Adonis desired to take possession of it, but was frustrated in the attempt, and the maritime Baal secured the permanence of his rule by marrying one of his sisters—the Baalat-Beyrut who is represented as a nymph on Græco-Roman coins.* The rule of the city extended as far as the banks of the Tamur, and an old legend narrates that its patron fought in ancient times with the deity of that river, hurling stones at him to prevent his becoming master of the land to the north. The bar formed of shingle and the dunes which contract the entrance were regarded as evidences of this conflict.**
* The poet Nonnus has preserved a highly embellished account
of this rivalry, where Adonis is called Dionysos.
** The original name appears to have been Tamur, Tamyr, from
a word signifying “palm” in the Phoenician language. The
myth of the conflict between Poseidon and the god of the
river, a Baal-Demarous, has been explained by Renan, who
accepts the identification of the river-deity with Baal-
Thamar, already mentioned by Movers.
Beyond the southern bank of the river, Sidon sits enthroned as “the firstborn of Canaan.” In spite of this ambitious title it was at first nothing but a poor fishing village founded by Bel, the Agenor of the Greeks, on the southern slope of a spit of land which juts out obliquely towards the south-west.* It grew from year to year, spreading out over the plain, and became at length one of the most prosperous of the chief cities of the country—a “mother” in Phoenicia.**
* Sidon is called “the firstborn of Canaan” in Genesis: the
name means a fishing-place, as the classical authors already
knew—“nam piscem Phonices sidôn appellant.”
** In the coins of classic times it is called “Sidon, the
mother—Om—of Kambe, Hippo, Citium, and Tyre.”
The port, once so celebrated, is shut in by three chains of half-sunken reefs, which, running out from the northern end of the peninsula, continue parallel to the coast for some hundreds of yards: narrow passages in these reefs afford access to the harbour; one small island, which is always above water, occupies the centre of this natural dyke of rocks, and furnishes a site for a maritime quarter opposite to the continental city.* The necropolis on the mainland extends to the east and north, and consists of an irregular series of excavations made in a low line of limestone cliffs which must have been lashed by the waves of the Mediterranean long prior to the beginning of history. These tombs are crowded closely together, ramifying into an inextricable maze, and are separated from each other by such thin walls that one expects every moment to see them give way, and bury the visitors in the ruin. Many date back to a very early period, while all of them have been re-worked and re-appropriated over and over again. The latest occupiers were contemporaries of the Macedonian kings or the Roman Cæsars. Space was limited and costly in this region of the dead: the Sidonians made the best use they could of the tombs, burying in them again and again, as the Egyptians were accustomed to do in their cemeteries at Thebes and Memphis. The surrounding plain is watered by the “pleasant Bostrênos,” and is covered with gardens which are reckoned to be the most beautiful in all Syria—at least after those of Damascus: their praises were sung even in ancient days, and they had then earned for the city the epithet of “the flowery Sidon.” **
* The only description of the port which we possess is that
in the romance of Olitophon and Leucippus by Achilles
Tatius.
** The Bostrênos, which is perhaps to be recognised under
the form Borinos in the Periplus of Scylax, is the modern
Nahr el-Awaly.
Here, also, an Astartê ruled over the destinies of the people, but a chaste and immaculate Astartê, a self-restrained and warlike virgin, sometimes identified with the moon, sometimes with the pale and frigid morning star.* In addition to this goddess, the inhabitants worshipped a Baal-Sidon, and other divinities of milder character—an Astartê Shem-Baal, wife of the supreme Baal, and Eshmun, a god of medicine—each of whom had his own particular temple either in the town itself or in some neighbouring village in the mountain. Baal delighted in travel, and was accustomed to be drawn in a chariot through the valleys of Phoenicia in order to receive the prayers and offerings of his devotees. The immodest Astartê, excluded, it would seem, from the official religion, had her claims acknowledged in the cult offered to her by the people, but she became the subject of no poetic or dolorous legend like her namesake at Byblos, and there was no attempt to disguise her innately coarse character by throwing over it a garb of sentiment. She possessed in the suburbs her chapels and grottoes, hollowed out in the hillsides, where she was served by the usual crowd of Ephébæ and sacred courtesans. Some half-dozen towns or fortified villages, such as Bitzîti,** the Lesser Sidon, and Sarepta, were scattered along the shore, or on the lowest slopes of the Lebanon.
* Astartê is represented in the Bible as the goddess of the
Sidonians, and she is in fact the object of the invocations
addressed to the mistress Deity in the Sidonian
inscriptions, the patroness of the town. Kings and queens
were her priests and priestesses respectively.
** Bitzîti is not mentioned except in the Assyrian texts,
and has been identified with the modern region Ait ez-Zeîtûn
to the south-east of Sidon. It is very probably the Elaia of
Philo of Byblos, the Biais of Dionysios Periegetes, which
Renan is inclined to identify with Heldua, Khan-Khaldi, by
substituting Eldis as a correction.
Sidonian territory reached its limit at the Cape of Sarepta, where the high-lands again meet the sea at the boundary of one of those basins into which Phoenicia is divided. Passing beyond this cape, we come first upon a Tyrian outpost, the Town of Birds;* then upon the village of Nazana** with its river of the same name; beyond this upon a plain hemmed in by low hills, cultivated to their summits; then on tombs and gardens in the suburbs of Autu;*** and, further still, to a fleet of boats moored at a short distance from the shore, where a group of reefs and islands furnishes at one and the same time a site for the houses and temples of Tyre, and a protection from its foes.
* The Phoenician name of Ornithônpolis is unknown to us: the
town is often mentioned by the geographers of classic times,
but with certain differences, some placing it to the north
and others to the south of Sarepta. It was near to the site
of Adlun, the Adnonum of the Latin itineraries, if it was
not actually the same place.
** Nazana was both the name of the place and the river, as
Kasimîyeh and Khan Kasimîyeh, near the same locality, are
to-day.
*** Autu was identified by Brugsch with Avatha, which is
probably El-Awwâtîn, on the hill facing Tyre. Max Müller,
who reads the word as Authu, Ozu, prefers the Uru or Ushu of
the Assyrian texts.