It has already been remarked that the Phenician merchant and trading vessel figures in the Homeric poems as a well-known visitor, and that the variegated robes and golden ornaments fabricated at Sidon are prized among the valuable ornaments belonging to the chiefs.[503] We have reason to conclude generally, that in these early times, the Phenicians traversed the Ægean sea habitually, and even formed settlements for trading and mining purposes upon some of its islands: on Thasos, especially, near the coast of Thrace, traces of their abandoned gold-mines were visible even in the days of Herodotus, indicating both persevering labor and considerable length of occupation. But at the time when the historical era opens, they seem to have been in course of gradual retirement from these regions,[504] and their commerce had taken a different direction. Of this change we can furnish no particulars; but we may easily understand that the increase of the Grecian marine, both warlike and commercial, would render it inconvenient for the Phenicians to encounter such enterprising rivals,—piracy (or private war at sea) being then an habitual proceeding, especially with regard to foreigners.
The Phenician towns occupied a narrow strip of the coast of Syria and Palestine, about one hundred and twenty miles in length, never more, and generally much less, than twenty miles in breadth,—between Mount Libanus and the sea. Aradus—on an islet, with Antaradus and Marathus over against it on the main land—was the northernmost, and Tyre the southernmost (also upon a little island, with Palæ-Tyrus and a fertile adjacent plain over against it). Between the two were situated Sidon, Berytus, Tripolis, and Byblus, besides some smaller towns[505] attached to one or other of these last mentioned, and several islands close to the coast occupied in like manner; while the colony of Myriandrus lay farther north, near the borders of Kilikia. Whether Sidon or Tyre was the most ancient, seems not determinable: if it be true as some authorities affirmed, that Tyre was originally planted from Sidon, the colony must have grown so rapidly as to surpass its metropolis in power and consideration, for it became the chief of all the Phenician towns.[506] Aradus, the next in importance after these two, was founded by exiles from Sidon, and all the rest either by Tyrian or Sidonian settlers. Within this confined territory was concentrated a greater degree of commercial wealth and enterprise, and manufacturing ingenuity, than could be found in any other portion of the contemporary world. Each town was an independent community, having its own surrounding territory and political constitution and its own hereditary prince,[507] though the annals of Tyre display many instances of princes assassinated by men who succeeded them on the throne. Tyre appears to have enjoyed a certain presiding, perhaps a controlling authority, over all of them, which was not always willingly submitted to; and examples occur in which the inferior towns, when Tyre was pressed by a foreign enemy,[508] took the opportunity of revolting, or at least stood aloof. The same difficulty of managing satisfactorily the relations between a presiding town and its confederates, which Grecian history manifests, is found also to prevail in Phenicia, and will be hereafter remarked in regard to Carthage; while the same effects are also perceived, of the autonomous city polity, in keeping alive the individual energies and regulated aspirations of the inhabitants. The predominant sentiment of jealous town-isolation is forcibly illustrated by the circumstances of Tripolis, established jointly by Tyre, Sidon, and Aradus. It consisted of three distinct towns, each one furlong apart from the other two, and each with its own separate walls; though probably constituting to a certain extent one political community, and serving as a place of common meeting and deliberation for the entire Phenician name.[509] The outlying promontories of Libanus and Anti-Libanus touched the sea along the Phenician coast, and those mountainous ranges, while they rendered a large portion of the very confined area unfit for cultivation of corn, furnished what was perhaps yet more indispensable,—abundant supplies of timber for ship-building: the entire want of all wood in Babylonia, except the date-palm, restricted the Assyrians of that territory from maritime traffic on the Persian gulf. It appears, however, that the mountains of Lebanon also afforded shelter to tribes of predatory Arabs, who continually infested both the Phenician territory and the rich neighboring plain of Cœle-Syria.[510]
The splendid temple of that great Phenician god (Melkarth) whom the Greeks called Hêraklês,[511] was situated in Tyre, and the Tyrians affirmed that its establishment had been coeval with the first foundation of the city, two thousand three hundred years before the time of Herodotus. This god is the companion and protector of their colonial settlements, and the ancestor of the Phœnico-Libyan kings: we find him especially at Carthage, Gadês, and Thasos.[512] Some supposed that they had migrated to their site on the Mediterranean coast, from previous abodes near the mouth of the Euphrates,[513] or on islands (named Tylus and Aradus) of the Persian gulf, while others treated the Mediterranean Phenicians as original, and the others as colonists. Whether such be the fact or not, history knows them in no other portion of Asia earlier than in Phenicia proper.
Though the invincible industry and enterprise of the Phenicians maintained them as a people of importance down to the period of the Roman empire, yet the period of their widest range and greatest efficiency is to be sought much earlier,—anterior to 700 B. C. In these remote times they and their colonists were the exclusive navigators of the Mediterranean: the rise of the Greek maritime settlements banished their commerce to a great degree from the Ægean sea, and embarrassed it even in the more westerly waters. Their colonial establishments were formed in Africa, Sicily, Sardinia, the Balearic Isles, and Spain: the greatness as well as the antiquity of Carthage, Utica, and Gadês, attest the long-sighted plans of Phenician traders, even in days anterior to the 1st Olympiad. We trace the wealth and industry of Tyre, and the distant navigation of her vessels through the Red sea and along the coast of Arabia, back to the days of David and Solomon. And as neither Egyptians, Assyrians, Persians, nor Indians, addressed themselves to a seafaring life, so it seems that both the importation and the distribution of the products of India and Arabia into Western Asia and Europe, was performed by the Idumæan Arabs, between Petra and the Red sea,—by the Arabs of Gerrha on the Persian gulf, joined as they were in later times by a body of Chaldæan exiles from Babylonia,—and by the more enterprising Phenicians of Tyre and Sidon in these two seas as well as in the Mediterranean.[514]
The most ancient Phenician colonies were Utica, nearly on the northernmost point of the coast of Africa, and in the same gulf, (now known as the gulf of Tunis) as Carthage, over against cape Lilybæum in Sicily,—and Gadês, or Gadeira, on the south-western coast of Spain; a town which, founded perhaps near one thousand years before the Christian era,[515] has maintained a continuous prosperity, and a name (Cadiz) substantially unaltered, longer than any town in Europe. How well the site of Utica was suited to the circumstances of Phenician colonists may be inferred from the fact that Carthage was afterwards established in the same gulf and near to the same spot, and that both the two cities reached a high pitch of prosperity. The distance of Gadês from Tyre seems surprising, and if we calculate by time instead of by space, the Tyrians were separated from their Tartêssian colonists by an interval greater than that which now divides an Englishman from Bombay; for the ancient navigator always coasted along the land, and Skylax reckons seventy-five days[516] of voyage from the Kanôpic (westernmost) mouth of the Nile to the Pillars of Hêraklês (strait of Gibraltar); to which some more days must be added to represent the full distance between Tyre and Gadês. But the enterprise of these early mariners surmounted all difficulties consistent with the principle of never losing sight of the coast. Proceeding along the northern coast of Libya, at a time when the mouths of the Nile were still closed by Egyptian jealousy against all foreign ships, they appear to have found little temptation to colonize[517] on the dangerous coast near to the two gulfs called the great and little Syrtis,—in a territory for the most part destitute of water, and occupied by rude Libyan nomades, who were thinly spread over the wide space between the western Nile[518] and cape Hermæa, now called cape Bona. The subsequent Grecian towns of Kyrênê and Barka, whose well-chosen site formed an exception to the general character of the region, were not planted with any view to commerce,[519] and the Phenician town of Leptis, near the gulf called the great Syrtis, was founded by exiles from Sidon, and not by deliberate colonization. The site of Utica and Carthage, in the gulf immediately westward of cape Bona, was convenient for commerce with Sicily, Italy, and Sardinia; and the other Phenician colonies, Adrumêtum, Neapolis, Hippo (two towns so called), the lesser Leptis, etc., were settled on the coast not far distant from the eastern or western promontories which included the gulf of Tunis, common to Carthage and Utica.
These early Phenician settlements were planted thus in the territory now known as the kingdom of Tunis and the western portion of the French province of Constantine. From thence to the Pillars of Hêraklês (strait of Gibraltar), we do not hear of any others; but the colony of Gadês, outside of the strait, formed the centre of a flourishing and extensive commerce, which reached on one side far to the south, not less than thirty days’ sail along the western coast of Africa,[520]—and on the other side to Britain and the Scilly Islands. There were numerous Phenician factories and small trading-towns along the western coast of what is now the empire of Morocco; and the island of Kernê, twelve days’ sail along the coast from the strait of Gibraltar, formed an established dépôt for Phenician merchandise in trading with the interior. There were, moreover, towns not far distant from the coast, of Libyans or Ethiopians, to which the inhabitants of the central regions resorted, and where they brought their leopard skins and elephants’ teeth, to be exchanged against the unguents of Tyre and the pottery of Athens.[521] So distant a trade, with the limited navigation of that day, could not be made to embrace very bulky goods.
But this trade, though seemingly a valuable one, constituted only a small part of the sources of wealth open to the Phenicians of Gadês. The Turditanians and Turduli, who occupied the south-western portion of Spain, between the Anas river (Guadiana) and the Mediterranean, seem to have been the most civilized and improvable section of the Iberian tribes, well suited for commercial relations with the settlers who occupied the isle of Leon, and who established the temple, afterwards so rich and frequented, of the Tyrian Hêraklês. And the extreme productiveness of the southern region of Spain, in corn, fish, cattle, and wine, as well as in silver and iron, is a topic upon which we find but one language among ancient writers. The territory round Gadês, Carteia, and the other Phenician settlements in this district, was known to the Greeks in the sixth century B. C. by the name of Tartêssus, and regarded by them somewhat in the same light as Mexico and Peru appeared to the Spaniards of the sixteenth century. For three or four centuries the Phenicians had possessed the entire monopoly of this Tartêssian trade, without any rivalry on the part of the Greeks; probably, the metals there procured were in those days their most precious acquisition, and the tribes who occupied the mining regions of the interior found a new market and valuable demand, for produce then obtained with a degree of facility exaggerated into fable.[522] It was from Gadês as a centre that these enterprising traders, pushing their coasting voyage yet farther, established relations with the tin-mines of Cornwall, perhaps also with amber-gatherers from the coasts of the Baltic. It requires some effort to carry back our imaginations to the time when, along all this vast length of country, from Tyre and Sidon to the coast of Cornwall, there was no merchant-ship to buy or sell goods except these Phenicians. The rudest tribes find advantage in such visitors; and we cannot doubt, that the men, whose resolute love of gain braved so many hazards and difficulties, must have been rewarded with profits on the largest scale of monopoly.
The Phenician settlers on the coast of Spain became gradually more and more numerous, and appear to have been distributed, either in separate townships or intermingled with the native population, between the mouth of the Anas (Guadiana) and the town of Malaka (Malaga) on the Mediterranean. Unfortunately, we are very little informed about their precise localities and details, but we find no information of Phenician settlements on the Mediterranean coast of Spain northward of Malaka; for Carthagena, or New Carthage, was a Carthaginian settlement, founded only in the third century B. C., after the first Punic war.[523] The Greek word Phenicians being used to signify as well the inhabitants of Carthage as those of Tyre and Sidon, it is not easy to distinguish what belongs to each of them; nevertheless, we can discern a great and important difference in the character of their establishments, especially in Iberia. The Carthaginians combined with their commercial projects large schemes of conquest and empire: it is thus that the independent Phenician establishments in and near the gulf of Tunis, in Africa, were reduced to dependence upon them,—while many new small townships, direct from Carthage itself, were planted on the Mediterranean coast of Africa, and the whole of that coast from the great Syrtis westward to the Pillars of Hêraklês (strait of Gibraltar) is described as their territory in the Periplus of Skylax (B. C. 360). In Iberia, during the third century B. C., they maintained large armies,[524] constrained the inland tribes to subjection, and acquired a dominion which nothing but the superior force of Rome prevented from being durable: in Sicily, also, the resistance of the Greeks prevented a similar consummation. But the foreign settlements of Tyre and Sidon were formed with views purely commercial. In the region of Tartêssus as well as in the western coast of Africa outside of the strait of Gibraltar, we hear only of pacific interchange and metallurgy; and the number of Phenicians who acquired gradually settlements in the interior was so great, that Strabo describes these towns—not less than two hundred in number—as altogether Phenicized.[525] In his time, the circumstances favorable to new Phenician emigrations had been long past and gone, and there can be little hesitation in ascribing the preponderance, which this foreign element had then acquired, to a period several centuries earlier, beginning at a time when Tyre and Sidon enjoyed both undisputed autonomy at home, and the entire monopoly of Iberian commerce, without interference from the Greeks.
The earliest Grecian colony founded in Sicily was that of Naxos, planted by the Chalkidians in 735 B. C.: Syracuse followed in the next year, and during the succeeding century many flourishing Greek cities took root on the island. These Greeks found the Phenicians already in possession of many outlying islets and promontories all around the island, which served them in their trade with the Sikels and Sikans who occupied the interior. The safety and facilities of this established trade were to so great a degree broken up by the new-comers, that the Phenicians, relinquishing their numerous petty settlements round the island, concentrated themselves in three considerable towns at the south-western angle near Lilybæum,[526]—Motyê, Soloeis, and Panormus,—and in the island of Malta, where they were least widely separated from Utica and Carthage. The Tyrians of that day were hard-pressed by the Assyrians under Salmaneser, and the power of Carthage had not yet reached its height; otherwise probably this retreat of the Sicilian Phenicians before the Greeks would not have taken place without a struggle. But the early Phenicians, superior to the Greeks in mercantile activity, and not disposed to contend, except under circumstances of very superior force, with warlike adventurers bent on permanent settlement, took the prudent course of circumscribing their sphere of operations. A similar change appears to have taken place in Cyprus, the other island in which Greeks and Phenicians came into close contact. If we may trust the Tyrian annals consulted by the historian Menander, Cyprus was subject to the Tyrians even in the time of Solomon.[527] We do not know the dates of the establishment of Paphos, Salamis, Kitium, and the other Grecian cities there planted,—but there can be no doubt that they were posterior to this period, and that a considerable portion of the soil and trade of Cyprus thus passed from Phenicians to Greeks; who on their part partially embraced and diffused the rites, sometimes cruel, sometimes voluptuous, embodied in the Phenician religion.[528] In Cilicia, too, especially at Tarsus, the intrusion of Greek settlers appears to have gradually Hellenized a town originally Phenician and Assyrian; contributing, along with the other Grecian settlements—Phasêlis, Aspendus, and Sidê—on the southern coast of Asia Minor, to narrow the Phenician range of adventure in that direction.[529]
Such was the manner in which the Phenicians found themselves affected by the spread of Greek settlements; and if the Ionians of Asia Minor, when first conquered by Harpagus and the Persians, had followed the advice of the Prienean Bias to emigrate in a body, and found one great Pan-Ionic colony in the island of Sardinia, these early merchants would have experienced the like hindrance[530] carried still farther westward,—perhaps, indeed, the whole subsequent history of Carthage might have been sensibly modified. But Iberia, and the golden region of Tartêssus, remained comparatively little visited, and still less colonized, by the Greeks; nor did it even become known to them until more than a century after their first settlements had been formed in Sicily. Easy as the voyage from Corinth to Cadiz may now appear to us, to a Greek of the seventh or sixth centuries B. C. it was a formidable undertaking. He was under the necessity of first coasting along Akarnania and Epirus, then crossing, first to the island of Korkyra, and next to the gulf of Tarentum; he then doubled the southernmost cape of Italy and followed the sinuosities of the Mediterranean coast, by Tyrrhenia, Liguria, southern Gaul, and eastern Iberia, to the Pillars of Hêraklês or strait of Gibraltar: or if he did not do this, he had the alternative of crossing the open sea from Krête or Peloponnesus to Libya, and then coasting westward along the perilous coast of the Syrtes until he arrived at the same point. Both voyages presented difficulties hard to be encountered; but the most serious hazard of all, was the direct transit across the open sea from Krête to Libya. It was about the year 630 B. C. that the inhabitants of the island of Thêra, starved out by a seven years’ drought, were enjoined by the Delphian god to found a colony in Libya. Nothing short of the divine command would have induced them to obey so terrific a sentence of banishment; for not only was the region named quite unknown to them, but they could not discover, by the most careful inquiries among practised Greek navigators, a single man who had ever intentionally made the voyage to Libya.[531] One Kretan only could they find,—a fisherman named Korôbius,—who had been driven thither accidentally by violent gales, and he served them as guide.