While we cannot assign an exact age to any of these works, we can see how the beginnings of the art of Greece can be traced to a much more remote antiquity than was previously apprehended. Mingling in the heroic age with a people uniting in itself much of the civilization of Assyria and Egypt, the Greeks were acquiring the knowledge which their own artistic genius subsequently turned to such brilliant account. The highway is complete from Greece to untold antiquity. We learn, therefore, from the relics brought together by General Cesnola, that the view taken of the devious course followed by ceramic art is correct. Egypt gave instruction to all. In her is the spring of ancient art. The Phœnicians studied under her Assyrian pupils, and the two branches, from Phœnicia and Egypt, met in Greece, and there appeared in a new form, more refined, and reflecting a higher ideality and a keener sensitiveness to the subtlest lines of beauty. Di Cesnola has found in Cyprus their point of contact, and has disclosed to our eyes the teacher and scholar sleeping in a common grave. [Illustration: Fig. 159.--Greek Vase and Cups, found at Dali. Cesnola Coll., (N. Y. Metropolitan Museum.)] Should it be asked if in Cyprus alone we must look for the ceramic remains of Phœnicia, the Land of Palms, the answer must be negative. It is true that few relics have come down to us from the sites of her domestic industries. But let us glance briefly at the history of that wonderful country, wonderful alike in enterprise and in science. Ptolemy Claudius, writing in the second century, says that Phœnicia extended from Egypt on the south to the Eleutherus on the north, and eastward to the confines of Syria; or, in other words, that to it belonged the entire eastern shore of the Mediterranean. Like all other eastern nations, it changed its boundaries as the successive waves of war swept over it. First came the Persians, then the Greeks, and, lastly, the Romans. When enjoying its independence, in an earlier age, it was the disseminator of the knowledge which, to a great extent, it acquired in Egypt. To Greece it gave its alphabet, the foundation of the literature which has kindled the admiration of the scholars of all times. Its navigators passed the Pillars of Hercules and reached the shores of England. Phœnician colonies were founded all along the Mediterranean, at Utica and Carthage on the south, and at Marseilles in Gaul. Here, then, was a people gathering in from every side all that the world could give of art and science, and spreading its knowledge with every keel which, from the great ports of Tyre and Sidon, furrowed the Mediterranean. As might be expected, therefore, the remains of its ceramic art and the evidences of its influence are found in Cyprus, Malta, Egypt, Carthage, Greece, Sicily, Rome, and Etruria.