§ VIII Bronzes and Ornaments
One of the most original sides of Phœnician art consists of the manufacture of bronze, silver or gold dishes, on which various subjects in Assyro-Egyptian style are chiselled, engraved, or even hammered in repoussé. The skill of the Tyrian and Sidonian artists in this branch of art was celebrated from the highest antiquity. Solomon appeals to them for the furniture of Jehovah’s Temple; in Homer, Achilles offers as a prize for the races, in the games organised for the funeral of Patroclus, “a crater of chiselled silver, holding six measures, and without rival on earth for beauty: skilful Sidonian craftsmen made it;” elsewhere the poet speaks of a silver crater, the work of Hephaistos, which a king of Sidon gives to Menelaus. The Phœnician dishes found at Nimroud (fig. 92), in Cyprus, and at some points of the Mediterranean coasts, are specimens of those goldsmiths’ works which astonished Homer’s Greeks. They are pateræ without feet, shallow and hemispherical, such as those seen in the hands of the Assyrians in the bas-reliefs of Nineveh. The figures which decorate them are on the inner surface, and arranged in concentric zones. Engraved or hammered in repoussé, these subjects seem sometimes to represent, not trivial figures nor images of deities, but, on the contrary, genre pictures, and scenes like those in the Egyptian paintings. Thus the subject which decorates the silver-gilt patera (fig. 233) discovered in 1876 at Palestrina, the ancient Præneste, in Latium, has been ingeniously explained by M. Clermont-Ganneau.99 In the concentric zone bordered by a long serpent a small drama is developed in relief in a series of successive phases; it might be called “A Hunting Day, or Piety Rewarded. An oriental play in two acts and nine tableaux.” We see: (1) the hero leaving his house in his war-chariot; (2) he alights to shoot a deer; (3) capture of the deer; (4) halt in a wood after the hunt; the horses are unharnessed; (5) preparations for the meal, in which the deer is to be eaten; (6) an ape attacks the hero, who, fortunately, is protected by a winged deity; (7) the ape is pursued and thrown down by the horses; (8) the hunter kills the savage beast; (9) triumphal entry into the house. The interpretation would be complete if a mythical name could be given to the hero of the drama.
Hunting scenes of the same kind, but not so easy to explain, decorate a silver dish from Cære in Etruria, of the same manufacture as the pateræ of Phœnicia, or Cyprus. On one of the silver dishes from Dali (Idalion) possessed by the Louvre, there is a lion hunt; on the patera from Amathus there is the siege of a fortress.
The treasury of Curium furnished Cesnola with a large number of these pateræ in silver or electrum, on which appeared engraved subjects of the same inspiration and the same style: figures with four wings, struggling with a lion; Astarte with her hand upon her breast, beside hideous patæci, Isis-Hathor, Egyptian sphinxes and sparrow-hawks; hunts, battles, religious sacrifices. Everywhere on these monuments, which, as the Homeric poems show us, were so greatly sought for by the Greeks of the heroic age, and imported by Sidonian merchants, we find copies of the usual designs on the Egyptian and Assyrian monuments, an unconscious mixture of hybrid scenes, which have nothing original except this quaint amalgam itself, even more striking here than in the other manifestations of Phœnician and Cypriote art. If we had a larger number of these curious dishes, we should find, no doubt, that the motives are little varied, often repeated, even in subjects as interesting as the Hunting Day, and that the effort of imagination here made by the Phœnician artist has been little inventive. Fortunately for the reputation of Phœnician and Cypriote goldsmiths, other monuments show that their metallurgy was not limited to these interesting pateræ. Thus, for instance, Cesnola brought from his excavations in Cyprus a fragment of a large bronze crater, the handles of which are decorated in the most original fashion. We here find lions standing on their hind legs holding œnochoæ, and clothed in fishes’ scales, like the god Anu in Assyro-Chaldæan symbolism.
In Cypriote furniture and ornaments we observe the same characteristics of a hybrid art. There are little silver vases chiselled in the Assyrian style with rare elegance, handles of sceptres, and other precious utensils like those of Nineveh. Certain ornaments, intended for women’s head-dresses, are of exquisite workmanship; so are the ear-rings, the necklaces of gold, gems and glass; with figures of lions, rams, deer, masks with curled beards in the Assyrian fashion, heads of Isis-Hathor and lotus-flowers. Some of these necklaces and bracelets end in lions’ or serpents’ heads, and form models which Greek artists needed only to copy, for they are masterpieces in their kind. We have seen that the Ninevite excavations brought to light ivory tablets carved by Phœnician artists, and imported into Mesopotamia by commerce: plaques of the same style have been obtained from Phœnicia itself: they were ornaments of precious caskets. These products of Phœnician industry were imported into all the coasts of the Mediterranean; and, at Palestrina, in Latium, an ivory tablet was found, on which a vessel manned by rowers is engraved, similar to those in the Egyptian paintings. Ostrich-eggs, found in Etruria, arranged to serve as vases, are adorned with engraved figures, the Phœnician character of which could scarcely be disputed: there are zones of warriors on foot, on horseback, and in their war-chariots; files of animals, fights of lions with bulls in semi-Egyptian style; the frame of these scenes is borrowed from Assyria; the whole is relieved by iridescent colours.100
If we had in Phœnicia bas-reliefs like those of Assyria, and paintings like those of Egypt, we should be able to give some account of those brilliant stuffs of dyed purple, described by classical antiquity with so much enthusiasm. It was to the Tyrian god, Melkarth, that tradition assigned the invention of this dye, obtained, as it is well known, from the juice of a marine shell, the murex, which is found especially on the coast of Phœnicia. We can only affirm, according to literary testimony, that the workshops of Tyre and Sidon produced stuffs in abundance, the colour of which, as the ancients remarked, instead of being altered and deteriorated by a bright light, was only rendered more vivid and brilliant by it.