The pillars of Hercules

by David Urquhart

A secret such as this could be preserved and transmitted only by constant use. How then could it have come from Phœnicia to us? Augury had been swept away from the face of the earth. A thousand years had run their course between the fall of Tyre and the maritime enterprises of the Saracens. Thirty generations had gone to the tomb.

The difficulty I fully admit and feel. I oppose to it the intrinsic evidence offered by the instrument, and the impossibility of referring it to any other race, Chinese, Mussulman, Arabs, Hindoos, or to the systems of modern Europe. That it must have passed, I contend; how it passed is another matter. The knowledge of the road is no point of my argument:—nevertheless, I think I have found the clue.

From the close of the reign of the Ptolemies, to the Portuguese discoveries in India, we have but a single record of eastern commerce, given by a trader named Sopater, to Cosmas, and inserted in his Typographia Christiana. Every country, from China to Ethiopia, is mentioned, and the produce or merchandise which each sent or received, enumerated. The centre of this traffic was Ceylon, by whose merchants and shipping it was carried on. That island thus possessed commercial prosperity of the first order, while the great empires were sinking into that decrepitude which invited the northern invasion, and facilitated the outbursts of Saracenic enthusiasm.

This commerce was not carried on by the Cingalese, but by strangers, settled in the country, who had kings; occupied the maritime places; were of a different religion, and had temples.—Who could those strangers be?

Ceylon was never invaded by a foreign state, or overrun by a foreign race. The struggle of Buddhism and Brahminism had not extended to that island (at the time in question, Buddhism had been expelled from the continent). These strangers could not have been from India—they were not Greeks or Romans. Had they been Chinese, they would have been mentioned as such, and have been, like the Cingalese, Buddhists. They were not accidental rovers.

Sopater mentions various peculiarities—one, a hyacinth in one of the temples, which, when illumined by the rays of the sun, radiated with light. Does not this recall the emerald emitting light in the Temple of Hercules at Tyre?[159] Another coincidence may be found in the name of the cocoa-nut, as given by Cosmas (Argillia), with that of the cocoa-nut tree (Argel), still used by the Arabs.

“There was,” he says, “a church of Christians.” These had therefore temples and churches; their presbyter was ordained in Persia, whence they had their deacons and ecclesiastical chiefs. In the mountains above Mesopotamia, to this day there are Jews and Christians intermingled, the Christians avowing themselves converted Jews, the Jews declaring themselves apostate Hebrews. This recalls the old Jewish and Phœnician association of the time of Solomon, and their common expedition to Darohish.

The Phœnician settlements in Ceylon corresponded with those in Spain. They had, moreover, been already established there for fifteen hundred years. On all the western coasts of the Indian Ocean, dwelt cognate tribes, with which they trafficked, and from whom they could be sustained or recruited. They were in that Indian island exposed to none of the conquests, invasions, or convulsions which have so often changed the face of the West. If the story of Sopater had never been told, and the work of Cosmas had, like so many others, perished, we might have assumed that Phrygians continued to dwell and traffic in that central yet secluded station of the Indian ocean. Neither Hindoos nor Persians had taken to the sea; China had not engaged in conquest; no Carthage had interfered with them, and no Rome swallowed them up.

Isolated not from Europe only, but from Asia also and Africa; surviving the fall of Tyre and Carthage, and, without passing through Christianity, they thus, down to Mussulman times, preserved the augury of Paganism with the enterprise of Phœnicia.

Sopater did not describe them as Phœnicians, because, when he wrote, Tyre was deserted; Carthage was a Vandal town, Cadiz and Carthagena were Gothic cities. The Phœnicians had disappeared, and the name was forgotten, and this people, who had never so called themselves even in the West,[160] could not have told him in the East that such was the name which European writers had given them.