It is easy to see how this great surrounded water nourished the seeds of our civilisation: why all the influences we enjoy here in the north came upwards to us from its harbours: why Asia stretched out towards it in order to learn, and attempted (but always failed) to absorb it. It is so diversified by great peninsulas and very numerous islands that the earliest sailors need never miss the land: it has so indented and varied a coast that harbours are nowhere lacking to it. Its climate is of that kind best suited to men, yielding them fruits and warmth with some labour, but not so hardly as to sour them into brutality nor so cheaply as to degrade them by indolence. The separate homes in which polities can grow up separately and cherish their separate lives, were fortified by the sea which protected its archipelagoes and its long tongues of land, and were further guarded by the many mountain chains which so affect the horizons all along these coasts that almost every landfall you make as you sail is some very high, and often sacred, hill. But all this difference was permitted to interact upon itself and to preserve a common unity by the common presence of the sea. If it be true, as the wisest men have said, that everything comes from salt water, then nowhere in the world could the influence of the sea do more to create and feed the aspirations of men. Whether our race came thither from the north and east, or, as is more probable, from the African shore, this much is certain, that there grew up round the Mediterranean, Europe, which is Ourselves.
|The Phœnicians|
At one part things alien to us impinge upon this sea; this part is the eastern bay which is marked off upon the map with a dotted line and the shores of which are the outposts of Asia and of the Egyptians. The projection on the south is that delta of the Nile from which Egypt looked out jealously against rivals whom she despised or ignored: the long Levantine coast which blocks the eastern end of the whole sea was alive with the essence of the Asiatic spirit: with the subtlety, the yielding and the avarice of the Phœnician cities. Egypt may have attempted something westward: there is a legend of struggles with a fair people, and to this day in the salt marshes south of Tunis a group of date-trees, abandoned and unplucked, are called the “Dates of Pharaoh” and resemble no dates of that country, but the dates of the Nile valley. But if such expeditions were made they were fruitless. The desert was still a secure boundary for us: the first attack which Europe was to suffer came not from the sands, but from its own sea, and the first conquerors of the Maghreb were the Phœnicians.
This people were Orientals, like any others; but they had, as it were, specialised upon one most notable character of their race, which is to accumulate wealth by negotiation, and to avoid as far as may be the labour of production. To no other family of men has toil appeared to be a curse save to that of which the Phœnicians were members; nor are fatigues tolerable to that family save those endured in acquiring the possessions of others and in levying that toll which cunning can always gather from mere industry. Of all effort travel alone was congenial to them, and especially travel by sea, which, when they had first developed it, became for many centuries their monopoly and gave them the carrying of the world and the arbitrament of its exchanges. They dwelt in a small group of harbours on that extreme eastern shore of the Mediterranean, where a narrow strip of fertile land lay between them and the mountains. They sailed out before the steady northerly and easterly winds of summer, (which are but a portion of the Trade Winds;) they pushed from headland to headland and from island to island, bringing into economic contact the savage tribes and the wealthy states, passionate especially for metals, but carefully arranging that there should arise between the nations whom they exploited or served no such direct bond as would exclude their own mediation. Three thousand years ago their language was reflected in the names of half the landmarks and roadsteads of the sea—later the Greeks attempted to explain these names by punning upon their sound in some Greek dialect and fitting to each some fantastic legend.
As the Asiatics ran thus westward before the summer gales, their path was barred at last by the eastern shore of Barbary.
It is curious to note how specially designed was this coast, and especially its north-eastern promontories, for the first landing-place of Asiatics upon our shores. The recess which is marked upon the map with an X and which is now called the Gulf of Tunis was designed in every way to arrest these merchants and to afford them opportunities for their future dominion.
A Phœnicia
B Berenice
C Cyrene
L Leptis
S Syrtis
They had sounded along the littoral of the desert: they were acquainted with the harbours which led them westward along the Libyan beach and with the little territories which were besieged all round by the sand and drew their life from the sea: where later were to rise Cyrene and Berenice and Leptis.
|The Bay of Carthage|