Phoenician sculptors in the round did not very often indulge in the representation of animal forms.  The lion, however, was sometimes chiselled in stone, either partially, as in a block of stone found by M. Renan at Um-el-Awamid, or completely, as in a statuette brought by General Di Cesnola from Cyprus.  The representations hitherto discovered have not very much merit.  We may gather from them that the sculptors were unacquainted with the animal itself, had never seen the king of beasts sleeping in the shade or stretching himself and yawning as he awoke, or walking along with a haughty and majestic slowness, or springing with one bound upon his prey, but had simply studied without much attention or interest the types furnished them by Egyptian or Assyrian artists, who were familiar with the beast himself.  The representations are consequently in every case feeble and conventional; in some they verge on the ridiculous.  What, for instance, can be weaker than the figure above given from the great work of Perrot and Chipiez, with its good-humoured face, its tongue hanging out of its mouth, its tottering forelegs, and its general air of imbecility?  The lioness’ head represented in the same work is better, but still leaves much to be desired, falling, as it does, very far behind the best Assyrian models.  Nor were the sculptors much more successful in their mode of expressing animals with whose forms they were perfectly well acquainted.  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.[720] They are just recognisable, and that is the most that can be said for them.  A dog in stone,[721] found at Athienau, is somewhat better, equally the dogs of the Egyptians and Assyrians.  On the other hand, the only fully modelled horses that have been found are utterly childish and absurd.[722]

The reliefs of the Phoenicians are very superior to their statues.  They vary in their character from almost the lowest kind of relief to the highest.  On dresses, on shields, on slabs, and on some sarcophagi it is much higher than is usual even in Greece.  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.[723] 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 general character of the sculpture is archaic and Assyrian; nor is there a trace of Greek influence about it.  Hercules, standing on an elevated block of stone at the extreme left, threatens the herdsman, who responds by turning towards him, and making a menacing gesture with his right hand, while in his left, instead of a club, he carries an entire tree.  His hair and beard are curled in