as schools of art can 1 See, in the appendices to Cyprus, the description given by C. W. KING, of Trinity College, Cambridge, of the intaglios upon metal and stone contained in this treasure (The Rings and Gems in the Treasure at Curium}. THE TEMPLE IN CYPRUS. 29; nowhere have been greater than in Cyprus ; nowhere can these exhibitions, as we may fairly call them, have offered a greater variety than in the shrines of an island which the Greeks began to frequent at a very early period, shrines which were thus loaded for centuries with the gifts of two different races. Egypt, Chaldrea, and Assyria had no secrets from the Phoenicians ; in their countless voyages, the latter must have become acquainted with everything those countries produced which could by any means be turned to the honour of their own gods, and a little later, when the originality of the Greek genius began to assert itself, visitors from Greece came in their turn to offer the best works of their native artisans to those gods w r hom they were seeking to appropriate to their own use. If the treasure of the great Paphian sanctuary had, by some happy chance, been preserved to us, what a variety of styles, what a number of curious and even marvellous works of art we should have found! It would have sufficed to arrange the objects in some kind of order, to have before us a history of ancient art, as told by the monuments themselves, which would have enabled us to follow the happy borrowings and fertile contacts which so greatly helped the task of the Greeks, and saved them so much priceless time. This good fortune has been denied us. The temple whose treasure was recovered by General di Cesnola was less celebrated and therefore less rich than that of Paphos. Perhaps it w?s not even the principal temple of Curium. That city could boast of a sanctuary of Apollo which, according to what Strabo says of it, must have enjoyed a certain importance ; l but according to the evidence gathered by General di Cesnola, it is not unlikely that its site was at a different point in the area occupied by the city, and far enough from the ruins the subtructures of which had such a delightful surprise in store. 2 In that case we do not even know the character and name of the god to whom Cesnola's temple was consecrated. We are told that Curium was a Greek city, an Argive colony ; 3 it is certain that the Greek element won the upper hand there in time ; but tradition said that its founder was a son of Cineras, 4 and to Greek annalists Cineras was a personifi- cation of the Phoenician race. It would seem possible, therefore, 1 STRABO, xiv. vi. 3. 2 CESXOLA, Cyprus, pp. 342, 343. 3 STRABO, xiv. vi. 3 HERODOTUS, v. 113. 4 STEFHANVS BVZANTINUS, s. v. Km'pior. VOL. I. Q Q 298 HISTORY OF ART IN PHCENICIA AND ITS DEPENDENCIES. that a Phoenician settlement preceded the Argive colony at Curium, and that long after the Greeks had taken possession of the place it had a numerous Semitic population. This conjecture is to a certain extent confirmed by the fact that in the fifth century, when the chief Grecian cities in the island rebelled against Darius, Stesenor, king of Curium, betrayed the national cause and frater- nized with the Phoenician kings of the south-west and the Persian army. 1 However this may be, we find that at Curium, although a few objects, such as a fine terra-cotta vase and some jewels and engraved stones, are Greek in their origin, the great mass of the treasure is of oriental, i.e. of Cypriot and Phoenician, manufacture. The intaglios in metal and. pietra-dura form one of the richest and most interesting sections of the collection, and by far the larger number of them are of Assyrian, Egyptian, or Phoenician work- manship. From this we may fairly conclude that the influence of Greek taste had scarcely begun to make itself felt in the island, even in many of the Greek colonies, when the vault was closed. Why and when did the closure take place ? This is a difficult question to answer, but it is one which the archaeologist cannot pass over in silence. We agree with General di Cesnola that the treasure cannot as a rule have been kept in the four chambers in which it was found. 2 These are paved with round blueish pebbles set in a bed of cement, beneath which there is a layer of sand. This method of making a floor is still in use in the better houses in the island. But in spite of it the room at Curium must always have been very damp ; most of the vases and other utensils of copper or silver have been reduced to dust. And when a faithful worshipper offered either his own image or some object of value to his deity, it was not that it might be put away in a subterranean cellar, where no one would see it and where it might be forgotten by the god himself. Even in those days men liked their piety and generosity to bring them immediate honour. When Eteandros, king of Paphos, consecrated two heavy golden bracelets (Fig. 217), in the temple of Curium, and engraved his name and title upon them in Cypriot characters, 3 his intention was that his name 1 HERODOTUS, v. 113. 2 CESNOLA, Cyprus, p. 305. 3 The inscription is hardly perceptible in our woodcut because it is traced in the interior of the circle, where the shadow comes. THE TEMPLE IN CYPRUS. 299 should be read by those who visited the sanctuary, and that his offering should be placed before the eyes of the god to whom it was presented. We can hardly doubt, therefore, that these four chambers with their connecting passage formed a crypt or hiding place in which the more valuable property of the temple could be concealed on any sudden alarm. 1 They were cut in the living rock and covered by the flooring of the temple. The only access was by a low and narrow passage, which could easily be filled up with earth ; the whole arrangement was well contrived to protect the treasures of the god against a sudden surprise, against the impatient violence of soldiers flushed with victory. We know too little of the internal history of Cyprus to be able to say at what moment and by fear of what danger the priests of FIG. 217. Gold bracelet. Weight 449 grammes. From Cesnola. the temple were driven to bury their valuables. The struggle with Persia in 500 suggests itself. Curium entered into the coalition of cities associated with the revolt of Ionia, and when she heard that Darius had passed considerable forces into the island with the help of the Phoenician fleet, she may well have taken the alarm and placed her treasures beyond the reach of profanation. She did not yet suspect that her king, Stesenor, would buy his own pardon and that of his subjects by treason on the field of battle. The first difficulty this explanation meets with 1 In Greece the temple of Delphi had underground cellars which were used for the same purpose. Strabo tells us that, during the sacred war, Onomarchus sent men down there to bring away the treasures hidden in the crypts ; but the earth quaked and the terrified workmen abandoned their task before they had well begun it (ix. iii. 8). 300 HISTOKV OK ART IN PIKKXICIA AND ITS DEPENDENCIES. lies in the fact that the treasure was not restored to its place in the temple. That so many priceless objects should have been left neglected is only to be explained, so far as we can see, by suppos- ing that the town was taken and sacked, and that all those officers of the temple who knew of the secret hiding-place and its contents were slain. But from what Herodotus tells us as to the part played by Curium in that campaign, we cannot believe that such a disaster should have overtaken a city whose prince had just rendered so great a service to the Persian satrap. Again, among the intaglios found in these subterranean chambers there are some o which I am inclined to ascribe to the fifth rather than to the sixth century B.C. ; they show hardly a trace of archaism ; the nude is treated with much ease and freedom ; the female nude especially is presented in attitudes which imply much familiarity with the subject. 1 As we have begun to guess, why should we not go on ? May we not suppose that the treason of Stesenor excited the fury of the Greeks in the island, and especially at Salamis, and that when, towards the middle of the fifth century, Cimon appeared with his victorious fleet in Cyprian waters, Curium was besieged and sacked by its neighbours ? The collection includes one or two intaglios of such an advanced style of execution that we might at a pinch bring down the closing of the vaults to the time of Evagoras. At that period, again, the island was torn by san- guinary conflicts between the partisans of Persia and those who stood out for national independence, and between the two Curium may have paid dearly for the fault of a century before. In any case it appears that a certain tradition of the buried treasure survived, for the mosaic pavement of the temple had been pierced at several points, and Cesnola was able to trace excavations to a depth of from six to seven feet which, being ill directed, came to an end against the rocky foundations. His suspicions were, in fact, aroused by these abortive pits. 2 The floor in their neighbourhood sounded hollow, and by turning the 1 Mr. KING, in his attempt at a catalogue of the intaglios in the treasure of Curium, thinks that the series which he endeavours to establish embraces a period extending from the very beginnings of the glyptic art to the commencement of the fifth century before our era (CLSNOLA, Cyprus, p. 354). He calls particular attention to the following intaglios figured in Cesnola's work : Plate xxxix. 5, 6, 7, 8 ; and plate xl. 12 and 13. i.A, Cyprus, p. 30.? THE TEMPLES OF Gozo AND MALTA. ?oi obstacle which had stopped his predecessors and digging much deeper, he arrived at the hiding-place which they had missed. Evidently the first explorer had not belonged to the personne I of the temple. He was not one of the priests or servants who, at the first alarm, had carried every precious object into the crypt and arranged them there in an order which proves that the operation was not hastily carried out, but completed at leisure by men who thought the necessity for concealment would soon be over. But their hopes were vain, and it is probable that every man about the temple perished in the massacre, carrying with him the secret of these vaulted chambers. We dare not pretend to regret their death, but let us at least join the archaeologist who has described the intaglios from Curium with such loving care, 1 in rendering our tribute to the memory of those faithful guardians who took such efficient means to preserve the wealth of their god from sacrilege. 3. 772e Temples of Gozo and Malta. We have already had occasion to quote the Phoenician monu- ments found at Malta (Figs. 28 and 46). That island and its neighbouring islet of Gaulos, now Gozo, were the first points to be occupied by the Tyrians and Sidonians when they began to frequent the central basin of the Mediterranean. W T e do not know whether they were the first inhabitants or not, but it is certain that the peculiarities of the situation caused them to colonise the islands in force. When Carthage took up the heritage of Tyre in the western Mediterranean, Malta became one of her naval stations, and even when the fortune of war brought Malta and Gozo under the Roman standard, the o Phoenician language continued to be written and spoken in them, as we know from the inscriptions on some of the coins and still more from the types which most of them bear (see Fig. 218). The Italian merchants and magistrates must have introduced Latin, but perhaps it had not entirely superseded the Semitic idiom even when, at the end of the ninth century of our era, the 1 KING, in Cesnola's Cyprus, p. 387. o^- HISTORY OF ART IN PHOENICIA AND ITS DEPENDENCIES. island fell for two hundred years into the hands of the Arabs. 1 The latter would therefore have no difficulty in ingrafting their own tongue upon that of the islanders, and to this day Arabic forms the basis of the very peculiar dialect spoken by the inhabitants of the little archipelago. Twice, therefore, in its history Malta has been an advanced port for Oriental or African powers, once when the Phoenicians attempted to bring all the coasts of Italy and Sicily within their grasp, and again in the middle ages, when it had mosques and minarets from whose summits the muezzin proclaimed the still widening faith of Mahomet. The existence far into the full flush of Graico-Roman civil- ization of temples in which everything, idols, rites, and archi- tecture, was Semitic and Oriental, is proved by inscriptions. One of the most curious Phoenician texts extant mentions the FIG. 2lS. Coin of Malta. Bronze. From Uuruy.* construction of three or four sanctuaries by the people of Gozo. 8 One was raised to the glory of Sadambaal, a second in honour of Astarte ; chips in the marble have removed the name of a third divinity, perhaps of a fourth. But whatever the number may have been, the names of Sadambaal and Astarte are enough 1 In the Acts of the Apostles (xxviii. 2} the inhabitants of Malta, on to which St. Paul was carried by the tempest, are called barbarians by the sacred writer ; we may infer from that that Paul and his companions were surprised to find in the peasants and fishermen by whom they were saved and warmed at a great fire people who spoke neither Greek nor Latin. As for their Semitic dialect, it was, no doubt, so much altered that a Jew could not understand it. 2 The inscription MEAITAK2N is Greek, but the types are both quite Oriental in character. On one side we find Isis, with an Egyptian head-dress, and one of those symbols which are continually met with on the votive steles of Tanit from Carthage. On the reverse we find one of those winged deities, with the points of their wings urned up, which also occur so often on Carthaginian steles (Fig. 187) and Phoenician coins (GERHARD, Gesammelte Abhandlungen, plate 43). 3 Corpus Inscriptionum Semi/icarum, pars i. No. 132. THE TEMPLES OF Gozo AND MALTA. 303 to show that no gods of the Greek pantheon are in question. The text, without being very old, is apparently no later than the end of the third Punic war. Taking a mean between the extreme dates proposed, we may place the works it was meant to record at about the middle of the third century before our era. By a curious coincidence the ruins of two buildings obviously religious in their character have been discovered on this very soil of Gozo. Such a small island can hardly have been blessed with many temples, so that we may fairly guess that in these remains we see all that is left of two of the temples referred to in the in- scription. Not that the point is of any great importance ; long before this inscription was discovered and translated the buildings in question were recognised as temples. The only mistake made by the explorers who first drew attention to them was in taking au sdrieux the name given to them by the peasants, the Giganteia, or "giant's building." 1 This name led them to credit the ruins with a prodigious antiquity, and even to half accept them as the work of a race of giants who inhabited the island before the arrival of the Phoenician colonists, perhaps before the flood ! Such dreams are to be explained and excused by the want of all points of comparison. The ancient monuments of Syria were as yet hardly known, and explorers came to their conclusions without knowing how fond the Phoenicians were of materials of extravagant size, and how they inoculated all the peoples with whom they cim^ in contact with that taste. In the Giganteia, as in soms of the ruins in Malta itself, there are stones from ten to twenty feet long, and of proportional height and width (Fig. 2 1 g). 2 Such dimensions might well astonish the agriculturists of Gozo, who were accus- tomed to build with mere chips of stone ; but they will seem modest enough to those who have stood before the walls of 1 During the last eighty years these ruins have been often drawn and studied. A list of these successive explorations is given in CARUANA (Report on the PJmnidan and Roman Antiquities in the Group of the Islands of Malta, 8vo, Malta, 1882). This report, which was drawn up under the orders of the English governor by the keeper of the public library, gives a sufficiently accurate statement of the present condition of these monuments. We gather from it that the so-called Giganteia has suffered much during the last fifty years. Many curious parts of the structure are no longer in existence which were there in 1834, when Albert de la Marmora made the drawings which we reproduce. For the history of the monument and its present state see the Report, pp. 7-9. 2 Our figs. 219 and 220 have been engraved from a photograph sent to us by M. Dugit, Dean of the Faculte des Lettres of Grenoble. 304 HISTORY OK ART IN I'IKKMCIA AND ITS DEPENDENCIES. Arvad, of the Haram-ech-Cherif, at Jerusalem, or before the famous trilithon of Baalbek. Another mania that possessed these same workmen was for applying to dressed stone the processes with which they attacked the living rock. From a single stone they would cut an entire column or even doorway, things which else- where would be made up of various different members ; J now, we could hardly name a more remarkable instance of this tendency than the doorway leading into a hall in one of the temples of Malta. It has neither jamb nor lintel. It has been cut with the chisel through a huge slab of limestone kept in place by a pair of tall uprights (Fig. 220). If we examine the general arrangements of these temples at Gozo and Malta, we find in them none of the features which dis- tinguish the religious buildings raised by the Greeks and Romans ; the whole spirit of their construction is Phoenician. Of this our readers may judge from the plans, sections, and details we are about to give of the two best preserved of these monuments : the Giganteia of Gozo and the Hagiar Kim, or "stones of adoration," which are to be found at Malta, near the village of Casal Crendi. The Giganteia comprises two temples close together, but without any direct communication from one to the other. Their doorways face westwards and open through a long wall which binds them to each other, forming a facade for both (Fig. 221) ; the axes of the two buildings are parallel and their plans are almost identical, but their dimensions are by no means the same. The more northern building is much the larger; we may guess that it was dedicated to the more powerful of the two deities here worshipped. Each temple consists of two halls communicating by a narrow passage; their shape is an elongated ellipse. In line with the outer door and with the passage between the two halls the building ends in each case in a small apse, or hemicycle, the floor of which is raised slightly above that of the chamber from which it opens. In each of the lateral apses there is a similar dais, giving to the whole a certain resemblance to the choir and side chapels of a modern Roman Catholic church (Fig. 222). It is probable that a barrier formerly separated these raised platforms from the public part of the hall. The right apse in the first hall was reached by a flight of semicircular steps, projecting out into the body of the chamber. 1 See above, p. 109. VOL. I. THE TEMPLES OF Gozo AND MALTA. 307 It was here that the most unmistakable traces of the ancient worship, a worship in which the divinity was represented by the same emblem as at Byblos and Paphos, were found. The cone (Fig. 223) had been overturned but its site was easy to recognize. This was a sort of pavilion at each side of which stood a stone upright, like those figured on the Phoenician and Cyprian coins to which we have already alluded. Two heads, roughly carved FH;. 220. Door\\ ay in the temple of Hagiar Kim, at Malta. in the local stone, were found lying upon the ground in the larger temple not far from the cone. Their cheeks were enframed in a long veil, and they resembled to some extent the heads on the Egyptian Canopic vases. 1 The whole building is 440 feet in circumference and eighty-eight feet in greatest length, internal measurement. Its greatest width is seventy-six feet eight inches, and its width across the outer hall 1 LA MARMORA, p. 13, and plate i. figs./, and/ 1 . 3oS HISTORY OK ART IN PHCKNICIA AND ITS DEPENDENCIES. fifty-three feet eight inches. There is no sign of any kind of roof. The sacred emblem alone seems to have been protected against the weather ; and the rest of the building was open to the sky. In the right hand apse of the second chamber there is a basin cut in the rock which forms the floor ; it was used, no doubt, for ablutions. Some quadrangular blocks which stand up through the soil in the same chamber must have been altars. In front of the apse in the first hall the stones are covered with an elaborate decoration of spirals and of bosses in the shape of women's breasts Kir,. 221. Plan of the Gigantcia at (Jozo. From La Marmora. with a hole in the centre. 1 On one block a snake or an eel-shaped fish is chiselled. 2 We shall again encounter this same barbaric decoration at Hagiar Kim. The second temple, situated to the south of the one just described, is less interesting ; the floors of the apses lie at the same level as that of the central passage. There are neither altars nor elaborately carved stones. Either the building was 1 LA MARMORA, plate i. figs. m. and . '' Ibid, plate i. fig. g. O THE TEMPLES OF Gozo AND MALTA. intended to be less elaborate than the first or it was never finished (Fig. 224). The method of construction at the Gigantcia is identical with that at Hagiar Khu ; we find the same irregularity and the same use of huge blocks in both. One block, marked c on the plan Fin. 223. The cone of the Giganteia. Height about 40 inches. Fr.mi La Marmora. (Fig. 225), and the largest in the building, is twenty-two feet six inches long, ten feet eleven inches high, and three feet seven inches wide. One great pier is twenty feet three inches high. 1 The plan is more complicated than that of the temples at Gozo, but the FIG. 224. The Giganteia, longitudinal section of the second temple through the line n M. From La Marmora. same fondness for ellipsoids is to be traced in the shapes both of the building as a whole and of the separate chambers. There! 1 We borrow these particulars from the first description ever given of these ruins : it was published after the excavation of 1840 under the title: Description of an Ancient Temple near Crendi, Ma I fa, in a Letter from J. G. Vance to M. Carlisle, in the Archceologia, vol. xxix. pp. 227-240. This description is accompanied by six wretched plates. Not long afterwards attention was called to the same ruins by M. CH. LEXORMAXT, who spoke of them in a letter addressed to M. Cesar Daly at the beginning of one of his voyages to the East (Monuments phenieiens de. Malic. in the Revue gencrale de P Architecture et des Trareaux publics, 1841, p. 497 and plate 21). Our plan and the details of Hagiar Kim which we here reproduce are taken from the plates in M. Caruana's Report and from the photographs given with it. ^u HISTORY OF ART IN PIKKNICIA AND ITS DEPENDENCIES. seem to have been two entrances, and seven apses may still be traced ; symmetry suggests an eighth which we have ventured to indicate by dotted lines. In the two principal chambers (A and n) the semicircular parts seem to have been divided from the rest. Our plan shows a line of masonry, a single course, which may either have been used to retain an elevated dais or to support a screen ; in any case, it forms a line of demarcation between what we should call the nave and the choir. If these two saloons had V $> TO^-ssc f Fi<;. 225. Plan of the temple of linear Kim, Malta. From Carunnn. no companions the plan would not sensibly differ from that of the Gigantcia; the only difference would lie in the omission of the corridor, which, in the Gozo temples, leads from one room to the other. We may be allowed to guess that the four chambers to the left of A and i; are later additions. They may have afforded accommodation for the worship of secondary deities, and to their construction may be due the disappearance of the second apse of hall B. Two of these new chambers (E and D) have recesses in their side walls, which appear to have been what we should call THE TEMPLES OF Gozo AND MALTA. chapels ; they were each covered with a single flat stone, the only trace of a roof to be found in the whole building. The chief sanctuary seems to have been in the first of the two great halls. An effort at decoration seems here to have been made, and several curious fragments have been found among the debris. The whole of the walls are covered with an ornament made up of a multitude of small holes, in which some people have chosen to see an imitation of the star-sprinkled vault of heaven (Fig. 226). : Such an explanation is, perhaps, more ingenious than well founded ; is it not more simple to suppose that the general effect was agreeable to those early architects ? A similar decoration FIG. 226. Interior of the temple of Hagiar Kiin. From Caraana. has been observed in certain parts of the temple at Gozo. 2 These myriads of stabs are no more, in our opinion, than a decoration suggested by the same ideas and carried out on the same principle as the carefully chiselled joints of which, as we have already seen, other workmen of the same race were so fond. This same decoration occurs on two fragments picked up in the principal hall at Hagiar Kim (A), and now preserved in the public library of Malta. One of the two is a slab with a decoration resembling that of one of the stones of the Giganteia. Below a 1 CARUAXA, Report, pp. 10, u. - LA MARMORA, plate i. fig. h. VOL. I. S S 314 HISTORY OK ART IN PIKKNICIA AND ITS DKPF.NDEXCIKS. slightly salient band or fillet hangs a conical or egg-shaped excrescence llankecl on either side by a pendant spiral like the hook of a pastoral staff (Fig. 227). In this, too, a symbol has been discovered, and some have pretended to see in it a figurative representation of the world springing from an egg. 1 If that were his meaning we can hardly congratulate the stone-cutter on the clarity with which he has expressed his thoughts. Why was he satisfied with half an egg, and why did he hide that half between those two eye-filling volutes ? To us it seems to be nothing more than an ornamental motive ; a roiifrhlv-su"ested G( rcr between o ^ oo oo two of those huge spirals which play such a conspicuous part in all primitive systems of decoration ; we shall meet it in force in the art of Mycenae FIG. 227. Decorated stone, from Hagiar Kim. From Caruana. The second monument found in this hall is an altar of very singular shape (Fig. 228). The most curious thing about it is the vertical concavity which takes up so much of its anterior face. In this hollow a not unskilful chisel has carved a sort of shrub with leaves symmetrically arranged, which seems to spring from a box. The Maltese decorator, probably a village mason, has copied some familiar plant, just as the ceramists of Thera, lalysos and Mycense were wont to do ; and yet the mystic speculations of a Philo and a Damascius have been ransacked to discover some profound mean- ing in his work, and to turn his humble but effective ornament into a sacred tree. In the same enclosure, and not far from the altar we have described, several more of much simpler form were discovered. Of one we catch a glimpse in Fig. 226 ; it is mushroom-shaped, 1 CARUANA Report, pp. 10, u. THE TEMPLES OF Gozo AND MALTA. and deserves to figure on a larger scale (Fig. 229) on account of its resemblance to a type of altar often met with in Syria (Fig. 191). Here as at Gozo the fragments of a cone have been found ; its base instead of being elliptic, as at the Giganteia,is circular. 1 In this same room (A) seven small figures carved in the local limestone were picked up ; they are now in the Library of Valetta. In the absence of anything that may be called an attribute it is difficult to decide whether these are votive statuettes or idols, or, as the Maltese scholars think, the seven Cabeiri. 2 Their heads have dis- appeared ; they were probably metal additions for there are no FIG. 228. Altar. Hagiar Kim, Height 2%\ inches. Diameter of its table 14^ inches. From Caruana. marks of breakage. At the neck there is simply a hollow, and, in two of the figures, a pair of small sockets. The workmanship is so rough that it is difficult to determine the sex. Most of the statuettes are nude (Fig. 230), but two seem to be dressed in long robes (Fig. 231) ; some are seated, others crouched on their heels. At the back of one a long tress of hair falls to the feet. At first sight the fullness of the chest seems to hint at the feminine gender, but there is no certain indication. All the figures are fat to deformity. The sculptor, if we may give him such a title, has wished thus to suggest that his gods or his men, as the case may be, were beings 1 LA MARMORA, plate ii. figs. 9, 10. 2 CARUAXA. Report, p. 30. HISTORY OF ART IN PIKV.NICIA AND ITS DEPENDENCIES. of great power. The execution is incredibly rough. The hands and feet are not modelled at all. The limbs end in shapeless stumps. FIG. 229. Altar. Hagiar Kim. Malta. Height 38 inches. From Caruana. Hagiar Kim is not the only temple whose ruins still exist in Malta; the remains of a building, not unlike the Giganteia in its arrangements, are to be encountered not much more than half a. mile off, at a place called Mnaidra. 1 It includes two pairs of oval FIG. 230. Statuette. Height 7 inches. From Caruana. chambers, in which stand more than one of those mushroom-shaped altars which have been found at Hagiar Kim, Some remains of a still larger building exist at Bordj-en-Nadur, near the harbour of Marsa Scirocco ; 2 it was long used as an open quarry by the knights 1 CARUAXA, Report, pp. 14-17. 2 /^ p p _ 17-19. THE TEMPLES OF Gozo AND MALTA. of St. John, and now hardly anything is left of it beyond the wall of which we have already given a wood-cut (Fig. 46). This wall surrounds an apse whose dimensions suggest larger rooms than those of the other temples. A marble pavement and some shafts of columns have been rescued at different times from the dddns. The two marble cippi with inscriptions to Melkart came from these ruins (Fig. 28), l whence it has been reasonably concluded that the temple was dedicated to that god, and was, perhaps, the chief religious building in the island. Finally, there are some more ruins of the same character on the slope of the Corradino hill, close to the great harbour. In 1840 excavations, too soon abandoned, laid bare the entrance and two apses. 2 FIG. 231. Statuette. Height 8| inches. From Carnana. Our readers may be surprised at our insistance on monuments in which the art is so poor, but we had our reasons for treating them at length. They are little known ; several of them are really well preserved, at least in parts, while they furnish us with authentic if not elegant types of that religious architecture of the Phoenicians of which we know so little. When we compare the temples of Gozo and Malta with those of Cyprus and Phoenicia proper we only find one feature peculiar to the former, and that is the love of the Maltese architect for the elongated ellipse and its conse- quence, an apse-shaped sanctuary. 3 With that exception we find 1 Corpus Inscriptionum Semiticarum, pars i. Nos. 122 and 122 bis. 2 CARUANA, Report, pp. 19, 20. 3 Some of the temples of the great Syrian goddess were also of this shape. A painting at Pompeii represents a semicircular pavilion with a great cone in the centre (Roux, Herculaneum et Pompei, 5th series, vol. iii. pp. 16-22, and plate vii.) 3i8 HISTORY OF ART IN PIKKNICIA AND ITS DEPENDENCIES. all the features encountered in the Levant, the same irregular masonry, the same huge units, the same liking for worship in the open air, the same altars and isolated piers, finally, the same emblem in the place of honour, the sacred cone. The similarities are striking and the differences are much the same o as those we should find between a village church and a great cathedral. In spite of its advantageous situation Malta was too small to become, especially in antiquity, an important centre of population. In the fine season, when merchant fleets and ships of war lay in the ports of the archipelago, all was life and animation ; captains and seamen escaped from the perils of the deep, carried their offerings to Melkart, Esmoun, and Astarte, and some of these offerings, like the cippi on which the names of Abdosir and Osirsamar appear, were of considerable value ; l but their number and richness did not raise the sanctuaries of the island above their station as provincial and even rustic temples, constructed and decorated by a community of peasants, fishermen, and small traders. The great want of the Maltese was not material re- sources but refined taste ; they had plenty of excellent stone, stone which at the present day is exported to Tunis and there largely employed, but they were without the models and practical in- struction in their use which the natives of Cyprus owed to their proximity to Egypt, to Syria, and to the cities of Greece. 4. The Temples of Sicily and Carthage. While, by a singular chance, Malta and Gozo have handed down to us several Phoenician temples in which both the general arrangements and not a few accessories of the cult may still be traced, nothing remains of the far richer and more important sanctuaries raised by the Syrians, and still more by their Car- thaginian cousins, on the shores of Sicily. The existence of these shrines is proved only by numerous passages in ancient authors and by the existence of a few votive steles, the last remains of the mass of votive offerings accumulated in them by the piety of many generations. Nothing is left of the famous temple in which Astarte was worshipped as Erck-Hayim, literally " long-life," that 1 Corpus Inscriptionum Semilicarum, pars i. Nos. 122 and 122 bis. THE TEMPLES OF SICILY AND CARTHAGE. 319 is to say the " goddess who gives a long life," whence the name Eryx, given to the town by the Greeks of Sicily and used by all the classic writers. Of this temple we know only that it was built on the very top of the mountain, within a strong wall which crowned its slopes and defended its summit (Fig. 34). Of the vast collection of monuments which it must have possessed the only thing that has survived is a stele with an inscription referring to some building executed within its precincts by a certain Himilco, son of Baaljatho. 1 Lilybaeum, on the site of the modern Marsala, seems to have had a temple to Ammon ; this we infer from a curious stele quite recently discovered (Fig. 232). - It bears a short dedication signed by a personage calling himself Hanno, son of Adonbaal. But the chief interest of the monument lies in the bas-relief on its upper part. In the' middle of the field stands one of those candelabra of which we have already given examples taken from Carthaginian steles (Figs. 82 and 83) ; to the left is the sacred cone, here represented with head and arms as on the coins of certain Asiatic towns ; near the cone stands a caduceus, on the right there is a man adoring. He is dressed in a robe falling to the feet and gathered in a band about the waist ; a pointed cap is on his head. The whole thing is without value as a work of art, but it gives a good idea of the Phoenician costume, a costume which resembles that still worn in the Levant by those Greek, Syrian, and Armenian merchants who have not yet adopted the costume of Europe. 3 Several votive inscriptions have been found in Sardinia which allow us to infer that there were Phoenician sanctuaries on that island also; 4 they bear the names Baal Sama'im or Baal of the skies, of Astarte-Erek-Hayim, of JEsmoun, of Baal-Ammon, of Elat. Some steles, found mostly in the tombs of Sulcis, confirm this conjecture. On many of them Astarte may be recognised as a female figure in a long robe and an Egyptian head-dress. She 1 Corpus Inscriptionum Semiticarum, pars i. No. 135. The text of the inscription has,-unfortunately, been lost for the last two hundred years, and we know it only by two ancient copies which leave much to be desired. 2 Ibid. No. 138. 3 Conf. the worshipper on the Carthaginian stele figured above (fig. 13) and another on a stele given below (Fig. 305). 4 Corpus Inscriptionum Semiticarum, pars i. Nos. 139-141, 143, 147-149, 151. 320 HISTORY OF ART IN PIKFNICIA AND ITS DEPENDENCIES. holds the lunar disk in both hands and appears to offer it for adoration. One of these steles must date from the very com- mencement of the Phoenician occupation (Fig. 233) ; its base is like a truncated pyramid or one of the towers of a pylon ; the FIG. 232. Stele from Lilybaeum. Corpus, plate 29. pedestal on which the goddess stands and the pavilion under which she is sheltered have the same form, while the whole is crowned with a frieze of ursei. The upper gorge bears a globe THE TEMPLES OF SICILY AND CARTHAGE. without wings. The same arrangement is found in many other steles, but with variations and differences in execution which prove that all these monuments by no means belong to the same century. 1 In any case this worship and the divine type con- secrated by it had not fallen into disuse even at the time of the Roman conquest ; this is proved by several steles which, by their chronological order, would come at the end of the series. The columns which enframe the pavilion are classic, but in one stele at least motives entirely Phoenician are mingled with the distinc- tive features of the Ionic order (Fig. 193). The winged globe occupies the centre of a cornice with a purely Greek profile, but FIG. 233. Stele from Sulcis. Height 28 inches. From Crespi. above that cornice again appears a row of ureei. In another stele from the same place (Fig. 194), we are inclined to see a relic of the worship of Baal-Hammon. High in the field we see a disk embraced by a crescent ; lower down, an animal walking to the left. This animal certainly looks more like a sheep than a ram ; it has no horns, but their absence may be explained by the general roughness of the work. Nothing has been found that we can recognize as ruins of the buildings in which these gods were adored. The temple of CRESPI, Catalogo, plate i. Nos. i, 8, 10, and n. VOL. I. T T 322 HISTORY OF ART IN PHOENICIA AND ITS DEPENDENCIES. Melkart at Gades had a great reputation in the time of Strabo, 1 but now \ve do not even know its site. In Carthaginian Africa no temples earlier than the Roman Conquest have been found, but various signs prove that it pos- sessed buildings whose decorations had certain features in common o with those in other parts of greater Phoenicia. Here, for instance, FIG. 234. Lintel at Ebba. Limestone. Height 55 inches. is a lintel which is at present doing duty as a doorpost at Ebba, to the south of Kef (Fig. 234). The sockets for the hinges may still be traced. But the curious thing about it is that it bears, between two lotus buds, those symbols to which we have already drawn 1 STRABO, iii. v. 3, 5, 9. THE TEMPLES OF SICILY AND CARTHAGE. attention as a kind of blazon proper to Phoenician art, the solar disk here with a crown of rays and the crescent moon. In a neighbouring district, at Djezza, among the ruins of a Byzantine fort, a very curious and original capital may be seen (Fig. 235). It is of the Ionic order but the familiar elements are arranged in very novel fashion. The proportions are neither Greek nor Roman. The volutes are applied to the faces of a cubical calathos, from which they do not stand out on any side. The hollow beneath the egg moulding may once have been filled with a bronze astragal. The influence of classic types is here very strong but in its broad effect this capital is like nothing so much FIG. 235. -Capital at Djezza. Limestone. Drawn by Saladin. Height with astragal 20 inches. Diameter of the lower part 18 inches. as those Cypriot caps of which we have already given so many examples (Figs. Si-53)- 1 Even at Carthage itself there is no more satisfaction for our curiosity. Taken twice by the Romans, all buildings anterior to the victory of Scipio have utterly disappeared. Its demolition was begun by order of the senate in 146, and, under the empire, it was rebuilt in the style of the time upon the ancient site, a century and a half the ruins of Carthage served as a quarry for i We owe our thanks to M. Saladin for the drawings of these two fragments The faces of the capital are not parallel, and the one here shown is nc the remaining three. 324 HISTORY OK ART IN PIKKNICIA AND ITS DEPENDENCIES. the neighbouring cities, and when its reconstruction was deter- mined on, such of the ancient materials as remained were either reworked and impressed with the taste of the day or dispersed far and wide. Some of them might, no doubt, be recovered, if the excavations, formerly begun by Beule, were taken up and pro- secuted with sufficient energy. But as for the real Punic temples, the buildings which saw Hamilcar and Hannibal within their gates, it is not likely that even if the site were explored down to the very rock anything but a few chips of mouldings and other unimportant debris would be recovered. Of all the great temples of Punic Carthage the only one whose site appears to be fixed by ancient texts and modern discoveries is that of Esmoun, which is called the temple of yEscula'pius in documents of the empire. 1 It was in the heart of the city, upon the hill, Byrsa, which served as an acropolis. Unhappily its site is now covered by the church of St. Louis and its dependencies ; but neither in the works undertaken when that church was built nor in the excavations of Beule was anything found which could be said to date from the primitive building ; all the fragments dug up belong certainly to the new Corinthian temple of white marble built under the Roman emperors. Its style was that of the Roman structures raised in the first century of our era. Nothing seems to have survived of the temple in which, on the supreme day of Carthage, nine hundred Roman deserters intrenched them- selves with Hasdrubal, and when betrayed by him defended themselves to the last extremity. This temple was the richest and most beautiful in Carthage." It faced eastwards, and was built on the edge of the plateau by the side of the great public square near the harbours. It was reached by a staircase of sixty steps, but if danger threatened it the staircase could easily be destroyed, for it merely rested against the perpendicular wall of the acropolis. The site was admirably chosen, and we should "much like to know how it was treated by the architect. The hill on which the temple stood rose about 200 feet above the sea level ; it dominated the whole city, and must have had a great effect upon those who sailed into its shadow and allowed their eyes to mount the wide steps with which it communicated with the streets below. Whether 1 BEULE, FouUles a Carthage, pp. 9, 10, 44, 51, 75. 2 APPIAN, viii. 130 ; MoAiora TWV aAAw cV GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS OF THE PHOENICIAN TEMPLE. 325 it guarded any strongly marked signs of its oriental descent down to the day when it disappeared in the conflagration lighted by its own defenders we cannot now say ; neither can we tell how far its walls extended nor what the dimensions of the temple proper, the naos, may have been. As for the other shrines in the Punic town all that we know about them is that the temple of Baal-Hammon was in the Forum, 1 and that of Tanit upon a hill separated from the Byrsa by one of the principal streets. 2 This hill was not so high as the Byrsa, but it offered nearly as large a platform, and several temples of secondary importance were grouped about the sanctuary of the goddess who was the real patroness of Carthage, and who, as the Virgo C&lestis, or Juno, preserved that role down to the very last days of paganism. 5. On the General Characteristics of the Phoenician Temple. We have spared no pains to follow up the slightest traces of every temple built by the Phoenicians on the coast of Syria itself, and in the islands and on the shores of the Mediterranean, wherever they had permanent colonies. In our search disappointments have been frequent. Literary and epigraphic texts are too short and vague to give much information. Bas-reliefs often show the altar, the sacred emblem and the officiating priest well enough, but they abridge the temple very sternly indeed. As for the ruins themselves, it often happens that, as at the Maabed of Amrit, the arrangements about which we feel most curiosity have disappeared and left no sign. In Cyprus the ruins are in better condition, and perhaps when they are systematically explored they may tell us 1 BEULE, Fouilles a Carthage, pp. 3 1 and 8 1 . 2 Ibid. pp. 9, 26, 27. Between this hill and the sea. and between the former and the water tanks, all those votive steles consecrated to Tanit, face of Baal, were found. Of these there are ninety in the British Museum and more than two thousand at Paris ; the latter are due to the excavations of M. de Sainte-Marie. Most of them were found at the sides of the hollow, hedge-bordered road, which runs from the sea and passes between the Byrsa and the hill on which the temple of Tanit is supposed to have stood. It is likely that this road follows the line of one of the principal streets of ancient Carthage. Almost all the steles are broken ; those which are intact are about twenty-four inches high. As a rule they are rough at their lower extremity, which seems to prove that they were planted in the ground. Their backs are roughly dressed. 526 HISTORY OF ART IN PHOENICIA AND ITS DEPENDENCIES. all \ve want to know. At Malta and Gozo, where the remains are clear enough, we are in presence of buildings of the second or third class which cannot be taken as worthy representatives of the national architecture. But in spite of the scantiness of these data, the individuality of the Phoenician, or rather of the Semitic, temple, stands out with sufficient distinctness to allow the historian to grasp its salient features. It is distinguished from the most familiar of our types, that of Greece and Rome, by one capital difference ; it attaches much less importance to the cella, the chamber in which the image or symbol of the god is placed. It consists of a great court, or open-air hall, in the centre of which, or at one extremity, rises a tabernacle or pavilion with the emblem of divine power beneath its shelter. In Greece the attention of the architect was con- centrated on the cella, the home of the god, the dwelling-place of his often colossal statue ; in Phoenicia the symbol was, as a rule, of no great size. The grandiose feature of the Semitic temple was the 7re/3io\77, the courtyard with its continuous portico, which in some cases included a fine order and a rich scheme of decoration. Even now the Semitic race is not without places of worship in which the general arrangement is much the same as this. In the first place, there are old mosques at Cairo, those of Amrou and Touloun, for instance, where great quadrangles are surrounded by single- or double-aisled colonnades, and nothing is wanting but the idol. But if we go to Mecca we shall find the type in all its completeness in the mosque of the Caaba (Fig. 236). Even the triumph of the Koran has not abolished the betyle, and there, standing in the centre of the wide inclosure, the mystic stone has received for centuries the homage of the Arab tribes. 1 The primitive form of worship of these peoples was the courban, or sacrifice offered on a high place, which is still practised near Mecca on the occasion of the great pilgrimage. At first their temple was no more than a clearing of levelled earth at the top of 1 Our view of Mecca and the mosque of the Caaba is from a drawing by M. Tomaszkiewicz after a photograph by Colonel Sadik-Bey, for which we have to thank M. G. Schlumberger. The black stone itself is not visible ; it is a rounded mass of basalt, framed in silver and let into one of the angles of the Caaba or Beit Allah (house of God). The Caaba is the cubic mass, 37 feet high, which stands in the middle of the square, and is draped in the black veil called the tob-el-Caaba (shirt of the Caaba). See on this subject ALI BEY BEN ABBASSI, Voyage, \Q\, ii. pp. 348-351. p '^p'-r? GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS OF THE PIKEXICIAX TEMPLE. 329 a hill, where the altar of sacrifice was raised within a belt of trees. As civilization advanced, and the religious notions of the people became more complex, the Phoenicians borrowed from the Egyptians the idea of a tabernacle in which to lodge their fetish ; it was Egypt that taught them to raise their sanctuary in the middle of the consecrated area, the Jiarain. Thus far the Phoenician temple is founded upon that of Egypt, but it never seems to have been a servile copy. It was not hidden, like the buildings at Luxor and Karnak, behind a huge wall ; it had no labyrinth- of dimly-lighted chambers lying between the sanctuary and the outer air ; perhaps through want of skill rather than want of inclination Phoenicia substituted wide courts for the hypostyle halls of the Pharaohs. In spite of its simplicity the Semitic type of religious building had a grandeur and nobility of its own ; it was the first type to meet the pioneers of Greek civilization ; the /Eolians and lonians found it in Cilicia, in Syria, in Cyprus and in the other islands in which they came into contact with the Phoenicians. They began by borrowing from it, and even when, by their own genius, they had created an entirely new system of religious architecture, their buildings still preserved some traces of these early lessons. We may thus explain a peculiarity of classic architecture which had hardly received all the attention it deserves ; the 7rep and the lesson of the disaster was taken to heart. It proved that even the maritime quays and harbours required fortifications, which were still more necessary to the cities on land. Egyptians, Assyrians, Chaldeans, Persians and Greeks, must all in turn have been tempted by the riches accumulated "in these seaboard towns towns which were not all so favourably placed as Tyre and Arvad. Those on the mainland were vastly more exposed to hostile attempts, but even Tyre, as the success of Alexander proved, was not quite beyond the reach of an enemy. The cities of Phoenicia were, then, embraced by huge w r alls of defence, at whose construction we are enabled to guess by the remains still to be seen at Arvad and Sidon (Figs. / and 41). The enceinte of Tyre was especially strong. This we know from the stubborn resistance which it offered for seven months to the attacks of Alexander, delivered with all the dash of an ever- victorious army. 1 Practically there is nothing left of the ramparts which so long defied the great conqueror. " I do not think," says M. Renan, " that any city having played for centuries a prominent rblc in the world has left feebler traces than Tyre." Ezekiel was a true prophet when he said to Tyre : " Though thou be sought for, yet shalt thou never be found again." ! A traveller who sjiould sail along the Syrian coast between Kasmie and Ras-el-Ain without knowing exactly where he was, would never guess that he was abreast of the site of an ancient city.'' The only frag- ment of Phoenician building which M. Renan thought he could recognize at Sour was a wall, now below the sea-level, which had 1 DIODCRUS, xvii. 46 ; PLUTARCH, Alexander, 24. 2 EZEKIEL, xxvi. 21. 3 REN AX, Mission, p. 529. FORTIFIKD WALLS. 33^ served to uphold a quay built out into the water. The southern ramparts must have stood on the quay in question ; it is formed of huge blocks of stone filled in with a concrete or beton full of broken bricks and potsherds. 1 We must then form our idea of this enceinte from the evidence of ancient writers. According to Arrian it was i 50 feet high on the land side ; its thickness was in proportion to its height, and the huge blocks were held together by mortar. 2 This last detail seems doubtful ; the few Phoenician walls of which fragments remain are built of dry stones ; but the submarine wall described by M. Renan has all the characteristics attributed by the historian to the walls of Tyre ; it is possible that when the Tyrians found what good results they could obtain by such a process, they made use of it in their enceinte, which must often have been repaired and under-pinned. The wall was flanked with towers, and the king's palace was backed against it. The roofs of the latter communicated directly with the covered wav that ran the whole length of the curtain ; j o this we gather from Arrian's account of the assault which put an end to Tyrian independence.'' We have already met with the same arrangement in Assyria, at Khorsabad. 4 The ramparts of Sidon and Arvad, of which some imposing fragments still remain, have left no traces in history ; they had not the luck to hold the victor of Issus and Arbela in check for a \vhole winter. It is, again, in accounts of the siege of Tyre that we read of Phoenician skill in the contrivance and management of military engines. The engineers of Alexander, who had won their reputation in the campaigns of Phillip, met their match in those of Tyre. 5 On both sides the greatest fertility of invention and energy in execution had already been displayed when Alex- ander committed himself to the stupendous task of building his famous mole. 6 In this respect the siege of Tyre was a preface 1 Mission, pp. 535, 560, 561. See also the plan given at page 531. 2 ARRIAN, Anabasis, II. xxi. 3. 'Hr 8e avVots TO. rei^r) Kara TO ^w/x.a, TO re VI//GS a's /cat e/carov /^.aAicrra TroSas KGU e's TrAaro? ^vfJLfJLfTpOV, Allots //eyuAots eV yvil/ia 3 ARRIAN, Anabasis, II. xxiii. 6. 4 Art in Chaldcea and Assyria, vol. ii. p. n, and plate i. 5 Upon the Macedonian engineers of the school of Polyidus, see J. G. DROYSEN, Geschichte des Hellenismus (two vols. Hamburgh, 1836-1843), vol. i. p. 291, note i. DIODORUS, xvii. xli. 3 : xliii. i. ^6 IIlxTORY OF ART IN PlIcKNICIA AND ITS ni' to that great siege of Rhodes in \vhich Demetrius Poliorcetes won his surname. In order to find a stronghold whose ramparts were not recon- structed by the Franks established in Syria at the time of the Crusades, we must quit those parts of the country in which life has always been most active and, as a consequence, most fatal to the relics of the past ; \ve must travel northwards, into the district of the Arvadites. It was a little outside the path of invasion ; the neighbourhoods of the ancient sites were free from modern cities, like Beyrout and Saida, Sour and Acre, and, as we have seen from the tombs, the antique remains are there in better condition than in the districts south and west of the Lebanon. Towards the northern boundary of the region which formerly depended upon Arvad, there is, near a small village called Banias, a city rampart still standing for almost its whole length. 1 Situated out of the beaten track, it had never drawn attention until quite lately ; we borrow a map of the site, as well as a partial view of the wall, from M. Camillc Favrc the first traveller to notice it.' 2 Banias is about twenty-five miles north of Arvad, it is the ancient Balanca, the Valauia of the Crusades. The ruins of the Grrcco-Roman city are not of much importance ; little is to be seen but a few substructures, which, being in the neighbourhood of abundant springs, represent most likely the baths from which the village took its name. 5 A short distance westward of these springs and higher up the river, about a mile and a half from the sea, there stands a rampart which still rises many feet above the plain for the whole of its length (Fig. 237). The space it embraces is, roughly speaking, an elongated triangle, one of its long sides being formed by the wall in question, and the other two by a ravine whose northern face is an inaccessible precipice ; it will be seen therefore, that the site was well chosen for defence. Not counting its bastions the wall is about 670 yards in total length. At its two extremities it ends close to the precipice in a sort of returning angle, which is particularly well marked on the eastern face. The rampart is 1 STRAI-.O places TJnlaneum on what he calls "the coast subject to the Arvadites." 2 C. FAVRE, fianias {Balance) ft son enceinte cyclopeenne (Reruc archeologique, 2nd series, vol. xxxvii. pp. 223-232, and plate viii.). 3 Tiu/Vu'etoj' means public />a//i, bathing establishment. FORTIFIED WALLS. t -> 7 OvV pierced at three points by openings varying from 25 to 35 feet wide. There is no trace either of lintels or door-posts. The passage must have been barred by wooden gates set in timber frames. To the left of the north-western gate the salience of the wall with its triple face almost deserves to be called a tower. Elsewhere the trace is more simple ; the constructor has been satisfied with mere redans, but his determination to bring an attacking enemy under the full fire if we may use the word of the CYCLOPEAN RAMPAltT KEAR BANiAS. FIG. 237. Plan of the rampart near Bania?. garrison is always evident. Moreover there is, between the gates, a series of salient and re-entering angles, and they flank each other ; but they seem to have been dictated by the configuration of the soil. Except about the north-western gate the ground is everywhere higher within the rampart than it is outside, so that the fortification is riot commanded from any point in its near vicinity. The high ground within was cut into terraces and VOL. i. xx 338 HISTORY OF ART IN PIUKNICIA AND ITS DEPENDENCIES. retained by scarps ; one of these is shown in our woodcut, which represents the part of the wall abutting on the north-western gate. The present height of the wall itself, varies between 16 and 35 feet ; it is built of roughly squared blocks of grey limestone ; of these the largest are about 40 inches long and 30 high. They are fixed without cement, but the wider joints are filled up with small stones. There is not the slightest sign of mortar. The most remarkable thing about this rampart as a piece of masonry, is the pains taken by the builder to preserve his horizontal courses in spite of the roughness of his units. In other respects the setting of the stones is not good ; the vertical joints often FIG. 238. The Phoenician wall near Banias. coincide. The thickness of the wall varies between i6and 27 feet, so that it would afford standing room for a strong force of defenders, in case of an attempt at an escalade. Even where the wall seems to have lost none of its original heights there is no sign of a parapet of any kind. It must have been built at a time when military engineering was still in its infancy. The only siege machine whose antiquity might equal that of this rampart, is the battering ram, which, as we have seen, appeared in Assyria as early as the eighth century, 1 and against its blows a wall would have to trust only to its mass. The main attack would be directed against the gates, in the hope of forcing them from their hinges. 1 See Art in Chaldaa and Assyria, Vol. I. Fig. 26. FORTIFIED WALLS. 339 We have already hinted as to how this danger was provided for ; thus, at the north-eastern gate the besiegers would find them- selves squeezed into a narrow passage between the precipice and the bastion-shaped end of the wall ; while before they could get within striking distance of the gates giving upon the plateau, they would have to advance between salient angles of the wall for some thirty or forty yards. The traveller who has here been our guide considers this rampart to be the work of Pelasgians. But who were the Pelasoqans ? That term has no real meaning for the historian o o unless it signifies the fathers of the Hellens and Italiots, the oldest and first established in Europe of those tribes whose descendants were to speak Greek and Latin. Now can any text be named from which we may infer that one of these Aryan tribes ever dwelt upon the Syrian coast, and dwelt there in such a permanent fashion that they built fortified cities ? There is nothing to show that the Pelasgians even made a flying visit to these shores. On the other hand nothing could be more natural than the existence of a Phoenician stronghold at this point ; it may well have been the northern covering fortress for that Arvadite kingdom whose borders stretched eastward to the Orontes and southward to Orthosia. Banias is only ten leagues from Antarados, and un- mistakable traces of Phoenician worship have been found still farther, on Mount Casius, for instance, which rises close to the mouth of the Orontes. Moreover there is nothing foreign to the habits of the Phoenician builder in the character of the wall itself. The stones are not so large as at Arvad, but as a whole the physiognomy of the work is quite similar ; we find in both the same horizontally of the courses and the same coincidence of the vertical joints. Neither at Kition nor at any other Cypriot town of Phoenician origin has any well-preserved rampart yet been found which can be ascribed to Syrian builders. 1 But if we cross the sea and seek them in one of those islands in which first the Syrians and afterwards their heirs, the Carthaginians, established themselves so strongly, we shall be more successful. Mount Eryx, at the western extremity of Sicily, played for three centuries a capital 1 Cesnola tells us that at Golgos he found the remains of the ancient wall, but he neither reproduces the fragments nor gives us any details as to their workmanship (Cyprus, p. 109). 340 HISTORY OF ART IN PIKI.NICIA AND ITS DKPENDENCIKS. role in the struggle waged by Carthage first against the Greek cities and secondly against the armies of Rome. Close to the excellent harbour of Drepanum, Eryx rises to a height of about 2,350 feet above a rich and fertile plain. On its summit stood a temple of Astarte, the platform being artificially enlarged by embanking ; this was a work of some difficulty and was ascribed by the Greeks to Daedalus. 1 Below the temple, on the side next the sea, the houses of the town rose in stages one above another. The Carthaginians were not content with fortifying the temple and the city , they drew a line of circumvallation round the whole base of the mountain. Their ramparts thus inclosed a space wide enough to shelter a large army, which was put beyond fear of thirst by numerous springs. Neither these works nor the remains of the zigzag road which led up from the sea-shore to the top of the mountain have yet been thoroughly explored, but a learned farta. t/tnda FK;. 239. Tlan of the Pha-nician wall at Fryx. From Salinas. archaeologist, Signor Salinas, has recently made a study of that section of -the wall which lies to the north-west of Monte San- Giuliano. 2 The wall by which this little modern town is embraced coincides in that direction with the ramparts of Carthaginian Eryx. The upper sections have been reconstructed again and again, but all the lower courses of the ancient wall are still in place and bear the mark of the Phoenician masons ; ;>> even the modern gateways stand upon the antique sites. On this north-western side the wall of Eryx is still standing for a distance of about 1,100 yards (Fig. 239). The irregularity of its trace is to be explained by the necessity under which its 1 DIODORUS, iv. Ixviii. 4; Pom;n:s, i. lv. 6, 9; Iviii. 2 ; VIRGIN, sEneid, v. 759; STRABO, vi. ii. 6. - A. SALINAS, Le Mura fenicie di Erice (Roma, 1883, in 4(0, 8 pages and 3 plates). 3 See above, Figs. 34 and 35. FORTIFIED WALLS. 34 designer found himself of following the contours of the hill-side. The wall is about eight feet thick ; .it is broken at unequal distances by rectangular towers standing out very boldly from the curtain (see Figs. 34 and 240). The chief care of the architect seems to have been given to these towers, which are built of much larger units than the curtain ; it is only in the towers that we find stones six feet long. 1 The outer faces of these large blocks are quite in the rough, but elsewhere the stones are FIG. 240. One of the towers of Kryx. From Cavallari. better worked and more carefully squared. Salinas has noted these differences, but his attention is chiefly taken up with a curious feature to be found both in that part of the structure where large units are employed and in the part where the stones are small. The courses vary in height ; but once the height of a course is determined by the corner stone, the Phoenician builders 1 The only block of which M. Salinas gives the exact size is 5 feet 8 inches long by 4 feet high. 34- HISTORV OK ART IN PH ITS DEPENDENCIES. have exercised great ingenuity in preserving its level. The mason often had to make use of stones of a different height from those placed at the end of the course ; in that case he made up for the difference by introducing small stones, so that each course was built up as it were like a wall in itself. Such masonry no doubt leaves much to be desired. It cannot be compared to a Greek wall of the fine period, where every unit was carefully prepared for the exact place it had to occupy. To form a right appreciation of this way of building, the walls of Eryx must not be compared to those of Messene but to those of Tiryns or to any other Greek or Italian wall on the face of which the joints describe a network of irregular polygons. There is, in fact, real progress in the tendency to horizontal courses which we find at Balanea as at Arvad, at Sidon as at Eryx ; it is the mark of an advancing industry, of a taste just beginning to feel the sentiment of order and the subtle charm of symmetry. The chief gateways through this wall have been so much altered that we can only guess how they may have been arranged in antiquity, but the posterns at the foot of some of the towers are better preserved (B, c, E, F on the plan). They are of two different types. Some have a rectangular opening bridged over by a heavy stone lintel (Fig. 241). In others the opening is arched, the arch being obtained by a device of which we found many ex- amples in Egypt. 1 Our two views of this postern show that the arrangement of the masonry is not the same on both faces. On the outside the semi-circle of the arch is cut through two stones large enough to leave plenty of material above the void and thus to guarantee solidity (Fig. 242). On the internal face there are four stones corbelled out one beyond the other, the two uppermost so thin that we are astonished to find them unbroken beneath the weight that rests upon them (Fig. 242). The rampart of Eryx cannot be so old as the walls of Banias, Arvad, and Sidon. The Sicilian constructor seems to have progressed in his art. His joints are better placed. Instead of being one over the other they are, as a rule, over the middle, or something like 'it, of the stone below. Again we find small stones used in the curtain beside the masonry of much larger units of which the towers are composed. These are indications of a later age and are confirmed by the history of Phoenician colonization. As 1 Art in Ancient Egypt, Vol. I., Figs. 74-76; Vol. II., Figs. 51-53. FORTIFIED WALLS. 343 we have seen, the Tyrian settlements in the west were little more than factories, whose safety depended rather upon their friendly relations with the native tribes than upon military strength, so that the walls of Eryx must date from the time when Carthage took up the work of Tyre. 1 It was not till then that the necessities of a new political situation compelled the great African city to construct this vast intrenched camp, a camp excellently contrived FIG. 241. Postern in the wall of Eryx. From S.ilinns. either for preparing an advance in force or for covering a retreat. The walls of Eryx can hardly have been commenced earlier than 1 At the meeting of the Berlin Archaeological Society on November 6th, 1883, Herr Sachau, in speaking of the paper of Salinas, drew attention to the fact that the mason's marks found so far on the walls of Eryx were not enough to give a date to that structure. The ain certainly was shaped as in the oldest Phoenician writings, but before any certain conclusion could be arrived at from the study of these characters we must wait, said Herr Sachau, until other letters such as mini and shin, whose forms were greatly modified by time, have been found (Philologische Wochen- schrift, ist December, 1883, p. i). ;,4 } lliM'nkv 1-1 AKI IN I'IM:MCIA AND 1 1> 1 )I.IT.M>F.N( IKS. the first years of the fifth century, aiul it is likely that between that date and the first Punic \var they were often enlarged and repaired. In 260 Hamilcar destroyed the town and transferred its inhabit- ants to Drepanum, but he certainly did not raze the fortifications, and in after years the dispersed population came back and re-established themselves round the sanctuary. Upon a Roman penny of the Considia family we find both temple and rampart figured (Fig. 244). The former stands upon some rocks which are meant to represent the summit of the mountain ; in front there is a wall ending in quadrangular towers, and having in the Fir,. 242. Postern in the wall c.f Eryx. From Salinas. Outside view. centre an arched doorway Hanked by round towers. This coin is contemporary with Cicero. Solunte, built on a high hill close to the sea, and Motya, seem both to have had a wall built after the same fashion as that of Firyx. The rampart at Motya is the more regular and the better preserved of the two (Fig. 245). This town was built on the western coast, on a small island separated from the mainland by a channel about eight or nine hundred yards wide. This choice of a site appears to suggest a very old Phoenician colony. The FORTIFIED WALLS. 345 modern name of the place is San Pantaleone. The stones are of great size and are set in regular courses, without cement. There are, or at least there were at the end of the last century, two very well preserved towers on the western side. The base of the enceinte was washed by the sea, and the place, as a whole, must have been very strong. 1 We may be told that in Sicily the Phoenicians had Greek walls to copy from, and that they may even have employed Greek work- men, either seduced by bribes or chosen from among the prisoners of war and compelled to use their skill for the benefit of their masters. FIG. 243. Postern in the wall of Eryx. From Salinas. Inside view. But this idea is discredited by the fact that in a country never reached by Grecian navigators, in that Mauritania Tingitana, as the Romans called it, which we know as Morocco, we find masonry carried out upon the same system as in these Sicilian 1 Speaking of Solunte, SERRA DI FALCO mentions a wall "di grossi macigni squad- rati" ; but he gives no drawing of it (Le Antichita della Sicilia, vol. v. p. 60); he is content with giving a view of the site, in which the ruins themselves are hardly visible. The fortifications of Motya are represented in HOUEL, Voyage pittoresque des lies de Sidle, de Malte, et de Lipari (4 vols. folio, Paris, 1782-1785, vol. i. p. 17, plate ix.). VOL. I. Y V HISTORY ART i\ PIKKXICIA AND ITS DKI-KNOKNCIKS walls. Of this the best instance is afforded by the curious ruins of Lix, the Lixus of Greek and Latin geographers. Lix was a Phoenician colony, as we know from a text of Scylax and from certain medals on which its name appears in Phoenician characters. Near the Phoenician settlement, but separated from it by the river, the indigenous tribes built a town which lived upon its relations with the stranger merchants. 1 The latter were strongly fortified on a lofty hill commanding the mouth of the Lixus, now the Oued-Loukos. The position \vas admirably chosen ; the I'Hi. 244. 'Ihc temple and ramparts of Eryx. From a coin.- Phcenician ships could at all times find a secure refuge in the river's mouth, while the windings of the stream covered the town and made it difficult of access on the land side (Fig. 246). Lixus was divided into two distinct parts ; the Acropolis, standing upon the lofty plateau which forms the northern half of the hill, and the town proper, whose remains are to be traced on the slopes facing south and north-east. Besides this it seems that there \vas a suburb of considerable size on the river bank to the north of the town. The greater part of the site is now covered with a dense growth 1 .... KCU TToA.1,5 (ftOlVlKOlV AlfoS, KOL Te'/)O. TToAlS \L/3ru>V tOTt TT(.f>n.V TOT 7TOTtt//.or. ' 2 Enlarged from DONALDSON. Anhitectura niiininnatica, No. 32. FORTIFIED WALLS 347 of myrtles, carob-trees, mastics and wild olives, which a perfect network of bramble and bindweed renders quite impenetrable at many points. M. Tissot, from whom we have taken the figures and other details we are about to give on the subject of Lixus, succeeded, however, in traversing the whole area in two different .directions and in following the complete trace of the walls. 1 The enceinte of the lower city was entirely built of small stones ; it is identical in character with many other structures in the same region, and they date from the Roman period, as we know by the fragments of Latin epigraphy and sculpture imbedded in them. In the whole of this country the only strangers who preceded the Roman colonists and brought the germs of civilization to its FIG. 245. The uall of Motya. From Ilouel. natives were the Phoenicians. To the Phoenicians, therefore, without a moment's hesitation, were the remains of a very different wall at the same place attributed. The difference between this and the rampart of the lower town is made all the more conspicu- ous by the way the latter has been repaired. Wherever a breach 1 These ruins had already been pointed out under their right name by EARTH ( Wanderungen durch die Kiistenlander des Mittelmeers, pp. 21, 22); but we owe our only circumstantial description of them, with maps and views, to M. CHARLES TISSOT, formerly Minister Plenipotentiary of France in Morocco (Recherches sur la geographic compares de la Mavritanie Tingitane, pp. 203-221 ; and Memoires pr'esentes a r Academic des Inscriptions par divers savants etrangers, vol. ix. p. 139). The map we reproduce was perforce omitted from the Academy memoir. 34$ HISTORY OK ART IN PIKI.NICIA AND ITS DEPKNDENCIKS. occurs it is filled in with small stones, \vhile the original work is entirely carried out in large blocks, like those we saw at Banias, Kryx, and Motya. The rampart of the upper town incloses a hexagon of about 2,000 yards in total circumference. It is built of huge stones carefully dressed and set without mortar (Fig". 247). All the blocks in a single course are of the same height but of a different length ; the majority measure about sixty inches by forty, but some of those at the angles are as much as twelve feet long by nearly seven high. At some points the wall is still from fourteen to eighteen feet high. The angles are strengthened by square towers. The only building of which any important remains are still visible was, perhaps, a temple. It is built of huge stones, and the large rough slabs with which a sort of covered way is roofed remind us of the Panaghia Phaneromeni of Larnaca. We are led to see a temple in this building by the discovery in its immediate neighbourhood of a cone cut from a very hard stone which is not to be found in the country. In this we can hardly refuse to recognize a symbol of the same kind as that found at Gozo, in the Giganteia (Fig. 223). These ruins lie between the Acropolis and a small artificial harbour, partly formed by a wall about seventy yards long. This harbour had two entrances, and by its means the Phoenician ships could be brought close up to the warehouses. While awaiting their turns they could anchor in the river. All this helps us to form a good idea of what a Phoenician settlement amoni^ barbarous tribes was like. Life and move- O ment had their centre about the harbour ; a little higher up were the sanctuaries to which the sailors came to offer their vows to Melkart and Astarte. Finally, although they took care to be on good terms with the natives, it was necessary that their dwellings should be guarded from sudden attack. Wherever safety was not insured by the nature of the site, as it was at Motya and Gades, the factory was safe-guarded by one of those ramparts of solid masonry against which the efforts of a band of savages could do nothing. No doubt the Acropolis was provided with reservoirs of fresh water and silos filled with grain. Nothing proves the energy of the Phoenician race more clearly than all these arrangements for enabling a few hundreds of ! i , I 1C |s i !; j j }.' ,. ; .< ; jr, jaswi^ ** I iiiPili 1 ' JMi 1 j'*' ' ii'. 1 ///I' ! * ' - i"' ^Vflliy'.v.'ii'i-', ,.^'' M - ! 1Vv' : --^ ' l '.'.'. - i^:^ r^ , jl^iV' - 1 ' 4 ' !' -4^ '/<.' , i- or *''' IBiv.jiy;:;*, 1 ;,* 1 ',' i !< * i-i -I MI, .'/IM'" v .i;' : ; 'l-\'\ j'-.V'. i r" 'iRji'.V' 1 . 1 ' 1 , 1 ' H Hi- !il . : '- *'.' R : t 4: i, 4 .'- * ''.',', M^t ;m-Mj -'i' 1 rf\;^ ^p;^-,^.ip^ .^PT* ! fS>^^^ , fwIiW^I^Isl!' rj^lMni-'l ui^'W^^ ^^r FORTIFIED WALLS. ^i J -J merchants and sailors to live in safety so many hundreds of miles away from that native city which they enriched by their self- sacrifice. If the Punic engineers were able to carry out such considerable works as these in Sicily, and on the distant shores of the Atlantic, it stands to reason that they would spare no pains to fortify the capital of the Empire. At a very early period Carthage became alive to the necessity of being on her guard against the jealousy of other Phoenician cities on the same coast, against the ill-will of her Libyan subjects, and against the feelings of envy and covetousness which her wealth and industrial success could not fail to excite. The ancients speak with wonder of the wall of Carthage, which must, after the suburb of Megara was included ^^w^^^m^- '- /' X;^V* v '; W^'' FIG. 247. The wall of Lixus. From an unpublished drawing by Charles Tissot. in it. have been from six to seven leagues in total leno-th o (Fig. 248). l Every captain who ventured to attack the Cartha- 1 OROSIUS says the enceinte of Carthage was 20 miles in circumference, EUTROPJUS says 22, LIVY 23 (Epitome of book li.). STRABO says 360 stades, or 72,810 yards (41 miles 650 yards), a figure we can hardly accept ; there must be some mistake either by the author or his copyist. Upon the plan of Carthage drawn up by DAUX, in which all the remains of ancient walls are laid down with the greatest care, the total length of the wall, according to M. Tissot, is 28,300 metres (about 31.200 yards). Daux's plan will be published by M. Tissot in the great work he has in preparation upon Carthaginian and Roman Africa. [Since these words were written M. Tissot has died and left his great work incomplete. The first volume, however, is in print, and the manuscript of the rest in such a condition that its publication may be surely expected. ED.] On the whole, it agrees with that of Falbe, the best ,>5- IIlSTOKY (>K ART IN PlId-.NICIA AND ITS 1 H.I'KN 1 >F.NCI1.S. ginians in Africa Aj^ithocles, Regains, the leaders of the revolted mercenaries was checked at the: foot of these walls ; even at the end of the third Punic war, when Carthage no longer had an army, they offered a long resistance to the legions of Rome. I'io. 248. Map of the peninsula of Carthage. We are told that the enceinte of Carthage was built of dressed stone, saxo quadrato? According to Diodorus it was forty cubits, we have so far (Rccherches snr t emplacement de Carthage, with five plates and a topo- graphical plan ; Paris, Imprimerie Royale, 1883). Our j)lan is taken from M. Duruy's Jlistoire des Rom a his, vol. i. p. 415. 1 OROSTUS, iv. 22. FORTIFIED WALLS. 353 or sixty-one feet, high, and twenty two cubits, or thirty-four feet, thick. 1 Appian gives about the same thickness, but he reduces the height to thirty cubits, or about forty-six feet. He calls this the height of the curtain beneath the battlements, and says that the towers, which had four stories, were much higher. 2 He adds that the wall was triple at least on the side of Byrsa and the Gulf of Tunis. 3 The author of the best work on the question, the regretted Charles Graux, shows that although these dimensions are out of the common, there is nothing astonishing in them, and that the figures of Appian especially are admissible enough. 4 What follows, however, is not so easily explained. According to Appian there were, at least on the west and south, three walls exactly like each other, and separated by regular distances. In the interior of each there were stables for 300 elephants, and, over them, for 4,000 horses, as well as lodging for 24,000 men, and huge magazines containing food for the elephants and forage for the horses. There are many things in the description of Appian that try our credulity and make us regret the loss of the account left by Polybius, an accurate writer, who was, morever, an eye witness of the great siege. For a right interpretation of Appian's text we cannot do better than turn to the incisive study of Charles Graux, who has no difficulty in showing that the historian in question was nothing more than a compiler, of mediocre skill, and that, being quite ignorant of military matters, he formed an idea of the Carthaginian fortifications which does not bear analysis. Graux gives a very clear explanation of the triple wall. To this end he makes use of the rules laid down by Philo the engineer in his Manual of Fortification; of the Attack and Defence of Places, a work compiled, in the opinion of some scholars, in the third, according to others, in the second, century of our era. He 1 DIODORUS, xxxii. xiv. 2 APPIAN, viii. 95. TWrcov (of the walls) 8' f.Ka