§ VI Phœnician and Cypriote Ceramics
The triple influence that we have remarked in Phœnician and Cypriote sculpture is observed no less clearly in pottery. In the seventh century Assyria carried on the artistic education of Phœnicia; then it was Egypt till the end of the sixth; finally Greece enters into the lists in her turn, bringing her peculiar genius which, especially in Cyprus, joins hands with its two elder brothers. The Phœnicians, then, learnt first of all from the Assyrians and Egyptians how to model clay, and to fashion of it figures and vases of every form.
In the list of terra-cottas from Phœnicia which depend upon Ninevite art, and which were found at Amrith (Marathus), chariots holding four warriors and drawn by two or four horses hold the first rank. The figures, generally bearded, and wearing the conical cap, present in their features the purest Semitic type, like certain Babylonian terra-cottas; the harness of the horses shows the minute detail of the Ninevite equipages. Besides these chariots, figurines have been obtained from the Phœnician necropoles, which represent Astarte, nude, standing upright, carrying her hand to her breast, or else sitting and clothed in a long robe down to her feet without folds; she often wears a high calathos of Asiatic origin, which has been observed on the head of captives in the Assyrian bas-reliefs.
We know that ceramics was never highly developed in Assyria and Chaldæa; accordingly, as soon as Egyptian influence could show itself in the political sphere in Phœnicia, the pseudo-Egyptian style was not slow to replace the pseudo-Assyrian style in ceramics. The figurines of the new school, fashioned like the preceding ones in orange-red clay, represent women standing or sitting, sometimes suckling a child, holding a fan, a pigeon, or the lunar disk. The Phœnicians even learned from the Egyptians to coat their statuettes with green or blue enamel, analogous to that which is called Egyptian faïence, so that it is sometimes difficult to say whether the enamelled statuettes found in the tombs of Phœnicia are imported from Egypt or are works of native industry. In their course of servile imitation Phœnician craftsmen have reproduced even the hieroglyphic characters, which they distorted because they did not understand the sense of them.
The type most frequently copied by the Phœnicians is the grotesque god Bes or the embryo god Ptah, whom they turned into the god Pygmæus, called Patæcus by Herodotus. This large-headed and bandy-legged dwarf, of repulsive obesity, the type of deformity and ugliness, is met with everywhere in Phœnician pottery.
The pseudo-Hellenic or Græcizing style has furnished numerous terra-cotta monuments in Phœnicia, as is attested by the large head found in the necropolis of Amrith, which is nothing less than part of the lid of a sarcophagus in human form. The head is vulgar, and has neither an Egyptian nor an Assyrian appearance; it was inspired by Greek art, but to some extent followed oriental tradition. Among the Phœnician statuettes which may be referred to Greek archaic art there are figurines of Aphrodite standing upright, clothed in a long tunic, the folds of which the goddess grasps in one hand, while she holds a pigeon in the other. Tresses of hair fall over the breast on each side of the head. On other occasions the costume of these women is composed of a long robe and a mantle fastened by a brooch on the shoulder; they hold their arms close to the sides of the body.
The clay of Cyprus lends itself better than that of Phœnicia to moulding and to baking, therefore in very early times it could be utilised for this purpose; and a considerable number of its productions take us back to a very primitive stage of art. The most ancient of the Cypriote figurines follow oriental and Asiatic traditions. They represent Astarte, the goddess of fecundity; they are modelled with the thumb, with lines traced with a point, and bands of black or red for all their ornament. “The head is almost formless,” says M. Perrot;95 “a curved, beak-like nose, a pair of large round eyes, and monstrous ears may be distinguished, each of the latter pierced with two holes at the place of attachment of the heavy elaborate earrings worn by Phœnician and Babylonian women. The arms are bent round horizontally, so that the hands lie either on the chest or the stomach.... The extreme width of the hips seems to give a promise of maternity. The scratches on the clay may be meant to represent a loin-cloth. The legs are held tightly closed; they taper rapidly downwards, and end in feet scarcely large enough to give stability.” To the same period belong those vases in the form of animals or human heads, those strange statuettes of foot-soldiers, of riders covered with speckled armour, and of war-chariots, which one might suppose to be modelled by children. Cypriote figurines are so numerous, however, that they can be arranged in a scale so as to mark without gaps the gradual stages in the progress of the art.
In Cyprus the grotesque god Pygmæus, whom we noticed in Phœnicia, is often met with, and he offers the same characteristics here as on the coast. We have always the mixture of the pseudo-Egyptian and pseudo-Assyrian styles combined in different degrees with the archaic Greek style. We will cite, following M. Heuzey, some statuettes of women with their hair dressed in Egyptian fashion, and marked by the gesture of the divine mother, holding her hand to her breast, and by the gesture of the goddess of generation (fig. 227); this last, which reminds us of the Aphrodite of Cnidos, is not found in purely oriental art. Here we catch in the very act the fusion of Asiatic traditions with Hellenic ideas. Such was the skill of Cypriote artists in pottery that they manufactured terra-cotta statues of life-size; in this case they have all the characteristics that we noticed in statuary.
Phœnician vessels carried far away into the whole basin of the Mediterranean the products of Phœnician, Rhodian, and Cypriote pottery. At Corinth, for instance, a small aryballus in the form of a helmeted head, of pseudo-Egyptian style and of Phœnician workmanship, was found. The helmet covers the whole head, except the eyes, nose, and mouth. There is an Egyptian cartouche containing the name of the king Uahabra (Apries), B.C. 599—569.
On the site of Carthage, a large mask in terra-cotta coloured reddish-brown was disinterred, which recalls at once the mask of Amrith and the lids of the Egyptian sarcophagi in human form (fig. 228). The hair is dressed in Egyptian fashion, the ears pierced to receive rings, and the cheeks marked with a groove at the natural limit of the beard. The modelling alone is rather Assyrian, and shows signs of Asiatic softness. In the excavations near the harbours I obtained one of the most remarkable examples of Punic pottery that can be cited (fig. 229). The cheerful smile of this head of Astarte gives it a strong family likeness to the head of Tanit on Carthaginian coins, and even to the archaic heads of Athena on the most ancient tetradrachms of Athens.
The terra-cottas found at Tharras and at Sulci in Sardinia, present the same types and the same hybrid character as those of all Phœnician countries. Even the Chaldæan goddess has been observed among them, nude, in full face, holding her hands to her breast, and sometimes disguised in an Egyptian head-dress; figures of Pygmies, and of Astarte sitting on a throne, holding a pigeon or a lunar disk, have also been found.
Thus, from one end of the Mediterranean to the other, wherever the Phœnicians established their factories, they carried with them their hybrid art, in which the fusion of the elements is not sufficiently marked to prevent those that are borrowed from being recognised. The dissection and analysis of each of the products of Phœnician art, both in the terra-cottas and in sculpture, enable us to restore to Assyria, Egypt, and Greece what belongs to each of them; this work done, nothing is left which is the property of the Phœnicians except the execution.