FOOTNOTES:
[4] The term Japhetic is rather confused and unscientific. It is used here as being more popularly intelligible.
[5] Herodotus.
PHŒNICIANS.
AUTHORITIES:
Moevers, Rénan, Duncker, Ewald, Ezekiel, Proverbs of Solomon, etc.
Previous to any epoch settled by positive history, the Canaanites, or Phœnicians, a highly civilized nation, dwelt in the land called Palestine. They were an elderly branch of the Shemitic family; their generic name embracing the Hittites, Jebusites, Amorites, and Girgasites—all of whom the Greeks called Phœnicians. Canaan, in the Shemitic dialects, signifies "lowland," as was Palestine, in contradistinction to Aram, or the highlands of Mesopotamia (Naharajim, Nahirim of the Old Testament). Canaan, in Hebrew proper, is sometimes synonymous with "merchant;" and the historical development of the Phœnicians explains and justifies this signification. The Greek name Phœnicians, is supposed by some to be derived from phoinizai, "to kill," whence Phoinikes (Phœnicians), "bloody men." The Phœnicians, being very jealous of their maritime trade, killed and in every way molested the navigators from other lands who dared to follow their vessels or spy out their extensive maritime establishments, factories, or connections. For this reason the Greeks long considered the Tyrrenian seas as highly dangerous for navigators, and as filled with rocks, monsters, and anthropophagi. Other investigators, again, derive the Greek word Phœnicians from their ruddy complexion, or from their having first navigated the Red Sea.
The primitive seats of the Phœnicians lay north and south of Syria. From thence they are supposed to have emigrated to Palestine through the northern part of Syria, while another column from the south advanced from the delta on the Persian Gulf, anciently called Assyrium Stagnum, or from the islands of Tyros (Tylos) and Arados, situated in the above-named waters. Some writers suppose that an earthquake obliged them to emigrate from these shores of the Erythrean or Red Sea (Persian Gulf) of antiquity, and that their Greek name owes its origin to this circumstance.
These wanderings through regions already thickly inhabited by various tribes and nations, may have contributed to develop in these Shemites that powerful mercantile propensity to which they chiefly owe their historical immortality; then and there, too, they most probably began the traffic in slaves, to which, if they were not its originators, they certainly gave a new and powerful impulse. Thus, while the Phœnicians figure in history as the earliest navigators and merchants, they must also be written down in the light of having inaugurated, or at least, greatly extended the accursed slave-trade.
No division into castes seems ever to have existed among the Phœnicians. As a general rule, no traces of this social circumscription are to be detected among the nations of pure or even of mixed Shemitic stock which flourished in Fore-Asia—in Syria, Babylon or Assyria. The Phœnician political organism embraced 1st, the powerful ruling families; and 2dly, the subject classes—a division similar to that of the aristos and demos which prevailed in Greece, or to the patricians and plebeians of Rome. The land of Canaan was originally cultivated by freeholders and yeomen. When one tribe subdued another, or when the victors settled among the vanquished, the latter were not enslaved; they became a kind of tribute-paying colonists, with limited political privileges, but with full civil rights. They were at liberty to hold real and personal property of every kind, just as much as the ruling tribe or class. So also it was among all the Shemites, and, with but few exceptions, among all the nations of antiquity.
Slaves, at this period, were employed only at hard labor in the cities and in the household; they were as yet neither farmers, field-laborers, nor mechanics. But, as already mentioned, the Phœnicians were the great slave-traders, carriers and factors in the remotest antiquity, and this both by land and sea. At a period of more than fourteen centuries B.C., the Phœnicians covered all the shores around the Egean and Mediterranean seas with their factories, strongholds and colonial cities. Besides this, they stretched out even to the Euxine, while their colonies studded, also, the Corinthian and Ionian gulfs (on the sites of modern Patras and Lepanto), and extended on the Atlantic coast even beyond Gibraltar. The records of the earliest wanderings of these Canaanitish tribes into Africa, and even Greece, are preserved in legends as the migrations of gods, demigods and heroes.
Thus the Phœnicians linked in a vast commercial chain Britain, Iberia (Spain), and India; while the Guadalquiver, the Nile, the Euphrates, the Tigris and the Indus, served as highways for their trading enterprise. From Byblos, Tyre, Sidon and other emporiums, they sent out caravans far and wide into Arabia and Fore-Asia. The products of their art and industry were reputed most exquisite even as early as the epoch of the Iliad, and they were vain enough to look on themselves as the pivots of the world's prosperity, and the Scriptures repeatedly mention the pride and denounce the vices of the Phœnician cities. What their merchants bought or received in barter in Asia or in Egypt, they exchanged for the rough products of Greece, Spain, Albion, Libya, and the lands on the Euxine: these consisted principally of grains, hides, copper, tin, silver, gold, and indeed all kinds of marketable objects. Their central situation for the commerce of the known and almost of the unknown world, especially favored the slave-trade. Accordingly Phœnician slaves became more and more valuable, and a continually extending market produced a constantly increasing demand. In all probability the inland caravan excursions afforded the principal supplies for their immense slave traffic; but they also bought, stole, and kidnapped from every possible place and by every conceivable stratagem—just as modern American slave-traders do. In this horrid industry they visited every shore. They carried it on among the Greeks, among the Barbarians of the Hellespont and the Pontus, among the Iberians, Italians, Moors and other Africans. Natives of Asia were sold to Greece and other European countries, while Syria and Egypt were furnished with European slaves. The great majority of these slaves belonged to what is called the Caucasian race, and negroes constituted a comparatively insignificant part. In return for these white chattels the Phœnicians bartered the products of Egypt and of Fore-Asia.
The Phœnicians, then, were the great, and, in all probability, the exclusive slave-traders of those times. The traffic had its chief centre in Byblos, Sidon and Tyre—the depots, bazaars, and storehouses of which were always glutted with human merchandise.
In times positively historical, when Phœnicia had come to be the mighty and flourishing emporium of the world's trade, foreign slaves constituted the immense majority of the population of her cities—as indeed was the case with most of the commercial cities of antiquity; but none of them were so crowded with slaves as were Byblos, Tyre, and Sidon. In consequence of this agglomeration, slavery gradually crept from the market and the household into general industry and agriculture. The slaves thus employed by the Phœnicians may be classified as follows: 1. Slaves of luxury, living in the house of the master; 2. Slaves employed in various branches of manufacture, as weavers, dyers, and artisans of all kinds—as also in the manual labors common to every maritime and commercial city; 3. Agricultural slaves.
This vast accumulation of slaves begat repeated and bloody revolts during the whole historic existence of Phœnicia. The scanty and comparatively insignificant fragments of her history which now exist are filled with accounts of such revolts, generally ending as most fearful tragedies. An uprising of this kind occurred in Tyre about ten centuries B.C.; and history records, that at that time the king, the aristocracy, all the masters, and even great numbers of non-slaveholding freemen were slaughtered. The women, however, were saved and married by the slaves; and thus many primitive oligarchic families entirely disappeared. Frequent servile revolts and insurrections of this kind resulted at length in the partial emancipation of the slaves and their conquest of certain civil rights.
In keeping with the almost boundless accumulation of wealth in those cities was the increase in the number of slaves. As a consequence, the free laborers, artisans, and farmers became impoverished and dispossessed; and, as was natural, they often joined the insurgent bondmen. The oligarchs also sent out these poor freemen wherever Phœnician ships could carry them, or wherever there was a chance of establishing factories, cities, or colonies. Such was the common origin of those primitive Phœnician settlements, which were scattered north and west on almost every shore. In most regions, even in Libya, their object was simply commercial and not at all of a conquering character. At any rate the newcomers soon intermarried and mixed with the natives.
The slaveholding rulers were now forced to sustain a hired soldiery to keep down the slaves—not for defence against an external but an internal foe. Among these hirelings were the Carryians, Lydians, Libyans, and Libyo-Phœnicians. To such motley mercenaries were they obliged to intrust the security of their homes and municipalities. At times this hireling soldiery joined the revolted slaves, and they formed but a poor defence against the Egyptians, or against Assyrian, Babylonian, Persian, and Alexandrian conquest. To all these empires the Phœnician slaveholders were obliged to pay tribute, until finally Alexander massacred or enslaved them all—slaveholders and slaves alike.
Already some of the violent pro-slavery militants in the slave section of the United States express their purpose to invoke the aid of France in their schemes of secession and conquest, and propose that their cities and states be occupied by French garrisons. What a striking analogy with the course of the fated Phœnicians! And if eventually France should listen to their humble prayer and send defenders to these terrified slave-masters, climatic reasons would induce her to furnish such troops as are naturally fitted to bear the tropical heats of the slave-coast—the malarious regions of Louisiana and South Carolina. Such would be her Zouaves and Turcos—the Zouaves enemies of every kind of slavery, and the Turcos negroes themselves. Where then would be their defenders and their security? Every French soldier, even if neither Zouave nor Turco, would, in all probability, side at once with the oppressed against the oppressor. The prejudice of race, so prevalent in America, is not a European characteristic: it did not exist in antiquity; it does not prevail in Europe now.
It was not the existence of an oriental political despotism in Phœnicia—it was domestic slavery, which, penetrating into industry and agriculture, destroyed the richest, most enterprising, and most daring community of remote antiquity. Cicero wrote their epitaph: "Fallacissimum esse genus Phœnicum, omnia monumenta vetustatis atque omnes historia nobis prodiderunt."
When, therefore, positive history slowly rises on the limitless horizon of time, Phœnicia appears as an ominous illustration of how domestic slavery, from an external social monstrosity, tends to become a chronic but corrosive disease. And neither does the evidence of history end with her. Over and over again will it be found that slavery, after eating so deeply into the social organism as to become constitutional and chronic, has the same ultimate issue, even as a virus slowly but surely penetrates from the extremities into the vitals of the animal organism.
The intermediate stages of such diseases and the process of the symptoms are often modified in their outward manifestations to such an extent as to lead even the keen observer astray. But it is only he who can unerringly diagnosticate the nature of the disease who can ever become a great healer: he discovers the true character and source of the malady, whatever may be its external complications, and from whatever conditions and influences they may result. Some symptoms may increase, others decrease in intensity and virulence in the physiological as in the social disease—they are, however, secondary. The parallel holds good—the principle remaining unchanged: life becomes extinct for similar reasons in the animal as in the social and political body.
Thus, in the history of the Phœnicians, and therefore, in the earliest authentic epoch, a great historical and social law manifests itself in full action. This activity it retains through all the subsequent social and political catastrophes in the life of nations and empires, down even to Hayti with her immortal Toussaint. Slavery generates bloody struggles. Many of these have resulted in the slaves violently regaining their liberty, while others have destroyed the whole state—swallowing up the slaveholders in their own blood, or burying them under the ruins of their own social edifice.
LIBYANS.
AUTHORITIES:
Diodorus Siculus, Corippus, Moevers, etc.
The primitive social and intellectual condition of the populations dwelling along the shores of Africa washed by the Mediterranean sea, can only be inferred from their respective relations with the Phœnicians and Carthaginians. Other sources of historical information as to that remote period there are none, while later times also give comparatively scanty satisfaction.
Ethnology has not yet positively determined who the aborigines of Libya were, and it is questionable if it can ever be satisfactorily settled. Egyptian inscriptions indicate a white race in the north-eastern corner of Libya, adjoining Egypt; while further to the west lived the blacks. At a period exceedingly remote, the whites mixed with these negro blacks, who probably immigrated from the centre of Africa—Soudan—and spread over the whole of Libya. These remote epochs, however, altogether refuse chronological limitation. But when chronology, even of the most rudimentary kind, becomes possible, history shows us the existence, in Libya, of a nomadic and agricultural people, who can be no other than these cross-breeds, and who had brought a part of the land to a high degree of cultivation. The Libyans may thus be considered as an autochthonous African population—a theory which is confirmed by other evidence not now necessary to give.
Among these Libyans—called by the Greeks Afri, and by the Romans, Africani—agriculture was in a highly flourishing condition at the epoch of the earliest myths and legends of Greece: all the Hellenic legends relating to the distant sea-wanderings of gods or heroes, carry them to the Libyan shores about the Regio Syrtica—Tripolis. Among these are the Argonauts and Heraklides, Perseus, Kadmos, Odysseus, and Menalaos. So the Greek myths of Atlas and the Garden of the Hesperides have their spring and source in that part of Libya. All this presupposes a very old culture. Herodotus says that the Ægis of the Greek Pallas originated in Libya, as also that Athene here received Gorgona's head for her Ægis. Even at the present day, the chiefs of some of the tribes in the southern part of ancient Libya carry the skins of leopards and other wild beasts on their shoulders in such a way that the head of the animal, Ægis-like, covers their breast. The adventurous Phœnician and Greek navigators of the earliest period accordingly found the Libyans already a highly cultivated people. This culture, too, they possessed previous to their intercourse with the Canaanites, Phœnicians, or Greeks—anterior even to the wanderings of Astarte, Anna, or Dido.
At this epoch the Libyans were possessed of written language. Their alphabet was, in certain peculiarities, of an older type than even the Phœnician—that father of so many eastern and western alphabets. Leptis and Oka are Libyan names for Libyan cities which were in existence previous to any Phœnician colonizations—though these colonizations are themselves anterior to positive history.
Goats, sheep, and other domestic animals were introduced into Greece and Italy from Libya; and from thence also came the knowledge of how to breed and rear them. The Libyans also, in all probability, first taught them the mode of keeping and rearing bees, as the Greek word for "wax," keros—Latin, cera, is by some deduced from the Berber (Libyan) ta-kir, and the Greek designation for honey, meli, mel—Latin, mel, from the Berber ta-men-t. Others, however, trace both those words to a Sanscrit root.
As an evidence of their advanced civilization, it may be mentioned that the Libyans were highly accomplished in horticulture at a time when the fields of Greece and Italy were only rudely ploughed. From Libya across the Mediterranean, the leguminous or pulse plants seem to have been introduced into Southern Europe, together with the mode of their use and culture; and some investigators consider that the Latin names for "pease" (cicer), for "lentils" (lens, lentis), and for "beans" (faba), have their origin in the Berber ikiker, ta-linit, and fabua. But to these words, also, others give a Sanscrit origin. Cucurbis "cucumber," is in Berber curumb—although, again, it is traced, but forcedly, to the Sanscrit. Whatever may be the origin of the words, it is an historical fact that the Romans acquired their whole knowledge of horticulture from the Libyans and Libyo-Phœnicians; and it may even be surmised that the Latin urtus, "hortus," had its root in the Berber urt.
Civilization among the Libyans, therefore, was anterior to any contact either with Phœnicians or Greeks, and long centuries anterior to the Carthaginian domination over the northern shores of Africa.
The Libyans were a nation of agriculturists and freeholders. No trace of slavery appears among them, and, if it existed at all, was altogether insignificant and accidental. When the Phœnicians and Canaanitish settlements increased in power and number, the Libyans became tributary colonists, and the Phœnicians instituted the slave-trade among them, whose victims were confined mostly to the nomads.
As we have before said, the poor white colonists sent from Canaan and Phœnicia to Libya intermarried with the natives; and from this union came the Libyo-Phœnicians of history. The relations which the Libyans (and subsequently the Libyo-Phœnicians, when again subjugated) held to Phœnician and Canaanitish settlers, were similar to those which free Romans afterward held to the Longobard and Frankish conquerors who settled upon and held the lands of which they were once the masters.
CARTHAGINIANS.
AUTHORITIES:
Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Polybius, Corippus, Moevers, etc.
The Carthaginians were the great ethnic offshoots of Phœnicia in the western part of the ancient world. It would not be in place here to inquire what motives led these wanderers away from their Asiatic home, or what was the nature of the settlement which they made. They left Tyre and founded the celebrated city of Carthage, on a spot where an ancient colony from Sidon previously existed.[6] Carthage very early—indeed, we might almost say, at the start—assumed a higher character than any previous colony or city of Phœnicia. It soon became, in fact, an independent political power. It began to flourish at a time when Tyre and Sidon were on the decline, and when these once great cities had become tributary to Asiatic potentates. The Carthaginians became first the protectors, and soon afterward, the masters of all the ancient Phœnician colonies scattered over the western world. Nor did they stop here; they became a warlike and conquering empire. The political misfortunes of their mother country increased, by almost uninterrupted immigration, the number of poor free citizens in Carthage, as well as in other seacoast cities now Punic, though once Phœnician—many of them, indeed, having a numerous Libyo-Phœnician population. This surplus the Carthaginians sent off as colonists into the interior of Libya, where they founded smaller cities or settled as agriculturists among the native population, whose lands, in many instances, were assigned to the new-comers. The Carthaginian oligarchy soon began to oppress and look with contempt upon the ancient Phœnicians, Libyo-Phœnicians and Libyans. In process of time, the new colonists mixed with the ancient populations, and all were soon equally sufferers from oppressive tributes and exactions. The common hatred of these various populations against the oligarchy, which frequently led to revolt, was a powerful aid to the Numidian kings and to the Romans in their efforts to crush haughty Carthage.
The great Carthaginian oligarchs and slaveholders extended and perfected what the Phœnicians perhaps only began. They acquired in various ways vast landed estates, and oppressed and impoverished the tributary colonists and small freeholders by grievous exactions; they seized their homesteads, and finally reduced them to serfdom and slavery. Toward the decline of Carthaginian power, such estates were mostly cultivated by slaves; and these slaves—those in the country as well as those in the cities—were either Libyo-Phœnicians and Libyans, or belonged to Asiatic and European races—the unhappy individuals being either bought or taken as prisoners of war. The subdued and slave populations were as mixed as the Carthaginian armies, which, in Africa especially, contained a vast number of negroes—thus presenting an antetype of the French Turcos.
The gigantic struggle of Carthage with Rome decided the destinies of the world. Carthage fell. But the breath of the moribund slave-holding oligarchy of Carthage poisoned Rome. The tragic malediction of Dido received its fulfilment, though not in the precise manner recorded by Virgil in the Ænead.
After having conquered Carthage and Numidia, the Romans distributed among their own colonists the immense estates of the Carthaginian slaveholders, which, however, had been previously appropriated by the Numidian kings. Phœnicians, Libyo-Phœnicians, Libyans and Carthaginians, all now either became Roman colonists, or else serfs and chattels in the villas of their Roman masters. When the Vandals conquered Africa, the Romans in their turn shared the fate of all their predecessors, who had in succession been reduced to serfdom and domestic slavery, the one by the other. In the character of serfs and chattels, these various races now cultivated for their Vandal masters the lands and farms which once were their own. Thus affording an additional illustration of the eternal and omnipotent law of retribution and compensation.