The one deity who really seems to have caught the popular taste is Eros, although at the time when most of the Tanagra statuettes were produced this popularity was hardly assured. The types of Eros standing, seated, flying, or riding on animals are innumerable and found all over the Greek world. The best examples come from Eretria in Euboea, but Myrina and Sicily have also produced large numbers. They vary from almost Praxitelean conceptions, like the Flying Eros from Eretria in the British Museum (C 199), to the veritable Pompeian amoretti from the same site and from Myrina. The riding types of Eros (on a horse, dog, swan, or dolphin) are chiefly found in the Cyrenaica or Southern Italy. In many cases the Eros types are used for ordinary unwinged boys.
Among the human male types a new feature is the introduction of the athlete, as he appears in many boyish figures from Tanagra, and later as a boxer among the somewhat coarse conceptions of the Roman period. Some years ago a remarkable copy of the Diadumenos of Polykleitos in terracotta was found in Asia Minor.[[430]]
In the tombs of the Aegean Islands, Italy, and elsewhere, a class of ware has sometimes been found quite distinct from the ordinary fictile pottery and resembling the porcelain or enamelled ware of the Egyptians and Babylonians, such as the ushabtiu, found in the tombs of the former, and the enamelled bricks of the latter. For the most part they must be regarded as importations, of foreign manufacture, the medium of commerce being the Phoenicians, who not only introduced Egyptian objects of art, but themselves endeavoured to imitate them. Hence we must distinguish some as of Egyptian origin, others as made by the Phoenicians. As might be expected, they are most often found where Phoenician influence was strong, as in Rhodes and Sardinia. Egyptian perfume-vases have been found in the Polledrara tomb at Vulci (see Chapter XVIII.) and may be dated by the accompanying scarabs of Psammetichus I. as belonging to the end of the sixth century.
But these are by no means the earliest examples. In the Bronze Age tombs of Cyprus occasional finds have been made of plates of blue porcelain or faïence, with Egyptian designs going back to the eighteenth dynasty[[431]]; and for several centuries other Egyptian objects in porcelain, or with enamelled glaze, continue to be found in the tombs of Cyprus, Rhodes, and Greece. And there is also a considerable quantity of such wares which is not Egyptian in character, although it may be to some extent imitative, and therefore demands notice. Of this the most remarkable examples are the rhyta, or drinking-horns, found at Enkomi in Cyprus, in 1896, and now in the British Museum.[[432]] The two finest specimens are in the form of a female head surmounted by a cup (Plate [X.]) and a ram’s head respectively. Although found in tombs with Mycenaean objects, and therefore presumably of early date, the style and modelling are so far advanced—so purely Hellenic—that they may be compared with archaic work of the sixth century B.C. or even later.
In the tombs of Kameiros in Rhodes,[[433]] along with Egyptian porcelain objects, were found many vases of this ware, of apparently Greek workmanship. This is further implied by the presence in one tomb of a figure of a dolphin with a Greek
, “I belong to Pythes.”[[434]] It is quite conceivable that the Greeks of Rhodes (as of Naukratis: see below) knew and practised Egyptian methods. The finds include small alabastra with friezes of men and animals in relief, and flasks of a compressed globular shape similarly ornamented; also aryballi of various moulded forms, such as animals or helmeted heads (Plate [X]. fig. 3). The vase in the form of a head seems to be an early Phoenician idea; and this particular type of the helmeted head seems to have been adopted subsequently by Ionian artists in the Clazomenae sarcophagi.[[435]] Similar vases and figures have been discovered in the tombs of Melos, Corinth, Cervetri, and Vulci, and also in Syria and at Naukratis in Egypt.[[436]] Others again from the tombs of Kameiros and Vulci take the form of jars of opaque glass ornamented with zigzag patterns in white and dull crimson on a greenish ground.[[437]] A specimen of somewhat similar ware was found in a Bronze Age tomb at Curium, Cyprus, in 1895,[[438]] consisting of a tall funnel-shaped beaker of blue and yellow glazed ware with an edging of dark brown (Plate [X].). The technique is superior to that of the later examples, and more on a level with that of the porcelain rhyta from Enkomi.
In Greece Proper there are altogether few traces of this enamelled ware, and after the sixth century B.C. it quite disappeared. But some very fine specimens have been found in the tombs of Southern Italy. A jug with delicate ornamentation in blue and white came from Naples, and a similar vase from the same site, but shaped like a kalathos and of a pale green colour, is now in the British Museum. Objects of this ware have also been found on the site of the ancient Tharros in Sardinia. Their glaze was a pale green, like that of the twenty-sixth dynasty wares, and with them was found a scarab of Psammetichus I, which shows them to be contemporaneous with the objects found in the Polledrara tomb. But the strong Phoenician element in Sardinia is sufficient to indicate that these fabrics are all of Egyptian importation.