Page 230 - The Art & Architecture of the Ancient Orient_Neat

ARAMAEANS AND PHOENICIANS IN SYRIA
themes in this zone arc Egyptian. The sphinxes in the inner zone also have Egyptian
pretensions.
The Amathus bowl, and some found in Etruria,202 show, in the continuous designs of
some of their zones, attempts to tell a story, however fantastic or incoherent it may ap­
pear to be. We see hunts and warlike exploits, as on the Greek orientalizing vases with
which the bowls arc contemporary. The ivory carvers, on the other hand, rendered such
scenes on unguent boxes of the ninth century, but after that they disappear.

Figure 98. Bronze bowl, from Curium in Cyprus

The examples we have given illustrate both the virtues and the shortcomings of the
most popular class of Phoenician metal-work. Like the ivories they tend to be garish.
But they supplied Greece with a wealth of traditional themes, when it had exhausted the
potentialities of the geometric style and a new start was made. In this function the earlier
group of Phoenician bowls is die most important, and it is significant diat examples of
the later group, though common in Etruria, are rare in Greece. In the seventh century
b.c. Greece was no longer avid for foreign goods; the oriental themes which had been
borrowed in an earlier age had now been transformed into truly Greek designs.

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