The glyptic art, through the multiplicity of its productions, is one of the principal elements of Phœnician archæology, and teaches us more than the miserable fragments which remain of pottery or sculpture. Here, more clearly than in the other branches of art, we find imitation of Egypt and Assyria taken for granted, as a witness of the poverty of invention of the Phœnician intellect. Two cylinders exist in the De Clercq collection which bear a cuneiform inscription by the side of Egyptian figures. That which we give as an example ([fig. 238]), after M. Menant,[101] is the seal of “Annipi, son of Addume the Sidonian.” Thus the owner of the cylinder is a Phœnician; he has inscribed his name in Assyrian beside the god Set,[102] Reseph, the warrior god, and Horus with the hawk’s head. The style of the inscription, like that of the figures, betrays, however, the unskilful hand of the Sidonian imitator.
Fig. 239.—Cylinder at the British Museum (after Menant).
We possess, on the other hand, cylinders on which the figures are purely Assyrian, while the inscription is in Phœnician or Aramaic characters. This one at the British Museum is the “seal of Akadban, son of Gebrod the eunuch, worshipper of Hadad” ([fig. 239]). The style of the figures and the details of the costume are so clearly Assyrian that this monument discloses to us the plagiaristic method to which the idle imagination of the Phœnicians had recourse. These merchants found it simpler and speedier to appropriate Assyrian or Persian cylinders, satisfied with having their names engraved upon them. They did not blush to wear during their life the ornaments of other nations, until their ashes should rest in sarcophagi stolen from the Egyptians.
However, in Cyprus, they tried to engrave cylinders for themselves. The recent excavations have disinterred a large quantity of them, and, by the side of cylinders brought from the continent by commerce, some have been found which were certainly manufactured in the island. But what astonishes us in these monuments is their extreme barbarism; the design is most summary, the figures are scarcely sketched, and the chisel has only made rough scratches on the jasper, the hæmatite, or the chalcedony. And even the figures of men or animals, the trees and the geometrical ornaments with which the Cypriote cylinders are covered, are copied by unskilful workmen from the productions of the Assyro-Persian or Egyptian glyptic art.
After all, Phœnician cylinders are rare enough. Practical before everything, the merchants of Tyre and Carthage preferred flat seals of multiple form to cylinders, the use of which was difficult; they manufactured scarabæi, scarabœoids, ellipsoids, cones, octagonal conoids, these last especially in the Aramæo-Persian period, and lastly bezels for rings. Among the numerous gems which have come down to us, and which must be attributed either to the Phœnicians themselves or to the Aramæan populations of Syria, some have still preserved their mounting: a ring in the form of a horse-shoe enabled the owner to turn the stone on its axis and to hang it from a necklace. The inscription of one or two lines, when it exists, gives the name of the owner, his father’s name, and sometimes his quality. The subjects, naturally more limited than those of the cylinders, are always of Egyptian, Persian, or Assyro-Chaldæan inspiration. There are, for instance, the winged and radiated disk, deer, lions, bulls, sphinxes, gryphons, the divine bust in a winged disk, a pontiff sacrificing at an altar, or in adoration before the pyreum. The Louvre possesses a scarabæoid of red agate acquired in Mesopotamia by M. de Sarzec; a god is seen upon it, holding a serpent in each hand, like the Egyptian Horus; he has four wings, and bears on his head the solar disk supported by two horns. The name, Baalnathan, indicates that its owner was probably an Ammonite or a Moabite. It may be admitted, with M. de Vogüé,[103] that among the Phœnician, Aramæan and Jewish intagli, those in which Egyptian influence appears exclusive are the most ancient, that is to say, anterior to the Assyrian rule in Syria.