The book of Genesis names one of the great grandsons of Cain, as the first who wrought and graved on metal and another as the inventor of musical instrument, - a proof that the arts were cultivated in very early stages of civilization.
Again, within four centuries after the flood, the men had made images of wood, and stone, and metal to worship.
They had not only built them cities but they had tasted of the barbarous civilities of war; they had erected trophies; poets had extolled the exploits of heroes; and sculptors had already fashioned their images to adore.
Constant tradition names Terah, the father of Abraham as a maker of images; and that the worship of them continued in his family for nearly two hundred years notwithstanding the call and conversion of Abraham, is proved by Rachel’s theft of the images of Laban, when she left her father’s house to accompany her husband to the land of Canaan.
But more than a century before the call of Abraham, a colony had been planted at Sicyon, by an Egyptian leader, Aegialeus, who brought with him the knwlldge of sculpture and painting and founded the earliest and purest school of Greek art.
Another civilized colony, from Egypt, soon settled in Greece. Inachus founded the city of Argos, while Abraham was still an idolater in Ur.
The Early History of Art
