[Illustration: Fig. 147.--Phoenician Vase, from Curium. (Cesnola Coll., N. Y. Metrop. Mus.)]
[Illustration: Fig. 148.--Phoenician Vase, from Dali, with Phoenician Inscription. (Cesnola Coll., N. Y. Metropolitan Museum.)]
The early Phoenician settlers located themselves chiefly on the southern and eastern sides of the island; the Greeks chose the north and west. Both were evidently actuated by the same motive, viz., to give the preference to the localities nearest the land from which they had come. The Phoenicians founded Paphos, Amathus, and Citium; the Greeks founded Salamis, Curium, Neo-Paphos, and several other towns. Tencer and Agapenor, two of the Greek heroes from the Trojan war, settled in Cyprus, and the island is thus introduced into Grecian legend. As time passed, the Greek and Phoenician elements underwent a more or less complete amalgamation. The Greek language became the prevailing tongue, and the Phoenician religion became the common creed. Aphrodite, who sprung from the foam of the sea, and was wafted to the shore of Cyprus, was the Tyrian Astarte, the Assyrian Mylitta. Her worship extended over the whole island, and was engaged in with all the licentious impurity of the Oriental original. Greece rose as Phoenicia declined, and her people spread beyond the limits of their ancestral settlements. One civilization rose upon the ruins of another, and died in its turn; and Cesnola found them piled one upon another in strata, to be opened up and read like the stony leaves of the geologist's book.
[Illustration: Fig. 149.--Phoenician Vase, from Curium. (Cesnola Coll., N. Y. Metropolitan Museum.)]
That this is literally the case can be very easily shown. General di Cesnola began his excavations at Larnaca, on the southern shore of the island, or near the ancient Citium, or Kittim, a Phoenician city. Near this city have been found a number of terra-cotta statuettes, which General Cesnola ascribes to the fourth century before our era. He thinks they were imported from Greece. They were accompanied by others, poorly executed, and some figures suggestive of Phoenicia and Egypt. It was here that the vase, Fig. 150, was discovered. Crossing the Santa Croce range, he found, at Dali, on the plain of Messaria, the necropolis of the Phoenician city Idalium. He began his excavations among the Phoenician tombs, and exhumed a great quantity of pottery of several shapes. The vases are of light-colored clay, and are variously decorated with geometric patterns and concentric circles in brown color. One of them (Fig. 148) has a Phoenician inscription, and all the others were evidently Phoenician. Above the tier of tombs from which these were taken, a second tier was discovered, of a different epoch, and containing objects of a totally different character. Earthen-ware gave place to glass in all the shapes found in Greek pottery, the amphora, lekythos, krater, kylix, and others. Many were of a formation so evidently late that the discoverer ascribes them to the Græco-Roman period. Here then, was Greek and Phoenician work reposing in juxtaposition. An explanation was found by returning to the Greek tomb which had been first opened, and under it was discovered the continuation of those of the Phoenicians. The Greek Idalium had grown upon the ruins of a Phoenician predecessor, and hidden under the ashes of the one Cesnola found the necropolis of the other. On prosecuting his researches in the latter, the type of pottery again altered, and the decoration of concentric rings reappeared. At Alambra, west of Dali, he found a number of small clay images--horsemen, warriors, chariots, a representation of a procession, and vases of two kinds. He made excavations in five burying-grounds, all apparently belonging to the Phoenician Idalium; and from a mound in the same district he obtained a collection which, from the combination of Egyptian and Assyrian forms and decoration, may be assumed to contain some of the most ancient relics of Phoenician art. Two green-glazed bowls have Egyptian paintings, and the vases occasionally take the form of animals and birds.