THE EXCAVATIONS OF CARTHAGE. 609 



ceramics, but the nose ring, the nezem, on a man — what a curious thing, 

 what a revelation it is. That is the way the old Carthaginian sea 

 wolves must have looked. 



There are other masks in these tombs; not portraits, but veritable 

 grinning masks. One represents an old man, with smooth-shaven, 

 wrinkled face, the nose hooked, the bald forehead receding. The laugh 

 that draws his features makes his cheek bones prominent, and forms a 

 double, funnel-shaped circle of folds about his mouth. The eyes are 

 represented by balls shaped like reversed crescents, and on each cheek 

 bone is a slight application of pastel. Another mask, both grotesque 

 and sinister, has rarer strength of expression. The low, narrow fore- 

 head bulges out; the cheek bones are sharp and prominent; the nose, 

 with base deeply imbedded in the cheeks, follows their movements; the 

 eyes are made by two large holes cut through the thickness of the 

 mask, and the mouth, whose lips form a bourrelet, recalling the Greek 

 tragic mask, by another; between the eyebrows is the disk, inclosed in 

 the reversed crescent, and the whole face, with its irregular features, 

 changes expression with the angle under which it is seen. 



The Carthaginians were endowed with feeling for caricature. Keal- 

 ism — that is, the nonidealistic reproduction of nature — induced a height- 

 ening of her grotesque aspects, an exaggeration of all her features. 

 This bias betrays itself everywhere in their portraiture — on their 

 engraved stones and on their statuettes. They liked to depict man in 

 attitudes lacking the nobility of Greek figures, and they liked to depict 

 monkeys. 



This feeling for caricature comes out even in their divinities, fat, 

 stocky dwarfs with lolling tongues, sometimes disgustingly nude; those 

 horned devils' heads, and those monstrosities made up of parts of ani- 

 mals different in nature and sex. Their Hercules, tbe prototype of the 

 Greek Hercules, has the Greek hero's strength and other attributes, 

 but is a grotesque dwarf, who struggles with cranes, larger than him- 

 self, and, though a dwarf, is yet terrible. They had a perception of the 

 contrasts and mockery of things human, and were the first to represent 

 their tragic and terrible aspect. 



Possibly this is the most original side of their art, the side that 

 obtruded itself on the people with whom they came in contact. Cer- 

 tain by no means unimportant gods of Egypt, Bes, Set, Phtah, as a 

 dwarf, and all the grotesque and malevolent divinities of darkness and 

 evil, introduced at an early period into the Egyptian Pantheon, seem, 

 if not directly of Phoenician origin, at least to have sprung from the 

 ancient fountainhead of civilization whence Phoenicia came forth, and 

 of which she has in a measure preserved the classic type. 



This explains the coarse idols, the fetiches, the stone gods, objects of 



Carthaginian fear and adoration. In the necropolis of Douimes was 



found a kind of hard, blackish pebblestone, strange to the environs of 



Carthage, of the shape of a flattened sphere. On one side it bears rude 



SM 98 — -39 



