“The Tur-vasu, or people whose creating god (vasu) was the pole (tur), when united with the traders of the south, became the mercantile mariners of the Indian Ocean, who had imposed their rule and traditions both on the lands of Northern India and on those of the twin rivers, the Euphrates and Tigris.... From India, the only land on the Indian Ocean where they could build sea-going ships, they extended their trade, forms of government and national myths, first to the Euphratean kingdoms and afterwards to Egypt and Syria, where they were known to the Greeks as the Phœnicians” (p. 356).
“These people had seven parent stars whose names are preserved. Professor Sayce has identified the first of these, Sugi, with ‘the star of the Wain’ and states that it means the ‘creating-spirit-reed’ or the northern khu=bird, the ‘reed of the bird, the mother of life.’ Sugi is therefore an additional name for the Bear to that of Bel, distributor of waters.... In both names the metaphor is the same, for it is from the reeds at the source of the rivers, their point of distribution, that the rivers are born.... Both names denoted the star that led the year and it was the Great Bear, as Sugi, that led the earliest year, opening with the week of creation” ... (p. 357). ... “The sons of the Tur or pole were the Indian Tur-vashu, the Zend Turanians, the mariners of Asia Minor called by the Egyptians Tour-sha (Maspero), the sea traders of the Mediterranean called the Tur-sene of Lydia, the Tur-sena or Tyrrhenians of Lemnos and Etruria, who spoke a language closely allied to that of the Akkadians. That their god was worshiped in Cyprus and Asia Minor is proved by the terra-cotta whorl found in one of the settlements on the site of Troy, dedicated in Cypriote characters to Patori-Turi, the father Tur, who gave his name to the Phrygian city of Turiaion. The great antiquity of the settlement is proved by the fact that though some bronze knives and instruments were found in it, by far the greater number of implements were of stone and the pottery, though similar to that of Mycenæ, is of a more archaic type” (Schuchhardt's Schliemann's Excavations, App. I, 331-332 and 334).
“They were also the first spinners, weavers, makers of pottery and built canoes and worked in mines.... They grew wheat, barley, peas, flax and fruit trees.... These men covered the whole of Europe and Southern Asia ... and the Indian Dekhan with cromlechs and stone circles, which were certainly in some cases roofed over, dolmens, meaning stone tables, shrines, altars, tumuli and memorial stones or pillars and all of these, whether found in Western Europe or Southern Asia, are completely identical in character. These people had, in their migrations, established an active and widespread foreign trade...” (p. 178).
“These maritime Tursena were intermingled with the matriarchal Amazonian tribes who preceded them, and who seemed to have founded the ancient ports of Asia Minor and Palestine, especially the Ionian cities of Smyrna and Ephesus and that of Askelon. It was in the land of Phrygia, the mountain countries of the Caucasus range and the snowy heights whence the Euphrates rose, that the earliest shepherds met the matriarchal races, the immigrants from the southeast, the Hindu village communities, who are called by the Greeks Amazons, and are described as the earliest ruling races of Asia Minor and Greece (p. 175).”
“... The Great Naga is the Akkadian god Ner-gal, and the Phœnician god Sarrahu, or the Great Sar. His name among the Shuites, or the worshippers of Susi-nag on the west of the Euphrates, is Emu, a name which is letter for letter the same as that of the national god of the Ammonites, Amun” (Sayce: Hibbert Lectures, 1887, iii, p. 196, note 1. “Amun means the builder, or architect, and is, like that of the Egyptian god, formed of aman, to sustain” (Gesenius, Thesaurus, p. 115). “He was the god of the house pole, who became in Egyptian Thebes, Amen-Ra, the hidden, and it was the people who made the house-pole the symbol of their ancestors, ... who brought to Egypt as well as to Assyria and India, the custom of having cities for the dead apart from those for the living.... It was from the rains of the summer-solstice ... generated from the Naga snake that the Phœnician sons of Kush were born, whose kings, like those of Egypt, wore the Uræus snake as a sign of royal authority. Their original settlement, according to a tradition recorded by Theophrastus, was at Tulos or Turos, in the Persian Gulf, the modern Bahrein. This was the holy island of Diloun, called Dilmun by the Akkadians.... It was the settlement of Hindu navigators in the holy island of Dilmun in the Persian gulf, and at Eridu, which first brought them in contact with the Arabian star-gazers and merchants, and it was the union, in the ancient city of Ur, of these races with the Hebrew tribe of Gad (who built, not only the cities of Bashan, but also those of Assyria and were the great builders of the ancient world), which first formed the Semite race. It was the meridian pole, the heavenly, revolving pole, the Tur of the Akkadians, which the Dravidian traders of India brought with them to Eridu” (p. 292). “It was these Tursena who, by developing the ancient organization of the village and province in India, divided all the countries they occupied into confederacies of cities, such as we find among the Euphratean nations, the Egyptians, Canaanites and the people of Asia Minor, Greece and Italy. It was they who were the fathers of Greek and Latin civilization.” (p. 296). “It was these people who brought from India their village institutions, their holy groves and seasonal dances.... Among them the Finnic mining races descended.... It was in Phrygia that they were mixed with the Daktuloi, or race of handicraftsmen and artificers, the sons of Dak, the showing or teaching god, the god Daksha, the father of the Kush race.... They were the carpenters and builders of the Stone age.”
Prof. Sayce's “Ancient Empires of the East” furnishes further interesting details concerning the Phœnicians. According to this eminent authority, at an early date, in order to relieve the pressure of population, they sent out organized colonies to the recently discovered lands of the West. Accordingly commercial marts were established at Thera and Melos,.... Colonies were established at Attica, on the coast of Africa, in Sicily, Sardinia and Corsica, and beyond the columns of Herakles, in Gadeira. The three cities of Rhodes were planned by Phœnician architects.... The Assyrian character of early Greek art is due to its Phœnician inspiration.... It was about “B.C. 600 that these people penetrated to the northwest coast of India and probably to the island of Britain as well.... They were the intermediaries of ancient civilization ... and the chief elements of Greek art and civilization came from Assyria through the hands of Phœnicians.... Phœnician art was essentially catholic ... it assimilated the art of Babylonia, Egypt and Assyria superadding something of its own.... Their chief deity was Yeud or Ekhad=the Only One ... they worshipped the Kabeiri ... originally seven stars ... who were the makers of the world, the founders of civilization, the inventors of ships.... The cities of Phœnicia were the first trading communities the world has seen.... Their colonies were originally mere marts and their voyages of discovery were taken in the interests of trade. The tin of Britain, the silver of Spain, the birds of the Canaries, the frankincense of Arabia, the pearls and ivory of India, all flowed into their harbours.... Many of their colonies were wholly independent, and governed by their own kings and benefiting Phœnicia only in the way of trade.... In Phœnicia ... the king seems to have been but the first among a body of ruling ... princes and ... chiefs. In time the monarchy disappeared altogether, its place being supplied by suffetes or ‘judges,’ whose term of office lasted sometimes for a year, sometimes for more, sometimes even for life.... At Carthage there were two suffetes, who were merely presidents of the senate of thirty ... whose power was subsequently checked by a board of one hundred and four.... By providing that no member of the board should hold office for two years running, Hannibal changed the government into a democracy.”
To those of my fellow-workers who have made a special study of the most ancient forms of cursive and ikonomatic writings of the Old World, I should like to submit some facts concerning the ancient Mexican method, which may carry a fresh suggestion and be an aid to future research.
When the first Spanish missionaries who reached Mexico found themselves confronted by the barrier of language and wished to teach the native converts the Lord's Prayer in Latin, they adopted the method of picture writing employed by the aborigines. By painting a banner=pantli, a stone=tetl, a cactus=nochtli and another stone=tetl, they conveyed the words Pa-te-noch-te, which, approximately, represented paternoster. The consequence was that the Indians were able to memorize prayers in a language unknown to them, by referring to pictures of objects and naming these in their own tongue. A number of curious documents exist, which exhibit a great difference and variety in execution and are more or less cursive, according to the artistic sense and ability of the missionary or converted Indian who drew them. The fact that Spaniards, possessing our mode of writing, should have found picture-writing the most effective means of teaching primitive people speaking an alien tongue has always appeared to me as most instructive and suggestive.
As the natives suggested this method to their instructors, it is obvious that it was their habitual mode of memorizing a foreign language. The possibility that words recorded in native pictography may belong to an alien tongue, opens out a new field for future research. A curious result is obtained when Tenoch-Titlan, one of the ancient names of the capital of Mexico is studied from this point of view. In the well-known rebus now employed as the arms of Mexico, the syllables Te and Noch only are actually expressed in picture-writing by the stone=tetl, from which a cactus=nochtli is growing. This group is, however, surmounted by an eagle holding a serpent in its talons and the meaning of this animal group appears symbolical merely. It may be a curious coincidence that the eagle holding a serpent in its talons was employed by Mediterranean people as an emblem of victory and occurs on ancient Greek coins with this significance, and that the recorded name, Tenochtitlan or “the land of Tenoch,” curiously resembles Tenos, the name of a Greek heptarchy, founded by seven tribes just as the adjacent town of Chalco, in Mexico, resembles Chalcis, the town in Eubœa, where Aristoteles died.
On p. [418] and in my discussion of Egyptian hieratic script, I have pointed out that some signs employed express the sounds of words in another tongue, that the syllables am and an, for instance, seem indissolubly and universally linked to pole-star worship and symbolism. It does not seem unreasonable to endeavor to explain this by imagining that individuals, wishing, in each case, to teach the word Sama=the revolving heaven i. e. the North, to people speaking different languages, should make a picture of a tree or boat named am in one tongue, and in another country, draw a spider, named am, by its inhabitants. In the first country the tree, or boat, and in the second, the spider, would, in time, become the symbols of the north, and though different, signify the same thing. In time, each sign might be employed to express the syllable am in general and in this way isolated systems of ikonomatic writing would evolve and, in course of time, native artists would more or less skilfully produce conventionalized and distinctly characteristic forms and methods.