vessel once more to such a heat that the threads were fused, and attached themselves to the ground on which they had been laid.  In melting they would generally more than fill the cavities, overflowing them, and protruding from them, whence it was for the most part necessary to repeat the polishing process, and to bring by means of abrasion the entire surface once more into uniformity.  There are cases where this has been incompletely done and where the patterns project; there are others where the threads have never thoroughly melted into the ground, and where in the course of time they have partially detached themselves from it; but in general the fusion and subsequent polishing have been all that could be wished, and the patterns are perfectly level with the ground and seem one with it.[846]

The running of liquid glass into moulds, so common nowadays, does not seem to have been practised by the Phoenicians, perhaps because their furnaces were not sufficiently hot to produce complete liquefaction.  But—­if this was so—­the pressure of the viscous material into moulds cannot have been unknown, since we have evidence of the existence of moulds,[847] and there are cases where several specimens of an object have evidently issued from a single matrix.[848] Beads, cylinders, pendants, scarabs, amulets, were probably, all of them, made in this way, sometimes in translucent, sometimes in semi-opaque glass, as perhaps were also the plaques which have been already described.

The ceramic art of the Phoenicians is not very remarkable.  Phoenicia Proper is deficient in clay of a superior character, and it was probably a very ordinary and coarse kind of pottery that the Phoenician merchants of early times exported regularly in their trading voyages, both inside and outside the Mediterranean.  We hear of their carrying this cheap earthenware northwards to the Cassiterides or Scilly Islands,[849] and southwards to the isle of Cerne, which is probably Arguin, on the West African coast;[850] nor can we doubt that they supplied it also to the uncivilised races of the Mediterranean—­the Illyrians, Ligurians, Sicels, Sards, Corsicans, Spaniards, Libyans.  But the fragile nature of the material, and its slight value, have caused its entire disappearance in the course of centuries, unless in the shape of small fragments; nor are these fragments readily distinguishable from those whose origin is different.  Phoenicia Proper has furnished no earthen vessels, either whole or in pieces, that can be assigned to a time earlier than the Greco-Roman period,[851] nor have any such vessels been found hitherto on Phoenician sites either in Sardinia, or in Corsica, or in Spain, or Africa, or Sicily, or Malta, or Gozzo.  The only places that have hitherto furnished earthen vases or other vessels presumably Phoenician are Jerusalem, Camirus in Rhodes, and Cyprus; and it is from the specimens found at these sites that we must form our estimate of the Phoenician pottery.