I. LAND AND PEOPLE
Phœnicia proper, even in its most flourishing state, was one of the smallest countries of antiquity. It comprised that part of the Syrian coast extending from Akko to Aradus, [Arvad] a narrow strip of land about two hundred miles in length, from north to south; and probably nowhere more than thirty-five miles in width. This short line of coast, rich in bays and harbours, was covered with lofty mountains, many of which ran out into the sea and formed promontories, and whose heights, covered with forests, supplied the most valuable material in the construction of the fleets and habitations of the Phœnicians. The larger range of these mountains bore the name of Libanus [Lebanon], and the other parallel range, the Antilibanus, lay eastward towards Syria. The sea, which broke with great fury upon this rocky shore, had probably separated some of these promontories from the mainland, and which, forming little islands at a small distance from the shore, are not less worthy of note than the mainland itself, being everywhere covered with extensive colonies and flourishing cities. Thus Aradus, the most northern frontier city of Phœnicia, was built on one of these islands; and opposite to it on the mainland was Antaradus, which derived its name from it. About eighteen miles to the south of this stood, and still stands, Tripolis; and at a like distance Byblus, with the temple of Adonis; and again, farther south, Berytus. Keeping along the coast, we come to Sidon at nearly the same distance; and finally, fourteen or fifteen miles farther, towards the southern boundary of the country, was erected, upon another island, the stately Tyre, the queen of Phœnician cities. The space between these places was covered with a number of towns of less import, but equally the abode of industry, and widely celebrated for their arts and manufactures. Among these were Sarepta [Zarephath], Botrys, Orthosia, and others; forming, as it were, one unbroken city, extending along the whole line of coast and over the islands; and which, with the harbours and seaports, and the numerous fleets lying within them, must have afforded altogether a spectacle scarcely to be equalled in the world, and must have excited in the stranger who visited them, the highest idea of the opulence, the power, and the enterprising spirit of the inhabitants.
Although these cities existed altogether in the flourishing period of Phœnicia, history has given us some account of the manner and time of their successive foundations. They were colonies of one another; and, like all other colonies of the ancient world, were founded either for purposes of trade, or by bodies of citizens who left their native abode in consequence of civil dissensions. The oldest of them, “the first-born of Canaan,” according to the Mosaic record, was Sidon, the foundress of the trade and navigation of the Phœnicians. Sidon was the parent of Tyre. In the first place, merely as a staple for her own wares; but the daughter soon waxed greater than the mother, and successfully rivalled her. In the blooming period of Phœnicia, Sidon was only the second Phœnician city in point of extent, though still rich and mighty, and secured in a great measure by her excellent harbours from ruin and decline, so long as the maritime commerce of the Phœnicians should endure. Arvad was founded by another colony from Sidon, and owed its origin to a civil broil in this city, which drove the discontented party to seek a new abode.
Palætyrus, founded by Sidon, and situated on the mainland, continued a powerful, rich, and flourishing commercial city till the time of Nebuchadrezzar, the Babylonian-Chaldean conqueror; against whom it had to defend itself during a siege or blockade of thirteen years; but that he in reality ever took or destroyed it, as is commonly asserted, there is no historical proof. During this blockade, the greater part of the inhabitants took refuge upon a neighbouring island, already furnished with numerous establishments and buildings, and thus founded the island city of Tyre, which, favoured by its strong position, soon equalled the parent city, and not only outlived the Babylonian and Persian empires, but continued to increase as the ancient Tyre declined. It was finally captured by Alexander, after an obstinate resistance; but he robbed it less of its ancient opulence and splendour by his arms, than by the foundation of Alexandria, which henceforth became the great seat of the commerce of the world, though Tyre did not altogether decline. In the midst of this city stood the temple of the principal deity of the Tyrians, the protecting god of the city, as its name, Melkarth, signifies. This deity was called by the Greeks the Tyrian Hercules, though entirely different from their god bearing the same name; hence the myths of the two are often confounded. The worship of the Tyrian deity was introduced into the most distant parts of the world to which that people penetrated and founded settlements; he was honoured as the national god by the independent colonies of Tyre, who were wont to acknowledge his supremacy by solemn embassies. The city was protected by high walls of cut stone; and had two harbours, one on the north towards Sidon, the other on the south towards Egypt. The mouth of the latter could be closed by immense chains.
Let us now inquire what was the internal government of these cities? What their relation with each other? Whether they formed one general confederation? or whether they remained entirely separate states, without any common tie? These questions demand our serious attention.
The remarks above made upon the nature of the country readily explain why the Phœnicians could never become a conquering nation, and the founders of a great monarchy, such as that of the Chaldeans, the Persians, and others. They must have been well satisfied, if they could protect their little territory from the invasions of such powerful Asiatic conquerors; and being, from the earliest times downwards a people dwelling in cities, they could have had no idea of taking the long marauding expeditions common to nomad nations.
In order to obtain a correct idea of the political state of Phœnicia, it is necessary to have a general notion of the rise and progress of civil government among the Syrian tribes. As far as the light of history carries us back, we everywhere find a number of single cities, with the territory around them, under a monarchial form of government; the sovereign power being placed in the hands of kings or princes. Examples certainly are to be met with where some of these cities and their monarchs obtained a decided preponderance (Damascus is at once an instance) and assumed to themselves a degree of authority. This, however, was a kind of forced alliance, which extended no farther than the exaction of tribute and subsidies in times of war, without depriving the subjected cities of their government and rulers. Syria, while independent and left to itself, never became organised into one state or one monarchy.
Here, then, we trace the groundwork of the Phœnician government. This country, like Syria, never became one state; but, from the earliest period down to the Persian monarchy, was always divided into a number of separate cities, each with its little territory around it. Some writers have stated positively the precise extent of the dominions of each city. Thus Antaradus, and the territory about it, formed part of the domain of Aradus, to which it lay opposite; thus Sarepta came within the dominion of Sidon, etc.
Allied cities, however, were certainly frequent in Phœnicia; indeed it seems very probable, that at certain times all the cities of Phœnicia formed one confederation, at the head of which stood originally Sidon, and afterwards Tyre. Even as early as the Mosaic period, alliances among these cities were common; the necessity of their common defence from foreign attack, which separately they were too weak to withstand, must naturally have led to this system. Neither were these confederations confined to Phœnicia alone; they prevailed also in the countries colonised by the Phœnicians; and Carthage in Africa, as well as Gades [or Gadeira] in Spain, stood at the head of the settlements in these districts without, however, obtaining a complete authority over them. A common religion, the worship of the Tyrian Hercules, the national and colonial deity, formed likewise a bond of union for all these cities, both of the mother country and the colonies, and strengthened and preserved the connection between them.
It is the nature, however, of all such confederations, to be liable to frequent changes; they vary indeed according to the political interests, and even the power and views of the separate states. Many changes of this kind must have arisen in this quarter, by the foundation and growing prosperity of the inland colonies; and many modifications must have taken place as these acquired sufficient strength to assume a kind of independence of the parent states. In the present case, in which we shall confine our observations to the flourishing period of Tyre,--that is, the period from Solomon to Cyrus, or at least Nebuchadrezzar,--it will be sufficient to show that Tyre, in the sense just stated, was always the dominant city of Phœnicia.
This may be inferred, in the first place, from the description given of Tyre by the prophet Ezekiel. Sidon and Arvad [Aradus] were at this time her allies, and supplied their contingents of soldiers and sailors. This being proved of the largest and most distant city of Phœnicia, no doubt can be well entertained respecting the smaller and nearer.
Besides, the subjects and allies of Tyre, and their revolts against the capital, are more than once expressly spoken of in history. The most striking proof of this is preserved in Josephus, from the works of Menander. For when King Shalmaneser undertook his expedition into western Asia and against Phœnicia, the allied cities, Sidon, Palætyrus, Akko, and many others, revolted against the Tyrians, and submitted to the king of Assyria. They went so far indeed as to fit out a fleet against them, which was defeated by the Tyrians, who thus secured themselves from further danger.
By comparing these fragments of Phœnician history and its government with the accounts that are left us respecting the state of Carthage, we obtain something more than bare historical conjecture, as we find a striking similarity between the government of the mother country and the colonies. What Tyre was towards Sidon, Arvad, Tripolis, etc., Carthage was towards Utica, Leptis, Adrumetum, and other cities. It not only seems quite natural, that in cities inhabited by one people, and so frequently called upon to struggle against their common and powerful enemies, alliances should be formed, and by alliances a kind of authority be conceded to the mightiest; but it is also consonant with the whole tenor of ancient history, that colonies should adopt the government of the mother state.
It may be concluded, then, from these facts, that the Phœnician cities formed together one confederation, at the head of which, in the period of their greatest splendour and perfect independence, stood Tyre. At the time of their subjection to Assyria and Persia, the bond that connected them necessarily became loosened, the other cities paid their tribute and furnished their contingents to Persia instead of to Tyre; the latter, however, still preserved its rank, and was always considered the chief city of the land.
The next question, namely, What was the internal government of the Phœnician cities? is equally difficult and obscure.
However desirable it may be to trace out accurately the gradual rise and progress of civic government in these, the earliest commercial cities, want of information limits us to a few general observations.
First, then, there can be no doubt but that each Phœnician city had its own proper government, and that in this respect they were perfectly independent of each other. They always appear so, as the following pages will evince, upon every occasion, and in every period of their history; being never spoken of but as separate states.
Secondly, It seems equally certain, that the chief authority was placed in the hands of kings, and certainly of hereditary kings, although political parties many times fomented revolutions by which new families were raised to the throne. This is especially shown by the history of Tyre; a catalogue of whose kings is extant in Josephus, from the time of Hiram, the contemporary of David, till the siege of the city by Nebuchadrezzar. Even under the dominion of the Persians, the royal dignity was preserved, though the monarchs were now only tributary princes, obliged to furnish money and ships to the Persians, and to attend them, when required, in their military expeditions. The kings of Tyre appear in this state in the expedition of the Persians against Athens, and even as late as the overthrow of Persia and the capture of Tyre by Alexander. As Tyre had its proper kings, so also had the other Phœnician cities, Sidon, Aradus, and Byblus. These are mentioned in various periods, and even as late as the Macedonian conquest.
Thirdly, Notwithstanding the existence of the royal dignity, the government was certainly not despotic; nay, the monarchial power was so strictly limited as to render it almost republican. It was indeed well-nigh impossible that despotism could have endured for so many centuries in commercial states, which can thrive only in the atmosphere of political liberty. A large maritime commerce requires a spirit of enterprise and resolute activity altogether incompatible with despotic government. Even the repeated political changes which took place in all these cities, and more particularly in Tyre, as well as the continual departure of colonies and their settlement in distant parts of the world, are circumstances which not only could not have been brought forth by despotism, but are the legitimate offspring of free nations. Many particulars which warrant this conclusion may still be found in Phœnician history, notwithstanding the general scantiness of its information.
Next to the kings stood the Phœnician magistrates. These conjointly sent ambassadors. Indeed, at certain periods, a general congress of the great Phœnician cities was wont to be held, when the kings in council with the sanhedrim deliberated upon the common affairs of the confederacy. Tripolis was the place destined for the common assembly of the three principal cities.
Besides this, there is no question but the authority of the monarchs was very essentially limited by religion. The priests in these states formed a numerous and powerful class, and seem to have stood next in rank to the kings. Sicharbas, or Sichæus, the chief priest of the principal temple, was the husband of Dido [Elissa], and brother-in-law to King Pygmalion. His persecution and death by the latter, gave rise to those serious commotions which ended in the emigration of that numerous colony which founded the city of Carthage. The political influence of the Phœnician priests of Baal among the Jews, which caused a revolution in the state, is sufficiently well known. Among a people like the Phœnicians, where everything so much depended on sanctuaries and religion, the priesthood could scarcely fail to have a large share in the government, though we are not in a situation to determine precisely its extent.
The prophet Ezekiel in his prophecy against the king of Tyre, gives us a somewhat deep insight into the power of the prince of that city. He is pictured as a powerful prince, living in great splendour; but still as the ruler of a commercial city, which by its trade filled his treasury; as one who encourages and protects commerce by his wisdom and policy; but who, in the end, degenerating to craft and injustice, is threatened with the punishment of his misdeeds. “With thy wisdom and with thy understanding,” Ezekiel cries, “hast thou gotten thee riches; with gold and silver hast thou filled thy treasury by means of the greatness of thy commerce. Full of wisdom sealedst thou great sums; thou dwellst in a garden of God, ornamented from thine infancy with precious stones, clothed with fine garments. But traffic has enriched thee with ill-gotten wealth and thou hast sinned.” From this remarkable passage it may at least be gathered, that the revenue of the Tyrian kings, and without doubt that of the princes of the other cities also, was derived from commerce; but whether from the customs, or, which seems more probable, from a monopoly of some of the branches of trade, or from both, cannot be decided.[b]
ORIGIN OF THE PHŒNICIANS
As is seen on examination of the different names which were in course of time applied to the Phœnicians, they are not as a race to be separated from the rest of the Canaanites, especially from the various elements of the pre-Israelitish population of Palestine. Their history is only that of a section of the Canaanite race, the history of that portion which, as far back as the times to which the earliest historical information concerning this territory refers, had fixed its abode, not in the interior of Palestine but on the edge of the sea, along the coasts of the strip of country which bordered it on the north as far as those level stretches of the coast lands of Syria which extended to the northwestern slopes of Lebanon. Although in the matter of descent no difference can be discerned between them and the other Canaanites, historical science must, nevertheless, regard them as a different people. It is in this sense that they are spoken of as the Phœnician race, the Phœnician people. They, and the inhabitants of the colonies which they founded, alone have a claim to the name of Phœnicians.
We can only guess at the manner in which the settlement of the Phœnician country by the Canaanites was effected, but the occurrences which afterwards took place in the interior of Palestine point to the assumption that the Canaanites did not spread inwards from the coast. It is not easily conceivable that at first they possessed merely those long narrow stretches of land and only subsequently extended their settlements from thence over those portions of the country west of Jordan of which they were masters before the Israelites. From ancient times there prevailed, as far as can be discovered, an endeavour on the part of the population of the interior, to approach the flat country on the coast, where the fruitful fields were in any case much more attractive than the mountains and hilly districts which, even in the time of the Israelites, were still partly covered with forest.
It may be concluded, therefore, that the Canaanite population of Phœnicia had at some time immigrated thither, either from the southern strips of the Syrian coast or from the northern portions of the interior of Palestine. But if this be so, the immigration must still be looked upon as an event which was completed at a distance of time historically so remote, that a distinct and faithful recollection of it can hardly have been preserved by the Phœnicians themselves. Even a possibility that a dim notion of these occurrences may have lingered, at least in isolated legends, is scarcely to be calculated on. Rather should we expect all real knowledge of the kind to be early extinguished, and that the Phœnicians in their new home, as a result of the historical development through which they passed, should have early come to regard themselves as the primitive inhabitants of the country. As a fact there do exist notices respecting what purport to be Phœnician traditions, the age and to some extent the authenticity of which cannot indeed be determined, but which seem to indicate that at least in Hellenic and still later times, the Phœnicians cherished this opinion. Every people considers itself autochthonous, directly it has ceased to remember its origin.
On the other hand, there are accounts which tell of an immigration of the Phœnicians, and even of an immigration from regions lying farther south. The first who speaks of this is Herodotus. In the description of the collection of Xerxes’ army which he sketches in the seventh book of his work, he says: “As regards the Phœnicians, they formerly dwelt, as they themselves say, on the Erythræan Sea. From thence they passed transversely across Syria and now dwell there on the seashore.”
Most of the remaining notices of the coming of the Phœnicians from the Erythræan Sea, which are found in the writings of the ancients, are to be referred to this assertion of Herodotus. The few other isolated references may be passed over in silence, with the exception of the one concerning the origin of the Phœnicians furnished by Justin in his extracts from the historical works of Pompeius Trogus. What he tells us is as follows: “The people of the Tyrians are descended from Phœnicians who, disquieted by an earthquake, left their first home on the inland sea of Syria (ad Syrium stagnum), and soon after settling on the nearest seacoast, there built a town, which they called Sidon on account of the abundance of fish, for the fish is called ‘sidon’ by the Phœnicians.” The statement that “sidon” means “fish” is incorrect, but it has at least the sense of “fishing.”
The inland sea, the Syrium stagnum which is here mentioned, is said to be not far from the Syrian coast. This has been thought to refer to the Lake of Gennesareth, the Sea of Galilee, with its abundance of fish. But as stagnum means a body of water with no outlet, this interpretation is improbable. Christian Carl Josias Bunsen seems rather to have found the real one, when he expressed the opinion that the Dead Sea is meant, and that the earthquake which is said to have induced the Phœnicians to quit the shores of that sea was the same to which the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah is ascribed in the Bible. The tale of the destruction of these towns apparently lies at the root of the idea that in this region, immeasurable ages ago, there existed a higher civilisation than was known in historical times, and which belonged to races other than those which dwelt there in the historical period. The higher the idea which men formed of this ruined civilisation, the less could they impute its disappearance exclusively to chance, and the blind forces of the rude powers of nature. When legend glances back to the prehistoric past, she always regards the overthrow of the noble and beautiful as the direct result of a crime.
Compared with one another, the two accounts allow us to conclude the existence of a common tradition, in which the division of the peoples into different tribes is explained generally, and its cause is conceived to have been a great natural disturbance, a transformation of the earth’s surface which is said to have occurred in the region round about the Dead Sea. In the reports which underlie the statements of Justin, or rather the sources of Pompeius Trogus, the history of the rise of the Phœnicians began with this catastrophe and therefore probably the general history of the various offshoots of the Canaanite section of humanity. On the other hand, in the Bible narrative, the same tradition is applied to connect it with the rise of two races which afterwards dwelt in the vicinity of that catastrophe. The peculiar nature of the catastrophe and the circumstance that just such great convulsions of the earth give occasion to new adjustments of the relations of peoples, lead to the conclusion that the joint tradition, which may be inferred from the two presentations, again refers back to a conception which cannot have arisen in the north of Palestine or in its coast districts, but only in the immediate neighbourhood of the Dead Sea, and in face of tokens which witness in eloquent language to the effects of the mighty forces of nature. In other words, a legend of local origin which ascribed the creation of the Dead Sea to a powerful convulsion of the earth, formed the germ of a legendary cycle with much common groundwork, in which the chief importance was assigned to the region of the Dead Sea and an earthquake which is said to have done its work there. This cycle consisted of a series of legends whose subject was the destruction of a lost civilisation which had attained a high pitch of excellence, and expression was thereby given to the conviction that the history of nations is not indeed to be traced back to its first starting-point, the origin of man, but that nevertheless the human race must have had a common origin.
If we ask with which race this legendary cycle developed, it is evident that we have here to do with a tradition of Canaanite origin which can have arisen only amongst those Canaanites who had their seat in the inland district, which lies in the neighbourhood of the Dead Sea. When it arose, cannot of course be determined. The Biblical account comes from the so-called Yahvistic narrator, who wrote as is assumed about the middle of the ninth century B.C. No doubt, however, the tradition on which this narrator draws is of much more ancient origin.
At best then we conclude that the information of Herodotus and Justin was derived from a Canaanite legend, in which a region by the Dead Sea was regarded as the starting-point of a division of the nations. And the starting-point was placed there, not because it was historically certain that such a movement of nations had begun in that place, but, on the contrary, because the starting-point was really unknown. But that region was said to have been the scene of a violent transformation of the earth’s surface, which had swallowed up the flourishing settlements of antiquity, and in their place created a dreary waste. It was only for this reason that the legend for the division of the nations was there localised.
The early study of navigation in Phœnicia, the development of the Phœnician race into a seafaring commercial people, the international character of their proceedings--in short all those peculiarities attending the appearance of this people in history, which have always required explanation--have been readily ascribed to their former sojourn on the shore of the Erythræan Sea. For the idea is, that it was not by any means in a state of savagery, but as skilled seamen, as experienced traders, conversant with all the achievements of the civilisation of southern latitudes and prepared for every contingency, that the Phœnicians for some cause not further explained, changed their home and sought out the Mediterranean coast of Syria. Although it has never been asserted that this event could belong to historical times, with it the explanation of historical problems, which so far as it is admissible, at all times is to be drawn entirely and without arbitrary suppositions from the condition and situation of the Phœnician settlements on the Syrian shore, is relegated into the region of the entirely unknown. As a matter of fact, those particular regions which have been specially represented as the primitive home of the Phœnicians, namely, the Babylonian coasts of the Persian Gulf and those which lie to the west of them, are so little qualified to favour the rise of navigation, owing to the want of suitable woods, that, as Aristobulus informs us, when Alexander the Great conceived the design of bringing the coast district of eastern Arabia under his dominion, both seamen and portable ready-made ships had to be brought from Phœnicia to Babylon, and this was actually done with the express intention of making of Babylonia, what it had never hitherto been, namely, “a second Phœnicia.”
Thus neither those statements which make the Phœnicians the primitive inhabitants of their country, nor those which represent them as immigrants, have any convincing force. It is in itself probable that they were originally native not to Phœnicia but to some place farther south, and in the interior of Palestine; but not because we have information to that effect, but solely on account of the outlying position of their settlements, representing the most northerly extent of territory of the Canaanites. Amongst the peoples of antiquity the Phœnician is not indeed the only one which must not be regarded as autochthonous, although all the accounts of their immigration which we possess are unworthy of credit. As a rule no conjectures can be brought forward, as to the road by which this or that people reached its place of abode. That this is possible in the case of the Phœnicians is one of the exceptions. They can only have reached their homes from the south, and that which urged them forward was, as has already been emphasised above, that same movement of peoples, which, starting from the northern territories of Arabia, has always produced an effect in the south of Palestine.[c]
II. EARLY HISTORY AND INFLUENCES
BEGINNINGS OF THE HISTORY AND CIVILISATION OF PHŒNICIA
According to the opinion of eminent geologists Phœnicia was an inhabited country at some wholly prehistoric period, long before the first appearance of the Phœnicians. Nevertheless neither skulls nor other portions of the skeletons of the primitive, prehistoric inhabitants have been found there up to the present time. But on the floor of particular caves, of which there are many on the western slopes of Lebanon, are certain strata composed of the remains of burnt coal and ashes, potsherds, splinters of the bones of animals, and flint stones of various shapes. The whole, as it were, cemented together by calcareous sinter, into a kind of brecciated mass as hard as stone. The bones of animals have been declared to be those of a species no longer extant, but they exhibit no trace of having been modelled. On the other hand the flints, which exist in great quantities, are regarded as products which are certainly the work of human hands. At least, experts who have gone deep into this department of inquiry, have expressed the conviction that shapes such as these exhibit could not have come into existence in any other way, by means of any fall of rock or chance splitting of masses of flint. Unfortunately, however, a class of shapes is in question concerning whose origin doubt and hesitation are permissible. There is no object amongst them which bears on the face of it either the unmistakable impress of a tool or a sure sign of polishing or careful fashioning. It also seems as though the deposits on the floors of those grottos which have been the principal subjects of investigation had in no instance remained undisturbed. Further confirmation must consequently be looked for before the existence of a population of Phœnicia which was prehistoric in the geological sense, can be regarded as an established fact, and even then the generation which exclusively employed tools of such a rough form as these flint fragments must in any case have been, would be divided by an immeasurable gulf from the generations which were subsequently established in the same country.
It is in no way probable that when the Phœnicians chose the lowlands on the west side of the Lebanon chain as their place of abode they took possession of a tract of country which had as yet practically no population. But we have not the slightest grounds for guessing the stage of civilisation of the predecessors whom they encountered there, nor to what race these belonged. Certain scholars have indeed sought to answer the question, why it was in Phœnicia that in early times a much higher development of civilisation appeared than in most of the other countries inhabited by members of the Semitic family of peoples, by the hypothesis that the branch of Semites which immigrated there found, as did those who settled in Babylonia, a population entirely different in endowments and descent, and who had long been in possession of a many sided civilisation; with these they may have intermingled, and from the complete amalgamation first proceeded that section of humanity, which bears in history the name of Phœnicians. This hypothesis has no other foundation than the idea that otherwise it would be necessary to attribute to a Semitic people qualities which are denied to the Semitic family generally.
As already shown, the exact point of time at which the race of Phœnicians established its claims to a home in Phœnicia, cannot be computed. It is still more impossible to fix its date than it is to determine the first commencement of historical development in Egypt and Babylonia, because in Phœnicia there is a total lack of monuments which might afford some kind of glimpse at such far remote distances of the past as are revealed by the earliest monuments of Egyptian and Babylonian origin. It may, however, be regarded as established that a consistent development, preparing the way for results which are known to history, began much later in Phœnicia than in the Nile Valley and the territory at the mouth of the Euphrates and the Tigris. Like the Babylonians and Egyptians, the Phœnicians were subsequently unable to refrain from drawing up a chronological scheme of their own history, embracing an inconceivably long period. At least Julius Africanus, a Christian chronographer who wrote in the first quarter of the third century A.D., mentions incidentally that there were versions of Phœnician history in which the latter was made to go back no less than 30,000 years. But this is quite a modest total when we remember that Babylonians are said to have asserted that their reckoning extended back 480,000 years. In what manner the enormous number of 30,000 years was attained may be guessed. A brief span of time would be filled by historical occurrences and lists of rulers.
As to primitive history, properly so called, or if it is preferred, the sojourn of the Phœnician people in its first and original home, it is probably not touched on in any way. In all probability the lion’s share was accorded to the gods, and to a plan of arrangement designed to bring the doctrine of the rule of the gods on earth, and especially in Phœnicia, into the framework of a regular chronological system. Such a scheme was required, because the lists of rulers were not limited to the enumeration of historical personages, but began with mythical figures and with gods. Therefore, on the whole, there is nothing behind these high figures, if they have been accurately reported, beyond a chronology of the Phœnician cosmogony and stories of the gods.
[Sidenote: [ca. 2750 B.C.]]
Of much more ancient origin and of much greater positive value is another date which is given by Herodotus. He asserts that during his stay at Tyre, which may be placed in the year 450 B.C., certain priests of the sanctuary there which was consecrated to the god Hercules (i.e. Melkarth) responded to his question as to how long the temple had been standing, by saying that that temple had been erected when the town was founded, and that that event had happened 2300 years before. According to this the founding of Tyre would fall somewhere in the year 2750 B.C. B. G. Niebuhr has declared himself very sceptical of the trustworthiness of the informants to whom Herodotus owed this intelligence. But even if their estimate is not to be taken as exact, and was not derived direct from records of the founding of the temple, and if it is also uncertain whether Herodotus was not merely informed of the period at which, in Phœnicia, the founding of the oldest city in that country began, still in itself few objections can be found to the correctness of this estimate as on the whole an approximately accurate date. It stands to reason that on practical grounds it was to the interest of the priesthood of that temple to bring exaggerated notions of its age into circulation. But in doing this, since they expressly invoke the notorious age of the town, they had every inducement to keep within the bounds of what was generally regarded as possible. At best, therefore, their estimate will be the earliest date with which the contemporary inhabitants of Phœnicia believed that they might associate their historical recollections generally. It was not merely a date such as is derived from simple love of romancing; otherwise they would have gone further back. In fact about twenty-five hundred years before Christ the Canaanites had actually taken up their abode in Phœnicia.
As everything points to the presumption that we have no historical information which stands in the way of free invention as to the age of the towns, this fact should serve to confirm the theory that the origin of the towns of Phœnicia did not take place under the influence of historical events of a violent character, and that the character of the conformation of the soil of the whole territory which favoured the isolation of the different sections, had its effect at a very early stage of their development. This was all the more to be expected because the rest of the Canaanites exhibited only slight tendencies towards national unity, a want which may perhaps be explained by the probability that their original home was also the border territory of the cultivated land of Syria, and that presumably the force of circumstances under which the transition to the life in fixed abodes was completed had not been enough to banish all remains of the nomad’s disposition. Even at the time of the immigration of the Israelitish tribes, the land west of Jordan was not, according to all appearance, thickly populated, and although along the Syria coast, a greater density of population had long prevailed, yet even in Phœnicia itself the first scattered settlements had little of the character of townships until the development of an active maritime trade, which continually drew fresh sections of the inhabitants of the lowlands to the neighbourhood of the landing-places. But for this very reason the fact that subsequently every separate section of the Phœnician country was referred to solely as the appendage and domain of each great coast city, should not lead us to the conclusion that these sections corresponded to a primitive division of the Phœnician race into separate branches. What this phenomenon really points to is rather mainly an historical effect arising from the geographical peculiarities of Phœnicia. And if the population was not everywhere of pure Phœnician origin, especially in the northern districts--it apparently received continual accessions from the territory of Lebanon and the inland country south of the latter--it is still not to be admitted that distinctions of tribe influenced the choice of the country to be settled.
There is a special tendency to assign a peculiar position to the men of Byblus and Berytus. But the reasons which have prompted it are by no means conclusive; the fact that these two towns are not mentioned in the table of peoples is explained by the general application of the term “Sidonian.” It is true that in another passage of the Old Testament (Joshua xiii. 5) the Byblites are apparently not included under the general name of Sidonians. But if the general sense of this passage has not been distorted by numerous interpolations, which can scarcely be conceded, still, the independent and separate importance of Byblus will appear as a historic fact and not as one to be referred to the prehistoric founding of the city by a tribe of non-Phœnician origin. A writer who, as in this case, wishes to point out to his fellow tribesmen the tracts of country they are to subdue, concerns himself rather with states and political units than with ethnological problems. As regards the separate existence of Byblus, we need only ask the question whether as a town not founded by Phœnicians it could have become what it did: namely, a pre-eminently sacred place, a centre of religious life and thought which had no second in this country--in fact, the Mecca of the Phœnicians. The coins of this city make it clear that to them “Kaddischat” (i.e., the “holy”) and Gebal (i.e., Byblus) were regarded as identical names. Here special honour was paid to “El” or, as the Greeks said, Kronos, who was the highest conception of God in Phœnician theology. Here, too, the service of the “Lady of the City,” Astarte, acquired, with all the unrestraint of the primitive sensuousness inherent in the notion of a goddess of love and vitality, a more distinct and potent shape than in the rest of Phœnicia. In the territory of Byblus, moreover, lay the scenes in which love once united the goddess with the youthful ruler Adonis, the most beautiful of the gods, and where at the instigation of a jealous deity, his deadly enemy, her lover met his early death from the tusk of a wild boar.
[Sidenote: [ca. 2800 B.C.]]
The surmises concerning the diverse origin of the original inhabitants of the towns of Phœnicia lose still more importance from the fact that, like Syria generally, Phœnicia first becomes the scene of historical events only in connection with the development of other countries, and had evidently long before then been subjected to foreign influences. One of the most ancient records of the history of the world, a relief which the Egyptian King Sneferu caused to be set upon a rock in the Wady Magharah, shows us the Egyptians, somewhere about the year 2800 B.C., as conquerors of the Mentiu [or Mentu], the nomad tribes of Mount Sinai.
In this warlike expedition they fought for the possession of the tracts of that inhospitable mountain region where copper ore was to be found, but long before this there appear to have been manifold relations between the inhabitants of the Nile Valley and the people of Anterior Asia--relations which rested mainly on the exchange of merchandise. For instance, it was doubtless as an article of commerce that the produce of those copper mines first became known in Egypt. It was only when this source threatened to fail them that the nation, little warlike as its temper was, determined by the subjection of the predatory inhabitants of the mountains to secure itself a regular supply of the invaluable ore which was not obtainable in Egypt. Whether, as has been assumed, the operation of friendly relations went so far that the influence of ancient Egyptian art may even be traced in the most ancient statues of Babylonia, is a question which must remain undecided. The stiff appearance of the figures which has been taken as a sign of this is probably better explained by the hardness of the material in which the works were executed in order that they might be able to last for all time, and also by the lack of convenient tools. On the other hand, even in the treatment of separate portions of the body, more attention is paid to the shape of the internal structure on which the outer depends, and more regard had to the modelling than is found in the formal style, where the chief attention is paid to rendering the general outline, and which is characteristic of Egyptian art. These differences are the beginning of a line of development peculiar to the sculpture of the Babylonians and Assyrians. Still, even in the Egypt of the pyramid age, there is much which points to very early commercial relations, regularly subsisting between it and the Semitic countries.
Far greater importance must be attached to the influence exercised by the Babylonian civilisation on the nationalities of Syria, before the conditions which are seen to have prevailed in historical times began to take visible shape. Although it may have begun to make itself felt later than that which came from Egypt, this influence was still from the first more enduring and penetrating. Two routes led the civilisation of Babylonia to the countries of the west. The one ascends the course of the river Euphrates, and has its outlet somewhere at the top of the Bay of Issus, in the northeast of the interior of Syria. Here the land of the Kheta borders the Euphrates, or, as the Assyrians name it, the land of Khatti. It was chiefly from this territory, that is, from the extreme northwest of Mesopotamia, that the Babylonian--subsequently the Assyrio-Babylonian civilisation--made its way into Syria, and similarly in Syria itself it spread mainly in the direction of from north to south. The wide circuit which it takes is necessitated by the fact that it is only on the upper course of the Euphrates that the great Syrian desert, which extends between the eastern borders of Palestine and the right bank of the Euphrates, comes to an end.
The other route also shuns the great desert land and turns in a southwesterly direction from the estuary of the two rivers towards the north of Arabia. From here also Babylonian civilisation only reached Palestine and Syria by a circuitous path which led moreover through tracts of country whose natural conformation refuses its inhabitants any impulse towards the reception of an advanced civilisation. This route, however, supplies a more direct connection with the actual starting-point and home of the civilisation of Babylonia. In all ages the zone of this southern thoroughfare, which stretches from the country of the Euphrates to the land east of Jordan and down to the south of Palestine, has in great part formed a home for nomads and semi-nomads. Of all Eastern nations, Babylonia exercised in the west of Palestine and the coast plains of Syria the greatest influence on the unstable populations of this zone. The habits of life which from all time have distinguished most of the tribes dwelling here,--namely, the Bedouin habits,--can only be pursued so long as each separate tribe has a wide range. As during long periods of isolation the layers of air that cover the steppe roll up into balls of cloud which suddenly break in heavy storms on the surrounding countries; so when the density of the population has increased to such an extent that this zone can no longer feed its inhabitants, a movement sets in which induces whole tribes to seek a new home in the cultivated land in the neighbourhood, and thus once more leave sufficient space for those who remain behind. Whilst the lands of the nomads give up their surplus population, those tribes which previously dwelt farther off arrive in the near neighbourhood of the arable districts, and gradually approach the level of the inhabitants of the latter. That form of existence which is the only one possible in the purlieus of a zone habitable only for nomads and semi-nomads, necessitates, from the very facts of the case, that most of the attainments of the civilisation of other and more happily situated countries must forever remain of little value to the dwellers of that district. The civilisation of Babylonia could no more be imitated here as a whole than any other phase of development resting on division of labour, on wealth, and the development of the idea of property.
Such regulated conditions and restrictions of the will of the individual as prevailed in Babylonia must, in any case, have always been in the highest degree repugnant to the unrestrained inhabitants of this zone, which lived only in the present, and must have seemed by no means worth striving after, as even in the present day European conditions have no attraction for most of the dwellers in Arabia. The ingenious products of industry they no doubt regarded as desirable valuables and adornments, and sought to obtain them without thinking of the possibility of learning to make such things for themselves. The only inventions which they really adopted were certain simple and practical ones, the use of which gave them light, and whose employment was permitted even by the primitive existence which they led, and besides these they received whole series of religious conceptions in which they imagined themselves to perceive an important increase and extension of their own knowledge. On the other hand, the wanderings to and fro which prevailed amongst the tribes, secured a rapid and general diffusion of any acquisitions they might make.
The influence of Babylonia on the rise of the civilisation of Syria would consequently, as far as regards the immigration of the Canaanites and the lands in the south of the great Syrian desert considered as its route, have been at first limited to a few main features. On the other hand the influence which the same civilisation acquired in Syria from the north, by virtue of its early extension in the countries of the upper course of the Euphrates, was probably equally old and far more complete. The race of the Hittites concerning whose origin and descent little is known, may have had a special part in this as intermediaries. But it is uncertain when the presence of this influence in Syria begins. The peoples of Syria were made in the highest degree susceptible to Babylonian civilisation by the fact that by descent and language they belong primarily to the Semites. For although the civilisation of Babylonia is probably not originally the product of a Semitic race, yet in Babylonia itself individual tribes of Semitic origin had made this civilisation their own in an age which belongs to the prehistoric period, and had transformed it so as to give it a Semitic character. And the elements of culture which penetrated into Syria from the northern territories of the Euphrates had passed through still further modifications and adaptations, and had laid aside whatever was foreign to the Semites. Merely on this account, it is obvious that what was transmitted could have retained little that was of a specifically Babylonian complexion. Everything in Syria which seems to bear this character on the face of it was, perhaps, just because this is so distinctly obvious, not borrowed in very ancient times, more probably adopted later; for the relations with the Assyrians lasted for centuries, and there was, speaking generally, no geographical boundary on the northeast between Syria and the countries of the Euphrates. At best such phenomena are due to a revival and renovation which left little standing that bore a true Syrian stamp, even if anything of the kind was attempted. Even the Assyrians themselves took all the trouble imaginable to copy the Babylonians as exactly as possible, and the peoples of Syria, who were still less independent in spirit, did the same so far as they were under the influence of the Assyrians. And even many centuries before the power of the Assyrians reached such a height that they were compelled to adjust themselves to it, they had derived everything that we call cultivation from the Babylonian sphere of civilisation.
Above all, the religious conceptions of the peoples of Syria were remoulded by it. Most of the attempts which were made with the object of formulating the native beliefs into a system were only brought about subsequently, as the Assyrio-Babylonian example became known. But not merely the interpretation of the existing worship and belief, not only the theology must have become more and more closely assimilated to the Assyrio-Babylonian pattern, but also, in the course of time, the names and artistic representations of the gods. For instance, we are informed that in the towns of the Philistine plains a god of the name of Dagon enjoyed specially high honour. He is frequently represented on coins, bearded and with long locks of hair, and holding a fish in either hand: the lower half of the body ends in a fish’s tail covered with scales and provided with fins. Both the name and the manner of representation distinctly point to a connection with Babylonia. In this case, according to all appearance, we are not dealing with a god whose worship was only introduced by the Philistines, but with an ancient Canaanite deity. He was also worshipped by the Canaanites of the interior. If we may trust the statement of Philo, in the Phœnician accounts of the beginnings of human civilisation it was to Dagon that the discovery of the nourishing properties of corn and the invention of the plough were ascribed. Now amongst the gods of Babylonia there is also found a god named Dagon or Dakan who figures in several inscriptions as the author of the laws, and it is also known that there were Babylonian legends which referred the first regulations of human life to teachings said to have been imparted by beings who were half men, half fish. Further, in Babylonian and Assyrian art we frequently find such hybrid creatures as well as human forms disguised as fish, the head of a fish’s skin, which hangs down the back being placed on the head of each figure. Up till now, however, we have no explanation of what these figures are meant to signify nor do we know by what name they were called. Nevertheless a model of this kind probably furnished the original for that representation of Dagon which was usual amongst the Canaanites. If he passed as the god of agriculture and its rules, he might still have adopted this shape. In any case the form is proof of Babylonian influence. As to the name, it is very probable that it was really of Semitic origin, but reached the Canaanites by way of Babylonia together with the conception of the god of the cultivation of the soil, which it denoted, and this may even have happened when they had not yet fixed their abode in Palestine. But as regards the pictorial representation, it is in the highest degree improbable that a people of essentially inland origin should from the first have imagined the divine protector and patron of agriculture as half man, half fish, and with fishes in his hands. The Canaanites can only have lighted on this strange manner of representing him when they had been already long established in Palestine, when divine beings of this form had become known to them through numerous designs imported from Babylonia, and it seemed as though no essential distinction existed between the conception of these beings and that of Dagon. Presumably the most decisive point of union was afforded by the name Dagon. Etymologically it signifies no more than a god of “corn” = dagan, but it also sounds like the word dag which means “fish,” and so easily lends itself to a double meaning which directly justifies and explains the design afterwards adopted from the name of the god.
In other cases Babylonian names seem to have dislodged the original designations of Syrian deities. But the same may be said of the Egyptian influences which, penetrating into Syria from the south, and especially into the coast districts, encountered those of Babylonia and Assyria.
With all this it must not be forgotten that the civilisation of the peoples of Syria did not stop at mere borrowing. In its beginnings it was not indeed an independent and uniform creation; but still the diversities of the separate districts lent it a certain variety, and the distribution of the different tribes gave a great deal of individuality. We may presume that the civilisation of the districts connected with the countries on the Euphrates first reached a considerable height and that then the other parts of Syria, in their various degrees, merely followed this development. In some details the influence of the earliest civilisation of northern Syria, or at least a special connection with it, betrays itself among the Phœnicians.
[Sidenote: [ca. 1500 B.C.]]
The gods Anat and Reschuf, seem to have reached the Phœnicians from North Syria at a very early period. So far, indeed, it is only certain that they were worshipped by the Phœnician colonists on Cyprus. However, the name Anat appears in the names of several towns in the Holy Land (in Beth-Anat and perhaps also in Anatoth), and a trace of the name Reschuf is still recognisable in the name of the coast town Arsuf. Portraits of these deities are displayed on the monuments of the Egyptians, who had appropriated them during their intercourse with Syria. The circumstance that the Egyptians were fond of representing both deities with the town goddess of Kadesh on the Orontes, points to Reschuf as well as Anat having been received into the Phœnicians’ system of gods from the pantheon of the northern portion of Syria. From the closing sentence of the treaty which Ramses II concluded with the Kheta [Hittites], it even seems that Anat was worshipped in many towns in the Hittite kingdom.
THE COLONIES
The settlement of the island of Cyprus by Phœnicians must have begun at a very early period, and probably took place at the beginning of the complete occupation of the mainland. In this process Phœnicia acquired an outland only a day’s journey from the coast of Syria, with favourable harbours on the side facing that coast, and sources of wealth of the most various kinds. The Phœnicians were most attracted by copper, the “Cyprian earth,” which along with iron and silver was found in the mountain range in the middle of the southern half of the island. It is probable that they acquired that masterly skill in mining which was the wonder of ancient times, not in Lebanon, but in the process of exploiting the copper treasures of Cyprus.
In most places there is no trace in historical times of distinction between autochthonous Cypriotes and descendants of the immigrant Phœnicians. It is only in places where there is a continuous flow of maritime intercourse from Phœnician districts, that we find an element of pure Phœnician nationality in the inhabitants. The political conditions of the island took shape quite in the same form as in Phœnicia and in Canaanitish Palestine. Here, too, the more flourishing municipal communities acquired supremacy over the neighbouring districts under the sovereign superintendence of town kings; in this way, it is true, they did not form an organic unit of political independence, but they formed different kingdoms of small area which corresponded to an equal number of town districts. Certain dynasties succeeded for a while in reducing several of these town districts to subservience, but at the first opportunity the league of kingdoms which had been thus expanded breaks up very easily into its original constituents.
Excavations recently carried on in Cyprus have brought to light seals on which are engraved pictorial representations of Babylonian form, and inscriptions in Babylonian cuneiform writing, with names of ancient Babylonian sovereigns. These seals which reach Cyprus in the form of rarities in the course of barter and exchange, show how ancient are the trade communications extending from the districts about the mouth of the Euphrates and the Tigris to the shore lands of northern Syria.
The wars which the Egyptians repeatedly waged from about 2830 B.C. with the Bedouin races of Sinai, exercised upon the political relations of Syria no more influence than the punishment executed by the Egyptian king, Pepi, upon an Aamu tribe, the Herusha, so that for the whole period of time from 2750 B.C., until the rise of the second [New] Theban Kingdom of Egypt, there is no political incident to note further than the conjecture that about the year 1950 B.C. one of the Elamite sovereigns of Babylonia appears to have reduced a large part of Syria to ephemeral subservience. Before the beginning of the second half of the second millennium B.C., must also be placed the commencement of the colonising activity of the Phœnicians, the first forcible occupation of Cyprus, possibly also the inauguration of trade with the large islands of the Grecian archipelago in the farther west. Moreover, before this point of time, under the influence of the states of Mesopotamia, the culture of those lands to the northeast and to the north of Syria had begun to take on the complexion which makes them similar to the culture of Babylonia. Many productions of this superimposed culture were already popularised in Egypt in the time of the Middle [Old Theban] Kingdom.
Whether the invasion of Egypt by the Hyksos, to which the Middle Kingdom was exposed, was preceded by upheavals in the political relations of Syria is not known. The Hyksos, at the time of their expulsion, appear to have found support in the population of southern Palestine. The conquest of the Hyksos’ stronghold of Avaris [Ha-Uar] under the Theban king Aahmes (I), is closely connected with the conquest of the town of Sherohan [Sharhana] in southwestern Palestine, and it is from this point that can be traced the beginning of the attempt by the Pharaohs to subdue Syria. To what a wide extent Egyptian culture must have expanded in the Syrian lands during the period in which the Canaanite princes ruled the provinces of Lower Egypt may be easily gathered.
The so-called expulsion of the Hyksos mainly consisted in the removal of a foreign dynast and his troops, and not in the expatriation of a whole people; yet the battles which this result entailed had hardened the Egyptians into a warlike race, and the national army thus created gave the kings of the XVIIIth and XIXth Dynasties a weapon which they utilised for centuries afterwards, partly to reduce broad stretches of foreign territory to their sovereignty or supremacy, partly also from time to time to impose new constitutions on the reduced territories, and to pillage to the fullest extent districts whose inhabitants had proved rebellious. In the most important centres they subdued, they placed Egyptian garrisons, introduced Egyptian officials to collect taxes as they became due, erected strongholds in places where, for strategical reasons, they seemed likely to be of advantage; a king of the XXth Dynasty even goes so far as to boast of having raised a temple to Amen in Canaan. They are animated, however, by no set intention to incorporate one province after another with their empire; their nearest concern is to press as far north as possible, to the North Syrian foreland of the Euphrates. They succeeded from time to time, although always for a short space only, in procuring free communication with the banks of the great mysterious torrent which did not run north as did their own Nile at home, but flowed in the direction of the distant south. Here was the turning-point of the trade route along which the “bluestone of Babel” and so many other rare products of Mesopotamia found their way to the “wretched” Ruthennu, the inhabitants of Syria. Thus at a comparatively cheap rate could be produced a number of the coveted articles which the commerce between northern Syria and the Canaanite country had made expensive.
Concerning events that take place in Phœnicia the Egyptian monuments of this time give us little information. Aahmes seems to have visited this scene of action, for by the country of Zahi, which is mentioned in an inscription of his, the Egyptians understand that slice of Syria to which Phœnicia belongs.
Without compromising themselves by a useless defence, the cities of Phœnicia already appear to have done homage to Tehutimes I, and to have discharged tribute. They must have been well content for the sovereigns of Egypt to rout the robber hordes of the mountains in Lebanon and Bekaa, and for a foreign jurisdiction and a foreign power to restore peace and order in northern Syria by the force of arms. True, they themselves did not always escape from these encounters with impunity. Tehutimes III repeatedly entered Phœnicia at the head of his army. On his return from Tunep in the twenty-ninth year of his reign, he sacked at harvest time the whole country of Zahi. The great corn stores lying ready to be threshed were commandeered, and an equal store of wine and oil. In the thirty-fourth year he took two cities of the land of Zahi, and in one of his last campaigns he destroyed the city of Arkali, i.e., Akko. In the reports of the campaigns of Tehutimes III there is no mention of Tyre and Sidon. By the term “dwellers in the harbour” (their overthrow being alluded to in a poetical description of the power of this monarch) we should, however, comprehend the inhabitants of the coast towns of Phœnicia. Gaza and Joppa are repeatedly mentioned at this time.
In the annals of Tehutimes III, Keft ships and Kepuna ships laden with timber are mentioned. In the poetical description of victory mentioned above, the land of Kefa is placed together with Asebi, i.e., with Cyprus or with a territorial portion of this island. We may hazard the conclusion that in Kefa are comprehended the islands of the “great sea,” i.e., of the Mediterranean; at all events it is not to be looked for in Phœnicia. Otherwise Tehutimes III would have included Kefa as the scene of his achievements in the annals along with Zahi and the lands of the Ruthennu. Moreover, the Keft people, represented by the Egyptians, do not in the slightest degree resemble the Canaanites. Clearly the Egyptian artists do not find in them the characteristic features which they are so fond of representing in the Semites of Anterior Asia, even until they pass into the régime of caricature.
The successor of Tehutimes III was Amenhotep II, of whose campaign in Syria we have but fragmentary evidence. His rule and that of his son Tehutimes IV lasted but a short while. Then came Amenhotep III, who reigned more than thirty-six years, and to him succeeded Amenhotep IV, called Khun-aten, the strangest of all the Pharaohs, who held his court not at Thebes, but in a new imperial capitol which he built for himself in the city known to-day as Tel-el-Amarna. He it was who had thoughts of converting the Egyptian religion to a monotheistic system. A particularly lucky stroke of fate has saved from ruin at Tel-el-Amarna a number of historical documents of the most valuable nature, which belonged to the state archives of Khun-aten, and which have only recently come to light from the hidden repositories in which they were preserved from destruction.
[Sidenote: [ca. 1400-1200 B.C.]]
It was the discovery of these tablets that first gave the means for estimating correctly the extension of Babylonian civilisation in Anterior Asia even at this period. In those Syrian districts which were completely under the dominion of Egypt, men used the Babylonian cuneiform character and the Semitic idiom of Babylonia in written intercourse with the Egyptian court, and like the Aramaic in the Persian epoch, this idiom was the official language of diplomatic negotiations, and was consequently studied even in Egypt itself.
The confusion which followed in Egypt on the decease of the unwarlike Khun-aten, facilitated a gradual increase in the power of the kingdom of the Kheta, already forwarded by the policy of that prince and his predecessor which had been directed rather to maintaining their possessions than to an extension of power. The peoples of Syria were left to themselves until, under Hor-em-heb, Egypt again began to acquire internal cohesion; Seti I, however, was the first who was able to reconquer much of the lost territory. He managed to advance through Syria, to the frontiers of the Kheta kingdom, and to return home with a rich booty. His son and successor, Ramses II, renewed the struggle for the possession of northern Palestine, and conducted, with varying success and through long years, a war against the Kheta and their allies. Finally a treaty of peace was concluded between the two powers, by which little more was left to the Egyptians than the dominion over the coast lands of Palestine, in which they were from henceforth able,--at least while Ramses II ruled,--to maintain themselves undisturbed. A strip of the Phœnician coast may also have remained under the suzerainty of this Pharaoh.
The arrangement with the Kheta remained in effect, not merely down to the close of the long reign of Ramses II, but also during that of his son Meneptah, and placed the districts of Syria where Egypt retained a free hand in a state of dependence for several generations. One of the Pharaohs of the XXth Dynasty, Ramses III, also succeeded in re-establishing for a short time the dominion of Egypt, at least in the south of Palestine. In the eighth year of this king’s reign, the kingdom of the Kheta succumbed to the onslaught of a national migration for which a host of tribes from distant countries had joined together. Carrying their wives and children with them, the invaders made their way through Syria to the eastern frontier of Egypt. Amongst the tribes from which this enterprise started the Egyptians make mention of the Pursta (Pulista?). It is not impossible that this name denotes that same people to whom Palestine owes its name, the foreign nation of the Philistines. The assertion that the Askalonians, i.e., the Philistines, destroyed Sidon, is not to be taken quite literally, and only to be regarded as referring to the devastation and plundering of a part of Phœnicia. The repulse of the Pursta and their allies is one of the last signs of life still displayed by the effete Egypt of the period of the XXth Dynasty. The later Ramessides soon entirely lost that dominion over the districts of southern Palestine which Ramses II could still call his own. Centuries went by before armed intervention in the affairs of Syria could be again ventured on from the Nile Valley.
By the sixteenth century B.C., and before that date, though how much earlier it is impossible to say, the Phœnicians were familiar with the whole of the Ægean Sea, which they had probably reached in the first instance by way of the south coast of Asia Minor and the island of Rhodes. From the harbours of Rhodes it was a simple matter to sail to the smaller isles of the archipelago, and so, by easy stages, to the Ægean coasts of Greece and Asia Minor. It is probable that, in pursuit of their commercial enterprises, they visited every nook and corner of this part of the Mediterranean, establishing factories where the conditions were favourable, and trading-stations on islands near the shore, or at such points on the mainland as seemed least liable to attack, instructing the natives in the art of mining where minerals were to be had, or taking the work in hand themselves.
VOYAGES AND TRADING-STATIONS
The records of their presence which have come down to us are scanty, and in some cases of doubtful authenticity. The statements of Greek authors to the effect that certain cities, buildings, or forms of worship, were erected or instituted by the Phœnicians, often mean no more than that their real origin was unknown. The names of Cyclopean, Pelasgian, and Phœnician were indiscriminately bestowed on all relics of venerable antiquity, and even when the Homeric poems were composed, the Phœnician occupation of the Greek archipelago lay far back in the remote past. In the Iliad and the Odyssey, the Phœnicians appear only as dwellers in Phœnicia, or the land of Sidon, mariners and traders, whose business leads them to and fro in great waters, far from their homes, and who now and again cast anchor in one spot for a twelvemonth or so, as occasion offers. We hear much of their doings, of the splendour of their goblets of wrought silver, and their embroidered stuffs, the product of Sidonian looms; of the jewels of gold and amber they offer for sale; of their dishonest and knavish tricks, of how they cheat simple folk of their property, and then sell them into slavery, induce maidservants to come on board their galleys with stolen goods and their masters’ children, and then, quickly hoisting sail, carry off the sons of noble houses to be sold as slaves at the next port they reach. But this is no true description even of the period when the Greek epics came into being, except in so far as it makes Sidon the chief depot of the unmatchable products of the art and industry of northern Syria. The episodes in the Odyssey which treat of Phœnician knavery are later interpolations. Nor are the deductions as to Phœnician expansion drawn by certain scholars from certain proper names in Greece very convincing, as, for all their ingenuity, they rest on internal evidence alone.
The Phœnicians colonised Rhodes, as they had colonised Cyprus, though not to the same extent. The centre of their settlements was Jalysus, opposite the coast of Asia Minor, at the northern end of the island; Cameiros, on the east, is also said to have been a Phœnician city. They established settlements in several of the Sporades and Cyclades, in Thera, Melos (where they found sulphur and alum), and Oliaros (Antiparos). The island of Cythera supplied them with a station for the purple murex fishery, and a starting-point for voyages to the west and to the Peloponnesian coast. Whether they had any settlements in Crete is uncertain, but they certainly had some close to the coast of Thrace, for Herodotus speaks with wonder and admiration of their gold mines in the island of Thasos. They are said, but on insufficient evidence, to have colonised Samothrace. Nor is it impossible that some venturesome mariners may have sailed through the Hellespont and Bosphorus to the Pontus Euxinus, and established Phœnician factories on the north coast of Asia Minor.
Schliemann’s excavations at Hissarlik, Mycenæ, Tiryns, and Orchomenos, and other discoveries of the relics of pre-Homeric civilisation, have brought to light a number of objects unmistakably Phœnician, or copied from Phœnician models, which prove that, in externals at least, the civilisation of the islands and coasts of the Ægean had far more affinity with that of northern Syria than with that which was destined to arise in Hellas. To take but a single example, the walls of Hissarlik, Tiryns, and Mycenæ, when complete, must have borne a strong resemblance to those of the strongholds of Palestine and northern Syria, as represented in Egyptian works of art. We do indeed find some attempts at originality among the relics of this period, as, for instance, in the shapes and decorations of the earthen vessels of Argolis, but, generally speaking, the foreign element preponderates; though it must remain an open question whether everything that indicates the ascendency of Asia Minor in this early stage of civilisation came by way of the sea, or whether some of it may not have been due to the gradual spread of Asiatic influences. Of Egyptian influence, direct or indirect, there is hardly a trace.
We must not, however, exaggerate the range of Phœnician influence. The great cities in which it was dominant perished early, and little or nothing of it penetrated to the interior of the mainland. Nor do the Phœnicians seem ever to have been undisputed masters of the Ægean; their stations were early abandoned, in Rhodes they had to maintain their ground against the Carians and were finally ousted by the Dorians. The north of Cyprus was early peopled by Greeks. In details and externals, there are many links between this early pre-Homeric civilisation and that which we find reflected in the Greek epics, but such remains of the former as survived were confined to a few island and seaboard tribes, and even among them, were undergoing a process of transformation. Its most important legacy was an acquaintance with the practical arts. The Phœnician vessels, sorry craft as they were, served as models to the Greeks, Phœnician gains by sea spurred them to imitation, and we are probably right in supposing that they learnt from the Phœnicians how to steer by the pole-star at night. A few details of the architecture of Tiryns, Mycenæ, and Hissarlik were adopted by the later architecture of Greece, though the difference of material had deprived them of their significance. Technical art in certain places and industries long remained faithful to patterns of Asiatic origin, as is manifest in the pottery of Melos and Rhodes, some bronzes lately discovered in Crete, and above all, as we should expect, in the manufactures of Cyprus.
The most important acquisition which the Greeks owed to the Phœnicians, was the art of writing, and the Canaanite alphabet, which, however, the latter had not acquired themselves at the time when North Syrian influence was in the ascendant in Greece. The Greeks adopted it at a later period, as they had shortly before adopted a system of weights and measures, closely akin to that which obtained in northern Syria, though they do not seem to have owed this last solely to the Phœnicians. Their commercial institutions and pecuniary transactions may have followed Phœnician models in many respects; for example, the Phœnicians were the first people whose commerce beyond sea made it necessary for them to insure legal protection for life and property by means of securities.
Where large numbers of Phœnicians lived together on foreign soil, they united to form distinct corporations with magistrates of their own. It was to the interest of these scattered communities to maintain intimate relations with some great city in their native land, and the mutual obligations thus incurred, were associated with the worship of the local divinity of the mother city. If, however, a Phœnician merely desired to make a brief stay in some foreign port, he put himself under the protection of a resident of good repute, and became his guest. At parting, a potsherd was broken in two, one half being kept by the host, and the other by the departing guest, who was thenceforth bound to extend a like protection to his former host, any member of his family, or any person employed in his affairs. When the latter desired to recommend any one to the protection of his former protégé, he gave him the broken potsherd to present as his credentials; if the two halves fitted, the bearer’s identity was established. Among the Greeks, this system of reciprocal hospitality (proxenia), took the place of the modern consular service. The Phœnicians in Greek cities were also money-lenders, and advanced loans at interest on ships and cargo, and in banking the Greeks probably learned much from them. It is unlikely that such a city as Carthage, into which wealth flowed from all quarters, should have been without a regular banking system, and a kind of money market. From Crete and Cythera, the Phœnicians sailed to the western end of the Mediterranean, allured no doubt by rumours of the mineral wealth of Spain. Sicily, Malta, Gozzo, Cossura, and the African coast, west of the great Syrtis, were at first no more to them than necessary anchorages and stations for obtaining provisions on the long voyage through the straits that divided Europe from Africa to the mouth of the Guadalquivir. The development of Phœnician colonies followed the sea route to Tartessus, and it was not until the route was well established that certain places along it rose into importance. Cadiz, the farthest point of it, was older than Utica; Lixos, on the African coast, beyond the straits, was said to be older than Cadiz. Tarshish yielded not only silver in immense quantities, but gold, lead, and other metals; the fisheries were profitable, and probably even then tin and amber found their way from the far north to the countries at the western end of the Mediterranean basin.
The Sidonians had been foremost in occupying the Ægean; the western half of the Mediterranean was the sphere of Tyrian enterprise. With the sole exception of Leptis Magna, on the western margin of the great Syrtis, every Phœnician colony there, as far as our information goes, was founded either from Carthage or directly from Tyre. Carthage sends tribute and ambassadors to the temple of Hercules at Tyre, her founders are the founder of Tyre and the goddess Dido, whom legend transforms into a Syrian princess. The Tyrian Melkarth is the reputed progenitor of the Carthaginians; it is he who subdued the Libyan tribes who opposed the first colonists, and who opened a gateway to the Atlantic to his people, setting up great pillars of rock on either hand, as beseems a god whose token is two pillars. The most important Phœnician settlement in the south of Sicily was Heracleia Minoa or Rosh Melkarth, i.e., Melkarth’s Head (Cape Melkarth). Again, just as the Greeks sometimes called Phœnician wares “Sidonian,” so certain articles of Phœnician commerce are called in Old Latin sarranic, a word derived directly from Sur. The fact that the Tyrians represented Phœnicia in western waters does not necessarily imply their supremacy at home. It seems more likely that they had, by right of discovery, a kind of monopoly of the trade with Tarshish and the western Mediterranean--a situation paralleled by the partition of the world between Spain and Portugal when the two sea-routes to the Indies were first discovered. The enormous profits of this trade, however, undoubtedly secured Tyre the leading place in Phœnicia, after the loss of the colonies in the Ægean.
But even in the west, the Phœnicians could not maintain their footing against the Greeks, and on the entrance of the latter into Sicily, soon after the middle of the eighth century, they abandoned most of their possessions in that island. On the opposite coast of Africa, their colonies seem to have been more numerous, and since the rise of Carthage, their influence had spread far into the interior. There they came in contact with tribes wholly incapable of competing with them, and Punic became the common language of the country, just as Arabic did at a later period, though whether the cities there owed their origin to Tyrians, Carthaginians, or natives, we are unable to say. There were other Phœnician colonies beyond the straits, which are said to have been destroyed by native tribes. When they were founded, when destroyed, and how long an interval had elapsed before Hanno of Carthage went forth, in the middle of the fifth century, to establish fresh colonies there, are questions to which we have no answer. Punic mariners seem to have been the first to visit the Canary Islands, and, according to the report that has come down to us, Hanno’s expedition reached a point sixteen days’ journey south of Cape Verde on the coast of New Guinea.
Our information concerning the voyages of Phœnicians to the north, in search of the tin which the nations of antiquity valued so highly, is vague in the extreme. Ezekiel mentions tin among the metals brought by Tarshish to the Tyrian market, but he may refer to that which was obtained from Lusitania and Galicia. On the other hand, the Gaditanians are said to have brought it by sea from the Cassiterides or Tin Islands (the coast of Britain), and the story goes that a merchant of Cadiz who steered his vessel on the rocks, in order to preserve the secret of the route from the Romans who were tracking him, was compensated for his loss out of the public funds. Again, the hypothesis that the Phœnicians actually got as far as the Baltic shore, to traffic for amber with the inhabitants of Samland, though conceivable, rests on nothing but conjecture. It is possible that they never went as far as Cornwall, and merely pretended that the tin of Spain was the product of the northern isles to evade the risk of competition.
Phœnician enterprise was directed to the west rather than to the east, and chose the way of the sea rather than that of the land. The reason was simple; sea-transport was exposed to fewer risks, and tribes in a low stage of civilisation accorded to settlers and merchants who came among them to barter treasures from the remotest ends of the earth, for the raw produce of the soil, a very different welcome from what they could expect from the rulers of the civilised East. But, few as their settlements were, the Phœnicians, nevertheless, drove a thriving trade with oriental nations. The products of Armenia must have come into the Tyrian market before the days of Ezekiel; Syria and Palestine supplied Phœnicia with food, with raw material and articles of commerce, and with labour for her wharves. In the time of Herodotus, the spices of Arabia passed through the hands of Phœnician merchants, and he mentions that in Egypt there was a Tyrian quarter of the city [Memphis] and a temple of the “foreign Aphrodite,” presumably Astarte.
The Phœnicians do not seem to have felt bound to interfere with the Israelite occupation of the land west of Jordan, and, with a few insignificant exceptions, the two nations appear to have lived side by side in peace; a state of things advantageous to both parties.
[Sidenote: [1100 B.C.]]
The migration of the Pursta, by destroying the Hittite empire, gave rise to a number of petty states, whose impotence may be estimated by the fact that in 1110, Tiglathpileser I, King of Assyria, pressed forward to the very shores of the Mediterranean. But more than two hundred years had yet to elapse before the kings of Assyria could seriously contemplate the conquest of Phœnicia. Tyre, strong in her monopoly of the trade with Tarshish, remained mistress of the seas, and mother of remote colonies long after the glory of Phœnicia had waned in the Ægean, and entered upon the heritage of Sidon, which had formerly held a similar position. Whether there was any political compact in virtue of which she took the lead in Phœnician affairs, we cannot tell; the foundations of her supremacy were her fleet and commerce, and the gradual extension of her sovereignty to a wider area.
The list of the kings of Tyre supplies useful chronological references for Jewish history, and to this accident we owe it that Josephus has preserved some extracts from Menander’s Annals of Tyre. The first monarch mentioned in these extracts is the son and successor of Abibaal, Hiram, who ruled Tyre from 969 [980] to 936 B.C.[b]
III. THE PHŒNICIAN TIME OF POWER
THE REIGN OF HIRAM I
The sources of information for the reign of Hiram are richer than for any other period of Phœnician history. They no longer offer merely a few scattered notices and chance remarks, or names which have scarcely any historical value, but they furnish data which are important, not only from their contents but relatively also in their extent, and which are all the more valuable because they touch upon the most remarkable period of the history of Western Asia. These sources may be divided into three classes. In the first rank are the priceless remnants of Phœnician historiography which Josephus, for the comparison and verification of the Biblical accounts of King Hiram and his relations with Solomon, has preserved from the historical works of Menander and Dius. Second, and even more important in their way, are the Biblical accounts themselves, which give information concerning the political, commercial, and social relations that were established between Israel and Phœnicia and their rulers. A third source of information in which, to be sure, has been incorporated many a legend from this brilliant period of both countries, consists mainly of later versions of Phœnician and Israelitish history, fragments from the works of Chætus, Theophilus, and Eupolemus, which have been preserved by ecclesiastical writers as a supplement to the above excerpts of Josephus and for a like purpose.
[Sidenote: [ca. 980-936 B.C.]]
After the death of the little-known King Abibaal, his son Hiram I ascended the throne at the age of twenty. The date of this event has been proven by chronological research to have been 980 B.C., eight years before the death of the great Israelite king David.[7]
From all that the above-mentioned sources relate or that can be inferred from comparison with the conditions before the reign of Hiram, it is apparent that Phœnicia was already in a condition where her affairs needed only to be more firmly moulded and secured. Hence, in this respect also, the Phœnician and Israelitish states, whose rulers, Hiram and Solomon, were friends and had so much in common in character and tastes, were in very similar circumstances. For it was but recently that in Tyre, too, a kingdom had been established in place of the government of the suffets, and at the same time the bond of dependence completely severed which had united Tyre as a colony to Sidon. It is probable, indeed, that in the weakness of the mother state this relation had before this time been maintained solely from a feeling of filial duty.
The relations with Israel and the recognised position as hegemonic state which Tyre maintained under Hiram, may have been established in the period immediately preceding, but what the records tell of this renowned king nevertheless makes him appear as the real founder of the Tyrian state. The records of the sources concerning his buildings on the island of Tyre, by which he secured the metropolis of the country against the reverses of a continental war, point to this. This work was carried out on a magnificent plan and made the formerly insignificant island town a protecting bulwark not only for Tyre, but for the whole of Phœnicia. These edifices must belong to the very beginning of his reign, for the accounts of Menander and Dius, which are evidently arranged in chronological order, mention them first, and the buildings which were erected at Jerusalem, at the beginning of his reign and with his co-operation, make it presumable that some occurrence of that kind had already taken place at Tyre.
A glance at the political position of the neighbouring states of the continent throws light upon the next point. The Israelites had very recently subjugated all the peoples of the vicinity with the sole exception of the Phœnicians; the smaller Syrian states, hitherto divided, formed a closer alliance with one another, and under the king of Damascus were beginning, even at that time, to form the second power in Western Asia.
So, threatened by the fresh danger of the combined forces of the hitherto divided Israelitish and Aramæan races, the Phœnicians spared no efforts in increasing the fortifications of the island city. It may well be presumed that in these early days of the new Tyrian royal state, Palætyrus, which in the period immediately subsequent continues to appear as the more important and as the seat of the royal residence, was the site of many new buildings, especially of such royal palaces as Hiram’s workmen also erected in Jerusalem. Of these, however, the sources give no information, because they bear upon the island town which was subsequently the more important, and because only a few remains of Palætyrus were in existence when these records were written.
Furthermore, the religious ceremonies took quite a new form under this king. Some of the old sanctuaries already in existence in Tyre he rebuilt, others he replaced with entirely new ones. According to the records the latter was the case with the temples of the two guardian deities, Melkarth and Astarte, while they mention the restoration of the cedar roofs of other temples not named, but in regard to the magnitude of these latter buildings, they relate how Hiram went to Lebanon and had a whole wood of cedar trees cut down for the work. The third great temple, that of Baalsamin, was adorned with golden votive offerings, amongst which was that famous golden pillar, often mentioned in later times and still on view in Tyre until the last centuries of its independence.
As through these enterprises, indicative of the love of splendour and the great wealth of the king, provision was made for the magnificence of the new royal city and of its religious services, so too, another regulation of Hiram’s, mentioned by Menander, points to a reorganisation of the cult, or at least of the order of festivals. For Menander relates that Hiram was the first to have the Awakening of Hercules celebrated in the month of Peritius, when he was starting forth on the war against the Cypriotes.
We learn from the records that the king not only reorganised the internal structure of the Tyrian state, but also took measures to safeguard the foreign acquisitions of his predecessors. The passage from Menander, cited above, tells that Hiram made war against the Cypriotes, who did not pay their tribute and were again subjugated by Hiram. From this it is clear that the Island of Cyprus had already, under Hiram’s predecessor, passed from the possession of Sidon, which had colonised it during her hegemony, to Tyre.
As all the records we have had under consideration indicate that Tyre had gained its position as leading state during the previous reign, and in Hiram’s time was looking to the organisation and strengthening of what had been won, the same thing may be said of the relations with Israel. The records on this subject are relatively complete, and of the most manifold interest for the history of both these flourishing states. We shall therefore have to treat them somewhat more in detail.
Through David’s successful wars the Israelitish state had grown from its former insignificance to a power greater than had for a long time existed in Western Asia. The whole of Syria and Palestine, with the exception of the northern coast, belonged to the kingdom of Israel, so that Phœnicia, on the continent side, was nearly surrounded by Israelitish territory. All the routes of commerce which led from the Euphrates, from Arabia and Egypt, to the emporiums of the Mediterranean, were controlled by the Israelites, and after the conquest of the Edomite district, they also possessed the commercial ports on the Red Sea, where the Phœnicians had long carried on an extremely profitable trade with Arabia and Ethiopia, and perhaps also, even before David’s time, with India. Under these circumstances the Phœnicians made an effort to enter into closer relations with their powerful neighbours.
Soon after the beginning of his reign, Hiram sent an embassy to David which resulted in his despatching Phœnician workmen to Jerusalem to build the Jewish king a palace. There is no mention of compensation for this service; so it seems, especially from the short account which makes the messengers and the workmen go to David together, that the Phœnician ruler had the building erected simply in order to show himself well-disposed towards the Israelite. However that may be, with the continued friendship of their rulers there could be no lack of important results for the political and commercial relations of the two states; and commercial undertakings and alliances, such as we find in greater extent in the reign of Solomon, may even at that time have been entered into by them.
After the death of David, Hiram sought to maintain the cordial relations between the two countries under Solomon’s rule, and therefore took occasion, upon the latter’s accession to the throne, to send an embassy to Jerusalem with congratulations, and to request the continuation of the friendship. Solomon was then cherishing the project of building the temple which David had desired to erect after the completion of the palace which Hiram’s workmen had built for him in Jerusalem towards the end of his reign. For the pious king considered it unfitting that he should dwell in a “cedar palace,” while the dwelling of Jehovah was a tent. But in view of the continuance of internal disturbances and the still incomplete subjugation of the provinces that had been incorporated in the kingdom, he was withheld from his project by the prophet Nathan, who showed him that the execution of it was destined to his successor.
In carrying out his father’s plan, Solomon could not dispense with Phœnician workmen and artificers, so he took the opportunity afforded by the friendly overtures of the Tyrian king to make a treaty with him. According to the more ancient version of this treaty, Hiram was to furnish cedar and cypress wood, together with carpenters and stone-masons for the building, and to send the materials already shaped on rafts to Judah. In return Hiram stipulated that he should receive yearly as long as the work continued, twenty thousand measures of wheat, as “food for his house,” that is, for the royal household, and twenty, or according to the reading of the Septuagint and according to Josephus, twenty thousand measures of oil of olives.
After the temple at Jerusalem had been completed with the assistance of Phœnician artificers, other compacts for similar purposes must have been made by the pomp-loving Solomon with the Tyrian king. For we learn that the supplies of cedar and fir trees and gold continued for twenty years. That at the same time the commercial relations of the two countries were regulated by treaties, import duties for wares fixed, the position of the Phœnician merchants resident in Judah, as well as that of the numerous Israelites settled in Phœnician lands determined, lies quite in the nature of the case and is also in part supported by definite statements.
A Phœnician tale represents the wise Solomon in a dispute with his friend Hiram, confounding him with riddles, and then being himself overcome by a Phœnician wiser than himself. As the legend of the wisdom of Solomon is here ingeniously linked with the friendly relation with Hiram, so another legend of the extraordinary wealth of the Israelitish king makes use of the same relation, by ascribing to him a remarkable votive offering in the temple of Melkarth, that golden pillar which, according to the excerpts from Menander and Dius, King Hiram had set up in the said sanctuary, where it was admired by Herodotus. Now, a legend which Eupolemus has preserved, says that this pillar came from Solomon, who sent it to Hiram in gratitude for his assistance in the building of the temple.
This tale has too much the character of a popular tradition to be deemed a mere invention of Eupolemus; and it is too vexatious to the spirit of later Judaism to be of Jewish invention. According to another Phœnician story, Solomon sent the gold that was not used in the building of the temple to the Tyrian king, and the latter is said to have had that famous column made as a setting for the statue of his daughter, who was married to Solomon. That Solomon married a daughter of Hiram is reported by two authors who have written on Phœnician history, Chætus and Menander of Pergamus. Biblical history records the marriage of Solomon with the daughter of an Egyptian king, and also mentions the Jewish king’s large harem, in which were also Sidonian women, for whom Solomon established the racial cult of the Sidonians, the worship of Astarte. This would indicate for the Sidonians an unusually high position in the harem.
[Sidenote: [ca. 980-887 B.C.]]
As Tyrian legend and history take pains to honour Hiram for his connection with Solomon, who was early a resplendent figure in eastern tradition, on the other hand we must not overlook a similar effort in Jewish historiography, which tells us with pleasure of the friendship of the two Israelitish rulers with Hiram, and does not conceal the fact that the external brilliancy and wealth of Solomon were a consequence of the connection with the rich and artistic neighbouring nation. Even later Jewish tradition relates many a strange thing about this famous Tyrian king. He is said to be that prince of Tyre who in Ezekiel xxviii. 2, walks amid the precious stones of Paradise, and, in accordance with a further interpretation of Ezekiel’s prophecy, he is said to have perished at the siege of Tyre by Nebuchadrezzar, after having lived five hundred years.
According to another not quite unfounded tale, Hiram had a temple built at Tyre like that at Jerusalem, and introduced Jewish customs in it, in which respect Hiram may be compared to the Emperor Julian, who transferred Christian usages to heathendom. This story is allied to another Syrian tradition that the ecclesiastical translation of the Old Testament which the Syrians use is that which Hiram requested Solomon to have made. As the traditions of the Phœnicians and of the neighbouring Hebrews and Syrians so long preserved the memory of the two kings, they look upon this time as the period of splendour of both Phœnicia and Israel.[b]
THE SUCCESSORS OF HIRAM
Hiram was succeeded by his son Baalbazer, who died after a reign of seven years. He was succeeded by his son Abdastarte, who reigned nine years. At the age of twenty-nine he fell a victim to a palace revolution. The four sons of his nurse conspired against him and removed him from their path. The oldest of them, Metuastarte, son of Leastarte mounted the throne and held the government twelve years. [Most of the authorities differ from Pietschmann in assigning twenty-four years to Metuastarte’s reign, in the last half of which he associated with himself on the throne a scion of the royal house who is known as Astarte or sometimes Abdastarte II.] His successor was one of his brothers, Astharymus, who nine years later was put to death by his brother Phelles. Only eight months afterwards a like fate overtook the latter. He was murdered by Ithobaal, (Eth-baal), priest of Astarte.
[Sidenote: [ca. 887-723 B.C.]]
With Ithobaal’s accession orderly conditions were again restored. He entered into friendly relations with the kingdom of northern Israel, concluded what Amos calls a “brotherly covenant” with it, and gave his daughter, Jezebel, in marriage to the warlike king, Ahab, son of Omri. The drought which visited northern Syria in Ahab’s time is also mentioned in the annals of Tyre; they limit its duration to one year, and ascribe its cessation to an intercessory procession which Ithobaal performed. Under his government the heavy doom which was to fall on the Syrian countries from Assyria, drew nearer to Phœnicia. Asshurnazirpal marched with his army (876 B.C.) down from the upper valley of the Orontes into the low-lying coast district of Djun Akkor, and proceeding southward across it, penetrated to the Nahr-el-Kelb, where one of the Assyrian rock sculptures appears to date from him. The towns of Phœnicia made haste to buy him off with presents, and thus escaped for this time. Ithobaal, it is said, founded Botrys, probably in the well-grounded anticipation that this raid would not be the last of the kind which would take this direction. From Botrys the passage of the Ras-el-Shakka could be commanded.
The successor of Ithobaal was his son Baalazar, who reigned six years, and the latter’s son Mettenus (Metten) then ruled during twenty-nine years. After his death the crown passed to Pygmalion. With this king, who occupied the throne forty-seven years, the consecutive list of the kings of Tyre which has come down to us from Menander’s works, comes to an end. No more of it has been preserved intact.
In Baalazar’s time the danger threatening Phœnicia from the growing power of Assyria, seems to have been recognised at Aradus and in the neighbouring towns. In the battle of Qarqar (854) Mettenbaal [Matinu-Baal of Shalmaneser II’s records], King of Aradus, fought on Ahab’s side against Shalmaneser II, and so perhaps did also the troops of Ushu and Sian, two places which the Assyrian inscriptions generally mention, together with Simyra and Aradus, and also those of Akko. These would be the towns which were least protected by natural boundaries on the side of northern Syria. Shalmaneser II boasts that on his campaigns against Hazael of Damascus, he had taken tribute from Tyre, where Metten was then reigning, and Sidon (842 and 839 B.C.), and also from Byblus (839); this may be a bragging name for voluntary presents he had received there. In Pygmalion’s time Sidon and Tyre seem to have been under an obligation to pay taxes to the Assyrian king, Adad-nirari III, whose conquering expeditions twice attained Phœnicia (804 and 803). It then had peace from the Assyrians for more than half a century, until the time of Tiglathpileser III. This king’s inscriptions announce that he wasted the territory of the towns of Simyra, Akko, Ushu, and Sian, installed there Assyrian captains and established colonists who were brought thither from the farthest corners of the empire. Hiram II of Tyre and Sibittibi’li of Byblus are named amongst the kings whose homage he received in Syria, and on another occasion Mettenbaal of Aradus, while Tyre had to pay him one hundred and fifty talents of gold. Aradus, Byblus, and Tyre were apparently the only independent states of Phœnicia at this time.
[Sidenote: [723-671 B.C.]]
Tyre remained the most independent and the most powerful. Elulæus, who reigned there about 728-692 B.C., under the name of Pylas, succeeded, at the outset of his reign in subduing the rebellious Cypriotes by means of his war-ships. In his time Shalmaneser IV, the successor of Tiglathpileser III, overran the whole of Phœnicia. A peace was concluded, by which Sidon, Akko, even Palætyrus, and many other towns passed to the Assyrian king. Apparently they wish to make themselves independent of the island city, even at the cost of their political independence. But since the Tyrians showed themselves dissatisfied with this, Shalmaneser again advanced into Phœnicia, and in order to reach the island fortress, he collected sixty ships with eight hundred rowers, from which it appears that they were of small dimensions. But the Tyrians defended themselves bravely; with twelve ships they scattered the enemy’s fleet, and took five hundred prisoners. Then the Assyrian king marched away, but left behind a part of his army, to hold the mainland opposite Tyre and cut it off from the river which there fell into the sea, and from the aqueducts, and thus prevent the Tyrians from supplying themselves with drinking water. This is said to have lasted for five years, while the Tyrians had recourse to the water which collected in wells they dug on their island. In the end they appear to have grown weary of resisting. Apparently the annals of Tyre do not assert that the efforts of the Assyrians were entirely without result. Sargon ascended the throne of Assyria in 722, and it is supposed that the Tyrians came to terms with him in 720, when he appeared in Syria to crush the alliance of Arpad, Simyra, Damascus, and Samaria. Sargon boasts that he drew the Ionians like fish from the sea, and quieted Cilicia, and Tyre, and he speaks of Tyre as a town which belonged to him. Sennacherib set up a king in Sidon, named Tubaal, that is Ithobaal, on whom he imposed a tax; Abdili’ti of Aradus and Urumilki of Byblus also did homage to him. From Syria he took workmen to Nineveh, who had there to build ships for him after the pattern of the vessels of their own country. These were manned with Tyrian, Sidonian, and also Greek, i.e., probably Cyprian, seamen, and with them he was able to undertake a maritime expedition on the Tigris to subdue the people of Bit Yakin and the Elamites “with their gods,” and to carry them away as prisoners (694 B.C.). These vessels are represented on a bas-relief at Kuyunjik, round transports, with the hind and foreparts bent upwards, and war-ships with a great projecting keel. Both classes had two decks. On the upper one, behind high side railings, outside which the warriors have hung their shields, the prisoners and men armed with spears, are seen seated. Between the decks sit the oarsmen, their backs turned to the forepart of the ship. Two rows of oars are at work, one above the other; two long poles serve instead of a rudder and are disposed right and left of the stern of the vessel.
[Sidenote: [671-586 B.C.]]
Soon after Sennacherib’s son Esarhaddon had begun his reign, Abd-milkot, king of Sidon, the successor, apparently, of that Ithobaal or Ethbaal whom Sennacherib had installed there, allowed himself to be beguiled into an effort after independence, in unison with Sanduarri, ruler of the two towns of Kundu and Sizu, which are to be sought inland, to the east of Sidon. The attempt failed. Sidon was taken (678 B.C.), plundered, and laid waste; the fortifications were demolished, the inhabitants led away into exile, and on its site a new settlement was established, which was peopled by men from the eastern districts of the Assyrian empire and received as a colony the name of Kar-Asshur-akhe-iddin (the city of Esarhaddon). In the year 671 B.C. Esarhaddon took the field against Tirhaqa of Egypt; and Baal of Tyre, trusting in Tirhaqa’s power, exhibited insubordination. As in Shalmaneser’s time, Tyre was again cut off by the Assyrians from all its supplies of food and water. It is not stated whether Baal was thus reduced to submission. But certain it is that in Asshurbanapal’s reign Baal was again besieged by the Assyrians, in his island city. Defences were again erected on the mainland opposite, and all approaches were blocked by land and sea. To quench their thirst the besieged are said to have been finally reduced to drinking salt water. The final result was that Baal submitted and tendered guarantees for a more loyal demeanour in future. He delivered up his own daughter and those of his brother as wives for the supreme king, together with a rich dowry, and also surrendered him his son Yahi-melek. This was more than Asshurbanapal required, and he sent Yahi-melek back to his father. Probably with the assistance of Baal’s war-ships, the Assyrians then proceeded to the subjection of the other island king of Phœnicia, Yakinlu of Aradus. He also was compelled to send his daughter to Nineveh with many presents; every such addition to his harem was peculiarly grateful to Asshurbanapal. Subsequently, however, Yakinlu again fell into disgrace, and was deposed; perhaps not without the co-operation of his ten sons, who all presented themselves, with valuable presents, at Asshurbanapal’s court, to make application for the vacant throne. It was given to one of them, called Azebaal; the rest were bought off with honours. The period to which these events belong cannot be exactly determined; it is possible that they may have some connection with the fact that Asshurbanapal’s brother Shamash-shum-ukin succeeded in rousing the vassals in the west to rebellion. In connection with a campaign which was undertaken against the Arab prince Yauta about 640 B.C., the towns of Ushu and Akko were punished in exemplary fashion, for negligent payment of the tribute and for repudiating their allegiance. This may have been the last warlike action which an Assyrian army performed in the territory of Phœnicia, although an Assyrian governor of Simyra, with the rank of an eponymos, or limmu, is mentioned as late as the year 636 B.C.
Syria and Palestine did not escape the blows of fate whose force wrecked the Assyrian empire after Asshurbanapal’s reign. Hordes of Scythian horsemen, carrying bows and javelins, broke in from the north and penetrated as far as the frontiers of Egypt (about 625 B.C.). Presents from Psamthek I are said to have induced them to turn back. Before leaving Syria the stragglers plundered the sanctuary of Aphrodite at Askalon. The power of Egypt was again increased under the rule of Psamthek, for his special care was the creation of a mercenary army composed of Carians and Ionians, and so strong did it become that his son and successor, Neku II (608 B.C.), was able to go still further and attempt to recover the dominion which the Pharaohs of the New Kingdom had possessed in Syria. Josiah of Judah, who was foolhardy enough to oppose him at Megiddo, was by him defeated. Syria seems to have submitted to him, as far as the countries bordering the Euphrates. Gaza offered resistance, but was taken.
But it was only for a short time that Neku II could feel himself a conqueror. Nabopolassar sent his son Nebuchadrezzar against him, and at Carchemish on the Euphrates a battle was fought in the year 605 B.C. which Neku lost. Nebuchadrezzar could not at once completely follow up his victory, for he had to return to Babylon, where his father had in the meantime died. Still the Babylonians now had a free hand in Syria, and Neku did not again venture to face them.
[Sidenote: [586-532 B.C.]]
The Phœnicians had long learnt how to make the best of a foreign supremacy. A strong party which held it advisable to side with Nebuchadrezzar as the most powerful of the rivals for the lordship over Assyria, appears to have held the reins of government in Tyre, when Apries (Uah-ab-Ra) attained that of Egypt. The latter, as Herodotus relates, immediately on his accession, took the field against Sidon and gave battle to the Tyrians by sea; and then only does it appear that opinion changed and Tyre allowed herself to enter into negotiations with Egypt. Otherwise, in 587 Nebuchadrezzar would have had no grounds for not only proceeding with his army to renew the siege of Jerusalem, but also advancing against Tyre. Apries did not venture to march against the Babylonians, but left the Jews and Tyrians to their fate. Already in July, 586, the capital of the kingdom of Judah had been conquered: the town was destroyed and the people led away into exile in Babylonia. According to Ezekiel the Tyrians hailed the fall of Jerusalem with joy: the gate which barred the nations was broken, another commercial route was opened up. But according to Menander, in 587 Nebuchadrezzar had already begun to blockade Ithobaal II in his island. Tyre resisted longer than ever before, and Ithobaal II did not surrender for thirteen years (574), and probably then only because he was compelled to do so by the straits to which the isolation from the mainland and the cessation of all industries had reduced his subjects. The town was neither taken by storm nor plundered and ruined. Ithobaal’s family had to remove to Babylon, so that in case Baal II, to whom Nebuchadrezzar gave Tyre in fee, should prove insubordinate, the Babylonians might not want for pretenders to the crown. To frighten the Pharaohs from further attempts to interfere, Nebuchadrezzar undertook a campaign against Egypt (in 568). The Tyrians remained docile. Nabonidus still called Gaza the southernmost landmark of his kingdom.
The reign of Baal II, which lasted ten years (to 564), was followed by an interregnum, a period in which Tyre was not under kings, but under judges, suffets--that is, rulers who could lay claim to no sort of legal right. Thus Tyre was in a state of anarchy. Finally a party prevailed, which sent for a legitimate king from Babylon, namely Maharbaal (Greek Merbalos), who reigned four years. He was succeeded by his brother Hiram (III), who was also fetched from Babylon. The annals of Tyre place the transference of power into the hands of Cyrus, the Persian, in the fourteenth year of the twenty years’ reign of Hiram III (538 B.C.). As a matter of course, when Babylon fell into the hands of the Persians, Phœnicia, like the rest of Syria, also changed masters. It seems as though the wearisome siege of Tyre, under Nebuchadrezzar, and the period of anarchy which followed it, had stifled in the Tyrians the last remains of the desire for independence. Hiram’s passive demeanour may have been determined by doubt of the safety of his own throne, if not by considerations respecting his kinsmen who had remained at Babylon, and dread of the nomination of a rival king by Cyrus; and if Hiram possessed some of the hereditary wisdom of the former princes of Tyre, who appeared even to Ezekiel as in their way “wiser than Daniel,” he may also have recognised in the Persians the people to whom belonged the future in southwestern Asia.
The modest extent of Phœnicia did not, from the first, correspond to the inordinate number and distant position of the colonies, which the Phœnicians, chiefly for the sake of the successful preservation of their commercial interests, had been obliged to establish on foreign shores. The loss in internal strength and able-bodied population thus inflicted on the mother country, was not compensated by the treasures laid up in that mother country itself, whose surroundings permitted of no extension of territory, and whose own prosperity would have been permanently hazarded by any attempt at an aggressive increase of power. And if, in many instances, the despatch of emigrants may have disposed of an excess of population, nothing could prevent the colonies from becoming, in course of time, more and more estranged from the interest of the mother city, and attaining a position in which they were entirely dependent on their own resources. To sail from the Syrian coast to Gades (Cadiz), took eighty days in the time of the Greeks, and before that probably much longer, and it was necessary to traverse the whole of the Mediterranean. Even if Phœnicia had been spared the continual pressure of the exigencies of war, it would still have been impossible permanently to maintain the dominion over the colonies in their entire extent, and to prevent the development of independence. But the very period in which the Phœnicians had most to suffer from attacks of the Assyrians, when the inhabitants of Tyre had to confine themselves to the defence of their citadel in the sea, coincides with the time in which the Hellenes founded their colonies in Sicily. The immediate connection with the Phœnicians of the west was thus lost. The latter were now compelled to defend themselves against the adversary with their own arms, and, as it were, with a complete change of front. At the same time, in the beginning of the seventh century, according to all appearance, there arose in the land of Tarshish a native dynasty, whose representative in legend is the long-lived king, Arganthonius, who is supposed to have attained the considerable age of one hundred and fifty years, and the rulers of this dynasty no longer exclusively favoured the commerce of the Phœnicians. When, about the year 690, the merchant Chalæus of Samos, arrived there, he was able unmolested to sell so much silver, that he is said to have made sixty talents by the transaction, and his example was imitated, especially by Phœnician seamen. Wherever the Hellenic merchant or seaman was admitted, he began to cast the Phœnician into the shade, and when, in the reign of Psamthek I, Egypt made herself more than ever accessible to foreign intercourse, it was not the Phœnicians but the Hellenes who derived the most advantages from the fact, although it may be true that, at Neku’s bidding, the Phœnician seamen were the first who attempted the circumnavigation of Africa, and successfully accomplished it. In Cilicia, even before the Persian epoch, Hellenic civilisation had begun to be generally adopted, and about the same time at which Phœnicia became subject to Cyrus, the towns of Cyprus, which had long been for the most part Hellenic, passed, though only temporarily, under the supremacy of Egypt. From this date down to the time of Alexander the Great, the history of Phœnicia forms a part of the history of the Persian empire, while from the middle of the seventh century B.C. the history of the Phœnicians of the west, merges more and more in that of the city which there constituted herself the energetic mistress of the colonies; that history is connected in the closest fashion with the destinies of Carthage.[d]
FOOTNOTES
[7] [Pietschmann makes the beginning and end of his reign 969 and 936 B.C.]
IV. PHŒNICIA UNDER THE PERSIANS
Although Tyre does not appear to have lost its independence in its wars with Nebuchadrezzar, it was impossible that it should endure a siege of thirteen years without great injury to its prosperity. At the commencement of the Babylonian war it was evidently at the head of the Phœnician states; the people of Sidon and Aradus furnished its fleet with mariners and soldiers; the artisans of Byblus wrought in its dockyards. But from this time the pre-eminence of the Tyrians is lost. Aahmes II dispossessed them of Cyprus, though a family of Tyrian origin seems to have acquired the sovereignty in Salamis, which they retained till deprived of it by Evagoras. We do not find any mention made of the Phœnician naval states, as forming a part of the alliance into which the Babylonians, Lydians, and Egyptians entered, for the purpose of resisting the danger which threatened them all from the rising power of Cyrus. But whether they were connected during this time with Babylon, or, as is more probable, with Egypt, whose power had revived under Aahmes II, they would be equally in opposition to the policy of Persia; and it was as a preparatory step towards obtaining possession of the seacoast, that Cyrus secured himself an ally in Palestine, by showing the Jews other marks of favour, and allowing them to rebuild Jerusalem, in doing which they availed themselves of the aid of Sidon and Tyre in felling timber on Lebanon. Without this security, it would have been very impolitic in Persia to allow the fortification of a place of such natural strength as Jerusalem.
During the whole of his reign we find no mention made of his employing the Phœnician navy in his enterprises, which indeed were exclusively military. Towards its close he unquestionably meditated an expedition against Egypt; but his attention was drawn off to the nomadic nations on his northeastern frontier, in warfare with whom he lost his life. Xenophon indeed attributes to him the conquest of Cyprus, Phœnicia, and Egypt, in his Cyropædia; but his assertion has not obtained credit. Cambyses, his son, almost immediately undertook an expedition against Egypt, in which he employed the naval forces of the Phœnicians. Both Cyprus and Phœnicia gave themselves up unresistingly to the power which was evidently destined to inherit the ascendency in Western Asia, previously possessed by Babylon. When the conquest of Egypt was effected, he wished to attack Carthage; but the Phœnicians refused, alleging the religious obligations which forbade them to take part in a war against their own descendants. Cambyses had no means of compelling them; he had no fleet of his own; they had given themselves up, by preference rather than necessity, to the Persians. The Cyprians had not the same motive as the Phœnicians for refusing to act against Carthage; but the strength of the naval armament lay in the Phœnician ships, and Cambyses desisted from his project.
[Sidenote: [525-466 B.C.]]
In the more perfect organisation, both of its revenues and its forces, which the Persian monarchy owed to Darius, the navy of Phœnicia became a regular and very important part of the public power. By its means Darius made himself master of the islands on the coast of Asia Minor. Along with Palestine and Cyprus it formed the fifth of the twenty nomes into which his empire was divided, and they paid jointly a tribute of 350 talents--just half the money-tribute which was levied from Egypt. Although these nomes are called by the general name of satrapies, and had each a separate governor, it does not appear that the internal constitution of the several kingdoms was disturbed; at least, in Phœnicia and in Cyprus the native princes continued to reign.
The commercial prosperity of Tyre and Sidon remained unimpaired, except by the rivalry of their own colonies of Carthage and Cadiz; for the Persians, like the Turks and Tartars, never became themselves a maritime power. The rich traffic of Arabia and the East still passed through the hands of the Phœnicians, and their manufactories of purple and glass were in full activity. Throughout the long struggle between Greece and Persia, which began with the burning of Sardis, the Phœnicians constituted the naval strength of the Persian armaments. The Cilician and Egyptian troops, destined for the reduction of Cyprus, were conveyed to that island in Phœnician ships. In the conflict by sea and land which subsequently took place, the Phœnician fleet was defeated by that of the Ionian Greeks; but the Persians having been at the same time successful by land, the revolt was suppressed, and Cyprus, after a year’s independence, returned to its subjection. The Persian commanders proceeded from the conquest of Cyprus to attack the Ionian cities themselves. A naval force of 600 vessels was assembled for the reduction of Miletus, the city of Aristagoras, by whom the Ionian revolt had been instigated, among which the Phœnicians were conspicuous for their zeal and bravery. In the sea-fight off the island of Lade, opposite to Miletus, they defeated the Ionians, who were deficient in naval training and discipline, and weakened by the defection of the greater part of the Samians. The conquest of Miletus speedily followed; and the Phœnician fleet, having subdued the islands of Asiatic Greece, crossed over to the Thracian Chersonesus. Miltiades, afterwards the conqueror of Marathon, narrowly escaped capture by one of their vessels, and his son Metiochus fell into their hands. It was no doubt by means of the Phœnician fleet, as well as that of the Ionians, that the islands of the Ægean were reduced, and the land forces of Persia conveyed to Marathon, though no specific mention is made of them in the subsequent operations.
When Xerxes carried out the project of a renewed invasion of Greece, which Darius had been prevented by death from executing, we find the Phœnicians bearing a conspicuous part among the naval forces which he assembled for that purpose. To them, in conjunction with the Egyptians, was committed the construction of the bridges of boats, by which the Hellespont was passed. The Phœnicians were also engaged in the construction of the canal, by which Xerxes cut through the isthmus which joins Mount Athos to the mainland, thus avoiding the fate which had befallen the fleet of Mardonius. They alone had sufficient experience in works of this kind to make the sides of their excavation a gradual slope; the other nations who were employed in it dug perpendicularly down, and increased their own labour by the falling in of the sides. Before crossing the Hellespont, Xerxes mustered his troops near Abydos, and caused his naval forces to try their skill and speed against each other by a contest in the Straits, in which the Phœnicians of Sidon were victorious over the Greeks as well as over the other barbarians. They furnished to the armament which assembled at Doriscus and the mouth of the Hebrus, 300 ships; the Egyptians sending 200, and the people of Cyprus 150. The names of their several commanders, probably their kings, have been preserved by Herodotus; Tetranestus the son of Anysus the Sidonian; Mapen the son of Sirom the Tyrian; and Merbaal the son of Agbaal the Aradian.
[Sidenote: [466-390 B.C.]]
We do not hear again of the Phœnician navy, until the Athenians, who had been left predominant in Greece and at the head of her naval confederacy, transferred the war to Cyprus and the coast of Cilicia. When the Persian generals, Artabazus and Megabyzus, mustered their troops in Cilicia for the reconquest of Egypt, they marched through Syria and Phœnicia, gathering the naval forces of this latter country on their way. After the main body of the Athenians had surrendered in the island Prosopitis, a reinforcement of fifty triremes, which had sailed into the Mendesian mouth of the Nile, in ignorance of what had happened, was attacked by the Phœnician fleet and almost entirely destroyed. The Athenians being thus threatened with the loss of their ascendency in the eastern part of the Mediterranean, Cimon, the conqueror at the Eurymedon, was sent with a fleet of two hundred triremes to occupy Cyprus. He attacked Citium, but died before it was reduced; his successor, Anaxicrates, hearing of the approach of a Phœnician and Cilician armament, sailed out to meet them, and defeated them off Salamis in Cyprus. Many of their ships were sunk, a hundred with their crews taken, and the remnant pursued to the coast of Phœnicia. This success, however, was not followed up by the Athenians, who returned almost immediately to their own country.
The Egyptians having revolted from Persia and set Amyrtæus [Amen-Rut] on the throne in the year 405, endeavoured to possess themselves of Phœnicia, the great source of the naval power of Persia; but their plan was frustrated by this return of the Phœnician fleet. We next find them mentioned (394 B.C.) as auxiliaries of Athens in the destruction of the naval superiority which Sparta had gained by the battle of Ægospotami. Persia, which had aided Sparta in the Peloponnesian war, faithful to its policy of distracting Greece by siding with the weaker party, and alarmed at the progress of Agesilaus in Asia Minor, raised by its emissaries a war in Greece, which occasioned the recall of the Spartan king. At the same time Pharnabazus collected a naval armament from Cyprus and Phœnicia to attack the Spartan fleet at Cnidus. The Athenian forces were commanded by Conon, and in the battle which ensued, the Spartans were defeated at sea with the loss of fifty triremes and many of the crews, who after swimming ashore were made prisoners by the land forces. The victorious fleets pursued their way to Greece, and being left by Pharnabazus under the command of Conon, assisted in rebuilding the walls of Athens.
From this time it appears probable that more intimate and permanent relations were established between Phœnicia, and Athens. Phœnicians settled there, and had their own places of worship and interment.
[Sidenote: [390-350 B.C.]]
The cities of Phœnicia were involved in the consequences of the war which arose between the Persians and Evagoras of Cyprus. Being forced into hostilities, he did not confine himself to the defence of his own kingdom, but reduced nearly the whole island, sent a fleet against Phœnicia, and took Tyre, according to Isocrates, by assault. In the incidental mention of Phœnician affairs which we thus gain from the Greek historians, Tyre appears as the predominant state, in naval strength, while Sidon was the most flourishing and wealthy, and, as being one of the residences of the kings of Persia, was more difficult to detach from its allegiance.
We next find Phœnicia engaged in the extensive revolt of the Persian provinces, which was encouraged by the successful resistance of the Egyptians under Nectanebo, the hostility of Sparta, and the disaffection of the Asiatic satraps. Nearly the whole maritime region from Egypt to Lycia, including Phœnicia and Syria, Cilicia, Pamphylia, and Pisidia, was in league to throw off the yoke of the Great King; Sparta aided them by a land force, sent to Egypt under Agesilaus, and the Athenian Chabrias commanded the fleet. Tachus, the king of Egypt, successor of Nectanebo I, advanced with an army into Palestine and began to reduce the strong places which were held by the Persians; but in the meantime disaffection had arisen among his subjects and the army, and he was compelled to abandon his kingdom and take refuge in Persia. Artaxerxes Mnemon died soon after, in the year 358 B.C. During the first part of the reign of his successor Ochus, Egypt, being successful in maintaining its independence against his feeble attempts for its reconquest, appears to have acquiesced in his possession of Phœnicia; but now Egypt was invited to take part in a revolt. The satrap and generals of Ochus [Artaxerxes III], who resided in the territory of Sidon, had treated its inhabitants with great insolence, and in a general assembly of the Phœnician cities held at Tripolis (352 B.C.), it was determined to renounce their submission to Persia. They began by destroying the royal residence and the stores of forage collected for the use of the cavalry, and put to death the Persians from whom they had received injuries. Having thus provoked to the utmost the hostility of Ochus, they raised a numerous fleet of triremes, hired foreign mercenaries, prepared arms and stores, and sent a message to Nectanebo inviting him to join them.
[Sidenote: [350-345 B.C.]]
Even the sluggish nature of Ochus was roused by these insults to his authority, and he prepared to take a terrible vengeance upon Phœnicia, and especially upon Sidon. He assembled a large force of infantry and cavalry at Babylon, with which (351 B.C.) he began his march towards the coast, commanding Belesys the satrap of Syria, and Mazæus the satrap of Cilicia, to unite their forces and invade Phœnicia. Four thousand Grecian mercenaries, however, whom Tennes the king of Sidon had received from Egypt, commanded by Mentor of Rhodes, sufficed along with the native troops to drive back both the satraps. Meanwhile Cyprus had followed the example of Phœnicia. The nine petty kings who governed an equal number of towns, in subordination to Persia, asserted their own independence. Evagoras, whom we have formerly known as tyrant of Salamis, had been assassinated soon after the termination of his war with Persia, but had left two sons, Pnytagoras and Evagoras. Pnytagoras, the elder, had been expelled by his younger brother; but the Persians had reinstated him, and given Evagoras a command in Asia. Idrieus, the prince of Caria, who had remained faithful to Persia amidst the general defection of the maritime states of Asia, sent a fleet of forty triremes to attack Salamis; Evagoras and the Athenian Phocion brought eight thousand mercenary foot-soldiers, and began the siege on the land side. The island was flourishing, as the result of several years of peace, and the hope of plunder drew adventurers from the opposite coasts of Syria and Cilicia, by whom the army of Evagoras and Phocion was soon swollen to double its former amount, so that dismay and apprehension prevailed not only in Salamis, but among the rulers of the minor states.
[Sidenote: [345-333 B.C.]]
While Ochus was on his march from Babylon, Tennes the king of Sidon, alarmed at the magnitude of the forces which were about to be brought against him, sent Thessalion, a confidential minister, to treat with the Persian king for the betrayal of the city when his army should appear before it, promising besides, his advice in the conduct of the expedition against Egypt, the localities of which he knew accurately. Ochus joyfully accepted the offer; but his pride was so much offended when Thessalion demanded, on behalf of Tennes, the pledge of the royal right hand, that he ordered him forthwith to be beheaded. An exclamation of Thessalion, that the king might do as he pleased, but that without the aid of Tennes his projects would fail, recalled him to a better mind, and he gave the pledge of his right hand,--the most sacred in the estimation of the Persians,--and proceeded on his march through Syria. The Sidonians had availed themselves of the king’s delay to make ample preparations for defence. They had collected a fleet of more than a hundred quinqueremes and triremes, fortified themselves with a wall and triple fosse, and carefully drilled their youth in martial exercises. But all was frustrated by the treachery of Tennes, and Mentor, the commander of the Egyptian mercenaries. Under the pretext of going to attend a general council of the Phœnician states, Tennes led one hundred of the most illustrious citizens of Sidon to the Persian camp, and betrayed them into the hands of Ochus, by whom they were put to death, as the alleged authors of the revolt. As he advanced towards the city, he was met by five hundred of the Sidonians with the branches of supplication in their hands. Before he gave an answer to their petition, he asked Tennes whether he was confident that he could place the city in his hands. Tennes replied that he could; and Ochus, who desired to have an opportunity of signal vengeance upon Sidon, which might strike terror into the other revolted states, not only refused the capitulation for which they supplicated, but caused them all to be put to death. It remained for the consummation of the treachery of Tennes to persuade the Egyptian mercenaries to admit the Persian troops within the walls.
The Sidonians had previously burnt their own fleet, that none might withdraw from the common danger; and now reduced to despair, they shut up themselves, their children and their wives in their houses, and set them on fire. Including slaves, forty thousand persons are said thus to have perished; and so large was the treasure buried in the ashes of the conflagration, that the king sold for many talents the right of extracting it. This tale of unexampled perfidy and cruelty terminated in a signal display of retributive justice. Tennes, having served the purposes of Ochus, was put to death by him, or, knowing that this fate was designed for him, attempted suicide; but wavering in his purpose, was killed by his wife, who immediately slew herself upon his body.[8] Retribution awaited Persia also. Sidon lost by this event her chief naval forces, but became again a flourishing city under kings of its own. The cruelty of Persia, however, was never forgotten; and when Alexander invaded Phœnicia, Sidon opened her gates to him. Cyprus was reduced soon after. Salamis was the last place which held out.
Ochus, who had at first favoured the claim of Evagoras, listened to the accusations of his enemies, and adopted the cause of Pnytagoras. Evagoras afterwards cleared himself from their charges, and received a government in Asia from the Persian king; but being guilty of malversation in his office, he escaped to Cyprus, where he was seized and put to death. Pnytagoras submitted to the Persians, and was confirmed in his sovereignty, and he held it to the time of Alexander, in whose service he engaged, commanding the fleet which besieged Tyre.
The conquest of Egypt, which soon followed that of Phœnicia, was the last rally of the Persian power, before its final struggle and overthrow. In the interval between the conquest of Phœnicia and the invasion of Asia by Alexander, Athens, the chief maritime state of Greece, was occupied with the protection of her own independence against the growing power of Macedonia, and Persia was left quietly to enjoy the command which she had acquired over the fleets of Cyprus, Phœnicia, and Egypt. Her interference in Grecian politics was confined to sending a force to aid the Perinthians in their resistance to Philip, and supporting, with her gold, that party in Athens, which, by opposing Macedonia, delayed the attack that had been long anticipated, when Greece should be united under a single head. Ochus, on his return from Egypt, gave himself up to the congenial vices of the Persian court, tyranny and luxury; but he had two able ministers, Mentor the Rhodian, who governed his western provinces, and Bagoas, the eunuch, the eastern. He had become odious to his subjects, and was killed by Bagoas (338 B.C.). Arses his youngest son, whom Bagoas raised to the throne, in the hope of ruling by his means, soon showed the purpose of avenging his father’s murder, and shared his fate in the third year of his reign. His children having been put to death, and the direct royal line thus become extinct, Darius, a great-nephew of Artaxerxes Mnemon, was placed on the throne, nearly at the same time (336 B.C.) that Alexander became king of Macedonia and master of Greece, whose forces he immediately prepared to employ for the invasion of Asia.
[Sidenote: [333-332 B.C.]]
The battle of the Granicus (334 B.C.) had given to Alexander the possession of Asia Minor; by that of Issus (333 B.C.) Darius was driven beyond the Euphrates, and the whole coast of Phœnicia was left open to the Macedonians. Alexander appointed Menon to the satrapy of Cœle-Syria, and himself marched southward along the coast. On his way he was met by Strato, the son of Gerostratus, the king of Aradus and the adjacent territory, who offered him a golden crown, and surrendered to him the island of Aradus, with Marathus and some other towns on the opposite coast. Gerostratus himself, with Enylus of Byblus and the other kings of the Phœnicians and Cyprians, was at this time at Chios, with Pharnabazus and Autophradates who commanded the Persian fleet. Rejecting the offer of alliance made him by Darius, Alexander continued his march, received the submission of Byblus, and occupied Sidon at the invitation of the inhabitants, who remembered the cruelties of Ochus. Strato their king, who had been placed in the sovereignty by the Persians, and was upheld by them, favoured the cause of Darius, and was probably at this time serving in the Persian fleet, with the contingent of Sidon. He was deposed by Alexander; and Hephæstion, to whom the choice of a successor was left, called to the throne Abdalonymus, a remote scion of the royal family, at that time following the occupation of gardener in the suburbs.
Azemilcus, the king of Tyre, was with Autophradates; but ambassadors delegated by the community, and consisting of his son and the most illustrious men of the state, met Alexander on his way, professing, according to Arrian, that they were ready to submit to his command. They probably hoped that, satisfied with this nominal submission, he would pass onward to Egypt, and that they should not be compromised with the Persians, if Darius regained the ascendency. There were obvious reasons, however, why Alexander should not be content with anything less than complete possession of Tyre. It would have been dangerous for him to attack Egypt, while the Persians had the command of the sea; still more dangerous to follow Darius into Upper Asia, leaving behind him Tyre doubtful, and Egypt and Cyprus hostile. While he marched against Babylon, the Persian fleet would reconquer the seacoast and return to Greece, where Lacedæmon was openly hostile, and Athens retained rather by fear than affection. Tyre once secured, the naval power of Phœnicia, the strongest arm of Persia, would be at his command; for the mariners and the sailors would quit her service as soon as they found that their country was occupied by the Greeks. Cyprus would follow the example of Phœnicia; the expedition against Egypt might be easily effected, and the Persians being cut off from the sea, the march against Babylon might be undertaken with safety, and the advantage of an augmented fame. As a cover to his design he requested permission to enter the island, and sacrifice to Melkarth [Hercules] the tutelary god of Tyre, and the progenitor of the Macedonian kings. The Tyrians were not imposed upon, and returned for answer that there was a temple of Melkarth in Palætyrus on the mainland, in which he was at liberty to sacrifice. He prepared therefore to possess himself of the island by force, and the Tyrians to defend themselves.
Probably, had the question of surrender been decided by the wishes of the upper classes, Tyre would have passed quietly into the hands of Alexander. Those who are in possession of honour and wealth are not disposed to put them to hazard for the sake of national independence; they are rather eager to gain merit by submission and co-operation. But in the minds of the common people there arises in such a crisis a passionate, unreasoning sentiment of patriotism, which prepares them to dare and endure everything for the sake of their country. The stubborn resistance of the Canaanites to the children of Israel, the self-devotion of the Sidonians, the desperate struggle of the Carthaginians when their city had been doomed to destruction by the Romans, the horrors of the last siege of Jerusalem, prove what fierce determination characterised the whole race to which the Phœnicians belonged. Perhaps a tradition still lived among the Tyrians, that the kings of Assyria and Babylon, in the days of their highest power, had been foiled in the attempt to possess themselves of their island city. Nor was success altogether hopeless, according to the calculation of probabilities. It might reasonably be expected that, instead of Darius wasting his time in fruitless offers, and not beginning to make preparations till Alexander had taken Tyre, a Persian force would erelong make its appearance in Syria, to interrupt the siege. The obstinate defence made by the Persian commander of Gaza shows what might have been the result had Persia been able to throw succours into Tyre. The boldness of the operation by which Alexander joined the island to the continent had no parallel in the practice of war and would have failed, notwithstanding his most strenuous exertions, had not the naval forces of Aradus and Sidon abandoned the cause of Phœnicia. Carthage, which was bound by ties of origin to Tyre, and had a common interest with her in preventing the naval preponderance of Greece in the Mediterranean, might be expected to give aid, and even in the event of defeat, afforded an asylum. At the moment when Alexander was about to begin the siege, a Carthaginian embassy arrived, bringing gifts to Melkarth, and encouraged the Tyrians to resist. No blockade could be formidable to a city which commanded the sea, and possessed ample wealth for the purchase of supplies. Had the Persian government displayed ordinary vigour, the delay of a seven months’ siege might have changed the history of the Eastern world.
Alexander perceived that his efforts would be vain as long as the Tyrians remained masters of the sea, and gave orders for the construction of new machines, and of a new mole of greater breadth, which, by inclining towards the southwest, instead of crossing the strait in a direct line, was less exposed to the action of the wind and current. While the necessary preparations were making, he himself went to Sidon to collect a fleet. The Sidonian triremes were with Autophradates, along with the ships of Aradus and Byblus; but their commanders, Gerostratus and Enylus, who had heard of the surrender of their respective cities, but not of the defeat of Alexander before Tyre, deserted the Persian cause, and at this critical moment brought their vessels into the harbour of Sidon. A fleet of eighty Phœnician ships was thus collected, which were joined by vessels from Rhodes, Soli, Mallus, and Lycia, and a penteconter from Macedonia.
Not long after, the kings of Cyprus, having heard of the defeat of Darius at Issus, and the occupation of Phœnicia by Alexander, anchored in the same harbour with 120 ships. The fate of Tyre was already decided. While these vessels were being fitted up for the peculiar service to which they were destined, Alexander with his cavalry and light troops made a rapid expedition of eleven days into Cœle-Syria, where he repelled the Arabs of the Desert, who had interrupted his soldiers in cutting down wood on Anti-Libanus, and made terms with the inhabitants of the country. Returning to Sidon, he found that Cleander had arrived from the Peloponnesus with 4000 Greek mercenaries, and having manned his ships with his bravest soldiers, in order to avoid those naval manœuvres in which the Tyrians were more skilful, and to fight hand to hand from the decks, he set sail for Tyre in order of battle, leading in person the right division of the fleet, and anchored in the northern roadstead opposite to the Sidonian harbour. In his absence the construction of the new mole had been proceeding rapidly, though not without obstacles. The Macedonians had thrown whole trees with their branches into the sea, and covered them with a layer of stones, on which other trees were again laid. The Tyrian divers, approaching the mole unseen, laid hold of the projecting branches, and dragging them out, brought down with them large portions of the superincumbent mass. In spite of these exertions, the mole was nearly completed.
Notwithstanding the proximity of Sidon, the Tyrians had not yet heard of the accession of the Cyprian and Phœnician fleets, and were dismayed at the sight of the large force under Alexander’s command. They renounced the intention of giving him battle, began to transport their children, wives, and aged men to Carthage, and blocked up the mouths of their harbours with a line of triremes ranged side by side. As the Tyrian fleet did not come out against him, he sailed towards the city; and finding it impossible to force his way into the Sidonian harbour, he attacked and sunk the three outermost of the triremes, and then anchored under the lee of the mole, which had again advanced nearly to the walls of the city. The next day the Cyprian fleet stationed itself off the Sidonian harbour, the Phœnician off the Egyptian, near that part of the mole on which Alexander’s own tent was pitched. The attack upon the walls was resumed, and every device for assault or defence known in ancient warfare was put in force on both sides.
Defeated in this way, the Tyrians resolved to attack the Cyprian fleet, and took their measures for the purpose with the utmost secrecy. They spread sails before the mouth of the harbour, so that their operations could not be overlooked; they chose for their attack the hour of noon, when the sailors were at their meal, or engaged in their other avocations, and when Alexander had retired to his tent, pitched on that side of the mole which was most remote from the Sidonian harbour. To avoid alarm they came out of port in single file, rowing gently and in silence, till they were near the enemy, when they plied their oars vigorously, and the celeustæ set up the customary shout of signal and exhortation. Alexander had remained that day a shorter time than usual in his tent, and speedily returned to the place where the fleet was stationed. The surprise had been complete; the Tyrians had found the Cyprian ships deserted, or hastily manned in the midst of confusion and alarm; they had already sunk the ships of Pnytagoras, Androcles, and Pasicrates, and were fast disabling the others and driving them on shore. His first object was to prevent any more of the Tyrian fleet from coming out of the harbour, for which purpose he directed his own ships, as fast as they could be got ready, to station themselves before its mouth, thus hindering both the egress of reinforcements, and the return of the others if they should be unsuccessful. He placed himself on board one of those which lay on the southern side of the mole, and sailed round the island to come upon the Tyrian fleet unawares from the north. This movement, though unseen by those who were fighting off the harbour, was perceived by the Tyrians on the walls, who called aloud to them to return, but were unheard amidst the uproar of the battle. Repeated signals were made, but they did not perceive the approach of Alexander’s fleet till they were close upon them. They then turned and fled towards the harbour; a few only were able to enter, the rest were intercepted, and either disabled or taken. The soldiers and crews for the most part saved themselves by swimming to the friendly shore which was near at hand.
This victory allowed the Macedonians to carry on their unobstructed operations against the wall. But its height and solidity opposite to the mole baffled their efforts to make a breach in it, and they were equally unsuccessful in an attack made at midnight by the floating batteries on the part near the Sidonian harbour. A storm had suddenly arisen; the quadriremes, which had been fastened together and covered with planks to afford footing to the soldiers, were torn asunder and dashed against each other, the men who were stationed on them being precipitated into the water. In the darkness and noise, signals could not be seen, nor the word of command heard. The soldiers overpowered the pilots, and compelled them to seek the shore, which they reached in confusion and with much damage. The Tyrians began a second wall within the first, that they might still have a defence, in the event of a breach being effected; but their fears were indicated by the awakening of superstition. It was a prevalent belief that the gods abandoned a city which was about to fall into the hands of an enemy. A citizen reported that he had seen in a dream Apollo preparing to desert Tyre. He was not one of their ancient divinities; but the Carthaginians had brought a statue of him from Syracuse, and had placed it at Tyre, where it had attracted the veneration of the people. To prevent the desertion of the god, they bound his statue by a golden chain to the altar of their native deity, Melkarth. There were some who would have propitiated Saturn, as the Greeks and Latins called Moloch, by the sacrifice of a child of noble birth, according to the immemorial custom of the Phœnicians in times of public distress and alarm; but the wiser counsel of the elder men prevailed. It was probably, however, at this time that the Tyrians, having taken some Macedonians who were on a voyage from Sidon, put them to death upon the walls, in view of their countrymen, and cast their bodies into the sea. If any reliance had been placed on aid from Carthage, it was dissipated by the arrival of an embassy, which informed them that none could be expected. The republic had been exhausted by its wars in Sicily, and had not long before concluded an humiliating peace with Timoleon. They could only promise the Tyrians an asylum for their wives and children, part of whom had been transported thither before the capture of the city.
The attack upon the walls was carried on with the greatest energy, and repelled by the use of all the arts of defensive warfare. To deaden the blows of the battering-ram, and the force of the stones hurled from the catapults, bags of leather filled with seaweed were suspended from the walls. Tyre as a naval city abounded in ingenious mechanicians, who devised new engines for its defence. They erected on the walls circular machines, the interior of which was filled with several layers of yielding materials. These were set in rapid motion, and the darts and other missiles which struck upon them were either blunted and turned aside by the force of their rotation; or, if they penetrated beyond the surface, were stopped by the soft substances within. The Macedonians raised towers upon the mole, which had now advanced to the island, equalling the wall in height, and by throwing bridges from them to the battlements, endeavoured to pass over into the city. The Tyrian mechanicians constructed long grappling-hooks, which they fastened to ropes, and, throwing them out to a distance, laid hold of the soldiers on the towers. If their bodies were caught, they were miserably mangled; if the hook fixed itself on their shields, they were compelled either to abandon them, and expose their undefended bodies; or if, from a feeling of military honour, they clung to them, they were dragged over the tower and precipitated to the ground. Others of the assailants met with the same fate, having been entangled in nets, which rendered them unable to use their hands. Masses of red-hot metal were thrown from the machines, which among the dense crowd never fell ineffectually. A new mode of annoyance was devised against those who attempted to scale the walls. Sand intensely heated in shields of brass and iron was poured out upon them from above, and, penetrating between the armour and the skin, inflicted such intolerable pain that the soldiers threw off their coats of mail, and were pierced by the arrows and lances from the wall. With long scythes fixed to the end of yard-arms, the Tyrians cut the ropes and thongs by which the battering-rams were worked. Towards the end of the day they sallied from the walls, armed with hatchets, and a deadly struggle took place on the bridges, which ended in the Macedonians being driven back. Diodorus and Curtius, who are supposed to follow Clitarchus the son of Dinon, a general of Alexander, represent him as meditating to abandon the siege and march on Egypt after this repulse. This is not probable in itself, since his whole enterprise must have failed had he left Tyre behind him, not only unconquered, but triumphant.
The next day but one being calm, he ordered the ships on which the battering-rams were planted to be brought up against the wall, in which they soon made a breach. They then drew off, and two other ships were brought up on which the bridges and storming parties were placed. Admetus commanded one of these, Cœnus the other, Alexander keeping himself in reserve with a body of his guards, to attack wherever an opening should be made. The triremes were directed at the same time to sail to both the harbours, that they might force an entrance, if the attention of the Tyrians should be absorbed by the main assault. The vessels which carried the machines for throwing darts, or whose decks were manned with archers, were commanded to sail round the island, and, approaching as near as possible to the walls, to distract the attention of the troops upon them by simultaneous attacks on many points. The conflict was short, when once the bridges were laid to the breach in the wall, and the Macedonian soldiers could advance over a firm and level surface. Admetus was the first who mounted; he was killed by a lance at the moment of his setting foot upon the wall, and died exhorting his soldiers to follow him. Alexander, with his guards, immediately entered and directed his march towards the palace, as the readiest access to the city. The Phœnician fleet had in the meantime burst the boom by which the Egyptian harbour was closed, and dismantled the Tyrian ships or driven them ashore. The Sidonian harbour had no such defence, and was easily entered by the Cyprian fleet. The city being thus occupied on all sides, the Tyrians assembled round the Agenorium, where they were attacked by Alexander and killed or put to flight. Many of the inhabitants shut themselves up in their houses and died by their own hands; others awaited their fate at the doors of their houses; many mounted to the roofs and thence flung down stones and whatever was at hand on the heads of the soldiery.
[Sidenote: [332-323 B.C.]]
The Macedonians had been provoked by their obstinate resistance, and enraged at the recent murder of some of their comrades, as before mentioned, and little mercy was shown. The city was burnt; eight thousand were killed, and the rest, with the exception of those to whom the Sidonians gave shelter on board their vessels, sold for slaves to the number of thirty thousand, including the mercenary troops. Two thousand are said to have been crucified, as a reprisal for the death of the Macedonian prisoners. The king and the chief magistrates, with the Carthaginian deputation, had taken refuge in the temple of Hercules, and their lives were spared. Alexander offered sacrifice to him and led a naval and military procession in his honour, accompanied with gymnastic games and a torch race. He consecrated also to Hercules the battering-ram which had made the first breach in the walls, and a Tyrian ship, sacred to the service of the god, which he had captured. And thus, after a siege of seven months, Tyre was taken in July of the year 332 B.C. Alexander replaced the population, which had been nearly exterminated, by colonists, of whom a considerable part were probably Carians, a nation closely allied to the Phœnicians.
The capture of Tyre took place in July, that of Gaza in October. The following winter (331 B.C.) was occupied by Alexander in Egypt, partly in laying the foundation of Alexandria, which was destined to become the great commercial rival of the Phœnician cities. Having visited the oracle of Ammon, he returned in the ensuing spring to Tyre, where his fleet was assembled, sacrificed again to Hercules, detached one hundred Phœnician and Cyprian ships to the Peloponnesus, and appointed Cœranus as collector of the tribute of Phœnicia.
After the battle of Arbela, Alexander incorporated Syria, Phœnicia, and Cilicia in one province, of which he gave the command to Menes. He had broken the power of Tyre, but the commercial activity and maritime enterprise of Phœnicia remained unimpaired. The Phœnicians followed his army on the march to India for the purposes of traffic, and loaded their beasts of burden on their return through the desert of Gedrosia with the gum of the myrrh and the nard, which it yielded in such abundance as to scent the whole region with the fragrance which was diffused, as the army in its march crushed them under foot. The Phœnicians are mentioned first, along with the Cyprians, Carians, and Egyptians, as composing the crews of the ships which were to sail down the Hydaspes to the Indian Ocean and thence to the mouth of the Euphrates and the Tigris. After his return to Babylon, he commanded forty-seven Phœnician vessels of various rates to be constructed and then taken to pieces, conveyed overland to Thapsacus on the Euphrates, and put together again that they might descend the river to Babylon. They were manned from the Phœnicians engaged in the fishery of purple, and other seafaring people from the coast; and wherever in Syria or Palestine any one could be found possessed of nautical skill, if he were a freeman he was enlisted, if a slave purchased. It was one of his vast projects to colonise by their means the islands in the Persian Gulf and its seacoast--a region not less fertile, says Arrian, than Phœnicia itself. His views of conquest extended to the whole Arabian peninsula--a country whose marshes, he was told, yielded cassia; its trees, myrrh and frankincense; and its shrubs, cinnamon. This scheme, with others still more gigantic, was rendered abortive by his death at Babylon in 323 B.C.[b]
FOOTNOTES
[8] [Other authorities attribute this end to Tennes’ father, Strato, and its cause to the failure of an alliance with Tachus of Egypt against the Persians.]
V. PHŒNICIA UNDER THE GREEKS, THE ROMANS, AND THE SARACENS
Ptolemy, to whom Egypt fell in the first division of Alexander’s empire, almost immediately attempted the conquest of Syria and Palestine, agreeably to the policy which the sovereigns of Egypt have always adopted, when that country has been ruled by an enterprising king. The forces which Antipater had left there were unequal to its defence, and Ptolemy easily made himself master of them, Jerusalem alone offering any resistance. He placed garrisons in the Phœnician cities, of which he kept possession till the year 315 B.C., when Antigonus, returning victorious from his war in Babylonia, easily reduced the other towns of Phœnicia, and took Joppa and Gaza by storm, but met with an obstinate resistance from Tyre.
Only eighteen years had elapsed since its desolation by Alexander, but the elastic power of commerce had repaired its strength, and though joined to the mainland by his mole, it was nearly as unassailable by an enemy that did not command the sea as while it remained an island. Antigonus blockaded it by land, and collecting a body of eight thousand wood-cutters and sawyers, felled the cedars and cypresses of Lebanon, which were conveyed to the coast by one thousand yoke of oxen, and fashioned into a fleet at Tripolis, Byblus, and Sidon. With the ships constructed in Phœnicia, Rhodes, and Cilicia, he reduced Tyre at the end of fifteen months. His son Demetrius, however, having advanced to Gaza, was totally defeated there (312 B.C.) by Ptolemy, who regained possession of the whole coast of Palestine and Phœnicia, but was compelled almost immediately to resign it to Antigonus and retire into Egypt, having destroyed the fortifications of Akko (Acre), Joppa, Samaria, and Gaza, the first of which was the key of Syria, the second and third of Judea, and the fourth of Egypt. Having defeated the fleet of Ptolemy before Salamis in Cyprus, and reduced that island, which was a chief source of his naval power, Antigonus, in 307 B.C., with his son Demetrius, attempted without success the invasion of Egypt, and on their retreat Ptolemy again possessed himself for a short time of the seacoast of Phœnicia, with the exception of Sidon. False intelligence of a victory gained by Antigonus caused him to make a truce with Sidon and withdraw into Egypt. By the battle of Ipsus (301 B.C.), in which Antigonus lost his life, his son Demetrius was dispossessed of the throne of Syria. He still, however, retained Cyprus, and having obtained possession of the harbours of Tyre and Sidon, reinforced his garrisons in those cities, when required by Seleucus to surrender them, as belonging to his kingdom of Syria, in the new division of territory consequent on the battle of Ipsus. During the war between them, terminated by the surrender of Demetrius in 287 B.C., Ptolemy, who had conquered Cyprus, appears quietly to have reoccupied Phœnicia and retained it during his life.
[Sidenote: [301-63 B.C.]]
The possession of Phœnicia had become still more important to the kings of Syria, since Seleucus (300 B.C.) made Antioch on the Orontes, with the harbour of Seleucia at its mouth, a principal seat of his power. Hence a series of struggles between the Seleucidæ and the Ptolemies during the latter part of the third century B.C. Ptolemy Euergetes, the third of the dynasty, had marched an army into Syria in the beginning of his reign (246 B.C.), and had placed an Egyptian garrison in Seleucia, of which his son, Ptolemy Philopator, still kept possession, when Antiochus the Great undertook (218 B.C.) the reconquest of Syria and Phœnicia. He took Seleucia by assault; Tyre and Akko were put into his hands by the treachery of Theodotus, Ptolemy’s lieutenant; and Nicolaus, who commanded the Egyptian army and fleet, was defeated and driven to take refuge in Sidon. In the following year, however, Antiochus, having collected his forces at Raphia, between Gaza and the frontier of Egypt, was totally defeated by Ptolemy, and Phœnicia and Syria remained in the possession of the Egyptians till the death of Ptolemy and the succession of his infant son.
In the year 203 B.C. Antiochus led an army into Syria and Palestine, and recovered possession of them. The Egyptians sent a force under Scopas, which gained some temporary advantages, but they were defeated at Panium and shut up in Sidon, where they were compelled to surrender. Thus Phœnicia once more (198 B.C.) fell under the power of Syria.
Tyre suffered a severe blow, when Ptolemy Philadelphus constructed the harbour of Berenice on the Red Sea, and established a road with stations and watering places between that place and Coptos, reopening at the same time the canal which joined the Pelusiac branch of the Nile to the Gulf of Suez. The traffic of the Red Sea and Indian Ocean, which had hitherto passed from Eloth and Ezion-geber across the Desert to Rhinocolura, and thence been conveyed by Tyrian vessels to all parts of the Mediterranean, was now brought by the Nile or the canal to Alexandria. The opening of the safe and easy route by Kosseir and Coptos, which saved the dangerous navigation of the northern end of the Red Sea, gradually drew to Egypt the wealth that had previously flowed into Phœnicia.
The sufferings which the Syrians endured from the civil wars of the Seleucidæ induced them in the year 83 B.C. to place themselves under the dominion of Tigranes, king of Armenia, who took possession of Syria. This state of things lasted for fourteen years, when, in consequence of the victories of Lucullus, Syria and Phœnicia returned for a short time (67 B.C.) to the dominion of the Seleucidæ. Four years later Pompey reduced Syria into a Roman province, making Gaza, Joppa, Dora, and Turris Stratonis free.
[Sidenote: [63 B.C.-636 A.D.]]
The dominion of Rome, however, was exercised mildly; and though Tyre and Sidon ceased to have any political importance, they retained their ancient fame for nautical science, for the manufacture of glass, and the preparation of the purple dye. A school of philosophy arose here, whose doctrines, like those of Alexandria, combined Greek and oriental elements, and endeavoured to reconcile philosophy with theology. Strabo mentions several contemporaries, eminent in their day, whom Tyre and Sidon had produced. Philo, to whom we owe the translation of Sanchoniathon, was a native of Byblus; his pupil, Hermippus, of Berytus. Porphyry, whose original name was Malchus, was of Tyrian parentage, though born at Batanæa, on the eastern side of the Jordan. Berytus became the seat of a school of law, which for three centuries furnished the eastern portion of the empire with pleaders and magistrates. Marinus of Tyre, who lived in the early part of the second century after Christ, was the first author who substituted maps, mathematically constructed according to latitude and longitude, for the itinerary charts which had been in use before. The maps of Marinus, like those of Ptolemy, which were only an improvement upon them, must have been founded on records of voyages and travels, of which the measured or computed distances were translated into latitudes and longitudes. Nowhere could such records have abounded more than in Phœnicia, which for so many centuries had taken the lead of all other nations in navigation and commerce. Had the invention of maps, in the modern sense, been due to the geographers and mathematicians of Alexandria, it is not probable that Ptolemy, himself a native of Alexandria, would have based his own work entirely on that of Marinus of Tyre.
After the sale of the empire by the Roman soldiery to Didius Julianus and his subsequent assassination (A.D. 193), Septimius Severus and Pescennius Niger were competitors for the purple. Niger, who commanded in the East, had his headquarters at Antioch, and all Syria as far as the Euphrates and the coast of Phœnicia was under his power. Antioch and Berytus favoured the cause of Niger; Laodicea and Tyre, through jealousy of their neighbours, that of Severus. On the news of Niger’s unsuccessful attempt to obstruct the march of Severus through the passes of Taurus, they destroyed the insignia of Niger, and proclaimed his rival. Niger sent against them his Mauritanian light troops, with orders to destroy the towns, and put the inhabitants to the sword. The commission was cruelly executed by the barbarians entrusted with it; they fell on the Laodiceans by surprise, and having inflicted great injury upon them, proceeded to Tyre, which they plundered and burnt after a great slaughter of the inhabitants. It had no longer the protection which its insular situation would have afforded it against an invasion of cavalry; Alexander had joined it permanently to the land.
Niger had been defeated by Severus in the battle of Issus (A.D. 194), and was soon after slain at Antioch. In his subsequent settlement of the affairs of the East (A.D. 201), Severus recruited the population of Tyre from the third legion, whose quarters had long been in Syria and Phœnicia, and rewarded the attachment of its inhabitants by giving it the title of Colony with the Jus Italicum. Its prosperity appears to have received only a transient check from its conflagration. A writer of the age of Constantine describes it as equalling all the cities of the East in wealth and commercial activity; there was no port in which its merchants did not hold the first rank. St. Jerome, about the end of the fourth century, in his Commentary on Ezekiel, speaks of it as the noblest and most beautiful city of Phœnicia, an emporium for the commerce of the world, and is at a loss how to reconcile its actual condition with the threat of its perpetual desolation.
[Sidenote: [636-1124 A.D.]]
The conquest of Phœnicia and Syria in the seventh century, by the Saracens, led to the establishment of an imperial dye-house at Constantinople, the products of which are repeatedly mentioned in the writings of Anastasius, the librarian of the Vatican, under the popedom of Leo III; but the Tyrian purple still enjoys its former celebrity, and is among the articles of luxury imported by the Venetian merchants into Lombardy in the time of Charlemagne.
Under the tolerant and enlightened sway of the caliphs, the civilisation of Phœnicia suffered no decay. At the time of the Crusades, Tyre retained its ancient pre-eminence among the cities of the Syrian coast, and excited the admiration of the warriors of Europe by its capacious harbours, its wall, triple towards the land and double towards the sea, its still active commerce, and the beauty and fertility of the opposite shore. To the manufacture of glass was added that of sugar, which for its medicinal virtues was carried to the remotest parts of the world. Joppa was at first the only harbour which the Christians possessed; but in the first ten years of the twelfth century, Baldwin, the successor of Godfrey on the throne of Jerusalem, reduced Antipatris, Cæsarea, Acre, Byblus, Tripolis, and Berytus. Sidon was induced to surrender (A.D. 1110) by the opportune arrival of a fleet from Norway, manned by Crusaders, and commanded by the brother of the king, which, passing through the British Channel and the Straits of Gibraltar, anchored in the port of Joppa. Tyre and Askalon alone remained in the hands of the infidels. Baldwin collected his forces (A.D. 1111) for an attack on the former city; but the Norwegian fleet had returned home after the capture of Sidon, and the ships which he hastily collected from the seacoast were of little value. The city had a numerous garrison, the troops, withdrawn from places less defensible, having thrown themselves into Tyre. Sieges were still conducted after the ancient manner, with the battering-ram and the balista. The besiegers made repeated attacks upon the walls, had forced the first and second, and at last brought up against the third two wooden towers, of such a height as to command the interior of the city, and covered with hides of oxen and camels to prevent their being set on fire; the besieged, however, had erected within towers of still greater height, from which they hurled Greek fire and combustibles of every kind upon the works of the Crusaders. Both the towers were utterly consumed. The approach of an army of twenty thousand men from Damascus was announced, and after a siege of four months, Baldwin, despairing of success, drew off his army to Acre and Jerusalem. From Tiberias the Christians made incursions into the territory of Tyre; but Baldwin having built a fort on the site of Palætyrus, undertook no further enterprises against the maritime towns during the remainder of his reign. No re-enforcements of ships and warriors arrived from the West, and the Christian power in the Holy Land was weakened by the dissensions of its chiefs.
His successor, Baldwin II, was taken prisoner in the year 1123, and the Sultan of Egypt was encouraged to attack Joppa with a fleet of ninety sail. The barons of the kingdom of Jerusalem assembled at Acre, appointed Eustace de Grenier viceroy, and sent a pressing message to the Venetians, who had set out with a powerful armament for the East, but had halted on the way to besiege Corfu. Before their arrival, however, the Egyptians had raised the siege and retired on Ibelim, where thirty thousand of them were totally defeated by eight thousand Christians, animated by the presence of their bishops and their holiest relics. The Venetian fleet followed the Egyptian to Askalon, and destroyed it in a battle before the walls of that fortress.
[Sidenote: [1124-1187 A.D.]]
The presence of such powerful auxiliaries encouraged the Christians to undertake aggressive operations, but it was difficult to decide whether Askalon or Tyre should be first attacked, the neighbours of each naturally considering it as the most formidable. The dispute was settled by an appeal to Heaven. Two pieces of parchment were placed in a box upon the altar, on one of which was written “Tyre,” and on the other “Askalon.” The child who was sent to make a choice drew forth that which was inscribed “Tyre,” and preparations were forthwith made for the siege, which began on the 15th of February, A.D. 1124. The Christians fortified themselves on the land side against the attempts to relieve the city which the Turks of Damascus might be expected to make, and began to construct machines with which to assail the walls. The population of Tyre, devoted to commerce, and become rich and luxurious by its means, was unwarlike; but the garrison was composed of Damascenes and Egyptians, who put in force all the known means for obstructing the progress of the siege. The tower of the Christians was set on fire, and only saved from destruction by the heroism of a pilgrim, who ascended it amidst its own flames and the missiles of the Tyrians. They were skilful swimmers, and under cover of night swam to the guardship of the Venetians, cut the cable by which it was anchored, and fastening another to the vessel drew it to the shore.
In expectation that the blockade by sea would be broken by a fleet from Egypt, or by land from Damascus, the Tyrians held out against assault and famine till the month of June. But no effective aid came from either quarter. The commander of Damascus twice marched as far as the Leontes; but the first time he withdrew at the sight of the Christian army, and the second he came to propose terms of capitulation. They were readily granted by the chiefs, though the common soldiers murmured that they were deprived of their hope of plunder, the infidels being allowed to remain in the city on payment of a moderate ransom, or to withdraw with their property. On the 25th of June the garrison marched out; the banners of the kingdom of Jerusalem, the republic of Venice, and the Count of Tripolis were hoisted on the towers, and Tyre once more became Christian. Its archbishopric was given four years after, with some diminution of the province, to William, an Englishman, and the best historian of the Holy Wars. Askalon was not reduced till the year 1153, when it surrendered to Baldwin III, after a siege of eight months.
[Sidenote: [1187-1453 A.D.]]
The kingdom of Jerusalem, which had been in a state of gradual decline during the twelfth century, notwithstanding the efforts made by Europe for its aid, was overthrown by Saladin in the year 1187, and the whole of the seacoast would have fallen into his power but for the heroic defence of Tyre. The battle of Tiberias, in which the army of the Cross had been annihilated, and the king Lusignan taken prisoner, had spread consternation among the Christians; one city after another had opened its gates to the conqueror. Conrad, the son of the Marquis of Montferrat, arrived off the harbour of Acre a few days after its surrender to the Saracens. He had heard nothing of the misfortunes of the Christians, but the light of the setting sun, falling on the banner of Saladin on the ramparts, showed him his danger, and with some difficulty he made his escape to Tyre.
The Count of Sidon, who had taken refuge there, and the castellan of Tyre were negotiating with Saladin for its surrender, and had already prepared to hoist his colours on the walls, as soon as he made his appearance before the gates. The people of Tyre, however, received Conrad with acclamations; the Count of Sidon fled to Tripolis, and preparations were made for the defence of the city. Saladin collected some ships to blockade Tyre by sea, and in the end of the month of December invested the city. Conrad had very few ships, but having possessed himself of some of Saladin’s fleet, which he had enticed to enter the harbour by the hope of a surrender, he manned them with his own troops, and attacking the remainder, drove them on shore. The enemy had taken advantage of his temporary absence to attempt to scale the walls; but he promptly returned and compelled them to retire with the loss of a thousand men. Saladin on this raised the siege, and did not resume it in the following spring. The archbishop, William of Tyre, had been engaged in soliciting aid from the Christian powers of the West, and had prevailed on the king of Sicily to send a fleet to Tyre with three hundred knights; other reinforcements arrived; the release of the captive king, Guy of Lusignan, gave unity to the Crusaders, and they became the assailants. In August of this year (A.D. 1189) the siege of Acre began, which ended, after a succession of extraordinary vicissitudes, in its capture by the united arms of Philip Augustus and Richard Cœur-de-Lion. By the pacification of August, 1192, Joppa is fixed as the southern, and Tyre as the northern boundary of the Christian territories in Palestine.
Tyre continued to flourish as a commercial city during the succeeding century, chiefly through the activity of the Venetians. In return for the assistance which they had rendered to Baldwin II, they had obtained for themselves the concession of a third part of the city and its dependent territory, the right of being governed by their own magistrates and tried by their own tribunals, and various commercial privileges throughout the extent of the kingdom of Jerusalem; and they succeeded in maintaining these rights, though often infringed.
The rise of the Mameluke power in Egypt was soon felt in the capture of Antioch (A.D. 1268), and the subsequent reduction of the principal towns of the seacoast. A temporary respite was obtained by the second expedition of Louis IX, in 1270, and of the son of Henry III, afterwards Edward I of England, in the following year. The dissensions which followed the death of the sultan Bibars (or Beybars) by whom Antioch had been taken, delayed the catastrophe which the nations of the West took no means to avert. The sultan Kalavun (Kalaoon) resumed the attack on the remains of the Christian kingdom. Margaret, the widow of John de Montfort, who held the principality of Tyre, entered into an agreement with him, by which she bound herself to withdraw from all alliance with the Christian princes who harboured evil designs against the sultan, to raise no new fortifications nor repair the old, and to divide with him the revenues of all territory which they might hold in common. Acre was again the scene on which the Christians and Saracens tried their strength. Kalavun died on the march from Egypt, but Ashraf, his son and successor, adopted his policy, and the siege was begun in the first week of April, 1291. Since its reconquest by Philip and Richard, it had taken the place of Tyre as the great mart of the Syrian coast; every language of the East or West found an interpreter within its walls. It was far more strongly fortified than when it defied for two years the attacks of Saladin, and forces were assembled in it amply sufficient for its defence, had they been wielded with vigour and unanimity. But dissension reigned among them. On the 18th of May, 1291, the whole city with the exception of the fort of the Templars, was occupied by Ashraf, and this was delivered up to him by capitulation on the next day. The few places which the Christians still held in Syria attempted no defence. The Frank inhabitants of Tyre abandoned it on the evening of the day on which Acre surrendered, and the Saracens entered it the following morning.
[Sidenote: [1479-1516 A.D.]]
Othman, the founder of the present Turkish empire, began his reign in A.D. 1288, three years before the reduction of Syria by the sultan of Egypt. From the conquest of Asia Minor and the Danubian provinces of the Greek empire, the Turks advanced in the middle of the fifteenth century to the capture of Constantinople (A.D. 1453), and spread a panic through Europe by the sack of Otranto in A.D. 1479. The progress of conquest was checked during the reign of Bajazet II; but his successor, Selim I, in A.D. 1516, conquered Syria in a single campaign, and since that time it has been subject to the Ottomans, the most barbarous of all the conquerors by whom it has successively been subdued. The consequent decline of its prosperity has been rapid and complete. The insecurity of life and property has been fatal alike to manufacturing industry, to agriculture, and to commerce; the traveller, if without arms or escort, has pursued his researches in perpetual danger of being plundered or killed, and with the certainty of vexatious delays and interruptions; the means of communication have been suffered to fall into decay, and no effort has been made to check the process by which nature is destroying the harbours of the coast. Neither sieges nor earthquakes have done so much as Turkish oppression and misrule to make Tyre what the traveller now sees, “a rock for fishermen to spread their nets upon.”[b]