610 THE EXCAVATIONS OF CARTHAGE. 



tracings, large round eyes, a nose, ears, and a mouth inordinately wide, 

 whose straight line cuts the lower part of the face — the grinning face 

 of the man in the moon. This stone is certainly a baetylus; that is, an 

 idol, one of the stones inhabited and animated by a divinity, which 

 were called by the Greeks stones with souls. Compare it with those 

 beautiful Carthaginian masks, representing the head of a goddess sur- 

 mounted by a crown of serpents, pure of line, refined and dignified, and 

 the contrast fairly grates on one. On the one hand, Greek art at its 

 noblest brought to bear on an Oriental conception ; on the other, coarse- 

 ness and barbarity. However, this head has a certain amount of 

 expression, and the same expression is found on a similar stone bearing 

 a mysterious inscription on the reverse side. It is found, also, on ostrich 

 eggs with human features coarsely painted in blue, red, and black. 

 One realizes that this god devoured children. 



The jewelry and the articles in precious metals help to complete the 

 picture of this strange civilization, a curious mixture of refinement and 

 barbarity, thoroughly impregnated with Oriental ideas, of which the 

 excavations at Carthage disclose new manifestations every day. The 

 jeweler's art does not pretend to embody a high conception of the ideal. 

 Jewels are the accessories and natural complements of beauty; they 

 are often substituted for it among peoples who rate richness of form 

 above beauty of feature and purity of line. To judge by their variety, 

 their perfection, and the place they hold in these sepulchers, they seem 

 to have been one of the favorite forms of art among the Carthaginians; 

 yet even they show this mixture of borrowed and native art. There 

 are scarabs, amulets, fragments of purely Egyptian necklaces, along 

 with pieces of jewelry in which, by the side of an inspiration from 

 foreign sources, the native skill of the Carthaginians in such work 

 asserts itself. 



The Phoenicians were always marvelous workers in metal. When 

 Solomon wanted to decorate the temple of Jerusalem and his palace he 

 requested the King of Tyre to send him artists. It is probable that 

 the jewelers of Sidon played the same role in Greece. M. Naville has 

 recently shown that they practiced their art as far as Egypt. At all 

 events, the products of their industry flooded the markets of the Occi- 

 dent, where they took women in exchange for their gold necklaces, their 

 bracelets, and, above all, their bronze and silver cups in repousse, deco- 

 rated in long circular designs with scenes from the chase, processions 

 of wild or domestic animals, contests between gods and fantastic 

 beasts — a resume of the religious conceptions which developed into the 

 mythology of the Greeks. 



The cups that are found in Greece, the Isle of Cyprus, and even Italy 

 have not yet been discovered in Carthage. The soil has not the sandy 

 dryness of Egypt, which preserves relics buried in it ; nor has it been 

 overlaid with a stratum of cinders such as at Pompeii enshrouds and 

 petrifies a whole civilization in its perfection. The cedar wood which 



