Page:Troja by Heinrich Schliemann.djvu/27
of the Mykenaean goddess. The rude idols, moreover, of which Dr. Schliemann has found so many at Hissarlik, belong to the same type as the sacred vases; on these, however, the ringlets of the goddess are sometimes represented, while the wings at the sides are absent. These idols re-appear in a somewhat developed form at Mykênac, as well as in Cyprus and on other sites of archaic Greek civilization, where they testify to the humanizing influence that spread across to the Greek world from the shores of Asia Minor. Thanks to the discoveries of Dr. Schliemann, we can now trace the artistic type of the old Chaldean goddess as it passed from Babylonia to Carchemish, and from thence to the Troad and to the Peloponnêsos itself.
As might have been expected, the same type is met with on the peculiar cylinders which are found in Cyprus, on the southern coast of Asia Minor, and in the neighbourhood of Aleppo and Carchemish, and which I have shown elsewhere to be of Hittite origin.[1] Here it is frequently combined with the symbol of an ox-head, like that which occurs so often at Mykênae, where it is found times without number associated with the double-headed axe, the well-known characteristic of Asianic art. A similar axe of green jade has been unearthed on the site of the ancient Hêraion near Mykênae, along with the foot of a small statue in whose hand it must once have been held. The foot is shod with a boot
- ↑ Academy, November 27, 1881 (p. 384); see also Major di Cesnola's Salaminia, pp. 118 sq., and Fr. Lenormant in the Journal des Savans, June, 1883, and the Gazette archéologique, VIII. 5–6, (1883). The art of the engraved stones of the Hittite class, which is based on an archaic Babylonian model, must be carefully distinguished from that of the rude gems occasionally met with at Tyre, Sidon, and other places on the Syrian coast, as well as from that of the so-called lentoid gems so plentifully found on prehistoric sites in Krêtê, the Peloponnêsos, and the islands of the Aegean. The origin of the latter is cleared up by a seal of rockcrystal found near Beyrût, and now in Mr. R. P. Greg's collection, which has the same design engraved upon it as that on the lentoid gem from Mykênae figured under No. 175 in Schliemann's Mycenae. This fact disposes of the theory so elaborately worked out in Milchhoefer's