In evidence of ancient art and contrivance, when Alexander besieged Tyre, more than three hundred years before our era, he employed "chain cables" for his ships, after the Tyrian divers had cut the rope cables and set his vessels adrift.[1]
The hitherto recognised dates are not considered competent to compute the period of man's existence on this earth. The original estimate being possibly founded upon a different basis of calculation, similar to the comparison alluded to by a sacred writer: "A thousand years in Thy sight are as yesterday when it is passed."
The existence of a strange pair of foreigners, who arrived from some unknown country, to introduce agriculture, arts, manufactures, and systematic morals, among the native tribes of the Andes, does not appear to be a traditional fiction, but a confirmed fact, in the history of the aborigines of Peru.
The grateful recollection of the present race of Indians, for the kindness, gentleness, and humanity of the Incas rulers towards their ancestors, are often compared disadvantageously with the sufferings and privations they think they experienced from subsequent governments, now modified, by peculiar changes.
The writer cannot doubt that Manco Capac and his wife were realities. Long voyages, attributed to a commercial people of very ancient date, may authorize an attempt to show the possibility of the discovery and improvement of the aboriginal people, distributed upon this portion of our great continent, by some race versed in arts and knowledge, descended from the Asiatic family, to whom primitive advances in civilization have been most anciently attributed.
The Phœnicians are described to have made voyages from their colonial settlements on the shores of the Mediterranean, to obtain amber from the Baltic, and tin from the British islands.
These Phœnicians, originally passing by the waters, or along the shores of the Euphrates, from the Persian gulf to the Mediterranean sea, are stated by tradition to have introduced agriculture, manufactures, arts, letters, architecture, and civilization, to the aborigines of Europe and of Africa, in "the antiquity of ancient days."
The colonies of Sidan and Tyre in Asia, of Carthage in Africa, and some on the European shores, in Greece, Italy, and Spain, have been attributed to these remote people. They are described in our venerated records as the merchants, navigators, and wise men of their distant age.
To pass the stormy Bay of Biscay, and encounter the boisterous seas of the Northern ocean, these explorers must have possessed vessels with officers and equipments, experienced pilots, and competent seamen, to authorize suspicion of enterprise, intelligence, and powers quite sufficient to lead them "to compass the earth."
The three years' voyages described in the Scriptures to have been undertaken by Tyrian seamen, and the valuable productions enumerated as portions of their cargoes, illustrate the mercantile character of that age, confirmed by curious modern discoveries in Egypt and Assyria.