CHAPTER III. THE PHŒNICIAN TIME OF POWER
THE REIGN OF HIRAM I
The sources of information for the reign of Hiram are richer than for any other period of Phœnician history. They no longer offer merely a few scattered notices and chance remarks, or names which have scarcely any historical value, but they furnish data which are important, not only from their contents but relatively also in their extent, and which are all the more valuable because they touch upon the most remarkable period of the history of Western Asia. These sources may be divided into three classes. In the first rank are the priceless remnants of Phœnician historiography which Josephus, for the comparison and verification of the Biblical accounts of King Hiram and his relations with Solomon, has preserved from the historical works of Menander and Dius. Second, and even more important in their way, are the Biblical accounts themselves, which give information concerning the political, commercial, and social relations that were established between Israel and Phœnicia and their rulers. A third source of information in which, to be sure, has been incorporated many a legend from this brilliant period of both countries, consists mainly of later versions of Phœnician and Israelitish history, fragments from the works of Chætus, Theophilus, and Eupolemus, which have been preserved by ecclesiastical writers as a supplement to the above excerpts of Josephus and for a like purpose.
[ca. 980-936 B.C.]
After the death of the little-known King Abibaal, his son Hiram I ascended the throne at the age of twenty. The date of this event has been proven by chronological research to have been 980 B.C., eight years before the death of the great Israelite king David.[7]
From all that the above-mentioned sources relate or that can be inferred from comparison with the conditions before the reign of Hiram, it is apparent that Phœnicia was already in a condition where her affairs needed only to be more firmly moulded and secured. Hence, in this respect also, the Phœnician and Israelitish states, whose rulers, Hiram and Solomon, were friends and had so much in common in character and tastes, were in very similar circumstances. For it was but recently that in Tyre, too, a kingdom had been established in place of the government of the suffets, and at the same time the bond of dependence completely severed which had united Tyre as a colony to Sidon. It is probable, indeed, that in the weakness of the mother state this relation had before this time been maintained solely from a feeling of filial duty.
The relations with Israel and the recognised position as hegemonic state which Tyre maintained under Hiram, may have been established in the period immediately preceding, but what the records tell of this renowned king nevertheless makes him appear as the real founder of the Tyrian state. The records of the sources concerning his buildings on the island of Tyre, by which he secured the metropolis of the country against the reverses of a continental war, point to this. This work was carried out on a magnificent plan and made the formerly insignificant island town a protecting bulwark not only for Tyre, but for the whole of Phœnicia. These edifices must belong to the very beginning of his reign, for the accounts of Menander and Dius, which are evidently arranged in chronological order, mention them first, and the buildings which were erected at Jerusalem, at the beginning of his reign and with his co-operation, make it presumable that some occurrence of that kind had already taken place at Tyre.
A glance at the political position of the neighbouring states of the continent throws light upon the next point. The Israelites had very recently subjugated all the peoples of the vicinity with the sole exception of the Phœnicians; the smaller Syrian states, hitherto divided, formed a closer alliance with one another, and under the king of Damascus were beginning, even at that time, to form the second power in Western Asia.
So, threatened by the fresh danger of the combined forces of the hitherto divided Israelitish and Aramæan races, the Phœnicians spared no efforts in increasing the fortifications of the island city. It may well be presumed that in these early days of the new Tyrian royal state, Palætyrus, which in the period immediately subsequent continues to appear as the more important and as the seat of the royal residence, was the site of many new buildings, especially of such royal palaces as Hiram’s workmen also erected in Jerusalem. Of these, however, the sources give no information, because they bear upon the island town which was subsequently the more important, and because only a few remains of Palætyrus were in existence when these records were written.
Furthermore, the religious ceremonies took quite a new form under this king. Some of the old sanctuaries already in existence in Tyre he rebuilt, others he replaced with entirely new ones. According to the records the latter was the case with the temples of the two guardian deities, Melkarth and Astarte, while they mention the restoration of the cedar roofs of other temples not named, but in regard to the magnitude of these latter buildings, they relate how Hiram went to Lebanon and had a whole wood of cedar trees cut down for the work. The third great temple, that of Baalsamin, was adorned with golden votive offerings, amongst which was that famous golden pillar, often mentioned in later times and still on view in Tyre until the last centuries of its independence.
As through these enterprises, indicative of the love of splendour and the great wealth of the king, provision was made for the magnificence of the new royal city and of its religious services, so too, another regulation of Hiram’s, mentioned by Menander, points to a reorganisation of the cult, or at least of the order of festivals. For Menander relates that Hiram was the first to have the Awakening of Hercules celebrated in the month of Peritius, when he was starting forth on the war against the Cypriotes.
We learn from the records that the king not only reorganised the internal structure of the Tyrian state, but also took measures to safeguard the foreign acquisitions of his predecessors. The passage from Menander, cited above, tells that Hiram made war against the Cypriotes, who did not pay their tribute and were again subjugated by Hiram. From this it is clear that the Island of Cyprus had already, under Hiram’s predecessor, passed from the possession of Sidon, which had colonised it during her hegemony, to Tyre.
As all the records we have had under consideration indicate that Tyre had gained its position as leading state during the previous reign, and in Hiram’s time was looking to the organisation and strengthening of what had been won, the same thing may be said of the relations with Israel. The records on this subject are relatively complete, and of the most manifold interest for the history of both these flourishing states. We shall therefore have to treat them somewhat more in detail.
Through David’s successful wars the Israelitish state had grown from its former insignificance to a power greater than had for a long time existed in Western Asia. The whole of Syria and Palestine, with the exception of the northern coast, belonged to the kingdom of Israel, so that Phœnicia, on the continent side, was nearly surrounded by Israelitish territory. All the routes of commerce which led from the Euphrates, from Arabia and Egypt, to the emporiums of the Mediterranean, were controlled by the Israelites, and after the conquest of the Edomite district, they also possessed the commercial ports on the Red Sea, where the Phœnicians had long carried on an extremely profitable trade with Arabia and Ethiopia, and perhaps also, even before David’s time, with India. Under these circumstances the Phœnicians made an effort to enter into closer relations with their powerful neighbours.
Soon after the beginning of his reign, Hiram sent an embassy to David which resulted in his despatching Phœnician workmen to Jerusalem to build the Jewish king a palace. There is no mention of compensation for this service; so it seems, especially from the short account which makes the messengers and the workmen go to David together, that the Phœnician ruler had the building erected simply in order to show himself well-disposed towards the Israelite. However that may be, with the continued friendship of their rulers there could be no lack of important results for the political and commercial relations of the two states; and commercial undertakings and alliances, such as we find in greater extent in the reign of Solomon, may even at that time have been entered into by them.
After the death of David, Hiram sought to maintain the cordial relations between the two countries under Solomon’s rule, and therefore took occasion, upon the latter’s accession to the throne, to send an embassy to Jerusalem with congratulations, and to request the continuation of the friendship. Solomon was then cherishing the project of building the temple which David had desired to erect after the completion of the palace which Hiram’s workmen had built for him in Jerusalem towards the end of his reign. For the pious king considered it unfitting that he should dwell in a “cedar palace,” while the dwelling of Jehovah was a tent. But in view of the continuance of internal disturbances and the still incomplete subjugation of the provinces that had been incorporated in the kingdom, he was withheld from his project by the prophet Nathan, who showed him that the execution of it was destined to his successor.
In carrying out his father’s plan, Solomon could not dispense with Phœnician workmen and artificers, so he took the opportunity afforded by the friendly overtures of the Tyrian king to make a treaty with him. According to the more ancient version of this treaty, Hiram was to furnish cedar and cypress wood, together with carpenters and stone-masons for the building, and to send the materials already shaped on rafts to Judah. In return Hiram stipulated that he should receive yearly as long as the work continued, twenty thousand measures of wheat, as “food for his house,” that is, for the royal household, and twenty, or according to the reading of the Septuagint and according to Josephus, twenty thousand measures of oil of olives.
After the temple at Jerusalem had been completed with the assistance of Phœnician artificers, other compacts for similar purposes must have been made by the pomp-loving Solomon with the Tyrian king. For we learn that the supplies of cedar and fir trees and gold continued for twenty years. That at the same time the commercial relations of the two countries were regulated by treaties, import duties for wares fixed, the position of the Phœnician merchants resident in Judah, as well as that of the numerous Israelites settled in Phœnician lands determined, lies quite in the nature of the case and is also in part supported by definite statements.
The so-called “Tomb of Hiram”
A Phœnician tale represents the wise Solomon in a dispute with his friend Hiram, confounding him with riddles, and then being himself overcome by a Phœnician wiser than himself. As the legend of the wisdom of Solomon is here ingeniously linked with the friendly relation with Hiram, so another legend of the extraordinary wealth of the Israelitish king makes use of the same relation, by ascribing to him a remarkable votive offering in the temple of Melkarth, that golden pillar which, according to the excerpts from Menander and Dius, King Hiram had set up in the said sanctuary, where it was admired by Herodotus. Now, a legend which Eupolemus has preserved, says that this pillar came from Solomon, who sent it to Hiram in gratitude for his assistance in the building of the temple.
This tale has too much the character of a popular tradition to be deemed a mere invention of Eupolemus; and it is too vexatious to the spirit of later Judaism to be of Jewish invention. According to another Phœnician story, Solomon sent the gold that was not used in the building of the temple to the Tyrian king, and the latter is said to have had that famous column made as a setting for the statue of his daughter, who was married to Solomon. That Solomon married a daughter of Hiram is reported by two authors who have written on Phœnician history, Chætus and Menander of Pergamus. Biblical history records the marriage of Solomon with the daughter of an Egyptian king, and also mentions the Jewish king’s large harem, in which were also Sidonian women, for whom Solomon established the racial cult of the Sidonians, the worship of Astarte. This would indicate for the Sidonians an unusually high position in the harem.
[ca. 980-887 B.C.]
As Tyrian legend and history take pains to honour Hiram for his connection with Solomon, who was early a resplendent figure in eastern tradition, on the other hand we must not overlook a similar effort in Jewish historiography, which tells us with pleasure of the friendship of the two Israelitish rulers with Hiram, and does not conceal the fact that the external brilliancy and wealth of Solomon were a consequence of the connection with the rich and artistic neighbouring nation. Even later Jewish tradition relates many a strange thing about this famous Tyrian king. He is said to be that prince of Tyre who in Ezekiel xxviii. 2, walks amid the precious stones of Paradise, and, in accordance with a further interpretation of Ezekiel’s prophecy, he is said to have perished at the siege of Tyre by Nebuchadrezzar, after having lived five hundred years.
According to another not quite unfounded tale, Hiram had a temple built at Tyre like that at Jerusalem, and introduced Jewish customs in it, in which respect Hiram may be compared to the Emperor Julian, who transferred Christian usages to heathendom. This story is allied to another Syrian tradition that the ecclesiastical translation of the Old Testament which the Syrians use is that which Hiram requested Solomon to have made. As the traditions of the Phœnicians and of the neighbouring Hebrews and Syrians so long preserved the memory of the two kings, they look upon this time as the period of splendour of both Phœnicia and Israel.[b]
THE SUCCESSORS OF HIRAM
Hiram was succeeded by his son Baalbazer, who died after a reign of seven years. He was succeeded by his son Abdastarte, who reigned nine years. At the age of twenty-nine he fell a victim to a palace revolution. The four sons of his nurse conspired against him and removed him from their path. The oldest of them, Metuastarte, son of Leastarte mounted the throne and held the government twelve years. [Most of the authorities differ from Pietschmann in assigning twenty-four years to Metuastarte’s reign, in the last half of which he associated with himself on the throne a scion of the royal house who is known as Astarte or sometimes Abdastarte II.] His successor was one of his brothers, Astharymus, who nine years later was put to death by his brother Phelles. Only eight months afterwards a like fate overtook the latter. He was murdered by Ithobaal, (Eth-baal), priest of Astarte.
[ca. 887-723 B.C.]
With Ithobaal’s accession orderly conditions were again restored. He entered into friendly relations with the kingdom of northern Israel, concluded what Amos calls a “brotherly covenant” with it, and gave his daughter, Jezebel, in marriage to the warlike king, Ahab, son of Omri. The drought which visited northern Syria in Ahab’s time is also mentioned in the annals of Tyre; they limit its duration to one year, and ascribe its cessation to an intercessory procession which Ithobaal performed. Under his government the heavy doom which was to fall on the Syrian countries from Assyria, drew nearer to Phœnicia. Asshurnazirpal marched with his army (876 B.C.) down from the upper valley of the Orontes into the low-lying coast district of Djun Akkor, and proceeding southward across it, penetrated to the Nahr-el-Kelb, where one of the Assyrian rock sculptures appears to date from him. The towns of Phœnicia made haste to buy him off with presents, and thus escaped for this time. Ithobaal, it is said, founded Botrys, probably in the well-grounded anticipation that this raid would not be the last of the kind which would take this direction. From Botrys the passage of the Ras-el-Shakka could be commanded.
The successor of Ithobaal was his son Baalazar, who reigned six years, and the latter’s son Mettenus (Metten) then ruled during twenty-nine years. After his death the crown passed to Pygmalion. With this king, who occupied the throne forty-seven years, the consecutive list of the kings of Tyre which has come down to us from Menander’s works, comes to an end. No more of it has been preserved intact.
In Baalazar’s time the danger threatening Phœnicia from the growing power of Assyria, seems to have been recognised at Aradus and in the neighbouring towns. In the battle of Qarqar (854) Mettenbaal [Matinu-Baal of Shalmaneser II’s records], King of Aradus, fought on Ahab’s side against Shalmaneser II, and so perhaps did also the troops of Ushu and Sian, two places which the Assyrian inscriptions generally mention, together with Simyra and Aradus, and also those of Akko. These would be the towns which were least protected by natural boundaries on the side of northern Syria. Shalmaneser II boasts that on his campaigns against Hazael of Damascus, he had taken tribute from Tyre, where Metten was then reigning, and Sidon (842 and 839 B.C.), and also from Byblus (839); this may be a bragging name for voluntary presents he had received there. In Pygmalion’s time Sidon and Tyre seem to have been under an obligation to pay taxes to the Assyrian king, Adad-nirari III, whose conquering expeditions twice attained Phœnicia (804 and 803). It then had peace from the Assyrians for more than half a century, until the time of Tiglathpileser III. This king’s inscriptions announce that he wasted the territory of the towns of Simyra, Akko, Ushu, and Sian, installed there Assyrian captains and established colonists who were brought thither from the farthest corners of the empire. Hiram II of Tyre and Sibittibi’li of Byblus are named amongst the kings whose homage he received in Syria, and on another occasion Mettenbaal of Aradus, while Tyre had to pay him one hundred and fifty talents of gold. Aradus, Byblus, and Tyre were apparently the only independent states of Phœnicia at this time.
[723-671 B.C.]
Tyre remained the most independent and the most powerful. Elulæus, who reigned there about 728-692 B.C., under the name of Pylas, succeeded, at the outset of his reign in subduing the rebellious Cypriotes by means of his war-ships. In his time Shalmaneser IV, the successor of Tiglathpileser III, overran the whole of Phœnicia. A peace was concluded, by which Sidon, Akko, even Palætyrus, and many other towns passed to the Assyrian king. Apparently they wish to make themselves independent of the island city, even at the cost of their political independence. But since the Tyrians showed themselves dissatisfied with this, Shalmaneser again advanced into Phœnicia, and in order to reach the island fortress, he collected sixty ships with eight hundred rowers, from which it appears that they were of small dimensions. But the Tyrians defended themselves bravely; with twelve ships they scattered the enemy’s fleet, and took five hundred prisoners. Then the Assyrian king marched away, but left behind a part of his army, to hold the mainland opposite Tyre and cut it off from the river which there fell into the sea, and from the aqueducts, and thus prevent the Tyrians from supplying themselves with drinking water. This is said to have lasted for five years, while the Tyrians had recourse to the water which collected in wells they dug on their island. In the end they appear to have grown weary of resisting. Apparently the annals of Tyre do not assert that the efforts of the Assyrians were entirely without result. Sargon ascended the throne of Assyria in 722, and it is supposed that the Tyrians came to terms with him in 720, when he appeared in Syria to crush the alliance of Arpad, Simyra, Damascus, and Samaria. Sargon boasts that he drew the Ionians like fish from the sea, and quieted Cilicia, and Tyre, and he speaks of Tyre as a town which belonged to him. Sennacherib set up a king in Sidon, named Tubaal, that is Ithobaal, on whom he imposed a tax; Abdili’ti of Aradus and Urumilki of Byblus also did homage to him. From Syria he took workmen to Nineveh, who had there to build ships for him after the pattern of the vessels of their own country. These were manned with Tyrian, Sidonian, and also Greek, i.e., probably Cyprian, seamen, and with them he was able to undertake a maritime expedition on the Tigris to subdue the people of Bit Yakin and the Elamites “with their gods,” and to carry them away as prisoners (694 B.C.). These vessels are represented on a bas-relief at Kuyunjik, round transports, with the hind and foreparts bent upwards, and war-ships with a great projecting keel. Both classes had two decks. On the upper one, behind high side railings, outside which the warriors have hung their shields, the prisoners and men armed with spears, are seen seated. Between the decks sit the oarsmen, their backs turned to the forepart of the ship. Two rows of oars are at work, one above the other; two long poles serve instead of a rudder and are disposed right and left of the stern of the vessel.
[671-586 B.C.]
Soon after Sennacherib’s son Esarhaddon had begun his reign, Abd-milkot, king of Sidon, the successor, apparently, of that Ithobaal or Ethbaal whom Sennacherib had installed there, allowed himself to be beguiled into an effort after independence, in unison with Sanduarri, ruler of the two towns of Kundu and Sizu, which are to be sought inland, to the east of Sidon. The attempt failed. Sidon was taken (678 B.C.), plundered, and laid waste; the fortifications were demolished, the inhabitants led away into exile, and on its site a new settlement was established, which was peopled by men from the eastern districts of the Assyrian empire and received as a colony the name of Kar-Asshur-akhe-iddin (the city of Esarhaddon). In the year 671 B.C. Esarhaddon took the field against Tirhaqa of Egypt; and Baal of Tyre, trusting in Tirhaqa’s power, exhibited insubordination. As in Shalmaneser’s time, Tyre was again cut off by the Assyrians from all its supplies of food and water. It is not stated whether Baal was thus reduced to submission. But certain it is that in Asshurbanapal’s reign Baal was again besieged by the Assyrians, in his island city. Defences were again erected on the mainland opposite, and all approaches were blocked by land and sea. To quench their thirst the besieged are said to have been finally reduced to drinking salt water. The final result was that Baal submitted and tendered guarantees for a more loyal demeanour in future. He delivered up his own daughter and those of his brother as wives for the supreme king, together with a rich dowry, and also surrendered him his son Yahi-melek. This was more than Asshurbanapal required, and he sent Yahi-melek back to his father. Probably with the assistance of Baal’s war-ships, the Assyrians then proceeded to the subjection of the other island king of Phœnicia, Yakinlu of Aradus. He also was compelled to send his daughter to Nineveh with many presents; every such addition to his harem was peculiarly grateful to Asshurbanapal. Subsequently, however, Yakinlu again fell into disgrace, and was deposed; perhaps not without the co-operation of his ten sons, who all presented themselves, with valuable presents, at Asshurbanapal’s court, to make application for the vacant throne. It was given to one of them, called Azebaal; the rest were bought off with honours. The period to which these events belong cannot be exactly determined; it is possible that they may have some connection with the fact that Asshurbanapal’s brother Shamash-shum-ukin succeeded in rousing the vassals in the west to rebellion. In connection with a campaign which was undertaken against the Arab prince Yauta about 640 B.C., the towns of Ushu and Akko were punished in exemplary fashion, for negligent payment of the tribute and for repudiating their allegiance. This may have been the last warlike action which an Assyrian army performed in the territory of Phœnicia, although an Assyrian governor of Simyra, with the rank of an eponymos, or limmu, is mentioned as late as the year 636 B.C.
Syria and Palestine did not escape the blows of fate whose force wrecked the Assyrian empire after Asshurbanapal’s reign. Hordes of Scythian horsemen, carrying bows and javelins, broke in from the north and penetrated as far as the frontiers of Egypt (about 625 B.C.). Presents from Psamthek I are said to have induced them to turn back. Before leaving Syria the stragglers plundered the sanctuary of Aphrodite at Askalon. The power of Egypt was again increased under the rule of Psamthek, for his special care was the creation of a mercenary army composed of Carians and Ionians, and so strong did it become that his son and successor, Neku II (608 B.C.), was able to go still further and attempt to recover the dominion which the Pharaohs of the New Kingdom had possessed in Syria. Josiah of Judah, who was foolhardy enough to oppose him at Megiddo, was by him defeated. Syria seems to have submitted to him, as far as the countries bordering the Euphrates. Gaza offered resistance, but was taken.
But it was only for a short time that Neku II could feel himself a conqueror. Nabopolassar sent his son Nebuchadrezzar against him, and at Carchemish on the Euphrates a battle was fought in the year 605 B.C. which Neku lost. Nebuchadrezzar could not at once completely follow up his victory, for he had to return to Babylon, where his father had in the meantime died. Still the Babylonians now had a free hand in Syria, and Neku did not again venture to face them.
[586-532 B.C.]
The Phœnicians had long learnt how to make the best of a foreign supremacy. A strong party which held it advisable to side with Nebuchadrezzar as the most powerful of the rivals for the lordship over Assyria, appears to have held the reins of government in Tyre, when Apries (Uah-ab-Ra) attained that of Egypt. The latter, as Herodotus relates, immediately on his accession, took the field against Sidon and gave battle to the Tyrians by sea; and then only does it appear that opinion changed and Tyre allowed herself to enter into negotiations with Egypt. Otherwise, in 587 Nebuchadrezzar would have had no grounds for not only proceeding with his army to renew the siege of Jerusalem, but also advancing against Tyre. Apries did not venture to march against the Babylonians, but left the Jews and Tyrians to their fate. Already in July, 586, the capital of the kingdom of Judah had been conquered: the town was destroyed and the people led away into exile in Babylonia. According to Ezekiel the Tyrians hailed the fall of Jerusalem with joy: the gate which barred the nations was broken, another commercial route was opened up. But according to Menander, in 587 Nebuchadrezzar had already begun to blockade Ithobaal II in his island. Tyre resisted longer than ever before, and Ithobaal II did not surrender for thirteen years (574), and probably then only because he was compelled to do so by the straits to which the isolation from the mainland and the cessation of all industries had reduced his subjects. The town was neither taken by storm nor plundered and ruined. Ithobaal’s family had to remove to Babylon, so that in case Baal II, to whom Nebuchadrezzar gave Tyre in fee, should prove insubordinate, the Babylonians might not want for pretenders to the crown. To frighten the Pharaohs from further attempts to interfere, Nebuchadrezzar undertook a campaign against Egypt (in 568). The Tyrians remained docile. Nabonidus still called Gaza the southernmost landmark of his kingdom.
The reign of Baal II, which lasted ten years (to 564), was followed by an interregnum, a period in which Tyre was not under kings, but under judges, suffets—that is, rulers who could lay claim to no sort of legal right. Thus Tyre was in a state of anarchy. Finally a party prevailed, which sent for a legitimate king from Babylon, namely Maharbaal (Greek Merbalos), who reigned four years. He was succeeded by his brother Hiram (III), who was also fetched from Babylon. The annals of Tyre place the transference of power into the hands of Cyrus, the Persian, in the fourteenth year of the twenty years’ reign of Hiram III (538 B.C.). As a matter of course, when Babylon fell into the hands of the Persians, Phœnicia, like the rest of Syria, also changed masters. It seems as though the wearisome siege of Tyre, under Nebuchadrezzar, and the period of anarchy which followed it, had stifled in the Tyrians the last remains of the desire for independence. Hiram’s passive demeanour may have been determined by doubt of the safety of his own throne, if not by considerations respecting his kinsmen who had remained at Babylon, and dread of the nomination of a rival king by Cyrus; and if Hiram possessed some of the hereditary wisdom of the former princes of Tyre, who appeared even to Ezekiel as in their way “wiser than Daniel,” he may also have recognised in the Persians the people to whom belonged the future in southwestern Asia.
The modest extent of Phœnicia did not, from the first, correspond to the inordinate number and distant position of the colonies, which the Phœnicians, chiefly for the sake of the successful preservation of their commercial interests, had been obliged to establish on foreign shores. The loss in internal strength and able-bodied population thus inflicted on the mother country, was not compensated by the treasures laid up in that mother country itself, whose surroundings permitted of no extension of territory, and whose own prosperity would have been permanently hazarded by any attempt at an aggressive increase of power. And if, in many instances, the despatch of emigrants may have disposed of an excess of population, nothing could prevent the colonies from becoming, in course of time, more and more estranged from the interest of the mother city, and attaining a position in which they were entirely dependent on their own resources. To sail from the Syrian coast to Gades (Cadiz), took eighty days in the time of the Greeks, and before that probably much longer, and it was necessary to traverse the whole of the Mediterranean. Even if Phœnicia had been spared the continual pressure of the exigencies of war, it would still have been impossible permanently to maintain the dominion over the colonies in their entire extent, and to prevent the development of independence. But the very period in which the Phœnicians had most to suffer from attacks of the Assyrians, when the inhabitants of Tyre had to confine themselves to the defence of their citadel in the sea, coincides with the time in which the Hellenes founded their colonies in Sicily. The immediate connection with the Phœnicians of the west was thus lost. The latter were now compelled to defend themselves against the adversary with their own arms, and, as it were, with a complete change of front. At the same time, in the beginning of the seventh century, according to all appearance, there arose in the land of Tarshish a native dynasty, whose representative in legend is the long-lived king, Arganthonius, who is supposed to have attained the considerable age of one hundred and fifty years, and the rulers of this dynasty no longer exclusively favoured the commerce of the Phœnicians. When, about the year 690, the merchant Chalæus of Samos, arrived there, he was able unmolested to sell so much silver, that he is said to have made sixty talents by the transaction, and his example was imitated, especially by Phœnician seamen. Wherever the Hellenic merchant or seaman was admitted, he began to cast the Phœnician into the shade, and when, in the reign of Psamthek I, Egypt made herself more than ever accessible to foreign intercourse, it was not the Phœnicians but the Hellenes who derived the most advantages from the fact, although it may be true that, at Neku’s bidding, the Phœnician seamen were the first who attempted the circumnavigation of Africa, and successfully accomplished it. In Cilicia, even before the Persian epoch, Hellenic civilisation had begun to be generally adopted, and about the same time at which Phœnicia became subject to Cyrus, the towns of Cyprus, which had long been for the most part Hellenic, passed, though only temporarily, under the supremacy of Egypt. From this date down to the time of Alexander the Great, the history of Phœnicia forms a part of the history of the Persian empire, while from the middle of the seventh century B.C. the history of the Phœnicians of the west, merges more and more in that of the city which there constituted herself the energetic mistress of the colonies; that history is connected in the closest fashion with the destinies of Carthage.[d]
FOOTNOTES
[7] [Pietschmann makes the beginning and end of his reign 969 and 936 B.C.]
Phœnician Vases
