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A bas-relief of peculiar interest was discovered at Athienau by General Di Cesnola, and has been represented both by him and by the Italian traveller Ceccaldi. It represents Hercules capturing the cattle of Geryon from the herdsman Eurytion, and gives us reason to believe that that myth was a native Phoenician legend adopted by the Greeks, and not a Hellenic one imported into Phoenicia.
The sheep carried on the back of a shepherd, brought from Cyprus and now in the museum of New York, is a very ill-shaped sheep, and the doves so often represented are very poor doves. They are just recognisable, and that is the most that can be said for them. A dog in stone, found at Athienau, is somewhat better, equally the dogs of the Egyptians and Assyrians.
Animal and human forms intermixed occur on a silver patera found at Athienau, which is more complicated and elaborate than the objects hitherto described, but which is, like them, strikingly Egyptian.
Phoenician temples had sometimes adjuncts, as cathedrals have their chapter-houses and muniment rooms, which were at once interesting and important. There has been discovered at Athienau in Cyprus the supposed site of Golgi a ruined edifice, which some have taken for a temple, but which appears to have been rather a repository for votive offerings, a sort of ecclesiastical museum.
Artistically this patera is much upon a par with those from Dali and Athienau, which have been already described. Our space will not admit of our pursuing this subject much further. We cannot give descriptions of all the twenty paterae, pronounced by the best critics to be Phoenician, which are contained in the museums of Europe and America.
A certain number of the sculptured figures found by M. Di Cesnola at Athienau were discovered under conditions that were quite peculiar, having passed from the shelter of a covered chamber to that of a protecting bed of dust, which had hardened and adhered to their surfaces; and these figures had preserved an unusual freshness, and seem as if just chiselled; but, saving these exceptions, the Cypriot figures have their angles rounded, and their projections softened down.
We may contrast with the refined work of the Athienau sarcophagus the far ruder, but more genuinely native, designs of a tomb of the same kind found on the site of Amathus. On this sarcophagus, the edges of which are most richly adorned with patterning, there are, as upon the other, four reliefs, two of them occupying the sides and two the ends.
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