The Library Magazine of Select Foreign Literature Part 5

The early Chaldean Empire, in spite of the culture to which it had attained, was still in the bronze age; iron was almost unknown, and its tools and weapons were fas.h.i.+oned of stone, bone, and bronze. Had the Greeks and the Phoenicians before them received their first lessons in culture from Egypt or from Asia Minor, where the Khalybes and other allied tribes had worked in iron from time immemorial, they would probably have received this metal at the same time. But neither at Hissarlik nor at Myken is there any trace of an iron age.

The second period of Western art and civilization is represented by some of the objects found at Myken in the tombs themselves. The intaglios have ceased to be Babylonian, and have become markedly a.s.syrian. First of all we have a hunting scene, a favourite subject with a.s.syrian artists, but quite unknown to genuine h.e.l.lenic art. The disposition of the figures is that usual in a.s.syrian sculpture, and, like the a.s.syrian king, the huntsman is represented as riding in a chariot. A comparison of this hunting scene with the bas-reliefs on the tombstones which stood over the graves shows that they belong to the same age, while the spiral ornamentation of the stones is essentially a.s.syrian. Equally a.s.syrian, though better engraved, is a lion on one of the gold prisms, which might have been cut by an a.s.syrian workman, so true is it to its Oriental model, and after this I would place the representation of a struggle between a man (perhaps Herakles) and a lion, in which, though the lion and att.i.tude of the combatants are a.s.syrian, the man is no longer the a.s.syrian hero Gisdhubar, but a figure of more Western type. In another intaglio, representing a fight between armed warriors, the art has ceased to be a.s.syrian, and is struggling to become native. We seem to be approaching the period when Greece gave over walking in Eastern leading-strings, and began to step forward firmly without help. As I believe, however, that the tombs within the _enceinte_ are of older date than the Treasuries outside the Acropolis, or the Gate of Lions which belongs to the same age, it is plain that we have not yet reached the time when a.s.syro-Phoenician influence began to decline in Greece. The lions above the gate would alone be proof to the contrary.

But, in fact, Phoenician influence continued to be felt up to the end of the seventh century B.C. Pa.s.sing by the so-called Corinthian vases, or the antiquities exhumed by General di Cesnola in Cyprus, where the Phoenician element was strong, we have numerous evidences of the fact from all parts of Greece. Two objects of bronze discovered at Olympia may be specially signalized. One of these is an oblong plate, narrower at one end than at the other, ornamented with _repousse_ work, and divided into four compartments. In the first compartment are figures of the nondescript birds so often seen on the "Corinthian" pottery; in the next come two a.s.syrian gryphons standing, as usual, face to face; while the third represents the contest of Herakles with the Kentaur, thoroughly Oriental in design. The Kentaur has a human forefront, covered, however, with hair; his tail is abnormally long, and a three-branched tree rises behind him.

The fourth and largest compartment contains the figure of the Asiatic G.o.ddess with the four wings at the back, and a lion, held by the hind leg, in either hand. The face of the G.o.ddess is in profile. The whole design is a.s.syro-Phoenician, and is exactly reproduced on some square gold plates, intended probably to adorn the breast, presented to the Louvre by the Duc de Luynes. The other object to which I referred is a bronze dish, ornamented on the inside with _repousse_ work, which at first sight looks Egyptian, but is really that Phoenician modification of Egyptian art so common in the eighth and seventh centuries B.C. An inscription in the Aramaic characters of the so-called Sidonian branch of the Phoenician alphabet is cut on the outside, and reads: "Belonging to Neger, son of Miga."[36] As the word used for "son" is the Aramaic _bar_ and not the Phoenician _ben_, we may conclude that the owner of the dish had come from northern Syria. It is interesting to find a silver cup embossed with precisely the same kind of design, and also bearing an inscription in Phoenician letters, among the treasures discovered in a tomb at Palestrina, the ancient Prneste, more than a year ago. This inscription is even briefer than the other: "Eshmunya'ar son of 'Asht,"[37] where, though _ben_ is employed, the father's name has an Aramaic form. Helbig would refer these Italian specimens of Phoenician skill to the Carthaginian epoch, partly on the ground that an African species of ape seems sometimes represented on them;[38] in this case they might be as late as the fifth century before the Christian era.

During the earlier part of the second period of Phoenician influence, Phoenicia and the Phoenician colonies were not the only channel by which the elements of a.s.syrian culture found their way into the West. The monuments and religious beliefs of Asia Minor enable us to trace their progress from the banks of the Euphrates and the ranges of the Taurus, through Cappadocia and Phrygia, to the coasts and islands of the gean.

The near affinity of Greek and Phrygian is recognized even by Plato;[39]

the legends of Midas and Gordius formed part of Greek mythology, and the royal house of Myken was made to come with all its wealth from the golden sands of the Paktolus; while on the other hand the cult of M, of Attys, or of the Ephesian Artemis points back to an a.s.syrian origin. The sculptures found by Perrot[40] and Texier const.i.tute a link between the prehistoric art of Greece and that of Asia Minor; the spiral ornaments that mark the antiquities of Myken are repeated on the royal tombs of Asia Minor; and the ruins of Sardis, where once ruled a dynasty derived by Greek writers from Ninus or Nineveh, "the son of Bell," the grandson of the a.s.syrian Herakles,[41] may yet pour a flood of light on the earlier history of Greece. But it was rather in the first period, which I have termed Phrygian, than in the second, that the influence of Asia Minor was strongest. The figure of the G.o.ddess riding on a leopard, with mural crown and peaked shoes, on the rock-tablets of Pterium,[42] is borrowed rather from the cylinders of early Babylonia than from the sculptures of a.s.syria; and the Hissarlik collection connects itself more with the primitive antiquities of Santorin than with the later art of Myken and Cyprus. We have already seen, however, the close relations.h.i.+p that exists between some of the objects excavated at Myken and what we may call the pre-Phoenician art of Ialysos,--that is to say, the objects in which the influence of the East is indirect, and not direct. The discovery of metallurgy is a.s.sociated with Dodona, where the oracle long continued to be heard in the ring of a copper chaldron, and where M. Karapanos has found bronze plates with the geometrical and circular patterns which distinguish the earliest art of Greece; now Dodona is the seat of primval Greek civilization, the land of the Selloi or h.e.l.loi, of the Graioi themselves, and of Pelasgian Zeus, while it is to the north that the legends of Orpheus, of Musus, and of other early civilizers looked back.

But even at Dodona we may detect traces of Asiatic influence in the part played there by the doves, as well as in the story of Deucalion's deluge, and it may, perhaps, be not too rash to conjecture that even before the days of Phoenician enterprise and barter, an echo of Babylonian civilization had reached Greece through the medium of Asia Minor, whence it was carried, partly across the bridge formed by the islands of the Archipelago, partly through the mainland of Thrace and Epirus. The Hitt.i.tes, with their capital at Carchemish, seem to have been the centre from which this borrowed civilization was spread northward and westward.

Here was the home of the art which characterizes Asia Minor, and we have only to compare the bas-relief of Pterium with the rock sculptures found by Mr. Davis a.s.sociated with "Hamathite" hieroglyphics at Ibreer, in Lycaonia,[43] to see how intimate is the connection between the two. These hieroglyphics were the still undeciphered writing of the Hitt.i.te tribes and if, as seems possible, the Cypriote syllabary were derived from them, they would be a testimony to the western spread of Hitt.i.te influence at a very early epoch. The Cypriote characters adopted into the alphabets of Lycia and Karia, as well as the occurrence of the same characters on a hone and some of the terra-cotta discs found by Dr. Schliemann at Hissarlik, go to show that this influence would have extended, at any rate, to the coasts of the sea.

The traces of Egyptian influence, on the contrary, are few and faint. No doubt the Phoenician alphabet was ultimately of Egyptian origin, no doubt, too, that certain elements of Phoenician art were borrowed from Egypt, but before these were handed on to the West, they had first been profoundly modified by the Phoenician settlers in the Delta and in Canaan. The influence exercised immediately by Egypt upon Greece belongs to the historic period; the legends which saw an Egyptian emigrant in Kekrops or an Egyptian colony in the inhabitants of Argos were fables of a late date. Whatever intercourse existed between Egypt and Greece in the prehistoric period was carried on, not by the Egyptians, but by the Phoenicians of the Delta; it was they who brought the scarabs of a Thothmes or an Amenophis to the islands of the gean, like their descendants afterwards in Italy, and the proper names found on the Egyptian monuments of the eighteenth and nineteenth dynasties, which certain Egyptologists have identified with those of Greece and Asia Minor, belong rather, I believe, to Libyan and Semitic tribes.[44] Like the sphinxes at Spata, the indications of intercourse with Egypt met with at Myken prove nothing more than the wide extent of Phoenician commerce and the existence of Phoenician colonies at the mouths of the Nile.

Ostrich-eggs covered with stucco dolphins have been found not only at Myken, but also in the grotto of Polledrara near Vulci in Italy; the Egyptian porcelain excavated at Myken is painted to represent the fringed dress of an a.s.syrian or a Phoenician, not of an Egyptian; and though a gold mask belonging to Prince Kha-em-Uas, and resembling the famous masks of Myken, has brought to the Louvre from an Apis chamber, a similar mask of size was discovered last year in a tomb on the site of Aradus. Such intercourse, however, as existed between Greece and the Delta must have been very restricted; otherwise we should surely have some specimens of writing, some traces of the Phoenician alphabet. It would not have been left to the Aramans of Syria to introduce the "Kadmeian letters" into Greece, and Myken, rather than Thebes, would have been made the centre from which they were disseminated. Indeed, we may perhaps infer that even the coast of Asia Minor, near as it was to the Phoenician settlements at Kamirus and elsewhere, could have held but little intercourse with the Phoenicians of Egypt from the fact that the Cypriote syllabary was so long in use upon it, and that the alphabets afterwards employed were derived only indirectly from the Phoenician through the medium of the Greek.

One point more now alone needs to be noticed. The long-continued influence upon early Greek culture which we ascribe to the Phoenicians cannot but have left its mark upon the Greek vocabulary also. Some at least of the names given by the Phoenicians to the objects of luxury they brought with them must have been adopted by the natives of h.e.l.las. We know that this is the case with the letters of the alphabet; is it also the case with other words? If not, a.n.a.logy would almost compel us to treat the evidences that have been enumerated of Phoenician influence as illusory, and to fall back upon the position of O. K. Mller and his school. By way of answer I would refer to the list of Greek words, the Semitic origin of which admits of no doubt, lately given by Dr. August Mller in Bezzenberger's "Beitrage zur Kunde der indogermanischen Sprachen."[45]

Amongst these we find articles of luxury like "linen," "s.h.i.+rt,"

"sackcloth," "myrrh," and "frankincense," "galbanum" and "ca.s.sia,"

"cinnamon" and "soap," "lyres" and "wine-jars," "balsam" and "cosmetics,"

as well, possibly, as "fine linen" and "gold," along with such evidences of trade and literature as the "pledge," "the writing tablet," and the "shekel." If these were the only instances of Semitic tincture, they would be enough to prove the early presence of the Semitic Phoenicians in Greece. But we must remember that they are but samples of a cla.s.s, and that many words borrowed during the heroic age may have dropped out of use or been conformed to the native part of the vocabulary long before the beginning of the written literature, while it would be in the lesser known dialects of the islands that the Semitic element was strongest. We know that the dialect of Cyprus was full of importations from the East.

In what precedes I have made no reference to the Homeric poems, and the omission may be thought strange. But Homeric ill.u.s.trations of the presence of the Phoenicians in Greece will occur to every one, while both the Iliad and the Odyssey in their existing form are too modern to be quoted without extreme caution. A close investigation of their language shows that it is the slow growth of generations; olic formul from the lays first recited in the towns of the Troad are embodied in Ionic poems where old Ionic, new Ionic, and even Attic jostle against one another, and traditional words and phrases are furnished with mistaken meanings or new forms coined by false a.n.a.logy. It is difficult to separate the old from the new, to say with certainty that this allusion belongs to the heroic past, this to the Homer of Theopompus and Euphorion, the contemporary of the Lydian Gyges. The art of Homer is not the art of Myken and of the early age of Phoenician influence; iron is already taking the place of bronze, and the s.h.i.+eld of Akhilles or the palace of Alkinous bear witness to a developed art which has freed itself from its foreign bonds. Six times are Phoenicia and the Phoenicians mentioned in the Odyssey, once in the Iliad;[46] elsewhere it is Sidon and the Sidonians that represented them, never Tyre.[47] Such pa.s.sages, therefore, cannot belong to the epoch of Tyrian supremacy, which goes back, at all events, to the age of David, but rather to the brief period when the a.s.syrian king Shalmaneser laid siege to Tyre, and his successor Sargon made Sidon powerful at its expense. This, too, was the period when Sargon set up his record in Cyprus, "the isle of Yavnan" or the Ionians, when a.s.syria first came into immediate contact with the Greeks, and when Phoenician artists worked at the court of Nineveh and carried their wares to Italy and Sardinia. But it was not the age to which the relics of Myken, in spite of paradoxical doubts, reach back, nor that in which the sacred bull of Astarte carried the Phoenician maiden Europa to her new home in the west.

A. H. SAYCE, in _Contemporary Review_.

FOOTNOTES:

[24] See E. Curtins: Die griechische Gtterlehre vom geschichtlichen Standpunkt, in _Preussische Jahrbucher_, x.x.xvi. pp. 1-17. 1875.

[25] _Contemporary Review_, January, 1878.

[26] See Fouqu's Mission Scientifique l'le de Santorin (Archives des Missions 2e srie, iv. 1867); Gorceix in the Bulletin de l'Ecole francaise d'Athnes, i.

[27] See, for example, Di Cesnola's _Cyprus_, pp. 401, 402.

[28] _Gazette Archologique_, ii-. 1, 3.

[29] See Schliemann's Mycen and Tiryns, pl. 273.

[30] Given by La Marmora in the Memorie della Reale Academia delle Scienze di Torino (1854), vol. xiv., pl. 2, fig. 63.

[31] Given in the Monumenti d. Inst.i.tuto Romano, 1876.

[32] Schliemann: Mycen and Tiryns, p. 530.

[33] See, for instance, the example given in Rawlinson's Ancient Monarchies (1st edit.), i. p. 118, where the flounced priest has what looks like a woman's breast. Dancing boys and men in the East still wear these flounces, which are variously coloured (see Loftus: Chaldea and Susiana, p. 22; George Smith: a.s.syrian Discoveries, p. 130).

[34] See, for example, Layard: Nineveh and Babylon, pp. 604, 606; Di Cesnola: Cyprus, pl. 31, No. 7; pl. 32, No. 19. A copy of the Mykenan engraving is given in Schliemann's Mycen and Tiryns, pl. 531.

[35] More especially the examples in Rawlinson's Ancient Monarchies, iii.

p. 403, and i. 413. For Mykenan examples see Schliemann's Myken and Tiryns, ppl. 149, 152, &c. Some of the more peculiar patterns from Myken resemble the forms a.s.sumed by the "Hamathite" hieroglyphics in the unpublished inscription copied by Mr. George Smith from the back of a mutilated statue at Jerabls (Carchemish).

[36] LNGR. BR. MIGA'.

[37] ASHMNYA'R. BNA' SHTA.

[38] Annali d. Ist.i.tuto Romano, 1876.

[39] Kratylus, 410 A.D.

[40] Exploration Archologique de la Galatie et de la Bithynie.

[41] See Herodotus, i.7.

[42] Texier: Description de l'Asie Mineure, i. 1, pl. 78.

[43] Transactions of the Society of Biblical Archology, iv. 2, 1876.

[44] I have given the reasons of my scepticism in the _Academy_, of May 30, 1874. Brugsch Bey, the leading authority on the geography of the Egyptian monuments, would now identify those names with those tribes in Kolkhis, and its neighbourhood.

[45] i. pp. 273-301 (1877).

[46] _Phoenicia_, Od. iv. 83; xiv. 291. _Phoenicians_, Od. xiii. 272; xv.

415. _A Phoenician_, Od. xiv. 288. _A Phoenician woman_, Od. xiv. 288; Il.

xiv. 321.

[47] _Sidon_, _Sidonia_, Il. vi. 291; Od. xiii. 285; xv. 425. _Sidonians_, Il. vi. 290; Od. iv. 84, 618; xv. 118.

SOME GOSSIP ABOUT LEICESTER SQUARE.

In old-world London, Leicester Square played a much more important part than it does to-day. It was then the chosen refuge of royalty and the home of wit and genius. Time was when it glittered with throngs of lace-bedizened gallants; when it trembled beneath the chariot-wheels of Beauty and Fas.h.i.+on; when it re-echoed with the cries of jostling chairmen and link-boys; when it was trodden by the feet of the greatest men of a great epoch--Newton and Swift, Hogarth, Sir Joshua Reynolds, and a host of others more or less distinguished. Mr. Tom Taylor, in his interesting work ent.i.tled "Leicester Square," tells us that the vicissitudes of a London quarter generally tend downwards through a regular series of decades. It is first fas.h.i.+onable; then it is professional; then it becomes a favourite locality for hotels and lodging-houses; then the industrial element predominates, and then not infrequently a still lower depth is reached.

Leicester Square has been no exception to this rule. Its reputation in fact was becoming very shady indeed, when the improvement of its central inclosure gave it somewhat of a start upwards and turned attention to its early history.

Of old, many of these grand doings took place at Leicester House, which was the first house in the Square. It was built by Robert Sidney, Earl of Leicester, a staunch Royalist, somewhere about 1636. His sons, Viscount Lisle and the famous Algernon Sidney, grew up less of Royalists than he was; and to Leicester House, with the sanction and welcome of its head, came many of the more prominent Republicans of the day, Vane and Neville, Milton and Bradshaw, Ludlow and Lambert. The cream of history lies not so much in a bare notation of facts as in the little touches of nature and manners which reproduce for us the actual human life of a former age, and much of this may be gleaned from the history of the Sidneys. They were an interesting family, alike from their rank, their talents, their personal beauty, and the vicissitudes of their fortunes. The Countess was a clever managing woman; and her letters to her absent lord when amba.s.sador in France convey to us many pleasant details of the home-life at Leicester House. Still more charming is it to read the pretty little billets addressed to the Earl by his elder girls. Of these six beautiful daughters of the house of Sidney, four were married and two died in the dawn of early womanhood. Of the younger of these, Lady Elizabeth, the father has a touching entry in his journal. After narrating her death, he adds: "She had to the last the most angelical countenance and beauty, and the most heavenly disposition and temper of mind that I think were ever seen in so young a creature."

With her death the merry happy family life at Leicester House drew to a close. The active bustling mother, whose influence had brought the different jarring chords into harmony, died a few mouths afterwards; and the busy years as they sped onwards, while consummating the fall of Charles and consolidating the power of Cromwell, also put great and growing disunion between the Sidney brothers. At the Restoration, Algernon was in exile; Lord Lisle's stormy temper had alienated him from his father; the Earl's favourite son-in-law was dead; of the three who remained he was neither proud nor fond; and lonely and sick at heart, he grew weary of the splendid home from which the fair faces of his handsome children had gone for ever, and made preparations to leave it. He was presented to Charles II.; and immediately afterwards retired to Penshurst in Kent; and Leicester House was let, first to the amba.s.sadors of the United Provinces; and then to a more remarkable tenant, Elizabeth Stewart, the ill-fated Princess and Queen of Bohemia. She had left England in 1613 a lovely happy girl, the bride of the man she loved, life stretching all rainbow-hued before her. She returned to it a weary haggard woman of sixty-five, who had drunk to the dregs of every possible cup of disappointment and sorrow. Her presence was very unwelcome, as that of the unfortunate often is. Charles II., her nephew, was very loath indeed to have the pleasure of receiving her as a guest; but she returned to London whether he would or not, and Leicester house was taken for her. There she languished for a few months in feeble and broken health, and there, on the anniversary of her wedding-day, she died.

The house immediately to the west of Leicester House belonged to the Marquis of Aylesbury; but in 1698 it was occupied by the Marquis of Caermarthen, who was appointed by King William III. cicerone and guide to Peter the Great when he came in the January of that year to visit England.

Peter's great qualities have long been done full justice to; but in the far-off January of 1698 he appeared to the English as by no means a very august-looking potentate; he had the manners and appearance of an unkempt barbarian, and his pastimes were those of a coal-heaver. His favourite exercise in the mornings was to run a barrow through and through Evelyn's trim holly-hedges at Deptford; and the state in which he left his pretty house there is not to be described. His chief pleasure, when the duties of the day were over, was to drink all night with the Marquis in his house at Leicester Fields, the favourite tipple of the two distinguished topers being brandy spiced with pepper; or sack, of which the Czar is reported to have drunk eight bottles one day after dinner. Among other sights in London, the Marquis took him to see Westminster Hall in full term. "Who are all these men in wigs and gowns?" he asked. "Lawyers," was the answer.

"Lawyers!" he exclaimed. "Why, I have only two in my dominions, and when I get back, I intend to hang one of them."

In January 1712 Leicester House, which was then occupied by the imperial resident, received another distinguished visitor in the person of Prince Eugene, one of the greatest captains of the age. In appearance he was a little sallow wizened old man, with one shoulder higher than the other. A soldier of fortune, whose origin was so humble as to be unknown, his laurels were stained neither by rapacity nor self-seeking; and in all the vicissitudes of his eventful life he bore himself like a hero, and a gentleman in the truest and fullest acceptation of the word. Dean Swift was also at this time in lodgings in Leicester Fields, noting with clear acute unpitying vision the foibles and failings of all around him, and writing to Stella from time to time after his cynical fas.h.i.+on, "how the world is going mad after Prince Eugene, and how he went to court also, but could not see him, the crowd was so great."

A labyrinth of courts, inns, and stable-yards had gradually filled up the s.p.a.ce between the royal mews and Leicester Fields; and between 1680 and 1700 several new streets were opened through these; one reason for the opening of them being the great influx of French refugees into London, on the occasion of the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685. Many of these exiles settled in and around Leicester Fields, and for their use several chapels were built. The neighbourhood has ever since been a resort of French immigrants.