Phœnician Bottle in Form of a Gourd
CHAPTER VII. PHŒNICIAN COMMERCE
At all stages of its history Phœnicia was essentially a manufacturing and commercial rather than a warlike nation. Nevertheless, it took a more or less prominent part in the combats of the great nations for many centuries. There was only one period, namely, during the reign of Hiram, the contemporary of David and Solomon, about 950 B.C., when Phœnicia could aspire to anything like first rank among the nations. It was at most a community of scattered cities, each generally independent of the others, rather than a nation in the narrower sense. Nevertheless, such is the vitality of a nation whose prosperity is based on the pursuits of peace, that Phœnicia continued to hold a respectable place among the powers of the earth, for a longer period than almost any other of the minor nations of antiquity. Thus we find it reviving again and again, after being subjected by the foreign conquerors, until finally, even so late as 332 B.C., it was able to afford most powerful opposition to Alexander, and throughout this period, for at least a thousand years, the navy of the Phœnicians was celebrated as being, for the most of the time, a type of excellence, and the Phœnicians for this reason were coveted as allies, or hired as mercenaries by such great contending powers as the Greeks and the Persians. All in all, notwithstanding the comparatively minor place which is always assigned to the Phœnicians, in comparison with such great conquering powers as Egypt and Babylonia, there are many reasons for feeling that the great manufacturers and traders of antiquity were among the most admirable of the peoples whose history has been preserved.
The accounts of wars and conquests must necessarily always hold a foremost place in the records of the historian, at least in our day, but one should not hesitate to give a due measure of praise to a nation whose ideal was not self-aggrandisement through the destruction of other nations, but the building up of power through the far more useful channels of manufacture and commerce. Where other nations destroyed, the Phœnicians constructed. They took no high rank as inventors pure and simple, but they were acceptors of the inventions of other peoples, and as an educating influence they have no peers among the oriental nations. And this is true simply because the Phœnicians were the great progressive and commercial people of antiquity.[a]
SEA TRADE
It requires no great sagacity to develop the causes by which the Phœnicians became a commercial and seafaring people. They were in a manner constrained to it by their situation; for the commodities of interior Asia becoming accumulated in vast quantities upon their coasts, seemed to demand a further transport. It would, nevertheless, be an error to assume this as the first and only impulse to their navigation, which most likely had the same origin here that it generally had among commercial nations; it sprung from piracy. The seeming advantages which this affords are too near and too striking to be overlooked by uncivilised nations; while the benefits to be derived from a peaceable and regular commerce are too distant to come at first within the scope of their ideas. It was thus that the piratical excursions of the Normans gave the first impulse to the navigation of the western countries of Europe. But among nations who are not, like the African nest of pirates, held back by despotism and other unfavourable circumstances, good gradually grows out from this original evil. A trifling advance, too, in civilisation soon teaches mankind how greatly the benefits of trade surpass those of plunder; and as the latter diminishes, the former increases.