Women in Phoenicia seem to have enjoyed considerable freedom. They are represented as banqueting in the company of men, sometimes sitting with them on the same couch, sometimes reclining with them at the same table.[1260] Occasionally they delight their male companion by playing upon the lyre or the double pipe,[1261] while in certain instances they are associated in bands of three, who perform on the lyre, the double pipe, and the tambourine.[1262] They take part in religious processions, and present offerings to the deities.[1263] The positions occupied in history by Jezebel and Dido fall in with these indications, and imply a greater approach to equality between the sexes in Phoenicia than in Oriental communities generally.
The men were, for Orientals, unusually hardy and active. In only one instance is there any appearance of the use of the parasol by a Phoenician.[1264] Sandals are infrequently worn; neck, chest, arms, and legs are commonly naked. The rough life of seamen hardened the greater number; others hunted the wild ox and the wild boar[1265] in the marshy plains of the coast tract, and in the umbrageous dells of Lebanon. Even the lion may have been affronted in the great mountain, and if we are unable to describe the method of its chase in Phoenicia, the reason is that the Phoenician artists have, in their representations of lion hunts, adopted almost exclusively Assyrian models.[1266] The Phoenician gift of facile imitation was a questionable advantage, since it led the native artists continually to substitute for sketches at first hand of scenes with which they were familiar, conventional renderings of similar scenes as depicted by foreigners.
An ornament found in Cyprus, the intention of which is uncertain, finds its proper place in the present chapter, though we cannot attach it to any particular class of objects. It consists of a massive knob of solid agate, with a cylinder of the same both above and below, through which a rod, or bar, must have been intended to pass. Some archæologists see in it the top of a sceptre;[1267] others, the head of a mace;[1268] but there is nothing really to prove its use. We might imagine it the adornment of a throne or chair of state, or the end of a chariot pole, or a portion of the stem of a candelabrum. Antiquity has furnished nothing similar with which to compare it; and we only say of it, that, whatever was its purpose, so large and so beautiful a mass of agate has scarcely been met with elsewhere.[1269] The cutting is such as to show very exquisitely the veining of the material.
Bronze objects in almost infinite variety have been found on Phoenician sites,[1270] but only a few of them can have been personal ornaments. They comprise lamps, bowls, vases, jugs, cups, armlets, anklets, daggers, dishes, a horse’s bit, heads and feet of animals, statuettes, mirrors, fibulæ, buttons, &c. Furniture would seem to have been largely composed of bronze, which sometimes formed its entire fabric, though generally confined to the ornamentation. Ivory was likewise employed in considerable quantities in the manufacture of furniture,[1271] to which it was applied as an outer covering, or veneer, either plain, or more generally carved with a pattern or with figures. The “ivory house” of Ahab[1272] was perhaps so called, not so much from the application of the precious material to the doors and walls, as from its employment in the furniture. There is every probability that it was the construction of Phoenician artists.
CHAPTER XIII—PHOENICIAN WRITING, LANGUAGE, AND LITERATURE
The Phoenician alphabet—Its wide use—Its merits—Question
of its origin—Its defects—Phoenician writing and language—
Resemblance of the language to Hebrew—In the vocabulary—
In the grammar—Points of difference between Phoenician and
Hebrew—Scantiness of the literature—Phoenician history of
Philo Byblius—Extracts—Periplus of Hanno—Phoenician
epigraphic literature—Inscription of Esmunazar—Inscription
of Tabnit—Inscription of Jehav-melek—Marseilles
inscription—Short inscriptions on votive offerings and
tombs—Range of Phoenician book-literature.
The Phoenician alphabet, like the Hebrew, consisted of twenty-two characters, which had, it is probable, the same names with the Hebrew letters,[0131] and were nearly identical in form with the letters used anciently by the entire Hebrew race. The most ancient inscription in the character which has come down to us is probably that of Mesha,[0132] the Moabite king, which belongs to the ninth century before our era. The next in antiquity, which is of any considerable length, is that discovered recently in the aqueduct which brings the water into the pool of Siloam,[0133] which dates probably from the time of Hezekiah, ab. B.C. 727-699. Some short epigraphs on Assyrian gems, tablets, and cylinders belong apparently to about the same period. The series of Phoenician and Cilician coins begins soon after this, and continues to the time of the Roman supremacy in Western Asia. The soil of Phoenicia Proper, and of the various countries where the Phoenicians established settlements or factories, as Cyprus, Malta, Sicily, Sardinia, Southern Gaul, Spain, and North Africa, has also yielded a large crop of somewhat brief legends, the “inscription of Marseilles"[0134] being the most important of them. Finally there have been found within the last few years, in Phoenicia itself, near Byblus and Sidon, the three most valuable inscriptions of the entire series—those of Jehavmelek, Esmunazar and Tabnit—which have enabled scholars to place the whole subject on a scientific basis.
It is now clear that the same, or nearly the same, alphabet was in use from a very early date over the greater part of Western Asia—in Phoenicia, Moab, Judæa, Samaria, Lycia, Caria, Phrygia, &c.—that it was adopted, with slight alterations only, by the Etruscans and the Greeks, and that from them it was passed on to the nations of modern Europe, and acquired a quasi-universality. The invention of this alphabet was, by the general consent of antiquity, ascribed to the Phoenicians;[0135] and though, if their claim to priority of discovery be disputed, it is impossible to prove it, their practical genius and their position among the nations of the earth are strong subsidiary arguments in support of the traditions.
The Phoenician alphabet, or the Syrian script, as some call it,[0136] did not obtain its general prevalence without possessing some peculiar merits. Its primary merit was that of simplicity. The pictorial systems of the Egyptians and the Hittites required a hand skilled in drawing to express them; the cuneiform syllabaries of Babylonia, Assyria, and Elam needed an extraordinary memory to grasp the almost infinite variety in the arrangement of the wedges, and to distinguish each group from all the rest; even the Cypriote syllabary was of awkward and unnecessary extent, and was expressed by characters needlessly complicated. The Phoenician inventor, whoever he was, reduced letters to the smallest possible number, and expressed them by the simplest possible forms. Casting aside the idea of a syllabary, he reduced speech to its ultimate elements, and set apart a single sign to represent each possible variety of articulation, or rather each variety of which he was individually cognisant. How he fixed upon his signs, it is difficult to say. According to some, he had recourse to one or other of previously existing modes of expressing speech, and merely simplified the characters which he found in use. But there are two objections to this view. First, there is no known set of characters from which the early Phoenician can be derived with any plausability. Resemblances no doubt may be pointed out here and there, but taking the alphabet as a whole, and comparing it with any other, the differences will always be quite as numerous and quite as striking as the similarities. For instance, the writer of the article on the “Alphabet” in the “Encyclopædia Britannica” (1876) derives the Phoenician letters from letters used in the Egyptian hieratic writing,[0137] but his own table shows a marked diversity in at least eleven instances, a slight resemblance in seven or eight, a strong resemblance in no more than two or three. Derivation from the Cypriote forms has been suggested by some; but here again eight letters are very different, if six or seven are similar. Recently, derivation from the Hittite hieroglyphs has been advocated,[0138] but the alleged instances of resemblance touch nine characters only out of the twenty-two. And real resemblance is confined to three or four. Secondly, no theory of derivation accounts for the Phoenician names of their letters, which designate objects quite different from those represented by the Egyptian hieroglyphs, and equally different from those represented by the Hittite letters. For instance, the Egyptian a is the ill-drawn figure of an eagle, the Phoenician alef has the signification of “ox;” the b of the Egyptians is a hastily drawn figure of a crane, the Phoenician beth means “a house.”