The Ceramic Art: A Compendium of The History and Manufacture of Pottery and PorcelainYoung, Jennie J.
History
The Ceramic Art: A Compendium of The History and Manufacture of Pottery and Porcelain
Young, Jennie J.
Pottery -- History
The ceramic remains found on the Phœnician coast are nearly all
referable to her later conquerors. One specimen is singular and
suggestive. It was found at Tyre, and is a polished cruse, with round
body, long neck, wide lips, and a handle joining the neck and body. It
resembles the Egyptian too closely to leave any doubt of the origin of
its style and manufacture. After our previous experiences we are quite
prepared to meet a mythical Phœnician worker in clay; but his
presence does not disturb our inferences. It merely pushes back to a
prehistoric age the date when the first of Phœnicia’s debts to Egypt
was incurred. Other examples, fragments with Phœnician inscriptions,
give further hints of the immediate well-spring of Grecian art.
Phœnician vases are found in Sicily. Egypt and Carthage teach the
same lesson, and illustrate the wide-reaching enterprise of the Tyrian
founders of Carthage.
Turning northward from Phœnicia to Asia Minor, the evidences of
ceramic skill point to identically the same conclusion. Let us take the
older first. There, as in Cyprus, we meet with early traces of Hellenic
art. Across the Ægean sea, on the shores of Asia Minor, Greece again
touched the older arts of Assyria and Egypt. The coffins found in
Mesopotamia are after the Assyrian type. From Tarsus come terra-cotta
works ornamented with green, in a simple style, closely allied to the
Greek. At Rhodes has been found a vase or pitcher of turquoise blue,
ribbed perpendicularly, and crossed at intervals by horizontal bands.
Such specimens take us back again to Egypt. In short, the history of
Asia Minor, its existence successively under Scythians, Medes, and
Persians, while it was receiving the surplus population of Greece from
the west, would lead us to look for what we only found in part in
Cyprus, namely, native styles moulded by influences from east, west, and
south. These generalizations are offered as a substitute for a more
connected history, for the construction of which intelligibly the
materials are wanting. Enough has been said to show that through many
different channels the arts of Egypt and the East set, in a long and
steady stream, toward Europe; that there, meeting with the rising
Hellenic civilization, they were transmuted and purified, and that from
the Hellenizing process emerged the admirable art now called Greek.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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