The value of this kind of coast defences was so apparent, that the ancients felt unable to ascribe them to simple human invention. And thus the Greeks attributed their origin to the demigod Hercules. But there seems some reason to believe that, long before Greece became a maritime nation, light-towers had been built by the Lybians and the Cuthites along the coast-line of Lower Egypt. These towers, we are told,[1] served as landmarks during the day, as beacons during the night. Their purpose was a holy one, and accordingly they were also used as temples, and each was dedicated to a divinity. The mariner, who naturally held them in great veneration, enriched them with his votive offerings. It has been conjectured by some authorities that their walls at first were painted with charts of the Mediterranean coast and of the navigation of the Nile; these charts being afterwards transferred to papyrus. The priests of these singular but valuable institutions taught the sciences of hydrography and pilotage, and the art of steering a vessel’s course by the aid of the constellations. On the summit of each tower a fire was continually burning; the fire being placed in a machine of iron or bronze, composed of three or four branches, each representing a dolphin or some other marine animal, and all bound together by skilful decorative work. The machine was attached to the extremity of a stout pole, and so placed that its radiance was directed seaward.
According to the Baron de Zach, in his “Correspondance Astronomique,” the Lybian appellation for these towers was tar, or tor.[2] As is signifies “fire,” we thus obtain the compound Tor-is, or “fire-tower;” whence the Greeks derived their [τύῤῥις], and the Latins their turris. In like manner, the Latin columna comes, it is said, from Col-On, the “pillar of the sun.”
THE BEACON FIRE.
Some authorities boldly carry this etymological diversion a little further. When the fire-towers were situated upon eminences outside the boundaries of cities, and constructed of a circular form, they were called Tith. The mythological Tithonus, so celebrated for his longevity, seems, they assert, to have been one of these edifices dedicated to the sun; and Thetis, the ancient ocean-goddess, simply a fire-tower near the sea, called Thit-is. Nor have ingenious theorists been wanting to maintain that the massacre of the Cyclops, who, according to the old legend, were stricken by Apollo’s arrows, was nothing but a poetical version of the manner in which the fires of the Cyclopean towers, planted on the eastern coasts of Sicily, were extinguished by the rays of the rising sun.[3]
The impression which the light-tower produced on the popular imagination is, however, more beautifully, as well as more certainly, described by Homer in a well-known passage of the “Iliad” (bk. xix. 375):—
“As to seamen o’er the wave is borne
The watch-fire’s light, which, high among the hills,
Some shepherd kindles in his lonely fold.”
In our English Bible the word beacon occurs but once—namely in the Prophecies of Isaiah (xxx. 17), who lived about two centuries later than Homer; but in the Septuagint version, the same word is rendered as a “flagstaff” or “perch,” and unquestionably refers to a land-signal rather than to a maritime light.