The Phœnicians left their mark upon the world. For many generations the Mediterranean was a ‘Phœnician lake,’ and they could boast of a general θαλασσοκρατία. This enabled their merchants and navigators to diffuse civilisation from Egypt and Assyria to the farthest West. They were the carriers of the world. Their ‘round ships’ or merchantmen (γαυλοί) and their long war-ships pushed far into the Northern and Southern Atlantic. The topographical lists of Thut-mes III. show a thickly inhabited country (Brugsch, i. 350–51), and, as Mariette Pasha says, a map of Canaan, composed of some hundred and fifteen hieroglyphic names, ‘is a synoptical table of the “Promised Land,” made two hundred and seventy years before the exodus of Moses.’ Among the settlements are Debekhu, now Baalbak, the Baal-city;[567] Tum-sakhu, the gate or shrine of Tum, the setting sun, now Damascus; Biarut (hod. Bayrut); Keriman or Mount Carmel and Iopoo, Joppa, or Jaffa. We find the Jordan in the Egyptian Iarutana, and Shabatuan is the Sabbaticus River of Pliny and Josephus.[568]
The chief cities of Phœnicia, Tyre and Sidon, were of unexampled splendour, depôts of the wealth of the East, as early as b.c. 1500. The arch-Homerid, who curiously enough never mentions Tyre, attributes all the finest works of art either to the Sidonians or to the gods. The eastern coast of the ‘Inner Sea’ was a centre of civilisation, a school of high culture which added beauty to necessary and useful technical products; and its arts and handicrafts became patterns to the world, even to Egypt, the mother. We have only a few inscriptions to remind us of its literature; but nothing can be more touching or more poetical than the epitaph of Eshmunazar, King of the Sidonians:[569]—‘Deprived of my fruit of life, my wise and valiant sons; widowed, the child of solitude, I lie in this tomb, in this grave, in the place which I built,’ &c. Phœnicia, too, gave not only her letters but her gods to Greece and Rome. Mulciber, for instance, was evidently Malik Kabir, the ‘Great King,’ father of the Cabiri, the patron-saints of Palm-land and the Pelasgi; this deity corresponded with the Egyptian Ptah, the Demiurgus-god denoted by the Scarabæus, a symbol as common in Phœnicia as in Nile-land. Melkarth,[570] again, whom Nonnius makes the Babylonian Sun, was the city-god; farther west he became Herakles, the Etruscan Erkle: the latter was an important commercial personage in Phœnicia, for his dog (according to the Greeks) discovered the murex. Melkarth is the Ourshol of Selden (‘De Diis Syriis’), who derives the word from ‘Ur,’ light.[571]
Another Syrian people, often occurring upon the Egyptian monuments, is the Shairetana, whom Layard supposes to be the Sharutinians near modern Antioch. They inhabited a country upon a river and a lake or sea. Their armour was a close-fitting cuirass of imbricated metal plates, worn over a short dress and girt at the waist; the helmet had side horns, and its upper dome was surmounted by a shaft-and-ball crest. Their weapons were javelins, long spears, and pointed Swords. The Tokkari, their neighbours, also carried for offence spears and large pointed knives or straight Swords. The Rebo had bows and long straight Swords with very sharp points. The same is the case with Ru-tennu or Rot-n-n, who often pass in review upon the monuments. They appear to have contained two divisions: the Ru-tennu-hir (upper Ru-tennu) were apparently the peoples of Cœlesyria, while the Ruthens or Luthens are mentioned in conjunction with Neniee (Nineveh), Shinar (Singar), Babel, and other places in Eastern Naharayn (Mesopotamia).
THE HARPE OF PERSEUS.
We have no knowledge of the Phœnician Sword except that supplied to us by the legend of the enigmatical Egypto-Argive hero, Perseus. According to Herodotus (ii. 91), his quadrangular fane was at Panopolis-Chemmis in the Theban nome: here his sandal, two cubits long, was shown to devotees; and the land prospered whenever he appeared, as is the case when it sees El-Khizr, the Green Prophet of El-Islam. The Greeks, whom we need not credit, made him the son of Jupiter by the ‘Acrisian maid’ (Danaë); and the Persians,[572] according to the Greeks, declared his son Perses to be the heros eponymus of their country, and the ancestor of their Hakhmanish or Achæmenian kings. His chief exploits were two. At Spanish Tartessus or in Libya (Herod. ii. 91) he slew, with the aid of a ‘magic mirror’ given to him by Neith-Athene, the gorgon Medusa, that old Typhonian head, from whose neck sprang Pegasus and Chrysaor.[573] At Phœnician Joppa (Jaffa)[574] he slaughtered the sea-monster (κῆτος) and saved ‘Andromeda,’ who is suspiciously like ‘Anat.’
In both these feats Perseus used a celestial weapon, the Harpé of Cronos, which Zeus had wielded in his duel with Typhon. The giant or bad-god had torn it from the grip of the good-god, whom he presently imprisoned in a cave; and it was not recovered till the captive was liberated by Thut-Hermes. The Greeks call this Sword Ἅρπη (Harpé),[575] and the name is evidently the Phœnician Hereba and the Hebrew Chereb; whilst its description, δρέπανον ὀξὺ (falx acuta, sharp sickle), identifies it with the Khopsh-blade of Egypt. Perseus performed his two exploits as Hercules slew the Lernæan hydra; and Mercury cut off the head of Argus (falcato ense), using the harpen Cyllenida.[576]
This legend has greatly ‘exercised’ commentators. The hero is connected with Io, Belus, and Ægyptus; while he is evidently related to the Cypriot Perseuth and the Phœnician Reseph[577] (flame or thunderbolt). The original fight is the eternal warfare of good, light, warmth, joy, with their contraries. It begins with Osiris-Typhon; it proceeds to Assyria, where Bel the Sun-god attacks the Tiamat or marine monster with the Sapara-Sword or Khopsh. In Persia it becomes Hormuzd (Ahura-mazda) and Ahriman (Angra-manus): in Jewry it is an affair between Bel and the Dragon; in Greece between Apollo and Python. The duello is continued by St. Patrick,[578] who banished for ever snakes from Ireland; and it makes its final appearance as ‘Saint George and the Dragon.’ This expiring effort of Egyptian mythology is held apocryphal by the Roman Catholic Church, and no wonder. Dragons do not, and never did, exist, except in memory as prehistoric monsters; moreover, the traveller in Syria is shown three several tombs of ‘Már Jiryús’ the Cappadocian, a saint who has spread himself from Diospolis-Lydda throughout the world. Under Justinian, the Theseum of Athens was dedicated to ‘Saint George of Cappadocia,’ and in Cyprus he had as many temples as Venus. The Saxon teacher thus invoked him:
Invicto mundum qui sanguine temnis,
Infinita refers, Georgi Sancte, trophæa.
He entered the English calendar when Henry II. married Eleanor, daughter of William of Aquitaine, the Crusader who chose the ‘flos Sanctorum’ for his patron saint. He is still godfather of the Garter, established by Edward III. in 1350; and the most feudal of existing orders wears ‘the George’ on a gold medallion, and celebrates its festival at Windsor on April 23.