THE PHŒNICIAN PEOPLE
The Land.—Phœnicia is the narrow strip of country one hundred and fifty miles long by twenty-four to thirty wide, shut in between the sea of Syria and the high range of Lebanon. It is a succession of narrow valleys and ravines confined by abrupt hills which descend towards the sea; little torrents formed by the snows or rain-storms course through these in the early spring; in summer no water remains except in wells and cisterns. The mountains in this quarter were always covered with trees; at the summit were the renowned cedars of Lebanon, on the ridges, pines and cypresses; while lower yet palms grew even to the sea-shore. In the valleys flourished the olive, the vine, the fig, and the pomegranate.
The Cities.—At intervals along the rocky coast promontories or islands formed natural harbors. On these the Phœnicians had founded their cities; Tyre and Arad were each built on a small island. The people housed themselves in dwellings six to eight stories in height. Fresh water was ferried over in ships. The other cities, Gebel, Beirut, and Sidon arose on the mainland. The soil was inadequate to support these swarms of men, and so the Phœnicians were before all else seamen and traders.
Phœnician Ruins.—Not a book of the Phœnicians has come down to us, not even their sacred book. The sites of their cities have been excavated. But, in the words of the scholar sent to do this work, "Ruins are not preserved, especially in countries where people are not occupied with them," and the Syrians are not much occupied with ruins. They have violated the tombs to remove the jewels of the dead, have demolished edifices to secure stone for building purposes, and Mussulman hatred of chiseled figures has shattered the sculptures.[37] Very little is found beyond broken marble, cisterns, wine-presses cut in the rock and some sarcophagi hewn in rock. All this débris gives us little information and we know very little more of the Phœnicians than Greek writers and Jewish prophets have taught us.
Political Organization of the Phœnicians.—The Phœnicians never built an empire. Each city had its little independent territory, its assemblies, its king, and its government. For general state business each city sent delegates to Tyre, which from the thirteenth century B.C. was the principal city of Phœnicia. The Phœnicians were not a military people, and so submitted themselves to all the conquerors—Egyptians, Assyrians, Babylonians, Persians. They fulfilled all their obligations to them in paying tribute.
Tyre.—From the thirteenth century Tyre was the most notable of the cities. Its island becoming too small to contain it, a new city was built on the coast opposite. Tyrian merchants had founded colonies in every part of the Mediterranean, receiving silver from the mines of Spain and commodities from the entire ancient world. The prophet Isaiah[38] calls these traders princes; Ezekiel[39] describes the caravans which came to them from all quarters. It is Hiram, a king of Tyre, from whom Solomon asked workmen to build his palace and temple at Jerusalem.
Carthage.—A colony of Tyre surpassed even her in power. In the ninth century some Tyrians, exiled by a revolution, founded on the shore of Africa near Tunis the city of Carthage. A woman led them, Elissar, whom we call Dido (the fugitive). The inhabitants of the country, says the legend, were willing to sell her only as much land as could be covered by a bull's hide; but she cut the hide in strips so narrow that it enclosed a wide territory; and there she constructed a citadel. Situated at the centre of the Mediterranean, provided with two harbors, Carthage flourished, sent out colonies in turn, made conquests, and at last came to reign over all the coasts of Africa, Spain, and Sardinia. Everywhere she had agencies for her commerce and subjects who paid her tribute.
The Carthaginian Army.—To protect her colonies from the natives, to hold her subjects in check who were always ready to revolt, a strong army was necessary. But the life of a Carthaginian was too valuable to risk it without necessity. Carthage preferred to pay mercenary soldiers, recruiting them among the barbarians of her empire and among the adventurers of all countries. Her army was a bizarre aggregation in which all languages were spoken, all religions practised, and in which every soldier wore different arms and costume. There were seen Numidians clothed in lion skins which served them as couch, mounted bareback on small fleet horses, and drawing the bow with horse at full gallop; Libyans with black skins, armed with pikes; Iberians from Spain in white garments adorned with red, armed with a long pointed sword; Gauls, naked to the girdle, bearing enormous shields and a rounded sword which they held in both hands; natives of the Balearic Islands, trained from infancy to sling with stones or balls of lead. The generals were Carthaginians; the government distrusted them, watched them closely, and when they were defeated, had them crucified.
The Carthaginians.—Carthage had two kings, but the senate was the real power, being composed of the richest merchants of the city. And so every state question for this government became a matter of commerce. The Carthaginians were hated by all other peoples, who found them cruel, greedy, and faithless. And yet, since they had a good fleet, had money to purchase soldiers, and possessed an energetic government, they succeeded in the midst of barbarous and divided peoples in maintaining their empire over the western Mediterranean for 300 years (from the sixth to the third century B.C.).
The Phœnician Religion.—The Phœnicians and the Carthaginians had a religion similar to that of the Chaldeans. The male god, Baal, is a sun-god; for the sun and the moon are in the eyes of the Phœnicians the great forces which create and which destroy. Each of the cities of Phœnicia has therefore its divine pair: at Sidon it is Baal Sidon (the sun) and Astoreth (the moon); at Gebel, Baal Tammouz and Baaleth; at Carthage, Baal-Hamon, and Tanith. But the same god changes his name according as he is conceived as creator or destroyer; thus Baal as destroyer is worshipped at Carthage under the name of Moloch. These gods, represented by idols, have their temples, altars, and priests. As creators they are honored with orgies, with tumultuous feasts; as destroyers, by human victims. Astoreth, the great goddess of Sidon, whom they represented by the crescent of the moon and the dove, had her cult in the sacred woods. Baal Moloch is figured at Carthage as a bronze colossus with arms extended and lowered. When they wished to appease him they laid children in his hands who fell at once into a pit of fire. During the siege of Carthage by Agathocles the principal men of the city sacrificed to Moloch as many as two hundred of their children.
This sensual and sanguinary religion inspired other peoples with horror, but they imitated it. The Jews sacrificed to Baal on the mountains; the Greeks adored Astarte of Sidon under the name of Aphrodite, and Baal Melkhart of Tyre under the name of Herakles.
PHŒNICIAN COMMERCE
Phœnicians Occupations.—Crowded into a small territory, the Phœnicians gained their livelihood mainly from commerce. None of the other peoples of the East—the Egyptians, the Chaldeans, the Assyrians, nor the barbarian tribes of the West (Spaniards, Gauls, Italians) had a navy. The Phœnicians alone in this time dared to navigate. They were the commission merchants of the old world; they went to every people to buy their merchandise and sold them in exchange the commodities of other countries. This traffic was by caravan with the East, by sea with the West.
Caravans.—On land the Phœnicians sent caravans in three directions:
1.—Towards Arabia, from which they brought gold, agate, and onyx, incense and myrrh, and the perfumes of Arabia; pearls, spices, ivory, ebony, ostrich plumes and apes from India.
2.—Towards Assyria, whence came cotton and linen cloths, asphalt, precious stones, perfumery, and silk from China.
3.—Towards the Black Sea, where they went to receive horses, slaves, and copper vases made by the mountaineers of the Caucasus.
Marine Commerce.—For their sea commerce they built ships from the cedars of Lebanon to be propelled by oars and sails. In their sailing it was not necessary to remain always in sight of the coast, for they knew how to direct their course by the polar star. Bold mariners, they pushed in their little boats to the mouth of the Mediterranean; they ventured even to pass through the strait of Gibraltar or, as the ancients called it, the Pillars of Hercules, and took the ocean course to the shores of England, and perhaps to Norway, Phœnicians in the service of a king of Egypt started in the seventh century B.C. to circumnavigate Africa, and returned, it is said, at the end of three years by the Red Sea. An expedition issuing from Carthage skirted the coast of Africa to the Gulf of Guinea; the commander Hanno wrote an account of the voyage which is still preserved.
Commodities.—To civilized peoples the Phœnicians sold the products of their industry. In barbarous countries they went to search for what they could not find in the Orient. On the coast of Greece they gathered shell-fish from which they extracted a red tint, the purple; cloths colored with purple were used among all the peoples of ancient times for garments of kings and great lords.
From Spain and Sardinia they brought the silver which the inhabitants took from the mines. Tin was necessary to make bronze, an alloy of copper and tin, but the Orient did not furnish this, and so they sought it even on the coasts of England, in the Isles of Tin (the Cassiterides). In every country they procured slaves. Sometimes they bought them, as lately the slavers bought negroes on the coast of Africa, for all the peoples of this time made commerce in slaves; sometimes they swooped down on a coast, threw themselves on the women and children and carried them off to be retained in their own cities or to be sold abroad; for on occasion they were pirates and did not scruple to plunder strangers.
The Secrets Kept by the Phœnicians.—The Phœnicians did not care to have mariners of other peoples come into competition with them. On the return from these far countries they concealed the road which they had travelled. No one in antiquity knew where were the famous Isles of the Cassiterides from which they got their tin. It was by chance that a Greek ship discovered Spain, with which the Phœnicians had traded for centuries. Carthage drowned the foreign merchants whom they found in Sardinia or on the shore of Gibraltar. Once a Carthaginian merchantman, seeing a strange ship following it, was run aground by the pilot that the foreigner might not see where he was going.
Colonies.—In the countries where they traded, the Phœnicians founded factories, or branch-houses. They were fortified posts on a natural harbor. There they landed their merchandise, ordinarily cloths, pottery, ornaments, and idols.[40] The natives brought down their commodities and an exchange was made, just as now European merchants do with the negroes of Africa. There were Phœnician markets in Cyprus, in Egypt, and in all the then barbarous countries of the Mediterranean—in Crete, Greece, Sicily, Africa, Malta, Sardinia, on the coasts of Spain at Malaga and Cadiz, and perhaps in Gaul at Monaco. Often around these Phœnician buildings the natives set up their cabins and the mart became a city. The inhabitants adopted the Phœnician gods, and even after the city had become Greek, the cult of the dove-goddess was found there (as in Cythera), that of the god Melkhart (as at Corinth), or of the god with the bull-face that devours human victims (as in Crete).
Influence of the Phœnicians.—It is certain that the Phœnicians in founding their trading stations cared only for their own interest. But it came to pass that their colonies contributed to civilization. The barbarians of the West received the cloths, the jewels, the utensils of the peoples of the East who were more civilized, and, receiving them, learned to imitate them. For a long time the Greeks had only vases, jewels, and idols brought by the Phœnicians, and these served them as models. The Phœnicians brought simultaneously from Egypt and from Assyria industry and commodities.
The Alphabet.—At the same time they exported their alphabet. The Phœnicians did not invent writing. The Egyptians knew how to write many centuries before them, they even made use of letters each of which expressed its own sound, as in our alphabet. But their alphabet was still encumbered with ancient signs which represented, some a syllable, others an entire word. Doubtless the Phœnicians had need of a simpler system for their books of commerce. They rejected all the syllabic signs and ideographs, preserving only twenty-two letters, each of which marks a sound (or rather an articulation of the language). The other peoples imitated this alphabet of twenty-two letters. Some, like the Jews, wrote from right to left just as the Phœnicians themselves did; others, like the Greeks, from left to right. All have slightly changed the form of the letters, but the Phœnician alphabet is found at the basis of all the alphabets—Hebrew, Lycian, Greek, Italian, Etruscan, Iberian, perhaps even in the runes of the Norse. It is the Phœnicians that taught the world how to write.
FOOTNOTES:
[37] Renan ("Mission de Phénicio," p. 818) says, "I noticed at Tripolis a sarcophagus serving as a public fountain and the sculptured face of it was turned to the wall. I was told that a governor had placed it thus so as not to provide distractions for the inhabitants."
[38] See ch. xxiii.
[39] See chs. xxvi., xxvii., xxviii.
[40] These idols, one of their principal exports, are found wherever the Phœnicians traded.