-F-Engraved Gems, Finger Rings, And Jewellery: (a) and (b) are of around 500 and 470 B.C.; (c) and (d) are Classical; (e)
and (f) are of the fourth century B.C.
Procession To The Tomb, drawn on an Athenian Geometric vase of about 740 B.C. With the simplest conventions of
drawing the artist conveys a complicated scene of women mourners (below the handle and behind the cart), males and a
child above, with the chequered shroud raised over the dead man on his funeral bed which rests on the cart for its journey
to the grave. In front of the horses are warriors. This was a grand funeral, and it decorates a large vase (in all 123 cm
high) which served as a grave marker.Contact with the eastern shores of the Mediterranean had never, perhaps, quite been broken. The Cyprus-Crete route
seemed well established, and via Cyprus, no doubt, the Levantine prospectors brought the exotica which began to appear
even in Proto-Geometric Greece. In the ninth century the Phoenicians founded their city on Cyprus, Citium, but it seems to
have been left to the Greeks, from Euboea and the islands, to guarantee trade with the Aegean by planting their own
emporium at the mouth of the Orontes in Syria (Al Mina) by the end of the century. This model for trade they followed in
succeeding centuries on Ischia in Italy and at Naucratis in Egypt.Eastern goods and eastern craftsmen (for sophisticated techniques cannot be learnt by mere observation of their products)
brought to Greece foreign styles and long-lost techniques of handling precious and foreign materials like ivory. Through the
eighth century the orientalizing crafts in Greece, notably in Athens and Crete, were practised alongside the native
Geometric, with little cross-fertilization. But gradually the orientalizing bronze shields made for the Idaean Cave in Crete