The corselet which, according to Herodotus, was given by Amasis, King of Egypt, to the Temple of Minerva at Lindos, in Rhodes, was possibly worked in this style; for Babylonian embroidery was greatly prized in Egypt, and imitated.
The second corselet given by Amasis to the Lacædemonians was worked in gold and colours, with animals and other decorations. This was of the seventh century B.C.[23]
Amongst the arms painted on the wall of the tomb of Rameses, at Thebes (in Egypt), is a corselet, apparently of rich stuff,[24] embroidered with lions and other devices. (Fig. [1].)
The Phœnicians imbibed and reproduced the styles they met with in their voyages. The bowls found in Cyprus described and engraved in the September number of the “Magazine of Art” (1883), are most interesting illustrations of the meeting of two national styles, the Assyrian and the Egyptian.[25]
Homer’s “Shield of Achilles”[26] must, in general design, have resembled these bowls (see Pl. [5]). They also recall the description by Josephus of the Temple veils at Jerusalem, which were Babylonian.[27]
Phœnicia, which was the carrier of all art, dropped specimens here and there, for many hundred years, along the borders of the Mediterranean and the coasts of Spain. We fancy we can trace her ocean-path by the western shores of Africa, and even to America; otherwise, how could it happen that a mummy-wrapping in Peru should so nearly resemble some of those wrappings found at Saccarah,[28] in Egypt, woven in precisely the same tapestry fashion?
Among the puzzling phenomena due probably to Phœnician commerce, is the complete suite of the sacerdotal ornaments of a High Priest, found in his tomb,[29] now in the Vatican Museum. This reminds us of other specimens of archaic art from distant sources, that our attention is forcibly arrested, and we wonder whence they came, and whether they were collected from alien civilizations by the Phœnicians before they dispersed them.[30]
Certain Egyptian sculptures of deformed and repulsive divinities—idols of the baser sort—are most interesting and puzzling by their affinity in style to the Indo-Dravidian and the art of Mexico, while they are entirely unlike that of Egypt. If Atlantis and its arts never existed, it may be suggested that it was the eastern coast of America that was spoken of under that name by the Egyptian priest with whom Herodotus conversed.
The Babylonian and Ninevite embroideries, carefully executed on their bas-reliefs, have a masculine look, which suggests the design of an artist and the work of slaves. There is no following out of graceful fancies; one set of selected forms (each probably with a symbolical intention) following another. The effect, as seen on the sculptures in the British Museum, is royally gorgeous; and one feels that creatures inferior to monarchs or satraps could never have aspired to such splendours. Probably the embroidery on their corselets was executed in gold wire, treated as thread, and taken through the material; and the same system was carried out in adorning the trappings of the horses and the chariots. The solid masses of embroidery may have been afterwards subjected to the action of the hammer, which would account for their appearing like jeweller’s work in the bas-reliefs (Pl. [1] and [2]).