46 REV. J. LESLIE PORTER, D.D. 
Mr. W. St. Coap Boscawen (F. R. Hist.Soc.).—Dr. Porter's paper is 
an extremely interesting one. He has collected much matter on a subject 
of great importance, and he has very clearly set forth the position of the 
Pheenicians as having been the first missionaries of culture journeying from 
east to west, a people who not only bore art and art treasures to the occident, 
but who carried with them what is still more precious to us, namely, the 
alphabet we use at the present day. But I think the writer of the paper has 
hardly brought out with sufficient prominence the real position the Phcenicians 
occupied in the matters he has touched upon. They were the early inter- 
mediaries between east and west, and, in looking at the work they did, 
whether as shown in their inscriptions or their art productions, nothing is 
more remarkable than to realise how entirely void they were of the inventive 
faculty. Their works were mere adaptations. For example, let us take those 
beautiful bowls from Cyprus, and especially that from Praeneste, to which 
the author refers. Any one studying Assyrian art will see that these bowls 
were very much like what he sees in so-called artistic products in this 
country, where you find a bit of Watteau with work of modern French art 
combined together. In fact, those works are simply a combination of the art 
of Egypt and Assyria joined together in the most bizarre manner. It is this 
wholesale borrowing that renders Phoenician art of so much value to us ; and 
it is important to note that the place where this tendency is most strongly 
exhibited is the island of Cyprus, which occupied a very important position 
in the East in ancient times, and formed, as it were, a point of union between 
the three great human families—the three most constructive peoples of the 
human race, the Hamitic family in Egypt, the Semitic family in Assyria 
and Syria, and at later times the Greek, who mingled with the other two, 
each in touch with each and all, learning some new lessons of beauty and 
thought, which in after-time gave rise to that art which reached its zenith 
in the works of ancient Greece. There is a great difference between the art 
of the Phcenicians themselves and the art which they were the means of 
propagating. It is remarked by M. Perrot, in his excellent work on the art 
of Assyria, that its chief characteristic was bas-relief. The Assyrians, as 
we know, never attained to any degree of skill in sculpture in the 
round, and never even in their finest bas-reliefs represented the un- 
draped figure; and it was not until the art of Phcenicia was brought 
in contact with the art of Greece that the last remaining fragments 
of stone were cut away from the high reliefs which had gradually been 
coming more and more into prominence in the sculpture they produced. 
This may be said to be the principal factor which the Greeks in Cyprus 
contributed to the art which had been brought there by the Pheenicians 
and Egyptians. We have only to look at the Cyprus monuments in 
the British Museum, and at the collection which should be there but 
which is now in the Metropolitan Museum at New York, in order to see 
how the art of the three great empires of the East was mingled in the work 
produced in the island of Cyprus. Another point to which I would refer 
