oftener than was necessary--men to whom African shores and a climate
softened by the breath of the Ocean were more congenial.

If, however, the Phoenicians were undoubtedly agents who introduced the
Egyptian culture to the early Hellenes of both Asia and Europe, did they
also introduce the Mesopotamian? Not to anything like the same extent,
if we may judge by the products of excavations. Indeed, wherever
Mesopotamian influence has left unmistakable traces upon Greek soil, as
in Cyprus and Ionia or at Corinth and Sparta, it is often either certain
or probable that the carrying agency was not Phoenician. We find the
nearest affinities to archaic Cypriote art (where this was indebted to
Asiatic art at all) in Cilician and in Hittite Syrian art. Early Ionian
and Carian strata contain very little that is of Egyptian character, but
much whose inspiration can be traced ultimately to Mesopotamia; and
research in inner Asia Minor, imperfect though its results are yet, has
brought to light on the plateau so much parallelism to Ionian
Orientalizing art, and so many examples of prior stages in its
development, that we must assume Mesopotamian influence to have reached
westernmost Asia chiefly by overland ways. As for the European sites,
since their Orientalism appears to have been drawn from Ionia, it also
had come through Asia overland.

Therefore on the whole, though Herodotus asserts that the Phoenician
mariners carried Assyrian cargoes, there is remarkably little evidence
that those cargoes reached the West, and equally little that Phoenicians
had any considerable direct trade with Mesopotamia. They may have been
responsible for the small Egyptian and Egyptianizing objects which have
been found by the excavators of Carchemish and Sakjegeuzi in strata of
the ninth and eighth centuries; but the carrying of similar objects
eastward across the Euphrates was more probably in Hittite hands than