VOYAGES AND TRADING-STATIONS
The records of their presence which have come down to us are scanty, and in some cases of doubtful authenticity. The statements of Greek authors to the effect that certain cities, buildings, or forms of worship, were erected or instituted by the Phœnicians, often mean no more than that their real origin was unknown. The names of Cyclopean, Pelasgian, and Phœnician were indiscriminately bestowed on all relics of venerable antiquity, and even when the Homeric poems were composed, the Phœnician occupation of the Greek archipelago lay far back in the remote past. In the Iliad and the Odyssey, the Phœnicians appear only as dwellers in Phœnicia, or the land of Sidon, mariners and traders, whose business leads them to and fro in great waters, far from their homes, and who now and again cast anchor in one spot for a twelvemonth or so, as occasion offers. We hear much of their doings, of the splendour of their goblets of wrought silver, and their embroidered stuffs, the product of Sidonian looms; of the jewels of gold and amber they offer for sale; of their dishonest and knavish tricks, of how they cheat simple folk of their property, and then sell them into slavery, induce maidservants to come on board their galleys with stolen goods and their masters’ children, and then, quickly hoisting sail, carry off the sons of noble houses to be sold as slaves at the next port they reach. But this is no true description even of the period when the Greek epics came into being, except in so far as it makes Sidon the chief depot of the unmatchable products of the art and industry of northern Syria. The episodes in the Odyssey which treat of Phœnician knavery are later interpolations. Nor are the deductions as to Phœnician expansion drawn by certain scholars from certain proper names in Greece very convincing, as, for all their ingenuity, they rest on internal evidence alone.
The Phœnicians colonised Rhodes, as they had colonised Cyprus, though not to the same extent. The centre of their settlements was Jalysus, opposite the coast of Asia Minor, at the northern end of the island; Cameiros, on the east, is also said to have been a Phœnician city. They established settlements in several of the Sporades and Cyclades, in Thera, Melos (where they found sulphur and alum), and Oliaros (Antiparos). The island of Cythera supplied them with a station for the purple murex fishery, and a starting-point for voyages to the west and to the Peloponnesian coast. Whether they had any settlements in Crete is uncertain, but they certainly had some close to the coast of Thrace, for Herodotus speaks with wonder and admiration of their gold mines in the island of Thasos. They are said, but on insufficient evidence, to have colonised Samothrace. Nor is it impossible that some venturesome mariners may have sailed through the Hellespont and Bosphorus to the Pontus Euxinus, and established Phœnician factories on the north coast of Asia Minor.
Schliemann’s excavations at Hissarlik, Mycenæ, Tiryns, and Orchomenos, and other discoveries of the relics of pre-Homeric civilisation, have brought to light a number of objects unmistakably Phœnician, or copied from Phœnician models, which prove that, in externals at least, the civilisation of the islands and coasts of the Ægean had far more affinity with that of northern Syria than with that which was destined to arise in Hellas. To take but a single example, the walls of Hissarlik, Tiryns, and Mycenæ, when complete, must have borne a strong resemblance to those of the strongholds of Palestine and northern Syria, as represented in Egyptian works of art. We do indeed find some attempts at originality among the relics of this period, as, for instance, in the shapes and decorations of the earthen vessels of Argolis, but, generally speaking, the foreign element preponderates; though it must remain an open question whether everything that indicates the ascendency of Asia Minor in this early stage of civilisation came by way of the sea, or whether some of it may not have been due to the gradual spread of Asiatic influences. Of Egyptian influence, direct or indirect, there is hardly a trace.
Phœnician Bottle with Triple Body
We must not, however, exaggerate the range of Phœnician influence. The great cities in which it was dominant perished early, and little or nothing of it penetrated to the interior of the mainland. Nor do the Phœnicians seem ever to have been undisputed masters of the Ægean; their stations were early abandoned, in Rhodes they had to maintain their ground against the Carians and were finally ousted by the Dorians. The north of Cyprus was early peopled by Greeks. In details and externals, there are many links between this early pre-Homeric civilisation and that which we find reflected in the Greek epics, but such remains of the former as survived were confined to a few island and seaboard tribes, and even among them, were undergoing a process of transformation. Its most important legacy was an acquaintance with the practical arts. The Phœnician vessels, sorry craft as they were, served as models to the Greeks, Phœnician gains by sea spurred them to imitation, and we are probably right in supposing that they learnt from the Phœnicians how to steer by the pole-star at night. A few details of the architecture of Tiryns, Mycenæ, and Hissarlik were adopted by the later architecture of Greece, though the difference of material had deprived them of their significance. Technical art in certain places and industries long remained faithful to patterns of Asiatic origin, as is manifest in the pottery of Melos and Rhodes, some bronzes lately discovered in Crete, and above all, as we should expect, in the manufactures of Cyprus.
The most important acquisition which the Greeks owed to the Phœnicians, was the art of writing, and the Canaanite alphabet, which, however, the latter had not acquired themselves at the time when North Syrian influence was in the ascendant in Greece. The Greeks adopted it at a later period, as they had shortly before adopted a system of weights and measures, closely akin to that which obtained in northern Syria, though they do not seem to have owed this last solely to the Phœnicians. Their commercial institutions and pecuniary transactions may have followed Phœnician models in many respects; for example, the Phœnicians were the first people whose commerce beyond sea made it necessary for them to insure legal protection for life and property by means of securities.
Where large numbers of Phœnicians lived together on foreign soil, they united to form distinct corporations with magistrates of their own. It was to the interest of these scattered communities to maintain intimate relations with some great city in their native land, and the mutual obligations thus incurred, were associated with the worship of the local divinity of the mother city. If, however, a Phœnician merely desired to make a brief stay in some foreign port, he put himself under the protection of a resident of good repute, and became his guest. At parting, a potsherd was broken in two, one half being kept by the host, and the other by the departing guest, who was thenceforth bound to extend a like protection to his former host, any member of his family, or any person employed in his affairs. When the latter desired to recommend any one to the protection of his former protégé, he gave him the broken potsherd to present as his credentials; if the two halves fitted, the bearer’s identity was established. Among the Greeks, this system of reciprocal hospitality (proxenia), took the place of the modern consular service. The Phœnicians in Greek cities were also money-lenders, and advanced loans at interest on ships and cargo, and in banking the Greeks probably learned much from them. It is unlikely that such a city as Carthage, into which wealth flowed from all quarters, should have been without a regular banking system, and a kind of money market. From Crete and Cythera, the Phœnicians sailed to the western end of the Mediterranean, allured no doubt by rumours of the mineral wealth of Spain. Sicily, Malta, Gozzo, Cossura, and the African coast, west of the great Syrtis, were at first no more to them than necessary anchorages and stations for obtaining provisions on the long voyage through the straits that divided Europe from Africa to the mouth of the Guadalquivir. The development of Phœnician colonies followed the sea route to Tartessus, and it was not until the route was well established that certain places along it rose into importance. Cadiz, the farthest point of it, was older than Utica; Lixos, on the African coast, beyond the straits, was said to be older than Cadiz. Tarshish yielded not only silver in immense quantities, but gold, lead, and other metals; the fisheries were profitable, and probably even then tin and amber found their way from the far north to the countries at the western end of the Mediterranean basin.
The Sidonians had been foremost in occupying the Ægean; the western half of the Mediterranean was the sphere of Tyrian enterprise. With the sole exception of Leptis Magna, on the western margin of the great Syrtis, every Phœnician colony there, as far as our information goes, was founded either from Carthage or directly from Tyre. Carthage sends tribute and ambassadors to the temple of Hercules at Tyre, her founders are the founder of Tyre and the goddess Dido, whom legend transforms into a Syrian princess. The Tyrian Melkarth is the reputed progenitor of the Carthaginians; it is he who subdued the Libyan tribes who opposed the first colonists, and who opened a gateway to the Atlantic to his people, setting up great pillars of rock on either hand, as beseems a god whose token is two pillars. The most important Phœnician settlement in the south of Sicily was Heracleia Minoa or Rosh Melkarth, i.e., Melkarth’s Head (Cape Melkarth). Again, just as the Greeks sometimes called Phœnician wares “Sidonian,” so certain articles of Phœnician commerce are called in Old Latin sarranic, a word derived directly from Sur. The fact that the Tyrians represented Phœnicia in western waters does not necessarily imply their supremacy at home. It seems more likely that they had, by right of discovery, a kind of monopoly of the trade with Tarshish and the western Mediterranean—a situation paralleled by the partition of the world between Spain and Portugal when the two sea-routes to the Indies were first discovered. The enormous profits of this trade, however, undoubtedly secured Tyre the leading place in Phœnicia, after the loss of the colonies in the Ægean.