Divination was rather ars Etrusca, and we are in the habit of referring its source to that people; but the Etruscans had no compass. Divination was no more original in Etruria than in Rome. It was, indeed, the key-stone of their state, the link of science and government, of astronomy and priesthood; but they came to Italy a perfect state, and Tarchon’s genius, symbolized by the head of a man and the body of a child, replaced the matured science of Canaan on the young soil of Ausonia.
As in the West, those ceremonies in which religion was united with science, and which therefore marked, not as they would with us, ignorance and superstition, but learning and enlightenment, are traced home to one particular people, and received their name, so also was it in the East. Though dim the echoes (σκοτειναὶ ἀχοαὶ) that have been handed down to us, we still recognise the voice and name of the masters of whom Abraham was the disciple. In Europe, letters were Phœnician; in the East, the learned were Sabeans. Rome got her ceremonies from Cere. The Cerethims were Sabeans. From the Sabeans the Mussulman had his Rekaat; the Polytheist his Incense; the Jew his Teraphim. Therefore the Ars Etrusca was derived from the early seats of the Phœnicians.
After fruitless attempts to discover the etymology of cardo,[152] it occurred to me that as the other names of winds, and, consequently, of the points of the compass, had been derived from those of the countries across which they blew,[153] so might this be a geographic term, and might be found to the north of Sabea or Chaldæa. The mountain on which the human race took refuge from the deluge is so placed, and bore this very name.[154] Cardo was then the primitive geographic point for the countries which were the cradle of the human race and the nurseries of science, and the term could only be derivative in Italy. The north star was the Kiblah of the Sabeans.[155]
Two people severally discovered the various branches of naval architecture and navigation. The ends were attained by both; the means they used were wholly different, both belonging to the earliest constituted societies, both from periods antecedent to history, navigating the Indian ocean. They alone constructing vessels of large burthen, alone possessing that navigation.
The word “Phœnician,” is a great stumbling-block in these inquiries. There was no people so called. It is a word of Greek invention[156] and construction. As there were Carthaginians or inhabitants of Carthage, so were there inhabitants of Tyre, and inhabitants of Sidon. The Cerathians, who occupied the adjoining territory, were simply “citizens,” as distinguished from the “Nomades,” or “Skenites,” and Perizzites, the inhabitants of “unwalled villages.”[157] The word Phœnix, or red, is identical with Adam, Edom, or Erythria. The Greeks so called them as coming from the Red Sea. In the time of Alexander, the Greeks found that they were also settled on the Persian Gulf, and that there was the metropolis, of which the Sidon and the Tyre of Syria were the daughters, as of these in subsequent times another progeny was to be found in Leptis, Utica; Carthage, Carthagena; Troy on the Scamander, and Tor in Devonshire.
For the word Phœnician we must then substitute, or by it we must understand, “Sea-faring Arab.” The tribe which took to these enterprises, had of course its early establishments on the Red Sea, the southern shores of Arabia, the Persian Gulf, that is, on Arabian soil, then it would reach to the Persian and Abyssinian coasts. The next stage would be the shores of the Mediterranean. They would construct on that sea such vessels as those with which they navigated the Indian Ocean, and are thus celebrated by the Greeks as the inventors of ships.
There is therefore no difficulty in placing the Phœnicians, in so far as antiquity is concerned, on a level with the Chinese, and in so far as geography is in question, on the same field of navigation and commerce. Yet the two systems are as opposite as it is possible for the imagination of man to conceive.
Before the arrival of the Chinese junk, had any one said that he had deciphered from the Eugubean tables that the discovery of America had been made by a large vessel, which had neither stem nor stern, kelson nor transom-beam, neither iron for its anchors, hemp for its cables, canvass for its sails, pitch, oakum, standing-rigging, rudder pintles, or pumps;—that with a taffrail standing forty feet above the water, it was not caulked,—whoever believed the story would have been set down as foolishly credulous and stupidly ignorant.
Men, after the original conception, are but blind practisers of what they have been taught, and see only what they already know: with all our travellers and sailors in China and in India, no one in Europe could have imagined, that the Chinese had an original scheme of naval architecture the very converse of ours, attaining the end in no instance by the means which we employ, and standing in relation to ours as a cetcaeous animal to one of the mammiferæ—as a turtle to a man.
The Chinese might have seen Phœnician vessels for 3,000 years before ours came round the Cape. They have imitated them as little as they have since copied ours. Vasco di Gama found the compass in these seas, not in junks but in vessels constructed like ours: ours are the continuation of those of the Phœnicians.[158] They left, doubtless, a progeny in the Indian Ocean as well as the Mediterranean. As in naval architecture neither of the styles could have been copied, and each must have been original,—so is it with their compasses; neither could have been copied from the other, and the invention must have been in each case separately made.