The ceramic remains found on the Phoenician coast are nearly all referable to her later conquerors. One specimen is singular and suggestive. It was found at Tyre, and is a polished cruse, with round body, long neck, wide lips, and a handle joining the neck and body. It resembles the Egyptian too closely to leave any doubt of the origin of its style and manufacture. After our previous experiences we are quite prepared to meet a mythical Phoenician worker in clay; but his presence does not disturb our inferences. It merely pushes back to a prehistoric age the date when the first of Phoenicia's debts to Egypt was incurred. Other examples, fragments with Phoenician inscriptions, give further hints of the immediate well-spring of Grecian art. Phoenician vases are found in Sicily. Egypt and Carthage teach the same lesson, and illustrate the wide-reaching enterprise of the Tyrian founders of Carthage.
Turning northward from Phoenicia to Asia Minor, the evidences of ceramic skill point to identically the same conclusion. Let us take the older first. There, as in Cyprus, we meet with early traces of Hellenic art. Across the Ægean sea, on the shores of Asia Minor, Greece again touched the older arts of Assyria and Egypt. The coffins found in Mesopotamia are after the Assyrian type. From Tarsus come terra-cotta works ornamented with green, in a simple style, closely allied to the Greek. At Rhodes has been found a vase or pitcher of turquoise blue, ribbed perpendicularly, and crossed at intervals by horizontal bands. Such specimens take us back again to Egypt. In short, the history of Asia Minor, its existence successively under Scythians, Medes, and Persians, while it was receiving the surplus population of Greece from the west, would lead us to look for what we only found in part in Cyprus, namely, native styles moulded by influences from east, west, and south. These generalizations are offered as a substitute for a more connected history, for the construction of which intelligibly the materials are wanting. Enough has been said to show that through many different channels the arts of Egypt and the East set, in a long and steady stream, toward Europe; that there, meeting with the rising Hellenic civilization, they were transmuted and purified, and that from the Hellenizing process emerged the admirable art now called Greek.