The designs on the Corinthian and Etruscan vases, may be considered as pictures in monochrome, according to Fuseli[72], whose ingenious but somewhat fanciful account of the process by which the monochromes were executed, is probably near the truth. The works of the earliest Greek painters, therefore, which we know were called monochromes, resembled the Corinthian and Etruscan figured vases; and, perhaps, it is equally credible that the two, three, and four-tinted vases represent, with tolerable accuracy, the steps towards the many coloured pictures which excited the admiration of the Greeks in the earliest paintings mentioned in authentic history. But, before we take up the history of painting exclusively, it will not be uninteresting to name a few of those early productions of the workers in metal, mentioned by the poets or older historians, and, in some instances, preserved in the treasures of the Grecian temples, particularly those of Delphi, to a late period[73]. We must remember that the Greeks of Europe, Asia, and the Islands, practised the arts with equal taste and success; that, by trade or by alliance with the Phœnicians, they maintained an intercourse with Egypt, and also a direct commerce with the Etruscans; and that their border nations on the Asiatic side were cultivated and luxurious, drawing their origin either from the same ancient civilised stock with themselves, or from Egypt, or its immediate neighbourhood. The shield of Achilles, that noble piece of chased and inlaid work as described by Homer, about nine centuries before our era, is an example. Its rich design could not have been imagined, unless the arts necessary to produce it had arrived at a high degree of perfection in his country at the time he wrote[74], though we may doubt if, at the period of the war of Troy, three hundred years before Homer, there existed artificers capable of executing it. Within a century after the taking of Troy, there was a great movement among the Greek tribes; many new colonies settled in Asia Minor, and the Heraclidæ finally regained their ancient seats in Peloponnesus. It is worthy of remark, that at that period Jerusalem was adorned with her first magnificent temple by Solomon, and that David built his house of cedar. The chief workman sent by Hiram the king of Tyre, to assist Solomon in the building of the Temple, but more especially to superintend the execution of the ornaments, was the son of a Tyrian artist by a Jewess of the tribe of Naphthali. According to one passage of scripture he was like his master called Hiram[75].