methods, as the colonies on the coast of Asia Minor understood them as early as the sixth century. In the year B.C. 500 Cyprus made an alliance with the cities of Ionia; and Cimon’s expedition in B.C. 450 determined the definite preponderance of Hellenic civilisation in that island. The statues in which Greek inspiration is recognised have something original which distinguished them at first sight (fig. 210). The physiognomy recalls that forced smile which has been called the _Æginetan smile_; the heads are freed from those conical head-dresses so dear to oriental art, which Greek art repudiated in order to replace them by a diadem or a high crown; the hair is no longer in ringlets and scarcely forms a row of flat curls to frame the forehead; the play of the drapery is quite different from that which comes from Nineveh, and reveals a good taste which is quite charming. In short, the Cypriote monuments, which correspond to this description, only form a branch of Greek archaic art, and we must no longer treat of them in a book devoted to the East. Let us only cite, as an example, the famous statue of the priest with the dove, which seems to date from the Græco-Persian period. It is a colossal statue 8 ft. high, representing a man holding in his hands a cup and a pigeon. His head-dress consists of a hemispherical cap which terminates in the head of an animal; three tresses of hair, a characteristic sign of Greek archaism, fall symmetrically from the back of his head on the front of each shoulder. The rows of curls in the beard which covers his mouth and chin are visibly imitated from the Assyrian fashion of dressing the hair. The fringes and draperies of the garment still remind us, indeed, as well as the square form of the shoulders and breast, of the statues of Tello; but how much more ample and harmoniously arranged they are! We have here Greek taste still imprisoned in the hieratic formula bequeathed to it by the East. [Illustration: Fig. 217.--Bas-relief of Heracles and Eurytion. (_Colonna-Ceccaldi, Monum. antiques de Cypre_, pl. v.)] To the same Græcizing art belong all those iconic statues from the temples of Golgoi and Amathus, which, instead of the peaked cap or of the pshent, wear on their heads garlands of foliage or of narcissus, more or less high and more or less rich, but infinite in their variety. Like the statues found in Phœnicia to which we alluded above, they are portraits of priests, priestesses, or other personages who offer to the god for perpetuity the object which they hold in their hand: a flower, a fruit, a branch, a patera, a pyx, an alabastron, a bull’s head or a pigeon.