The shirt had no sleeves, and the fringed garment which covered it left half of the arm exposed. Children of tender years had their heads shaved, as a head-dress, and rejoiced in no more clothing than the little ones among the Egyptians. With the exception of bracelets, anklets, rings on the fingers, and occasionally necklaces and earrings, the Syrians, both men and women, wore little jewellery. The Chaldæa women furnished them with models of fashion to which they accommodated themselves in the choice of stuffs, colours, cut of their mantles or petticoats, arrangement of the hair, and the use of cosmetics for the eyes and cheeks. In spite of distance, the modes of Babylon reigned supreme. The Syrians would have continued to expose their right shoulder to the weather as long as it pleased the people of the Lower Euphrates to do the same; but as soon as the fashion changed in the latter region, and it became customary to cover the shoulder, and to wrap the upper part of the person in two or three thicknesses of heavy wool, they at once accommodated themselves to the new mode, although it served to restrain the free motion of the body. Among the upper classes, at least, domestic arrangements were modelled upon the fashions observed in the palaces of the nobles of Car-chemish or Assur: the same articles of toilet, the same ranks of servants and scribes, the same luxurious habits, and the same use of perfumes were to be found among both.*
* An example of the fashion of leaving the shoulder bare is
found even in the XXth dynasty. The Tel el-Amarna tablets
prove that, as far as the scribes were concerned, the
customs and training of Syria and Chaldæa were identical.
The Syrian princes are there represented as employing the
cuneiform character in their correspondence, being
accompanied by scribes brought up after the Chaldæan manner.
We shall see later on that the king of the Khati, who
represented in the time of Ramses II. the type of an
accomplished Syrian, had attendants similar to those of the
Chaldæan kings.
From all that we can gather, in short, from the silence as well as from the misunderstandings of the Egyptian chroniclers, Syria stands before us as a fruitful and civilized country, of which one might be thankful to be a native, in spite of continual wars and frequent revolutions.
The religion of the Syrians was subject to the same influences as their customs; we are, as yet, far from being able to draw a complete picture of their theology, but such knowledge as we do possess recalls the same names and the same elements as are found in the religious systems of Chaldæa. The myths, it is true, are still vague and misty, at least to our modern ideas: the general characteristics of the principal divinities alone stand out, and seem fairly well defined. As with the other Semitic races, the deity in a general sense, the primordial type of the godhead, was called El or Ilû, and his feminine counterpart Ilât, but we find comparatively few cities in which these nearly abstract beings enjoyed the veneration of the faithful.* The gods of Syria, like those of Egypt and of the countries watered by the Euphrates, were feudal princes distributed over the surface of the earth, their number corresponding with that of the independent states. Each nation, each tribe, each city, worshipped its own lord—Adoni** —or its master—Baal*** —and each of these was designated by a special title to distinguish him from neighbouring Baalîm, or masters.
* The frequent occurrence of the term Ilû or El in names
of towns in Southern Syria seems to indicate pretty
conclusively that the inhabitants of these countries used
this term by preference to designate their supreme god.
Similarly we meet with it in Aramaic names, and later on
among the Nabathseans; it predominates at Byblos and Berytus
in Phoenicia and among the Aramaic peoples of North Syria;
in the Samalla country, for instance, during the VIIIth
century B.C.
** The extension of this term to Syrian countries is proved
in the Israelitish epoch by Canaanitish names, such as
Adonizedek and Adonibezek, or Jewish names such as Adonijah,
Adonikam, Adoniram-Adoram.
*** Movers tried to prove that there was one particular god
named Baal, and his ideas, popularised in Prance by M. de
Vogiié, prevailed for some time: since then scholars have
gone back to the view of Münter and of the writers at the
beginning of this century, who regarded the term Baal as a
common epithet applicable to all gods.
The Baal who ruled at Zebub was styled “Master of Zebub,” or Baal-Zebub;* and the Baal of Hermon, who was an ally of Gad, goddess of fortune, was sometimes called Baal-Hermon, or “Master of Hermon,” sometimes Baal-G-ad, or “Master of Gad;” ** the Baal of Shechem, at the time of the Israelite invasion, was “Master of the Covenant”—Baal-Berîth—doubtless in memory of some agreement which he had concluded with his worshippers in regard to the conditions of their allegiance.***
* Baal-Zebub was worshipped at Ekxon during the Philistine
supremacy.
** The mountain of Baal-Hermon is the mountain of Baniâs,
where the Jordan has one of its sources, and the town of
Baal-Hermon is Baniâs itself. The variant Baal-Gad occurs
several times in the Biblical books.
*** Baal-Berith, like Baal-Zebub, only occurs, so far as we
know at present, in the Hebrew Scriptures, where, by the
way, the first element, Baal, is changed to El, El-Berith.
