Page:Troja by Heinrich Schliemann.djvu/28

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PRIMITIVE CHALDEAN INFLUENCE.
[Preface.

with a turned-up toe, now known to be the sure mark of Hittite and Asianic sculpture. The double-headed axe is also engraved on the famous chaton of the ring discovered by Dr. Schliemann at Mykênae, the figures below it having boots with turned-up ends, and wearing the flounced robes of Babylonian priests. The whole design upon the chaton has manifestly been copied from the Asianic modification. of some early Babylonian cylinder.[1]

The presence, in fact, of small stone cylinders points unmistakeably, wherever they occur, to the influence of primaeval Chaldea. When Assyria and Phoenicia took the place of Babylonia in Western Asia as civilizing powers, the cylinder made way for the lentoid or cone-like seal. Hence the discovery of cylinders at Ilion is one more proof of the age to which the prehistoric ruins of Hissarlik reach back, as well as of the foreign culture with which its inhabitants were in contact. The cylinder figured under No. 1522 in Ilios is especially important to the archaeologist. Its ornamentation is that of the class of cylinders which may now be classed as Hittite, and, in its combination of the Egyptian cartouche with the Babylonian form of seal, it displays the same artistic tendency as that which meets us in indubitably Hittite work. A cartouche of precisely the same peculiar shape is engraved on a copper

    Anfänge der Kunst in Griechenland. The art of the lentoid gems must be of Phoenician importation. Whether, however, it may not have owed its original inspiration to the Hittites at the time when they bordered upon Phoenicia, must be left to future research to decide. Some of the designs upon these gems seem clearly to refer to subjects of Accadian or archaic Babylonian mythology, but this may be due to direct Babylonian influence, since Sargon I. of Accad (whose date has been fixed by a recent discovery as early as 3750 B.C.) not only set up a monument of victory on the shores of the Mediterranean, but even crossed over into Cyprus. The rudely-cut stones from Syria, to which I have alluded above, may have been the work of the same aboriginal population as that which carved the curious sculptures in the Wadis of el-'Akkab and Kânah, near Tyre.

  1. ↑ Schliemann's Mycenae, fig. 530. See Academy, Aug. 25, 1883, p. 135.
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