[Footnote 1: It is interesting to note that the earliest empires, Assyria and Egypt, were not naval powers, because they arose in rich river valleys abundantly capable of sustaining their inhabitants. They did not need to command the sea.]
On this sea power Crete reared an astonishingly advanced civilization. Until recent times, for instance, the Phœnicians had been credited with the invention of the alphabet. We know now that 1000 years before the Phœnicians began to write the Cretans had evolved a system of written characters—as yet undeciphered—and a decimal system for numbers. A correspondingly high stage of excellence had been reached in engineering, architecture, and the fine arts, and even in decay Crete left to Greece the tradition of mastery in laws and government.
| From Torr, Ancient Ships. |
| EGYPTIAN SHIP |
The power of Crete was already in its decline centuries before the Trojan War, but during a thousand years it had spread its own and Egyptian culture over the shores of the Ægean. The destruction of the island empire in about 1400 B.C. apparently was due to some great disaster that destroyed her fleet and left her open to invasion by a conquering race—probably the Greeks—who ravaged her cities by sword and fire. On account of her commanding position in the Mediterranean, Crete might again have risen to sea power but for the endless civil wars that marked her subsequent history.
The successor to Crete as mistress of the sea was Phœnicia. The Phœnicians, oddly enough, were a Semitic people, a nomadic race with no traditions of the sea whatever. When, however, they migrated to the coast and settled, they found themselves in a narrow strip of coast between a range of mountains and the sea. The city of Tyre itself was erected on an island. Consequently these descendants of herdsmen were compelled to find their livelihood upon the sea—as were the Venetians and the Dutch in later ages—and for several hundred years they maintained their control of the ocean highways.
The Phœnicians were not literary, scientific, or artistic; they were commercial. Everything they did was with an eye to business. They explored the Mediterranean and beyond for the sake of tapping new sources of wealth, they planted colonies for the sake of having trading posts on their routes, and they developed fighting ships for the sake of preserving their trade monopolies. Moreover, Phœnicia lay at the end of the Asiatic caravan routes. Hence Phœnician ships received the wealth of the Nile valley and Mesopotamia and distributed it along the shores of the Mediterranean. Phœnician ships also uncovered the wealth of Spain and the North African coast, and, venturing into the Atlantic, drew metals from the British Isles. According to Herodotus, a Phœnician squadron circumnavigated Africa at the beginning of the seventh century before Christ, completing the voyage in three years. We should know far more now of the extent of the explorations made by these master mariners of antiquity were it not for the fact that they kept their trade routes secret as far as possible in order to preserve their trade monopoly.
In developing and organizing these trade routes the Phœnicians planted colonies on the islands of the Mediterranean,—Sicily, Sardinia, Corsica, and Malta. They held both shores of the Straits of Gibraltar, and on the Atlantic shores of Spain established posts at Cadiz and Tarshish, the latter commonly supposed to have been situated just north of Cadiz at the mouth of the Guadalquivir River. Cadiz was their distributing point for the metals of northern Spain and the British Isles. The most famous colony was Carthage, situated near the present city of Tunis. Carthage was founded during the first half of the ninth century before Christ, and on the decay of the parent state became in turn mistress of the western Mediterranean, holding sway until crushed by Rome in the Punic Wars.
Of the methods of the Phœnicians and their colonists in establishing trade with primitive peoples, we get an interesting picture from Herodotus,[1] who describes how the Carthaginians conducted business with barbarous tribes on the northern coast of Africa.
[Footnote 1: History, translated by Geo. Rawlinson, vol. III, p. 144.]
| SCENE OF ANCIENT SEA POWER |