[604] I see with pleasure that Mr. W. P. Palmer proposes to continue his exploration of Phrygia; his lecture before the Hellenic Society (Dec. 14, 1882) promises much. The western half of the great western plateau of Asia Minor, this land of monotonous grandeur, is directly connected with the Ægean Sea by a single line of cleavage which extends from Miletus to Celænæ. Egyptian art and influence found its way to Greece viâ Phrygia as well as through Phœnicia, especially in the early days of the Argonauts and the Iliads, when Greece began to be connected with nearer Asia. Hence the wide diffusion of the Midas-myth (b.c. 670): the long-eared king’s tomb was discovered in 1800. I have elsewhere noticed how far Phrygia extended to the West, leaving indelible marks in Spain and Portugal.
[605] The Lycian tongue, as far as we know, resembles Zend; and the coin with a triquetra (Rawlinson’s Herod. i. 212) has three characters apparently Hittite. The Lycian confederacy of twenty-three towns (six cities being chief) was strong enough to resist Crœsus (Herodotus). Their relationship was by the ‘distaff-side’ (Mutterrecht), as opposed to the ‘Sword-side’; and we find traces of the same antique and logical practice among the Greeks: ἀδελφὸς is evidently derived from δελφύς.
[606] Major di Cesnola On Phœnician Art in Cyprus: the proofs are ‘gold and silver ornaments of remarkable beauty and grace,’ which are said to resemble the produce of Hissarlik.
[607] The Cyprian Venus was worshipped in the form of an Umbilicus or Meta, according to Servius (ad Æn. i. 724). Others compare it with a pyramid.
[608] Numismatique et Inscriptions Cypriotes, Paris, 1832. The Dali inscription is compared with the Lycian at the end of vol. i. pt. 1, Soc. of Bibl. Archæol. 1872. Discussing the eighty characters, the Duc de Luynes found twenty-seven Egyptian, twelve Lycian, and seven Phœnician. This would suggest that the syllabary is a branch of the picture-writing which grew to be an alphabet proper in the Nile Valley, and which, modified by the Phœnicians, passed into Greece. Others hold it to be an imperfect modification of the Assyrian cuneiforms, introduced about b.c. 700 and lasting till Alexander’s day. I have already noticed that the cuneiforms were originally pictures of natural objects; and that the same is evidently the case with the Chinese syllabary. Some of the Cypriot signs show a faint resemblance to the Devanagari alphabet, which we know to be a modern offshoot from South Arabian or Himyaritic. A gold incision from the Curium treasury (Plate xxxiv. No. 7) consists of two crescents adossed, which may be either Hittite or a simple ornament. Mr. Sayce, indeed, derives the syllabary from Khita-land. Of the crescent and the star I have already spoken; no date can be assigned to it in decorative art.
[609] I have figured a similar but broader blade as the Novacula in Etruscan Bologna, p. 66. The Prague Museum has about a dozen of these sickles found near Tepl: one (b) with a rivet-hole and a kind of beading. In the collection of Carinthian Klagenfurth I found a sickle (c, No. 1711) fifteen and a half cent. long by four broad, with an Etruscan inscription
. See Chap. X.
[610] The winged Sphinxes upon this patera with hawks’ heads are peculiarly Egyptian. The Sphinx, which may be older than the Pyramids, is a man-headed lion—the ‘union of force and intellect.’ Later types change the human head to that of an asp, a ram, and a hawk; and supply the latter with wings. The same is the case with the Sphinx of Troy and Assyria: it is mostly alate. The Grecian Sphinx changed the bearded human head to that of a woman; the Gyno-Sphinx in Egypt being later than the Andro-Sphinx. We find the female in the doorway of the Xanthus frieze and over the sarcophagus at Amathus (Cyprus, pp. 264–267). Those who would understand the peculiar beauty, not only of line but of expression, which the Egyptians threw into the face of the Sphinx have only to study the statue standing to the proper left of the main entrance to Shepheard’s Hotel, Cairo. It came, I believe, from the great Dromos of the Serapeum, the Apis-tombs of the marvellous Memphis cemetery.
[611] Meaning Holy Lady or Great Goddess, the Syria Dea. Preceded by the digamma, the word became Famagosta, and was corrupted to Fama Augusti and to Ammochosti, a sand-heap.