Late in the afternoon we came in sight of Sidon, that ancient city which the hand-book infers was famous at the time of the appearance of Joshua, since that skilful captain speaks of it as “Great Zidon.” Famous it doubtless had been long before his arrival, but the epithet “great” merely distinguished the two cities; for Sidon was divided like Tyre, “Great Sidon” being on the shore and “Little Sidon” at some distance inland. Tradition says it was built by Sidon, the great-grandson of Noah; but however this may be, it is doubtless the oldest Phoenician city except Gebel, which is on the coast north of Beyrout. It is now for the antiquarian little more than a necropolis, and a heap of stones, on which fishermen dry their nets, although some nine to ten thousand people occupy its squalid houses. What we see of it is the ridge of rocks forming the shallow harbor, and the picturesque arched bridge (with which engravings have made us familiar) that connects a ruined fortress on a detached rock with the rocky peninsula.
Sidon cames us far back into antiquity. When the Canaanitish tribes migrated from their seat on the Persian Gulf, a part of them continued their march as far as Egypt. It seems to be settled that the Hittites (or Khitas) were the invaders who overran the land of the Pharaohs, sweeping away in their barbarous violence nearly all the monuments of the civilization of preceding eras, and placing upon the throne of that old empire the race of Shepherd kings. It was doubtless during the dynasty of the Shepherds that Abraham visited Egypt, and it was a Pharaoh of Hittite origin who made Joseph his minister. It was after the expulsion of the Shepherds and the establishment of a dynasty “which knew not Joseph” that the Israelites were oppressed.
But the Canaanites did not all pass beyond Syria and Palestine; some among them, who afterwards were distinctively known as Phoenicians, established a maritime kingdom, and founded among other cities that of Sidon. This maritime branch no doubt kept up an intercourse with the other portions of the Canaanite family in Southern Syria and in Egypt, before the one was driven out of Egypt by the revolution which restored the rule of the Egyptian Pharaohs, and the other expelled by the advent of the Philistines. And it seems altogether probable that the Phoenicians received from Egypt many arts which they afterwards improved and perfected. It is tolerably certain that they borrowed from Egypt the hieratic writing, or some of its characters, which taught them to represent the sounds of their language by the alphabet which they gave to the world. The Sidonians were subjugated by Thotmes III., with all Phoenicia, and were for centuries the useful allies of the Egyptians; but their dominion was over the sea, and they spread their colonies first to the Grecian isles and then along the African coast; and in the other direction sent their venturesome barks as far as Colchis on the Black Sea. They seem to have thrived most under the Egyptian supremacy, for the Pharaohs had need of their sailors and their ships. In the later days of the empire, in the reign of Necho, it was Phoenician sailors who, at his command, circumnavigated Africa, passing down the Red Sea and returning through the Pillars of Hercules.
The few remains of Sidon which we see to-day are only a few centuries old,—six or seven; there are no monuments to carry us back to the city famous in arts and arms, of which Homer sang; and if there were, the antiquity of this hoary coast would still elude us. Herodotus says that the temple of Melkarth at Tyre (the “daughter of Sidon”) was built about 2300 B.C. Probably he errs by a couple of centuries; for it was only something like twenty-three centuries before Christ that the Canaanites came into Palestine, that is to say, late in the thirteenth Egyptian dynasty,—a dynasty which, according to the list of Manetho and Mariette Bey, is separated from the reign of the first Egyptian king by an interval of twenty-seven centuries. When Abraham wandered from Mesopotamia into Palestine he found the Canaanites in possession. But they were comparatively new comers; they had found the land already occupied by a numerous population who were so far advanced in civilization as to have built many cities. Among the peoples holding the land before them were the Rephaim, who had sixty strong towns in what is now the wilderness of Bashan; there were also the Emim, the Zamzummim, and the Anakim,—perhaps primitive races and perhaps conquerors of a people farther back in the twilight, remnants of whom still remained in Palestine when the Jews began, in their turn, to level its cities to the earth, and who lived in the Jewish traditions as “giants.”
X.—BEYROUT.—OVER THE LEBANON.
ALL the afternoon we had the noble range of Mt. Lebanon in view, and towards five o'clock we saw the desert-like promontory upon which Beyrout stands. This bold headland, however, changed its appearance when we had rounded it and came into the harbor; instead of sloping sand we had a rocky coast, and rising from the bay a couple of hundred feet, Beyrout, first the shabby old city, and then the new portion higher, up, with its villas embowered in trees. To the right, upon the cliffs overlooking the sea, is the American college, an institution whose conspicuous position is only a fair indication of its pre-eminent importance in the East; and it is to be regretted that it does not make a better architectural show. Behind Beyrout, in a vast circular sweep, rise the Lebanon mountains, clothed with trees and vineyards, terraced, and studded with villas and villages. The view is scarcely surpassed anywhere for luxuriance and variety. It seems to us that if we had an impulse to go on a mission anywhere it would be to the wicked of this fertile land.
At Beyrout also passengers must land in small boats. We were at once boarded by the most ruffianly gang of boatmen we had yet seen, who poured through the gangways and climbed over the sides of the vessel, like privileged pirates, treading down people in their way. It was only after a severe struggle that we reached our boats and landed at the custom-house, and fell into the hands of the legalized plunderers, who made an attack upon our baggage and demanded our passports, simply to obtain backsheesh for themselves.
“Not to show 'em passport,” says Abd-el-Atti, who wastes no affection on the Turks; “tiefs, all of dem; you he six months, not so? in him dominion, come now from Jaffa; I tell him if the kin' of Constantinople want us, he find us at the hotel.”