It is in no way probable that when the Phœnicians chose the lowlands on the west side of the Lebanon chain as their place of abode they took possession of a tract of country which had as yet practically no population. But we have not the slightest grounds for guessing the stage of civilisation of the predecessors whom they encountered there, nor to what race these belonged. Certain scholars have indeed sought to answer the question, why it was in Phœnicia that in early times a much higher development of civilisation appeared than in most of the other countries inhabited by members of the Semitic family of peoples, by the hypothesis that the branch of Semites which immigrated there found, as did those who settled in Babylonia, a population entirely different in endowments and descent, and who had long been in possession of a many sided civilisation; with these they may have intermingled, and from the complete amalgamation first proceeded that section of humanity, which bears in history the name of Phœnicians. This hypothesis has no other foundation than the idea that otherwise it would be necessary to attribute to a Semitic people qualities which are denied to the Semitic family generally.
As already shown, the exact point of time at which the race of Phœnicians established its claims to a home in Phœnicia, cannot be computed. It is still more impossible to fix its date than it is to determine the first commencement of historical development in Egypt and Babylonia, because in Phœnicia there is a total lack of monuments which might afford some kind of glimpse at such far remote distances of the past as are revealed by the earliest monuments of Egyptian and Babylonian origin. It may, however, be regarded as established that a consistent development, preparing the way for results which are known to history, began much later in Phœnicia than in the Nile Valley and the territory at the mouth of the Euphrates and the Tigris. Like the Babylonians and Egyptians, the Phœnicians were subsequently unable to refrain from drawing up a chronological scheme of their own history, embracing an inconceivably long period. At least Julius Africanus, a Christian chronographer who wrote in the first quarter of the third century A.D., mentions incidentally that there were versions of Phœnician history in which the latter was made to go back no less than 30,000 years. But this is quite a modest total when we remember that Babylonians are said to have asserted that their reckoning extended back 480,000 years. In what manner the enormous number of 30,000 years was attained may be guessed. A brief span of time would be filled by historical occurrences and lists of rulers.
As to primitive history, properly so called, or if it is preferred, the sojourn of the Phœnician people in its first and original home, it is probably not touched on in any way. In all probability the lion’s share was accorded to the gods, and to a plan of arrangement designed to bring the doctrine of the rule of the gods on earth, and especially in Phœnicia, into the framework of a regular chronological system. Such a scheme was required, because the lists of rulers were not limited to the enumeration of historical personages, but began with mythical figures and with gods. Therefore, on the whole, there is nothing behind these high figures, if they have been accurately reported, beyond a chronology of the Phœnician cosmogony and stories of the gods.
[ca. 2750 B.C.]
Of much more ancient origin and of much greater positive value is another date which is given by Herodotus. He asserts that during his stay at Tyre, which may be placed in the year 450 B.C., certain priests of the sanctuary there which was consecrated to the god Hercules (i.e. Melkarth) responded to his question as to how long the temple had been standing, by saying that that temple had been erected when the town was founded, and that that event had happened 2300 years before. According to this the founding of Tyre would fall somewhere in the year 2750 B.C. B. G. Niebuhr has declared himself very sceptical of the trustworthiness of the informants to whom Herodotus owed this intelligence. But even if their estimate is not to be taken as exact, and was not derived direct from records of the founding of the temple, and if it is also uncertain whether Herodotus was not merely informed of the period at which, in Phœnicia, the founding of the oldest city in that country began, still in itself few objections can be found to the correctness of this estimate as on the whole an approximately accurate date. It stands to reason that on practical grounds it was to the interest of the priesthood of that temple to bring exaggerated notions of its age into circulation. But in doing this, since they expressly invoke the notorious age of the town, they had every inducement to keep within the bounds of what was generally regarded as possible. At best, therefore, their estimate will be the earliest date with which the contemporary inhabitants of Phœnicia believed that they might associate their historical recollections generally. It was not merely a date such as is derived from simple love of romancing; otherwise they would have gone further back. In fact about twenty-five hundred years before Christ the Canaanites had actually taken up their abode in Phœnicia.
THE STAR OF THE EAST
As everything points to the presumption that we have no historical information which stands in the way of free invention as to the age of the towns, this fact should serve to confirm the theory that the origin of the towns of Phœnicia did not take place under the influence of historical events of a violent character, and that the character of the conformation of the soil of the whole territory which favoured the isolation of the different sections, had its effect at a very early stage of their development. This was all the more to be expected because the rest of the Canaanites exhibited only slight tendencies towards national unity, a want which may perhaps be explained by the probability that their original home was also the border territory of the cultivated land of Syria, and that presumably the force of circumstances under which the transition to the life in fixed abodes was completed had not been enough to banish all remains of the nomad’s disposition. Even at the time of the immigration of the Israelitish tribes, the land west of Jordan was not, according to all appearance, thickly populated, and although along the Syria coast, a greater density of population had long prevailed, yet even in Phœnicia itself the first scattered settlements had little of the character of townships until the development of an active maritime trade, which continually drew fresh sections of the inhabitants of the lowlands to the neighbourhood of the landing-places. But for this very reason the fact that subsequently every separate section of the Phœnician country was referred to solely as the appendage and domain of each great coast city, should not lead us to the conclusion that these sections corresponded to a primitive division of the Phœnician race into separate branches. What this phenomenon really points to is rather mainly an historical effect arising from the geographical peculiarities of Phœnicia. And if the population was not everywhere of pure Phœnician origin, especially in the northern districts—it apparently received continual accessions from the territory of Lebanon and the inland country south of the latter—it is still not to be admitted that distinctions of tribe influenced the choice of the country to be settled.
There is a special tendency to assign a peculiar position to the men of Byblus and Berytus. But the reasons which have prompted it are by no means conclusive; the fact that these two towns are not mentioned in the table of peoples is explained by the general application of the term “Sidonian.” It is true that in another passage of the Old Testament (Joshua xiii. 5) the Byblites are apparently not included under the general name of Sidonians. But if the general sense of this passage has not been distorted by numerous interpolations, which can scarcely be conceded, still, the independent and separate importance of Byblus will appear as a historic fact and not as one to be referred to the prehistoric founding of the city by a tribe of non-Phœnician origin. A writer who, as in this case, wishes to point out to his fellow tribesmen the tracts of country they are to subdue, concerns himself rather with states and political units than with ethnological problems. As regards the separate existence of Byblus, we need only ask the question whether as a town not founded by Phœnicians it could have become what it did: namely, a pre-eminently sacred place, a centre of religious life and thought which had no second in this country—in fact, the Mecca of the Phœnicians. The coins of this city make it clear that to them “Kaddischat” (i.e., the “holy”) and Gebal (i.e., Byblus) were regarded as identical names. Here special honour was paid to “El” or, as the Greeks said, Kronos, who was the highest conception of God in Phœnician theology. Here, too, the service of the “Lady of the City,” Astarte, acquired, with all the unrestraint of the primitive sensuousness inherent in the notion of a goddess of love and vitality, a more distinct and potent shape than in the rest of Phœnicia. In the territory of Byblus, moreover, lay the scenes in which love once united the goddess with the youthful ruler Adonis, the most beautiful of the gods, and where at the instigation of a jealous deity, his deadly enemy, her lover met his early death from the tusk of a wild boar.
[ca. 2800 B.C.]