Terra cotta masks and protomes form a rare category of Phoenician art that spans the Late Bronze Age through the first millennium BC without major chronological gaps. Most masks, and some protomes, have suspension holes at the top or along the sides. Masks dating to the Late Bronze Age are found at Hazor, Beth Shean and Gezer. By the seventh century BC some Levantine masks began to copy Greek attributes. There are Greek parallels for these masks, especially at the sanctuary of Artemis Ortheia in Sparta. These were taken to be the inspiration for the western Phoenician masks until so many examples, including ones earlier in date, were discovered in the cast (Culican 1975: 55-64). Discoveries of masks in the Levant have not, however, closed the argument, and scholars still debate how the idea of masks and the types of masks were transmitted.

Protomes, largely from the west the first millennia in urn BC, are also widely discussed, since their makers seem to have borrowed Greek attributes from different sources: Ionia, Rhodes, Cyprus and, in particular, Sicily (Culican 1975: 75-77; b Stern 1976:114; Markoe 1990:14-16). The impetus for making masks or protomes that "look Greek" may be especially complex. Craftsmen in more out-of-the-way places like Ibiza seem to have received their Greek-looking masks, or mask molds, from Carthage and subsequently to have modified them to suit local tastes.

"Handsome" (or normal) types vary greatly; at their finest they resemble naturalistic sculpture. Grotesque masks were some wrinkled ("old"), some unlined ("youthful") grin or grimace in fairly standardized patterns. Normal and grotesque masks are mirrored in miniature by small amulets in various media depicting male heads intended to be worn on necklaces. One category of mask copies a Greek Silenus (a semi-divine figure with the ears, legs and tail of a horse, usually associated with the god Dionysus) or satyr (follower of Dionysus with the ears, legs and tail of a goat). Phoenician artists copied a wide variety of such faces, imitating Greek types of the Archaic period (circa 600-480 BC) for centuries, long after Greek artists had ceased to manufacture them. Female masks and protomes are all of the "normal" type rather than the grotesque. They usually fall roughly into two categories: one type has an Egyptian hairstyle; the other has Archaic Greek facial features (an oval face, almond eyes and a faint smile) and wears a veil. Carthage seems to have been the source of a number of mass-produced protomes or molds of both types found in Sardinia and Ibiza. At Ibiza there also occur protomes which, although they dimly reflect the original Greek-looking type, have become a truly local product. Terra cotta masks have been variously interpreted as death masks. Tomb guardians or apotropaic devices were personifications of death. Copies of larger masks were worn by adults in religious rituals, and actual masks, either worn by children or adolescents in sacred dances, or put onto the faces of infants or children before they were sacrificed. Both male and female images were probably functional ritual objects as well as symbolic images. Most masks are too small to have been worn by adults but may be copies of actual masks worn in dances or rituals. The suspension holes on masks and some protomes also could have permitted their attachment to temporary statues as heads. We cannot be certain of the meaning of these Phoenician masks, however. Even if they imitate masks actually worn in rituals or represent heads attached to poles in Greek fashion, we can neither reconstruct the rituals nor identify the statues. Like so much of Phoenician art, these terra cotta faces tantalize us with what we can guess, but still do not know.

Phoenician Craftsmen and Craft-Organizations Unfortunately, no accounts survive describing the Phoenicians' own opinion of their art and artists, their sources of raw materials, the relationship of patrons and artisans, the nature of workshops or guilds, or even the tools and techniques they employed. We can often determine probable sources of raw materials and can sometimes pinpoint the immediate origin of the material used to make a specific object or class of objects (see Barnett 1975: 168, on the ivories from Nimrud). Many other questions also remain unanswered. How did patrons commission works? Who designed patterns? How was the work assigned? Even the role of the craftsman in Phoenician society is unclear (for comprehensive lists of suggestive questions concerning bronze technology and craftsmen, see Doeringer, Mitten and Steinberg 1970: viii-ix).

I use the simple definition of Mallowan and Georgina Hermann (1974: 35-36): a group of craftsmen working together, presumably under one or more leaders or masters Craftsmen from one workshop ended working objects in similar ways. It is possible to recognize different workshops by identifying similarities between groups of objects in technique of manufacture and in that elusive and rarely defined quality, "style." In the case of carved ivory, Richard Barnett has suggested that there may have been ivory workshops in all the richest cities of the Levantine coast (Barnett 1982: 55). Phoenician ivories are numerous and they have been the subject of scholarly study for a long time. Researchers have identified the work of individual craftsmen more often in the corpus of ivories than among objects in other media. They have also recognized series of artifacts from a single workshop or group of associated workshops, and individual motifs or even entire works of art in ivory based on shared pattern-books or models.

Variations in quality of carving and minor deviations from standard iconography probably indicate different hands. Barnett has suggested that similarities in motifs on groups of ivory panels found in a number of Levantine cities of the ninth and eighth centuries BC denote that similarly-decorated ivory furniture was in widespread use. Isolated finds of related single panels that seem unlikely to have belonged to furniture may indicate that craftsmen produced the same panels for a variety of purposes (Barnett 1975: 129). The repeated motifs and themes suggest that ivory-workers from different workshops shared or copied each other's patterns. Series of ivories exhibiting similarities down to the smallest detail also probably indicate that carvers worked from pattern books or models.

Stone sacrificial stelae form another body of data in which it is possible to detect common workshop styles and shared patterns. Carthage has yielded the largest corpus of such carved stone stelae. This important western Phoenician City seems to have served as an artistic center from which other cities borrowed motifs and conventions. Carthaginian stelae, too heavy to be easily moved, were copied mainly within North Africa (as at Hadrumetum [Soussel and Cirta [Constantinel), while more portable objects such as razors and terra cotta heads (or molds to make them) reached Italy and Spain. In general, the stone monuments are particularly useful indicators of entirely local Phoenician techniques of production and choices of motifs (see Moscati 1973). Late monuments with very repetitive themes from Carthage and from some Italian sites (for example, ones from Sulcis in Sardinia, depicting women holding tambourines) were probably so familiar that carvers did not require a pattern.

Artists borrowed individual motifs and even whole scenes from one another, not only within the same media, but also between media. Eastern Phoenician ivories and metal bowls of the early first millennium BC share motifs, as do later stone stelae and metal razors in the west. Similarly, Greek metalwork and pottery shared motifs in the Orientalizing Period (seventh century BC) and later (Doeringer, Mitten and Steinberg 1970: 103-6). Phoenician jewelry scarabs and amulets are particularly rich sources of representational motifs that recur for centuries in carved ivory and stone, worked metal and modeled clay throughout the Phoenician world, east and west.

Phoenician artists freely borrowed the imagery of other cultures and allowed themselves considerable leeway in depicting their own motifs and those of others. Yet Phoenician art was also traditional and conservative. This brief overview of Phoenician art cannot do justice to the wide variety of artifacts preserved in many different contexts or the rich iconography from which Phoenician craftsmen drew. I hope to have illustrated the kinds of questions we can ask of Phoenician art and some of the answers we can glean from the surviving evidence.

The foreign owners of some Phoenician art would have understood its iconography, while others would merely have enjoyed the appearance of a design or appreciated the materials a craftsman had chosen and the care expended in making an object. Some of the art was confined to a more purely Phoenician, ritual context and reflects religious beliefs and documents cultic practices we are only beginning to comprehend. In all cases, our appreciation of Phoenician art is greatly enhanced by our awareness of its varied contexts.