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.