A History of Art in Ancient Egypt, Vol. 1 (of 2)Perrot, Georges
History
A History of Art in Ancient Egypt, Vol. 1 (of 2)
Perrot, Georges
Art -- Egypt -- History; Egypt -- Antiquities
high plateaux of Asia Minor, to bring to the Greeks of Ionia and
Æolia, those same models, forms, and even ideas, and it was still
impossible to indicate their detours, or to count their stages.
Leake had indeed described, as early as 1821, the tombs of the
Phrygian kings, one of whom bore that name of Midas to which the
Greeks attached so strange a legend;[27] but he had given no drawings
of them, and the work of Steuart,[28] which did not appear till 1842,
was the first from which any definite knowledge of their appearance
could be obtained. Müller knew nothing of the discoveries of Fellows,
of Texier, or of Hamilton; while he was dying in Greece, they were
exploring a far more difficult and dangerous region. A few years
afterwards they drew the attention of European _savants_ to the
remains which they had discovered, dotted about over the country which
extends from the shores of the Ægæan to the furthest depths of
Cappadocia, remains which recall, both by their style and by their
symbolic devices, the rock sculptures of Upper Assyria. The Lycian
remains, which give evidence of a similar inspiration and are now in
the British Museum, were not transported to Europe until after
Müller's death.
[27] _Journal of a Tour in Asia Minor, with Comparative Remarks
on the Ancient and Modern Geography of that Country_ (1 vol. in
8vo. London, Murray, 1821, pp. 31-33).
[28] _A Description of some Ancient Monuments with Inscriptions
still existing in Lydia and Phrygia._ London, 1842, in folio.
The clear intellect of Ottfried Müller easily enabled him to perceive
the absurdity of attempting to explain the birth of Greek art by
direct borrowing from Egypt. He saw that the existing remains in both
countries emphatically negatived such a supposition, but materials
were wanting to him for a right judgment of the intensity and duration
of the influence under which the Greeks of the heroic age worked for
many centuries, influences which came to them partly from the
Phœnicians, the privileged agents of intercourse between Egypt and
the East, partly from the people of Asia Minor, the Cappadocians,
Lycians, Phrygians, and Lydians, all pupils and followers of the
Assyrians, whose dependants they were for the time, and with whom they
communicated by caravan routes. We may thus explain the extravagance
of the hypothesis which Müller advocated in all his writings; and, as
the originality of the Greek intellect displayed itself in the plastic
arts much later than in poetry, the partial falsity of his views and
their incompleteness is much more obvious and harmful in his handbook
than in his history of Greek literature.
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