The pillars of Hercules

by David Urquhart

The Greeks knew nothing of the art, though they possessed the substance. Prometheus, in Eschylus, claims the honour of almost every invention—glass is not enumerated among his titles to the hatred of Jupiter. Socrates, in “The Clouds,” tricks a bum-bailiff out of his wit by means of a burning-glass.[114] From the Scholiast we learn, that these were sold at the apothecaries.

This burner may now seem of another substance, of which the Phœnicians had possession—amber. I have seen it so used on the coast of the Baltic, being formed in the most primitive manner by rubbing between the palms of the hands. Amber was supposed to attract the sun’s rays, as it did various substances, whence its name, ἔλεκτρον. The word was also applied to glass,[115] from its possessing a similar quality. There may be more in the association than we have yet discovered. Pliny mentions the magnet as used in the preparation of glass. The Tyrians employed glass as artillery; they discharged what was called “melted sand” at Alexander’s troops in storms which inflicted torture, and carried dismay and agonies against which no defensive armour could avail. The Venetians, following in their steps, likewise made glass their artillery. The first shells, and perhaps the most effectual, were of glass; they are still to be seen used as ink-bottles.

But the art seems to have extended from burning glasses to microscopes and telescopes, or they must have had eyes differently constituted from ours; for without such aid we could not make out valleys and mountains in the Moon; the milky-way[116] to be composed of stars; or count, as there is reason to believe they had done, the satellites of Jupiter and Saturn: and, supposing reflectors, and not lenses, were employed to survey the heavens, we can hardly escape from acknowledging their claim to microscopes and magic lanterns.[117] Their gems could not have been engraved without such aid; indeed, we require glass to make out the figures of some of them.[118] Eye-glasses we know they had, from Nero, who, being short-sighted, used one in the amphitheatre: it is called an emerald. One of the personages on the Greek stage had eyes of different colours, which was represented in his mask, and of course by coloured glasses. All these were the “wares of Tyre.”

In after times the manufacture of glass was transferred to Rome; but in the early period the Phœnicians must have supplied glass to Greece and Italy, as they did to Egypt, Assyria, Spain, and Africa.

In the chapter of Ezekiel, in which Tyre is described, a very different country is represented as sending to Tyre their produce for “her wares;” but what the “ten thousand”[119] wares of Tyre were nowhere appears, unless in the “treasures hid in the sand.” We know of no wares that she had except dyes and glass;—dyes implies the dyeing of stuffs; but in Phœnicia there were no manufactories; and she is herself represented as importing manufactured stuffs. A few glass-houses, according to our notion, would not suffice to compel an exchange of the metal of Ogg, and the beasts of Deden, and the pearls of Chittim, and the gold of Tarshish. The wares consisted in the dye itself which she extracted from the shells of her own coast, and from that portion of the coast of Africa, where they were in like manner found, and the drops of glass equivalent to gems, to prepare which a few hands sufficed, and on which the profits must have exceeded all calculation.[120]

The great nations of antiquity eschewed commerce and navigation: they lived at home. It is the property of a primitive people so to live; and that concentration of life upon the spot must be the character of all institutions which are calculated to last long. To the Egyptian the sea was unclean: the Hindoo, the Persian, the Chinese, all avoided the sea-trade. Of the tribes nearly allied to the Phœnicians, one only, the Arabs, were a transporting people;[121] the two monopolised the trade of early times, the Arab carrying on the traffic of the desert by his camels, the Phœnician that of the sea by his ships.

The great nations I have referred to were not anti-commercial: they received the stranger who came amongst them as a friend; he was more—he was a guest—the rites of hospitality extended to whole tribes who came to settle wherever there was room for them. How much then must have been the favour which attended the arrival and settlement of trading strangers? There could have been in Tyre no competitions, no under-sellings, no combinations. From the beginning to the end of their exchanges there must have been an adaptation of the profits of the community and of the individual—a union of traffic and government.[122] This endured for not less than one thousand, and may have extended to nearly two thousand, years.

The Phœnicians, in the structure of the old world, may be compared to the lime cementing the blocks, or to the veins and arteries spreading life through the body. Phœnicia was the smallest of states: arms had no part in her growth, conquest no share in her greatness. She gathered and spread around the produce of the earth and of the toil of man; its business was on homely and vulgar things. More than the mystery which shrouds the antiquity of the most visionary, is spread over the origin of this most practical of people; our profoundest writers are at variance as to whether she gave to, or borrowed from, Greece her gods; as to the form of government which prevailed in her cities; as to the taxes imposed on her merchandise. The avowed introducers of letters into the Western world alone remain without the record of a written page, or of a chiselled stone.

We see in this society dominion without conquest; greatness without ambition; permanency without numbers; freedom without turbulence; commerce without legislation;[123] and riches without pauperism. Neither arrogant in their strength, nor servile in their weakness, they could abstain from encroachments on the Lybian or Iberian populations, who afforded them a settlement, and maintain their peculiar character in Memphis, Babylon, and Persepolis. Their commerce paid to, while it received tribute from, every shore it visited; and was enriched in the aggregate wealth of all the wealth it bestowed. Thus did it take tithe of the spices of Malabar and the Philippines; of the frankincense of Abyssinia and Arabia; of the fine linen of Egypt; of the herds and camels of Deden; of the corn and oil of Judæa; of the ivory and ebony of Lybia and Hindoostan; of the gold of Spain; of the tin of the Cassiterides; of the amber of the Baltic. It had its colonies and its stores at Taprobane, as it had them at Cadiz and in Britain.