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HISTORY OF ART IN PHOENICIA AND ITS DEPENDENCIES.
VOL. I.
HISTORY OF
t in flhcenidu
AND ITS DEPENDENCIES
FROM THE FRENCH
OF
GEORGES PERROT,
PROFESSOR IX THE FACULTY OF LETTERS, PARIS ; MEMBER OF THE INSTITUTE,
AND
CHARLES CHIPIEZ.
ILLUSTRATED WITH SIX HUNDRED AND FORTY-FOUR ENGRAVINGS IN THE TEXT t AND TEN STEEL AND COLOURED PLATES.
IN TWO VOLUMES.— VOL. I. TRANSLATED AND EDITED BY
WALTER ARMSTRONG, B.A., OXON.,
AUTHOR OF "ALFRED STEVENS," ETC.
: CHAPMAN AXP HALL, LIMITED.
ork: A. C. ARMSTRONG AND SON. 1885.
ILontion : R. CI.AY, SONS, ANO TAVLOK,
liREAD STREET HII.I..
r\
CONTENTS.
CHAPTER I.
THE PHCENICIAN CIVILIZATION".
PAGE
§ i. The Situation of Syria and the Configuration of the Phoenician
Coast i — IT
§ 2. The Phoenicians; their Origin and their First Establishment . . . n — 56
§ 3. Religion 56—83
§ 4. The Phoenician Writing 83 — 93
§ 5. General Remarks upon the Study of Phoenician Art 93 — 102
CHAPTER II.
ON TH GENERAL PRINCIPLES AND CHARACTERISTICS OF PHCENICIAN
ARCHITECTURE.
§ i. Materials and Construction . .' 103 — 113
§ 2. Forms . . : 113 — 125
§ 3. Decoration 126 — 141
CHAPTER III.
SEPULCHRAL ARCHITECTURE.
i. The Ideas of the Phoenicians as to a Future Life " 142 — 148
§ 2. The Phoenician Tomb 149 — 179
§ 3. Sarcophagi and Sepulchral Furniture 179 — 213
§ 4. The Phoenician Tomb away from Phoenicia • 213 — 250
viii CONTENTS.
CHAPTER IV.
SAC'RF.D ARCHITKCTfRK.
$ i. The Temple in Phoenicia 251—272
§ 2. The Temple in Cyprus 272 — 301
§ 3. The Temples of Go/o and Malta 301 --318
§ 4. The Temples of Sicily and Carthage 318 325
§ 5. On the General Characteristics of the Phoenician Temple .... 325 332
CHAPTER V.
CIVIL ARCHITECTURE.
§ i. Fortified Walls ... 333—364
§ 2. Towns and Hydraulic Works ... 364 — 384
§ 3. Harbours • . 385—410
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS.
PLATE.
PAGE
I. Three Cypriot heads To face 264
TAIL-PIECES, &c.
Cypriot head, Louvre Title.
Chapter I. Funerary cone, from Sidon 102
,, II. Cone-shaped seal, French National Library 141
,, III. Sardinian scarab 250
„ IV. Coin of Mallos 332
„ V. Sardinian scarab 410
FIG.
1. The Nahr-el-Fedar 5
2. Plan of the passes at the Nahr-el-Kelb 7
3. View of the passes at Nahr-el-Kelb 9
4. Syria in the time of the Egyptian domination 17
5. Tyre before the siege of Alexander 21
6. Tomb at Amrit 24
7. The walls of Arvad 25
8. Phoenician merchant galley 34
9. Phoenician war galley 34
10. Map of the Phoenician colonies in the Mediterranean basin 35
n, 12. Carthaginian coins 52
13. Votive stele from Carthage 53
14, 15. Votive steles from Carthage 54
16. Fragment of a votive stele from Carthage 55
17. Descent from the Pass of Legnia, in the Lebanon 58
18. The sources of the River Adonis 59
19. Coin of Byblos < 61
20. Astarte 65
21. Bes „ 65
22. Pygmy >. 66
VOL. I. b
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS.
Fill. 1'AGE
23. Upper part of the stele of Jehawmelek 69
24 Resef 72
25. Baal-Hammon 74
26. From a bronze in M. Peretie's collection 78
27. Child god 79
28. Votive stele 81
29. 30. From a Carthaginian votive stele So
31. Egyptian writing-case 86
3^. Fragment of a bron/e cup 90
33. Fragment of a sepulchral cippus 92
34. Phoenician wall of Eryx 97
35. Carthaginian mason's mark 98
36. Phoenician platter 99
37. Rock-cut house at Amrit 104
38. Rock-cut walls at Saida 104
39. Fragment of the map of Amrit 105
40. The tabernacle of Amrit 105
41. Remains of the walls of Sidon 106
42. Substructure of one of the temples at Baalbek 107
43. Square pier from Gebal 109
44. Wall of Tortosa no
45. Masonry from the Tower of the Algerines . , . , no
46. Wall of a temple at Malta in
47. The wall of Byrsa 112
48. Entablature from a temple at By bios 114
49. Capital at Golgos 117
50. Capital from Edde 117
51. Cypriot capital 118
52. 53. Cypriot capitals 119
54. Ornament from a Cypriot stele 120
55- Cypriot capital 120
56. Cypriot capital 121
57. The Serpent Grotto 122
58. Coin of Cyprus 123
59. Egyptian coffer 126
60. Phoenician cornice 127
61. Details of a cornice 127
62. Sculptured fragment 128
63. Cornice on a tomb 128
64. Moulding from a plinth 128
65,66. Mouldings from the base of a pyramidion 128
67. Coin of Byblos 129
68. Elevation of the doorway at Oum-el-Awamid and section of the lintel . . 129
69. Winged globe 130
70. Winged globe with crescent 130
7 1 . Sidereal symbols from a Carthaginian stele 131
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS. xi
FIG.
72. Marble column ........................ 131
73. Alabaster slab ........................ 132
74. Egyptian winged sphinx .................... 133
75. Phoenician scarabreoid ..................... 134
76. Alabaster slab ........................ 134
77. Alabaster slab ........................ 135
78. Altar with stepped ornament .................. 136
79. Rosettes enlarged ....................... 137
80. Stone trough ......................... 137
Si. Fragment of relief ....................... 138
82, 83. Candelabra figured on a stele ................. 138
84. Fragment of a sculptured slab .................. 139
85. Egyptian palette ........................ 140
86. Sarcophagus of Esmounazar ................... 143
87. Section of the Burdj-el-Bezzak ................. 150
88. Part of the Cemetery of Amrit ................. 151
89. Tomb at Amrit ........................ 152
90. 91. Tomb at Amrit ...................... 152
92, 93. Plan and section of a tomb at Amrit ............. 153
94. The Meghazils of Amrit .................... 155
95. Tomb at Amrit ........................ 157
96. 97. Plan and section of a tomb at Amrit ............. 158
98. Tomb at Amrit restored .................... 159
99. Longitudinal section of a tomb at Amrit ............. 159
100, 101. The Burdj-el-Bezzak ..................... 161
102. Section of a tomb at Sidon ................... 162
103, 104. Wells in a tomb at Sidon .................. 163
105. Longitudinal section of a tomb at Sidon .............. 164
1 06. Plan of a portion of the necropolis of Sidon ............ 165
107. Section through line A, B, c, of Fig. 106 .............. 165
108. Section through D, E ...................... 166
109. Section through N, M ...................... 166
no. Section through K, L ...................... 166
in. Tomb of Esmounazar ..................... 167
112. Section of the tomb of Esmounazar restored ............ 168
113. The "Tomb of Hiram" .................... 171
114. Necropolis of Adloun ..................... 173
115. Entrance to a Giblite tomb ................... 175
1 1 6. Interior of a Giblite tomb ................... 177
117. Section showing the soundings in the Giblite tombs ......... 178
1 1 8. Graves dug in the rock at Gebal ................. 180
119. Two Giblite sarcophagi ..................... 181
1 20. Sarcophagus from Oum-el-Awamid ................ 182
121. Cippus from Sidon ....... - ............... 182
122. Sandstone coffin ....................... 183
123. Leaden coffin ......................... 183
xii LIST OK ILLUSTRATIONS.
KIO. I'Ar.E
124. Sarcophagus of Sidon 184
125. CotVin of painted stone from an old drawing 185
126. Sarcophagus of Sidon 186
127. Head from an anthropoid sarcophagus of Sidon 186
128. Sarcophagus from Sidon 187
129. Sarcophagus from Sidon 188
130. Fragment of an anthropoid sarcophagus in terra-cotta 190
131. Comparative sections of a Phoenician sarcophagus and an Egyptian
mummy-case 191
132. Anthropoid sarcophagus from Sidon 192
133. Sarcophagus from Solunte 193
134. Marble sarcophagus found at Solunte . 195
135. Sarcophagus from Sidon 198
136. Iron holdfast and coffin handle 198
137. Lion's mask 200
138. Sarcophagus from Sidon 201
139. Alabastron 204
140. Baul-Hammon 205
141. Scarab with face of Bes 206
142. Astarte 208
143. Mother goddess 208
144. Mother goddess 209
145. Terra-cotta chariot 210
146. Silver ring with scarab in agate 212
147. Alabaster vases 216
148. Plan of a tomb at Dali 218
149. 150. Terra-cotta statuettes 219
151. Cypriot stele 223
152. Cypriot stele 225
153. 154. Tomb at Amathus 227
155. Plan of a tomb at Amathus 228
156. Section through the ravine at Amathus 228
157. Interior of a tomb at Amathus 229
158. Doorway of a tomb at Amathus 230
159. 1 60. Plan of a tomb at Nea-Paphos 231
161. Courtyard of a tomb at Nea-Paphos 232
162, 163. Plan and section of a tomb at Mall a 235
164. Cross section of above tomb 236
165. Plan of a Carthaginian tomb 238
1 66. Section of a Carthaginian tomb 238
167. Plan of a tomb at Sulcis 240
1 68. Section of a tomb at Sulcis 241
169. Tomb at Cagliari 242
170. 171. Sections of a tomb at Cagliari 243
172. Funerary Cippus from Tharros 243
173, 174. Cippi from tombs at Tharros 244
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS. xiii
FIG. PAGE
175. Sandstone cippus with Phoenician inscription 244
176. Interior of a tomb at Tharros 245
177. Statuette in glazed earthenware 245
178. Amulet in glazed earthenware 246
179. Glass amulet 246
180. Scarab 246
181. Scarab in form of a sow 247
182. Amulet in white earthenware, glazed 247
183. 184. Etuis found in the tombs 247
185. The Maabed at Amrith 253
186. Ceiling of the Maabed at Amrith 254
187. The Maabed at Amrith 254
1 88. Monolithic tabernacle of Ain-el-Hayat 257
189. Plan of the two tabernacles at Ain-el-Hayat 257
190. Ruin in the neighbourhood of Sidon 260
191. Stone altar 261
192. Votive stele from Carthage 263
193. Votive stele from Sulcis (Sardinia) 264
194. Votive stele from Sulcis 264
195. Statue found near Athieno 265
196. Limestone statue from Cyprus 267
197. Artificial grotto near Gebal 269
198. Capital from Kition, cut from the local stone 274
199. Coin of Cyprus 276
200. Plan of the remains of the temple at Paphos 278
201. Plan of the remains of the temple at Paphos 279
202. Coin of Cyprus 281
203. The hill of Paphos, remains of a temple in the foreground 282
204. Plan of temple at Golgos 282
205. 206. Elevation of a cone found at Athieno, and section of its lower part . 284
207. Pedestal for two statues 285
208. Model of a small temple in terra-cotta 287
209. The Panaghia Phaneromeni. Plan 288
210. The Panaghia Phaneromeni. Perspective 289
211. The Amathus vase 290
212. Small model of a cistern 292
213. Handle of the Amathus vase 292
214. Coin of Cyprus 293
215. Stone step 294
216. Plan of the crypt at Curium 295
217. Gold bracelet 299
218. Coin of Malta 302
219. Hall in the temple of Hagiar Kim, at Malta • 305
220. Doorway in the temple of Hagiar Kim, at Malta 307
221. Plan of the Giganteia at Gozo 308
222. Longitudinal section through the larger temple at the Giganteia .... 309
xiv LIST OK ILLUSTRATIONS.
KK;. i> A OK
223. The cone of the Giganteia 311
224. The Giganteia 311
225. Plan of the temple of Hagiar Kim, Malta 312
226. Interior of the temple of Hagiar Kim 313
227. Decorated stone, from Hagiar Kim 314
228. Altar 315
229. Altar 316
230. Statuette 316
231. Statuette 317
232. Stele from Lilybanim 320
233. Stele from Sulcis 321
234. Lintel at Ebba 322
235- Capital at Djezza 323
236. View of the great mosque at Mecca 327
237. Plan of the rampart near Banias 337
238. The Phoenician wall near Banias 338
239. Plan of the Phoenician wall at Eryx 340
240. One of the towers of Eryx 341
241. Postern in the wall of Eryx 343
242. Postern in the wall of Eryx 344
243. Postern in the wall of Eryx 345
244. The temple and ramparts of Eryx 346
245. The wall of Motya 347
246. Plan of Lixus 349
247. The wall of Lixus 351
248. Map of the peninsula of Carthage 352
249. The triple wall of Thapsus 355
250. The great wall at Thapsus 359
25 1. Plan of the wall of Byrsa 361
252. Reservoirs of Carthage 369
253. Carthaginian coin 374
254. Rural cistern 375
255. Plan of cistern 377
256. Cross section of cistern wall 378
257. Elevation of part of cistern wall 378
258. Base of column from a portico at Larnaca 380
259. Detail of a portico at Larnaca 381
260. Plan of ancient house at Malta 381
261. View of ancient house at Malta 382
262. The mausoleum at Thugga 383
263. Angle pilaster 384
264. Profile of cornice 384
265. Present condition of the Carthaginian harbours 389
266. The harbours of Carthage according to Beule* 391
267. Arrangement of the berths according to Beule' 391
268. The harbours of Carthage according to Daux 392
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS. xv
FIG. I'.UiE
269. Cornice moulding 393
270. Utica in the time of Caesar 397
271. Plan of the naval harbour at Utica 399
272. Admiral's palace, Utica 400
273. Restoration of the northern facade of the Admiral's palace, Utica . . . 403
274. Restoration of a lateral fagade 403
275. The mole of Thapsus 408
276. Plan of the mole of Thapsus 409
HISTORY OF ART IN PHOENICIA AND ITS DEPENDENCIES.
CHAPTER I.
THE riKENICIAX CIVILIZATION.
§ i. — The Situation of Syria and the Configuration of the
Phoenician Coast.
IN this history of art in antiquity, Egypt and Chaldsea occupy a privileged place. The length at which we have dwelt upon their art activities is justified by the fertility and originality of their genius, by the spontaneity of their development, and, above all, by their influence over that later stage in the progress of humanity of which our own civilization is no more than the sequel. Egypt -> and Chaldaea invented the methods and created the models that awoke the plastic genius of the Greeks. After a long period of probation that genius began, towards the time of Homer, to foster high ambitions, and to attempt works of art in the true sense ; but at first it borrowed more than it created ; nearly all the motives it employed may be traced to a foreign origin.
We may recognize those motives both by their physiognomy and their arrangement. They were invented far enough from Corinth and Athens, far even from Miletus and Ephesus ; they were invented in the valleys of the Nile and the Euphrates; and how did they traverse the vast spaces that had to be crossed before they could arrive upon the Ionian coasts, in Peloponnesus or Attica, in yet more distant Latium and Etruria ? How did they contrive
VOL. n
fj
•-
2 HISTORY 01 ART IN PIKKNRIA AND ITS DEPENDENCIES.
to fix the attention of so many half barbarous races ? Was it by their original inventors that they were carried so far a-field ? No. Neither Egyptians, nor Chaldaeans, nor Assyrians, had occa- sion to hawk their own goods over the basin of the Mediterranean. Egypt, indeed, equipped fleets and carried on a maritime commerce ; she had none of the dread of salt water that used to be attri- buted to her; but it was upon the Red Sea that she launched her vessels ; it was with the tribes of Arabia and of the Somali coasts that she had direct trade relations. There is nothing to suggest that an Egyptian vessel, either of war or commerce, ever put out from the mouths of the Nile and lost sight of the low shores of the Delta on an adventurous voyage to Cyprus or Crete. As for the Chaldaeans and the Assyrians, they did now and then succeed in embracing the coasts of Syria in their empire, but it was as conquerors only that they appeared in its maritime cities ; they made no attempts to turn them into bases for further conquests ; in modern phraseology, their flag never waved over the waters of the Mediterranean.
There must, then, have been middlemen by whom the forms and motives invented in Egypt and Mesopotamia were carried to the foreign races who borrowed and used them : and these
o
middlemen must, by native faculties, by culture and by geo- graphical position, have been naturally fitted for the task they had to fulfil. Among all those nations of the ancient world who have left a name in history, to which especially must we award the honour of having rendered this great service to civilization ? We must not, of course, forget the claims of the tribes established in Upper Syria and Asia Minor, the Khetas, the Cappadocians, the Phrygians, and Lydians — the chain of tribes, in fact, that con- nected the valley of the Euphrates with the shores of the yEgaean Sea. They received with the one hand what they gave with the other. Through them the Greeks of Ionia became possessed of certain myths and forms of worship, of certain processes, types and motives, which we can track across the whole breadth of western Asia. But Egypt could never have won its widespread influence through their means. Land communication remained slow, difficult, and uncertain throughout antiquity. A sandy desert, or a chain of inhospitable mountains inhabited by savages no less inhospitable, was enough to bar all passage to commerce. With the sea it is another matter. It appears to separate
SYRIA AND THE PHOENICIAN COAST.
countries and races, but as a fact it unites them. As soon as man learnt to trust to "the waste of waters" and to so combine the powers of the sail and rudder that his barque became as docile as a horse or camel, he could fix his eyes upon the sun and the stars and take himself whither he pleased. As the fertilising dust is carried by the breeze to fields far enough from that where it is shaken from the parent stem, so ideas travel much faster, much farther, and much more securely when they are carried over sea by the winds than when they have to encounter all the rubs and toils of travel by land. To establish communications between men who are separated by vast spaces there is no go-between so efficient as a maritime population, a population driven year by year, by love of gain and love of adventure, to extend the ever- widening circle of their explorations.
Such a population was at hand exactly when the Egyptians and Mesopotamians required its good offices, their civilizations being ripe for expansion beyond their own borders. Driven by events that we only know by their effects, a people had established them- selves on the Syrian coast, not far from the isthmus that unites Africa to Asia, between the valleys of the Nile and the Euphrates and within easy reach of both. In order to reach the frontier of Egypt, at Pelusium, not more than three or four days of a desert in which wells were frequent had to be traversed after quitting the last town in Syria. When they began to risk themselves at sea, the voyage was no less short and easy Even in the days when sailors crept along the coast, beaching their ships every night, they did not take long to arrive at the eastern mouth of the great African river, whence they might mount at their ease as far into the heart of the country as they wished to go.
To reach Mesopotamia a somewhat longer journey had to be undertaken. But the middle Euphrates throws out a great elbow westwards, which almost brings it into touch with the frontier of Upper Syria, and those making their way eastwards from the coast had only to follow the easy mountain roads which existed both north and south of the Lebanon, and to cross a well-watered plain, before they came to the valley of the great river. They had then only to abandon themselves to its current to arrive in due time in the heart of Chaldaea, on the quays of that Babylon whence numerous canals would put them in communication with every industrial centre in Lower Mesopotamia.
4 HISTORY OK ART IN* PIKKNKMA AND ITS I)KI'I:N-DI:NCIKS.
A great future was thus assured to any tribes who should people the region we still call by its ancient name of Syria. That region is bounded on the west by the sea, on the south by the isthmus that separates, or rather joins, Asia and Africa, on the west by the desert of Arabia and the Euphrates, on the north by the southern slopes of Amanus and Taurus. On three sides Syria was bounded respectively by the sea, by chains of mountains and by vast stretches of barren sand, so that the industrious communities who occupied it could only be attacked from a few points ; from the south, where there was no natural barrier, by the wide passes ol the north-east, and by those narrow defiles in the north-west called the Cilician gates. In the interior of the country, strong fortresses capable of offering a long and stubborn resistance to the invader could be erected on several sites which complacent nature had provided, and as a last resource the tribes could take to their ships and retreat either to the small islets that stud the coasr, or to the large islands in the west, one of which, Cyprus, could be descried on a clear day from the heights on the Syrian shore. The teeming waters which bathed the long line of coast must soon have excited in those who dwelt there the wish to risk themselves upon the sea and to hoist their sails to the breeze.
A large part of the country could only be inhabited by a sea- faring population — I mean the part squeezed in between the sea and the slopes of the Lebanon. Elsewhere one encounters spacious plains like the fertile fickaa, or Coulo- Syria, like the wondrous garden that hides Damascus in its waving verdure, like the plains of Esdraelon and the country of the Philistines. But from Mount Carmel to the Cape of Tripoli the summits rise to a height of some 3,000 feet, so close to the sea shore that no room is left for agriculture, and the two great rivers that are nourished by the springs and snows of the Lebanon, the Orontes and the Jordan, flow north and south ; the rivers that flow to the coast are no more than mountain torrents. The most important of them all, that which falls into the sea between Tyre and Sidon, the Nahr-cl-Litani, was called by the Greeks the Lcontcs, or " river of the lion." The NaJir-cl-Kclb, or " river of the dog, ' joins the sea north of the roads of Beyrout. Both of these are brawling torrents and thoroughly deserve their names (see Fig. i).
Between the sea and the great buttresses of the Lebanon there is seldom room for more than a narrow be-ich, a long ribbon of
SYRIA AND THK PHOENICIAN COAST. 5
sand divided every now and then by high and rocky capes. In the centuries that elapsed before man learnt to modify the con- figuration of the ground, and to make roads even along cliff-faces, it was difficult in the last degree, it was at times even impossible, to follow the trend of the coast, at least by land. In the autumn
Fir.. I. — The Xahr-el-Fedar.
rains, moreover, and when the snows melt in the spring, the mountain torrents are unfordable near their mouths, while no boats can live in them. But as civilization advanced men learnt to cut paths, or rather ladders, in the faces of the rocky spurs that had so long barred their way. These paths still exist. On my way from Sour to Saint Jean d'Acre, by the Ras-el-Abiad and the Ras
6 HISTORY ov ART IN PIUKNK IA AND ITS DKPKXDKXCIES.
en-Nakourah) I made use of them, and never, even in the East, have I journeyed by a worse route, or by one on which the traveller is more at the mercy of his beast, whose sureness of foot is tried at every step.
The Romans were the first to make communication easier and more certain. At the entrance to the gorge of the Nahr-el-Kelb, near Heyrout, the road they cut through the rock in order to avoid the abrupt ascents of the old pass, is still in use. The levels of this Roman road are much easier ; it doubles the cape instead of scaling its heights. It was by the old path that Assyrian and Egyptian armies found their way along the coast (see Figs. 2 and 3).1
It was long enough, however, before the Romans appeared that the tribes whose doings we have now to study settled in the country. If they wished to penetrate into the mountains they h;id to wait till summer, and then make their way along the beds of the dried-up torrents ; if they wanted to turn them and follow the coast, they could do so in many places by a narrow strip of sand, but elsewhere the waves beat against the actual knees of the hills.
At these latter points there was no road at all, or at most a giddy path along the face of the cliff, better fitted for goats than men. A pedestrian accustomed to its difficulties could make use of it with safety, but no one would dream of riding over or even of attempting to lead a string of pack horses along such a track.
While the solid earth presented difficulties that must long have seemed insurmountable, the sea wras open to all. It was upon the sea that the little plains on the coast had their outlook. In these the same configuration was repeated again and again. Here and there the mountains retire a certain distance from the sea and leave room for a few leagues of flat ground where houses could rise among fields and vineyards, or for slopes on which the vine and olive could flourish. These were sites prepared by nature for future cities, but before the latter could come into existence, easy circulation had to be provided for men and goods between one canton and another. Nothing could be more simple ; the sea was at hand ready to carry anything that would float. As soon as the elements of navigation wefe mastered, no farther embarrassment in
1 We borrow this plan and view from an interesting article contributed by Mr. W. S. BOSCAWEN to the Transactions of the Society of Biblical Arclueology (The Monu- ments and Inscriptions on the Rocks at Nahr-el-Kdb, vol. vii. pp. 331-352).
SYRIA AND THE PHOENICIAN COAST.
7
the matter of locomotion between one township and another could
FIG. 2.— Plan of the passes at the Nahr-el-Kelb. Egyptian bas-reliefs, i. vi. viii. ; Assyrian bas-reliefs, ii. iii. iv. v. vii. ix.
be felt. Except for a few stormy weeks in the year ships could come and go, driven by the winds when they were favourable, by
S HISTORY or Aui IN I'IM.MCIA AND ii> DKI-KNOKNCIES.
the sturdy arms of rowers when the bree/e was contrary or absent altogether ; at nightfall or at any sudden nu:nace from the sky, they could seek the nearest haven. And havens were plentiful. The mountain spurs which hindered land travelling were the salvation of the mariner. On one side or the: other of each jutting cape he found shelter from wind and wave. Here he would ride at anchor and wait for better weather, or if the worst came to the worst, he could beach his ship in some narrow creek and make all snug until the tempest should have spent its force.
Many things must then have combined to lengthen a voyage ; but time was of no great value — a few hours or a few days more or less made no great difference. The important thing was to be able to come and go ; to sally at will from home and to return at pleasure. In those days the mountains were clothed to their feet in forests which furnished splendid timber for ship-building, and that in inexhaustible quantities, so that it was easy to establish workshops on the shore in which the sound of the hammers should never cease. The carpenter who built and the mariner who sailed the ships furnished between them a bond of union for all the inhabitants of the coast, and prevented the isolation to which the peculiar formation of the country would otherwise have condemned each separate group.
Even now it is mainly by the sea that the towns on the Syrian coast communicate with each other. The only difference is that the feluccas are now aided in the work by the steamboats that ply between the larger ports. In other ways the ancient customs have been preserved. No one wishing to go from Latakich to Tripoli, from Tripoli to Beyrout, or from Beyrout to Jaffa, would go by land, except, of course, tourists and archaeologists.
In our days the profits of the traffic go chiefly to England and Austria, to Erance and Greece ; but it was not always so. For many centuries it was to Syrian ports that the vessels belonged by which the three basins into which the Mediterranean is divided were ploughed in every direction. The beginnings \vere modest enough. In their quest of elbow room, the tribes crept up and down the coast, doubling, not without trepidation, the beetling promontories with their fringe of foam. Gradually they explored the whole coast, from Carmel to Casius ; they became familiar with the set of the currents, with every secure anchorage and every sheltering bay ; they learnt to read the signs of coming
"
;;f:>' •> ,; \
VOL. I.
ORIGIN OF TIII-: PHOENICIANS, i i
storms. To turn their ships' prows out into the open and to become a people of merchants and adventurous mariners were then only matters of time.
£ 2. — The Phoenicians ; their Origin and their First Establishment.
According to all probability, it was touards the twentieth century before our era — rather before that than after — that the Phoenicians appeared in Syria ; and by the Phoenicians we mean, with the Greeks, the peoples who settled on the coast at the foot of Lebanon ; other tribes, their mare or less distant relations, dwelt north, east, and south of them.1
How did they come there, and whence ? According to a tradition gathered by Herodotus from one of their descendants, their ancestors lived on the shores of the Persian Gulf,'2 where they peopled the Bahrein Islands, two of which were still called Tyros and Arados in the time of Strabo. They passed for the mother countries of the two great towns on the Syrian coast, and we are told that they contained temples similar in appearance to those of Phoenicia.3 Perhaps some of the resemblances between the Phoenicia of the Mediterranean and that of the Indian Ocean were after-thoughts on the part of the latter, which may have thus thought to attract curious visitors to its coasts ; but the story must have been founded on fact. The Hebrew Scriptures agree with the Greek historians in speaking of the great migrations that carried into Syria, towards the period of the first Theban empire, those
1 There are no grounds for insisting upon the Greek etymologies of the word ; which they sometimes derived from the name of the palm-tree, sometimes from that of the colour red, which was dear to a people who long had a monopoly in the manufacture of purple dye. It is now generally agreed that the word is a corruption of the name given by the Egyptians to the whole bulk of the populations of Arabia and the Persian Gulf; the country of Punt. The primitive form would seem to be better preserved in the names Pceni, Punici, given by the Romans to those Phoenicians of Africa with whom they were so long embroiled (see MASPERO, Histoire ancienne, p. 169, and PH. BERGER, La Phenicie [article reprinted from Z' 'Encyclopedic des Sciences religieuses\, p. 3).
2 HERODOTUS, ii. 89.
3 STRABO, xvi. iii. 4. PLINY, Nat. Hist. vi. 32. According to Pliny the real name of Strabo's Tvros was Tvlos.
12 IllSTokY <>F Auf IN Plld.NICIA AM> ITS DKl'ENDENCIKS.
so called Canaanitish populations of which the Phoenicians formed the eastern branch. Must we suppose that,, to reach their new home, they traversed the deserts of Arabia by a line of oases, or that they mounted the stream of the Euphrates and descended from its upper stretches upon the lands to the west and south- west ? We cannot tell ; all that we know is that those districts were; conquered from the savage tribes which had occupied them, that the new-comers took possession ot all the sites they fancied from where Aleppo and Damascus now stand, in the north, to the river of Egypt and the peninsula of Sinai in the south, and that while one section threw themselves upon Egypt and founded the power of the shepherd kings, the rest, the Phoenicians of history, settled upon the Syrian coast between Mounts Carmel and Casius, and there, in situations covered on the east by a thick curtain of hills, founded many cities for which a brilliant future was in store.
To what family of peoples did the Phoenicians belong ?
Relying upon the genealogical table in the tenth chapter of Genesis, some have supposed them to belong to the stem of Cush ; so that they would be cousins of the Egyptians, like the Canaanites, who, according to the same genealogy, were also sons of Ham.1 But on the other hand since the Phoenician inscriptions have been deciphered it has been recognized that the Phoenician and Hebrew languages resembled each other very narrowly — so narrowly that they might almost be called two dialects of one tongue. If this be so, ought we not rather to connect the Phoenicians with that great Semitic race of which the Hebrews are the most illustrious representatives ? We cannot say how close the relationship may have been, but in any case the Phoenicians must have been much more nearly connected with the Hebrews than with the Egyptians and the other nations whom we know as Cushites and Hamitcs. The difference of religion on which so much insistance is placed by those who would derive the Phoenicians and Hebrews from separate stocks, must have resulted from differences in the material conditions and destinies of the two nations. Habits, and, after a time, religious
1 LEPSILS, Die I'o'ikcr und Sprachen Africas. Einleitung Zitr nubischen Gram- matik, Weimar, 1880, pp. xc. cxii. MASPERO, Histoire ancienne, pp. 147-8. PH. BERGKR, La Pheniae, p. 2.
ORIGIN OF TIIK PHOENICIANS.
beliefs, no doubt varied greatly between Jerusalem and Tyre and Sidon ; but arguments drawn from such evidence can hardly stand against the identity of language. If we accept the Cushite descent, we can only explain this identity in one way, namely, by supposing that the Hebrews exercised sufficient influence over the Phoenicians to induce them to abandon their own idiom for that of the descendants of Abraham. But there are many serious difficulties in the way of such an explanation, which is, moreover, in conflict with all that we know of Phoenician history.
It was only under David and Solomon that the Hebrews won great political and military prestige in Syria, and at that time Phoenicia had been a solidly-established state for many centuries. We have no reason to doubt that she had also been long in full possession of her language and written character. Moreover it is not difficult to gather from the historical and prophetic books of our Bible that, during the whole of the period of the kings of Israel and Judah, both before and after the schism of the ten tribes, the Phoenicians acted upon the Jews rather than the Jews upon the Phoenicians. We do not find that from the coming of David to the Captivity, the Jews made any attempt to conquer Phoenicia or to bring her under their sovereignty in any way ; they do not seem to have impressed upon her either their manners or their ideas ; on the contrary, it was from Tyre that they drew the architects and master workmen who built the temple of Jehovah. In defiance of their own prophets they never ceased to borrow from the same people both the images and names of their gods and the rites in which they were worshipped. A Syrian princess, Athaliah, reigned at Jerusalem, but there is nothing to suggest that a Jew ever rose so high in the towns on the coast. If not under their kings, when could the Jews have wielded any such influence or authority over their rich and industrious neigh- bours as to cause them to throw aside the non-Semitic idiom they had brought from their distant fatherland and adopt Hebrew instead ?
Search the history of Palestine from beginning to end and you will find no stage at which such a substitution was possible ; and on the other hand if you refuse to admit that the Phoenicians were of the same blood as the Jews, how do you account for their speaking and writing, not one of the idioms which we encounter at their
14 HISTORY OF ART IN PHUNKTA AND MS I)i:rr.M>K.\<n;s.
best in Africa, but a language that differs little from pure Hebrew21
\Ve could not put aside this question of origin altogether, and it was better that we should explain those solutions of the problem that seemed to us best foanded." Hut whether we call them Semites or Cushites the Phoenicians are the only nation of the Cunaanites which can pretend to occupy a conspicuous and well-understood place in the history of art. Nearly all the tribes of the interior remained in their original condition of agriculturists and nomad shepherds. The only tribe that succeeded in founding a powerful state was that of the Khetas or Hittites, which settled in northern Syria. We shall have occasion to return to these Hittites who, thanks to recent discoveries, have now emerged from the obscurity in which they were so long buried. We shall endeavour to show that they too had an influence upon the civilization of their western neighbours which must be taken into
1 The opinion we have here expressed is that now held by the scholar who has most closely studied the question. M. KRNKST RKXAN began by studying the Phoenician remains on the spot ; afterwards, in his lectures at the College dc France, lie explained all the texts now extant, and prepared translations of them for the Corpus Inscriptionum Ssmiticarum. He will be our chief guide in these pages. We shall conlinually have to quote his great work, the Mission dc J'henicii (i vol. 410., and a folio of 70 plates, Paris, Michel Levy, 1863-74). We also owe much to the ready liberality with which oar learned colleague has put his knowledge at our service whenever we have had to consult him in the course of our work. We may r.lso take this opportunity to express our obligations to M. PH. BERBER, associated for many years with M. Kenan, in the researches undertaken for the Academic des Inscriptions. M. Berger has given us much useful information. From the many papers he has published on Phoenicia and Carthage we have bo; rowed even more frequently than our foot-notes indicate.
- In many respects this ques'.ion is still very obscure. The place given to the Canaanites in the genealogies of Genesis has been explained by the natural anti- pathy they inspired in a people with whom they disputed the possession of Palestine, and who expressed their hatred by making them the descendants of Ham, that is of an ill-conditioned and accursed ancestor; " but," objects M. Bjrger, "from that point of view the Hebrews would have done the same to the Moabites, the Ammonites, and, especially, to the Idumaeans and Amalekites, their traditional enemies " (La Phcnicie, p. 2}. But as a fact they consented to recognize those detested tribes as their kinsmen. We do not under-estimate the force of the objection, although we cannot allow it to stand before the great fact of the identity of language. In his Orpines dc /' Uistoire. M. Fr. Lenormant has not yet discussed the question. He has begun an examination of the ethnographical tables in the tenth chapter of Genesis, but in his second volume he has only got as far as the family of Japhet. (M. Fr. Lenormant has died since these words were in print, and his Origines de I ' Hiitoiie remains a fragment. — F.u. )
ORIGIN OF THE PIKENICIANS.
account. But even when science has discovered the key to those inscriptions which are still mute, the Hittites will never loom so large as the Phoenicians in the great picture of the progress of human civilization.
Phoenicia takes up but a narrow space on the map ; it was about 130 miles from north to south, by a few miles wide at the broadest part ; but its ships carried the products of its own workshops, as well as of those of Egypt and Chald^ea, to the utmost limits of the ancient world ; by its models and the knowledge of its processes it acted on the intelligence of every country to which its merchants made their way. Scholars are not all agreed as to the force of that influence and the extent of its
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effects, but none of them dispute the great importance of the Phoenicians as manufacturers and as agents of distribution. Nothing that concerns such a people is without interest, and in order properly to understand the part they played in the work of civilization we must begin by making ourselves acquainted with the mode in which their cities sprang up and developed, with their political institutions and their religious beliefs.
The first Egyptian documents to mention the Phoenicians date from the eighteenth dynasty, or from a period sixteen to seventeen centuries before our era.1 If we allow two or three centuries, which is none too much, for these tribes to explore the country, to choose sites for their towns and to build their walls, we find ourselves carried back to the nineteenth or twentieth century for their first appearance in Syria — which is very near the date to which we believe the invasion of the Canaanites should be
1 The report of an Egyptian officer who visited the basin of the Dead Sea in the time of the twelfth Theban dynasty is still extant. No Canaanitish tribe is mentioned in it (FR. LENORMANT, Manud de FHisloire andenne, vol. iii. p. 9). On the other hand, in the account of an imaginary journey made by an Egyptian functionary into Syria towards the end of the reign of Rarneses II., an account contained in a precious papyrus of the British Museum, the hero, who penetrated as far as Helbon, the Aleppo of to-day, comes back by the Phoenician coast; he mentions Gebal, Beryta, Sidon, Sarepta, A vat ha, whose ruins now bear the name of Adloun, and he finally arrives at " the maritime Tyre," which he describes as a tovvnlet perched on a rock amid the waves. "Water is taken to it in boats," he says, "and the sea is full of fishes'* (FR. LKNORMANT, ibid, p. 34). Mr. Lieblein thinks he has found traces of the Phoenicians in Egypt as eaily as the sixth dynasty (Proceedings of /he Society of Biblical Archeology, 1882; p. 108) ; but the presump- tions he invokes in favour of his hypothesis do not seem to give it any high degree of probability.
1 6 HISTOXY 01- AKT IN PIKKNK i.\ AND i rs DEPENDENCIES.
assigned. But no chronology that cm be called certain or even very probable can be given for the early years of Phoenicia, any more than for those of Egypt or Chalchea.1
All that we can affirm with certainty is that when the great Theban Pharaohs began their Syrian wars, the Phoenicians were already in possession of the Syrian coast and had founded most of those cities whose names are encountered in their history (see Fig. 4)." Taking them in their order from north to south these were Aradus or Arvad (Ruad). Marath (Ann-it), Simyra, Arka, Gebal, the Byblos of the Greeks (Gcbeyl\ Berytos (Bey rout], Sidon (Satdii), Sarepta (Sarfend), Tyre (Sour], Accho (Acre or St. Jean (f Acre), and Joppa (Jaffa)- All these sites were so well chosen that hardly one of them is now deserted. Even when the country was most completely disorganized by wars of race and religion, by fanaticism and by bad government, nearly all these cities kept their inhabitants. Except at Beyrout their population is, of course, very far from being what it was in antiquity, but it has never fallen so low that Tyre and Sidon, Acre and Joppa have ceased to be markets of some importance and the chief towns of their districts. Still more significant is it that during the twenty centuries which have seen that stretch of coast pass under so many masters, not a single new centre of urban life and commerce, not a town that can be called modern, has been established. The ancient cities of the C.maanites are still all the country possesses and they are known to the modern world by names in which two thousand years have worked but little change.
The national tradition, preserved in cosmogonic form by Sanchoniathon, made Berytos and Gebal the two oldest es- tablishments on the coast/' Gebal, indeed, boasted of being the
1 According to HKROUOTUS, the Syrians, when they received the visit of the historian, told him that their town had been inhabited and their temple of Hercules built for 2,300 years, which would place the founding of the city about the middle of the twenty eighth century r,.c. From this statement, however, we may bj permitted to take off something for local vanity. Tyre had become the most important city in Phoenicia, and it would endeavour to exaggerate its age in order to make people forget, if possible, that Sidon had reason to boast of a greater antiquity and of a more venerable premiership.
2 This map and the next (fig. 10) are borrowed from M. MASTERO'S Hiatoire ancienne. We have introduced some slight changes into them which our readers will readily understand when they remember the different aims of our work and M. Maspero's history.
3 Upon Sanchoniathon and his translator. Philo of Byblos. as well as upon the
FIG. 4. — Syria in the time of the Egyptian domination.
VOL. I.
D
ORIGIN OF THE PHCENICIANS. 19
oldest city in the world ; it had been built, according to the story, by the god El, at the beginning of time. At first the natives of Gebal seem to have exercised a real authority over the rest of the Phoenicians,1 but owing to events which now escape us a city farther to the south, Sidon, soon rose to the first rank ; in Genesis Sidon is already spoken of as the first-born of Canaan.2 In the beginning it was no more than a village of fishermen, as its name Tsidon, " a fishery," proves. "It was at first confined to the southern slope of a small promontory jutting out obliquely towards the south-west. The famous harbour is formed by a low chain of rocks running parallel to the shore for some hundreds of yards and touching the northern extremity of the peninsula. The neighbouring plain is well provided with water and covered with those gardens which have given to the town the sobriquet of the flowery Sidon."
Sidon soon had two rivals, Arvad on the north and Tyre on the south. Arvad was built on an island at some distance from the main land. "It is," says Strabo, " a rock beaten on all sides by the sea, and about seven stades in circumference. It is entirely covered with dwellings, and the population is still so thick that the houses are all many stories high. The inhabitants are provided with drinking water partly by cisterns, partly by a supply brought from the opposite coast." In the centre of the channel between the island and main land there was a strong spring bubbling up through the sea water. In times of siege, when the cisterns had been emptied, the inhabitants turned to this spring and obtained supplies of water from it by the help of skilful divers.5 The people of Arvad made themselves masters of the strip of coast that faced their island ; Gabala, Paltos, Karne, Marath and Simyra were dependent upon them, and it would seem that for a time
value of those fragments which have come down to our time, see M. KENAN'S Memoire sur /' Origine etle Caractcre rentable deF Histoire phcnicienne quiporte le Norn de Sanchoniathon (Memoires de F Academic des Inscriptions, new series, 1868, vol. xxiii. part ii.). Sanchoniathon (Sanchon Jathon = "the god Sanchon has given") must have written in Phoenician, in the time of the Seleucidae, about the second or third century before our era. He must therefore have been a contemporary, or little removed from it, of Manetho and Berosus-^about the time of Hadrian. Philo must have made a free translation of the work of Sanchoniathon into Greek.
1 MOVERS, Die Phonizer. vol. ii. part i. pp. 1-4. 2 Genesis x. 15.
3 MASPERO, Histoire ancienne, p. 190. 4 STRABO, xvi. ii. 13.
5 Strabo gives a description of the way in which this feat was performed.
20 HISTORY or ART IN Pun NICIA AND ITS DKI-KN-DKNCIES.
their supremacy extended to Hnmath, on the other side of the mountains, in the valley of the Orontes.
While the Arvaclites thus enjoyed an uncontested supremacy in the north, the Syrians dominated, in the same fashion, the: whole of southern Phu-nicia, between the mouth of the Leontes and the country of the Philistines. For many centuries the other towns of that region were hardly more than provincial branches, so to speak, of Tyre. Tsor means a rock, and the modern name Sour is therefore more like the- ancient name than the Greek Ti'pos, or Tyre, which has been put into general use by the classic writers. Like those of Arvad, the founders of Tyre chose an island for the site of their to an. When they established themselves upon it it must have been separated from the main land by about three- quarters of a mile of water, which was quite enough for defence ; it put Tyre out of reach of any enemy but one who should be master of the sea. To compare small things with great, Tyre had a geographical situation analogous to that in which so much of the strength of England lies. She could defy oriental con querors like the kings of Xineveh and Babylon, and it was not until Alexander joined the island to the main land by an artificial isthmus that she fell. The creation of this causeway had other effects than the destruction of Tyre's impregnability. It arrested the passage of the sand which the currents swept along the coast, so that the harbours of the Phoenician city silted rapidly up, and in these days there is but one left, that which used to be called the Sidon harbour, which can receive a few small vessels. As for the other, the Egyptian harbour, it is so completely obliterated that modern explorers grope for its site, and even those who have most carefully examined the peninsula are not in accord as to where it was situated.1 A sketch that we borrow from M. Renan shows what he thinks as to the position of the two harbours'2
(Fig. 5)-
The rocky island, or rather the group of rocky islands which
were afterwards united and enlarged artificially to form the soil of
1 Upon this difficult question of topography see KENAN'S Mission de Phenicie, iv. ch. i. M. Renan recites and discusses the opinions of his predecessors, MM. de Berton, Poulain de Bossay, Movers, and others who have tried to throw light upon the same problem.
1 The shaded spaces show the ground filled in by Hiram, the lines of asterisks the actual trend of the shore.
ORIGIN OF THE PIICF.NICIANS. 21
Phoenician Tyre, gave but a narrow site for a town. On the south side the sea seems to have now taken back to itself a strip of ground that had been reclaimed in ancient times by embankments and retaining walls. As at Arvad, the houses were very high and packed very close.1 Allowing for all possible economy of space it is difficult to see how the island of Tyre can ever have held more than about twenty-five thousand souls.'2 This seems aston- ishing, but we must remember, in the first place, that the insular town had a corresponding city on the main land which bore the same name, and was no doubt at least as populous as the mari- time Tyre ; and secondly, that the highly cultivated plain in the
FIG. 5. — Tyre before the siege of Alexander. From Renan.
neighbourhood of the former supported and employed a large population of peasants and slaves.0' In times of peace, therefore, the Tyrian population was doubled, or perhaps trebled, by this continental faubourg and its smiling environs. And again we must not forget that maritime and commercial cities on islands often have an importance out of all proportion to their extent. M. Renan cites the example of St. Malo, which resembles Tyre
1 STRABO, xvi. ii. 23. •• It is said that the houses there are very high and have more stories than in Rome."
'- The surface of this island has been estimated at 576,508 square metres. 3 Mission de Phenicie, iv. ch. ii.
22 HISTORY OF ART IN PHOENICIA AND ITS DEPENDENCIES.
very much in situation, and at one time was a maritime centre almost of the first order, while it managed to give house room to more than 12,000 people on a surface less than that of the Syrian island by more than two-thirds.1
As we reflect upon all the advantages offered by the site of Tyre, at once close to the main land and separated effectively from it, we are tempted to believe that it must have been one of the first points occupied by the Phoenicians, who had already, in the Persian Gulf, learnt the safety that attends life on an island. Tyre was perhaps as old, then, as Sidon, but Sidon was the first to rise into prosperity. Neither in the tenth chapter of Genesis nor in Homer do we hear a word of Tyre."
\Ve have now glanced rapidly down the Phoenician coast from Arvad to Joppa ; we have called the attention of our readers to its principal cities, to those which have left the most conspicuous traces in history, and in doing so we have, we hope, given them some idea as to what 'Phoenicia really was. It was not a compact nation occupying a large and continuous territory. It had no resemblance to such countries as Egypt, Chaldaea and Assyria. To describe it accurately, it was no more than a series of ports each of which was set in a more or less narrow frame of cultivated land. These towns, situated one or two days' march from each other, were the centres of a life wholly municipal, like that of a Greek city. \Yhen their independence was menaced by the formidable monarchies of Egypt or Assyria, of Babylon, Persia or Macedonia, even the pressure of a common danger could not make them unite for common defence. The only bonds between the different townships were those due to identity of origin, language, and written character, and those arising from community of interests in business, from similarity of social habits and religious beliefs.
It would seem that there were three distinct Phoenician communities until the Macedonian conquest, and especially the
1 Afission de Fhcnicie, p. 553. Perhaps a more apt comparison, at least to English readers, would he one with Venice, which, thanks to a situation similar in all essentials to that of Tyre, was in the middle ages enabled to hold a position in the world differing very little from that enjoyed by the Syrian city fifteen hundred years before. — ED.
2 STRABO notices this in the case of Homer, xv. ii. 22.
ORIGIN OF THE PHOENICIANS. 23
diffusion of Greek culture, came to efface all differences. First there was that of Arvad, which is hardly mentioned by the Greek and Roman historians at all ; it was, however, very ancient, for the Arvadites figure among the sons of Canaan in the genealogies of Genesis,1 but we know hardly anything of its history. The oblivion in which it has rested is explained by the situation of this group of towns. It was masked, so to speak, by the Lebanon, which cut it off from lower Syria and the valley of the Orontes. It was thus a little aside from the path of those Egyptian and Assyrian conquerors whose disputes for the possession of the country were so often renewed. Moreover it appears that the Arvadites leaving to others the risks and profits that attended voyages to very distant countries, were contented with a coasting trade to Cyprus and Rhodes, and along the southern shores of Asia Minor. Thanks to this prudent commerce the whole district of Arvad became very prosperous. To the south of the island the coast described a wide gulf or bay, not unlike that of Genoa, and bordered with many rich villages and small towns, of which Marath was the chief.2 The rich shipowners of Arvad had their country houses, their farms, and their tombs upon the main land (see Fig. 6). According to Strabo their island was no more than seven stades, or about 1,416 yards, in circumference; it was therefore small enough for the crowded masses of human beings who found shelter behind its formidable walls (Fig. /) ; there was no room in it for the dead.
Gebal, or Byblos was the centre of another Phoenician community which preserved its own individuality until the last days of antiquity. There religious sentiment seems to have been more intense and to have played a more important part than anywhere else in Phoenicia. "Byblos," says M. Renan, "appears more and more to me to have been a sort of Jerusalem of the Lebanon.''3 Both in language and in bent of mind the Giblites seem to have been more like the Hebrews than the rest of the Phoenicians. In the great Byblos inscription, which is one of the most precious monuments of Semitic epigraphy, the King Jehawmelek (about 500 B.C.) addresses his great goddess, the lady Baalat-Gebail, in terms which might well, with some exceptions, have issued from the lips
1 Genesis x. 15-18. 2 RENAN, Mission de Phenicie, p. 21.
3 Ibid., p. 215.
24 HISTORY OK ART IN PHIKNICIA AND ITS DEPENDENCIES.
of a pious Jew. lie speaks of himself, in the Bible words, as "a
Fir.. 6. — Tomb at Amrit. From Kenan.
just king, and fearing God." In later times it was at Byblos and
1 Corpus Inscriptionum Semiticaruin, vol. i. part i. no. i, and plate i. M. PH. BERGER has given a translation of the Jehawmelek inscription into French ; it will be found in the lecture he gave at the Sorbonne under the title " Les Inscriptions Semitiques et PHistoire " (Bulletin de I Association, zyth February, 1883, p. 13).
ORIGIN OF THE PHOENICIANS.
in its dependent valleys, that the mysteries of Astarte and Adonis were celebrated, as well as the licentious rites of Tammouz, which were so popular in Syria throughout the Grseco-Roman period.
Finally we come to the Phoenician community par excellence, that of Tyre and Sidon, the southernmost of all. We there find the peculiar genius of the race at its greatest development, its taste for trade and industry, its love of maritime adventure, its readiness to accommodate itself to new conditions, its marvellous skill in opening relations with the most savage tribes and in implanting new wants in their breasts. In all that we shall have to say of the
FIG. 7. — The walls of Arvacl. From Rcnnn.
rapid expansion of Phoenicia and of the influence it exercised over the peoples of the west, we must be understood to speak of these two great cities, and especially of Tyre. The other Phoenician cities may have supplied sailors for the Tynan ships and cargoes for their holds,1 but it was Sidon first, and then, with increased decision and enterprise, it was Tyre, that took the initiative and
1 Addressing Tyre, EZEKIEL says (xxvii. 8): '•'•The inhabitants of Zidon and Arvad were thy mariners : thy wise men, O Tyrus, that were in thee, were thy pilots," which confirms what we say as to the division of the work. Tyre recruited her marine along the whole coast, but she herself furnished it with officers. VO1. I. !•;
26 HISTORY OF ART IN PIKKNICIA AND ITS DEPENDENCIES.
general direction of the movement. The captains of those two great cities were the earliest to press on towards the setting sun, till first the pillars of Hercules and afterwards still more distant points were left astern of their ships.
We know very little of the institutions of the Phoenician cities ; we know practically nothing of their political and social life. So far as we can guess they had a political system analogous to those of several cities of modern Europe in which similar ambitions and habits of life found a place, such as Genoa, Venice and the Hanse towns. Wherever the exigencies of a great maritime commerce tend to concentrate capital in a few hands, and to enable the more capable citizens to accumulate huge fortunes, there we always find a powerful aristocracy. This aristocracy sometimes leaves an appearance of power to popular assemblies or hereditary princes, but by right of its great wealth and superior intelligence it always keeps the reality of power in its own hands.
Between such cities as those we have named, the chief difference lies in the varying exclusiveness of the aristocracy by which they are ofoverned. In some it closes its ranks to new-comers and
o
tends to oligarchy ; in others it opens them and welcomes a certain measure of democracy.
It is difficult to say to which side Sidon and Tyre inclined. We are better informed, or rather we are a little less ill informed, as to the great African colony of Tyre, Carthage, and perhaps we may venture to assume that the daughter inherited a good deal of the mother's constitution. In the light of such an analogy we should say that the system of the Phoenician cities tended strongly to oligarchy. The inscriptions and the Greek historians, tell us, however, that they had kings. At Arvad we find a dynasty in which the names of Aniel and Jerostratus alternate with each other. At Sidon there was an ancient royal family whose origin must have been coeval with that of the city ; its reign was interrupted more than once ; but at moments of crisis its existence was remembered, and some member of the ancient house was sought out to put an end to intestine quarrels and the contests of pretenders. The life of Tyre seems to have been more troubled than that of Sidon. Tradition has handed down to us the names of several of her kings, but as a rule she seems, like the Carthaginians and the Jews before the time of Saul, to
ORIGIN OF THE PHOENICIANS. 27
have preferred suffetes or judges, two of whom held power at once.
But whatever title they enjoyed, whether they were hereditary princes or consuls appointed for a time or for life, their power must always have been more than a little precarious. Remember the doges of Venice and Genoa ! the true masters of the city were the heads of the principal families, or, to speak more accurately still, of the chief commercial houses. In Phoenicia, as at Carthage and in the Italian republics, the creators of the national wealth and the employers of the national labour formed, under one name or another, a species of senate.1 They all had ex- perience of affairs and habits of command. Each of them counted his ships by dozens, and his sailors, workmen, and agents by hundreds. One of these merchants would have a monopoly of trade to some country far larger than Phoenicia ; another might work tin or gold mines in some distant island of the north or west. The interests of the nation were therefore bound up with those of the shipowners, who offered it a continually widening field for its energies, and with those of its manufacturers, who provided the materials for profitable exchanges. There was no question bearing upon the future prosperity of the people in which the rich merchants and shipowners of the country — who knew per- sonally every shore and every nation of the Mediterranean — were not the best guides, and a council composed of such men could not fail, in time, to gather all real power into its hands. It was in such a council that all questions of importance were discussed and decided.
Even when they had kings the Phoenician cities were in reality small aristocratic republics. It wTas in Phoenicia that municipal liberty made its first appearance in the ancient world and that it first gave evidence of its inherent power. It created what the great oriental states, or rather agglomerations of men, had never known, namely, the citizen, the individual citizen, full of pride in the independence of his narrow fatherland, full of ambition for
1 ARISTOTLE, who was a great admirer of Carthage, insists upon the oligarchic character of her constitution and upon the importance it gave to wealth and to those who possessed it (Politics, ii. viii. 5). " It was the opinion of the Carthaginians that he who should exercise public functions should have not only great qualities but also great riches ; they thought that a man without fortune would not have the leisure necessary to make him successful as a governor of men."
28 HISTORY ov ART IN PIKKNICIA AND ITS DEPENDENCIES.
himself and for her. By enforcing on each individual a sense of his own personal value, this regime made him capable at certain critical moments of extraordinary devotion and energy. " Tyre was the first town to defend its autonomy against those redoubt- able monarchies which, from their seats on the Tigris and Euphrates, threatened to extinguish all life on the shores of the Mediterranean. When all the rest of Phoenicia had bent to the tempest, the dwellers on this isolated rock alone held the mighty Assyrian machine in check, and after supporting hunger and thirst for years had their reward in seeing the hosts of Shalmaneser and Nebuchadnezzar decamp from the neighbouring plain. A modern traveller cannot stand upon the mole which has made Tyre a peninsula without remembering with emotion that she was once the last bulwark of liberty."1
Thanks to this heroic resistance Tyre appears to the eyes of the historian the chief representative of the ambitions of Phoenicia and of the part she was called on to fill in the world ; but she was not the first to open the sea routes ; and even when every distant harbour was filled with her ships, even when her sailors excelled all their rivals in courage and enterprise, they were never alone in the work. Phoenicia never had what we should call a capital. During the Roman period Tyre and Sidon disputed the title of metropolis, that is, of mother city and foundress of Phoenician civilization.2 Tyre could boast of the more glorious services, Sidon of the greater antiquity. The earliest maritime enterprises and the first factories established in foreign countries dated from the hegemony of Sidon. Like all the rest of Phoenicia, Sidon had accepted without resistance the sovereignty of the Theban Pharaohs, when they were masters of Syria ; but the tribute paid to them by the Phoenicians was no heavy price to pay for the right of frequenting the Delta ports. The relations thus established with Egypt secured, in fact, a double monopoly to the Phoenicians. Almost everything drawn by Egypt from the markets of Asia, whether raw material or manufactured articles, passed through their hands ; while, per contra, the export trade of the Nile valley was carried on almost entirely through them ; from such a state of things, clever traders like the Phoenicians must have reaped enormous profits. Moreover the empire of
1 RENAN, Mission de Phenide, p. 574. - STRABO, xvi. ii. 22.
ORIGIN OF THE PHOENICIANS. 29
Thothmes and Rameses was then the first military power of the world, and it must have been a great advantage for the Phoenicians to be able to claim at need the protection of those princes or of their generals. On the high seas they might, as we should phrase it, fly the Egyptian flag, and cover themselves with its prestige.1
Favoured thus by a vassalage which hardly affected their freedom, the Sidonians began by visiting all the eastern coasts of the Mediterranean. In the north they established themselves upon the southern littoral of Asia Minor ; they took up strong positions in the islands of Cyprus and Crete, whence it was easy to make the coasts of Rhodes and the Sporades on the one hand, and of the Cyclades on the other, without losing the last glimpse of land.2 They seem to have appeared very early at Thera (Santorini), at Melos (Milo), and at many other points in the archipelago. They may even have mounted thence to the Thracian islands, to Thasos, whose mines they worked so long.:i We may even believe that they passed the Hellespont and penetrated to the Euxine, to bring from its farther shores the copper and iron of the Chalybes, and the tin of the Caucasus. In no part of the Hellenic main-land was their influence more strongly felt than in Bceotia. This is proved by the myth of Cadmus, or " the Oriental " (from kedem, east), who is said to have imported the alphabet into Greece, and to have founded the city of Thebes.4 In the Peloponnesus, their presence is to be traced in Argolis ; but it was in the island of Cythera, off Laconia, that they were chiefly established. There they set up
1 On the presence of the Phoenicians in Egypt and the part they played there, see the interesting observations of BRUGSCH (Histoire de CEgypte, pp. 142-150). He shows that the Tyrians were something more than stranger merchants kept outside the ordinary framework of Egyptian society. In papyri dating from the nineteenth dynasty there are many examples of Semitic names borne by officials of Pharaoh's court. The same writer shows that a certain number of gods of Asiatic origin were then introduced into the Egyptian pantheon. Of these the chief were Reshep, Bes, Kadesh, and Anta.
2 DIODORUS has preserved the tradition of these relations between Rhodes and the east. He makes Danaus and the Egyptians, Cadmus and the Phoenicians visit that island (v. Iviii. i, 2). According to his story Cadmus left there a great bronze lebes, or cauldron, covered with Phoenician characters, as a mark of his visit.
3 HERODOTUS, ii. 44 ; vi.
4 Upon the establishment of the Phoenicians in Boeotia, see especially M. FR. LENORMANT'S paper entitled La Legende de Cadmus et les Etablissements phcnidens en Grece (8vo, 1867, Levy).
30 HISTORY OF ART IN PIKKNICIA AND ITS DEPENDENCIES.
factories whence their merchandize could flow readily into all the markets of the neighbouring peninsula.
Emboldened by success the Sidonians ventured to brave the terrors of the open sea, and penetrated into the second basin of the Mediterranean, the basin bounded on the west by Italy and Sicily. In Africa they built Utica and Kambc, on the site that was afterwards to become famous as that of Carthage ; they braved the long rollers of the Adriatic, they touched at certain points in southern Italy and Sicily, and they took possession of Malta and Gozo, where they found excellent harbours of refuge in which their ships could rest and refit.1
About 1000 or 900 B.C. the supremacy passed from Sidon to Tyre.2 Taken by the Philistines and sacked, the former town received a blow from which she took long to recover, but she had done so much for the interests and glory of Phoenicia that for a long time, both in Syria and in the east, the words Phoenician and Sidonian were looked upon as convertible terms. In their official acts the princes who reigned at Tyre called them- selves kings of the Sidonians.3 The first Tyrian kings of whom history says anything are Abibaal, the contemporary of David, and his son Hiram, the friend of Solomon. We find the names of several more in the Hebrew Scriptures and in the writings of the Greek and Roman historians, but their probable dates and sequence are often difficult to establish. It is certain, however, that Tyre continued the work of Sidon, and that, with greater energy and on a wider scale, the Tyrian colonies multiplied on the more fertile parts of the North African coast, and became rich and populous cities ; among them were Hippo, Hadrumetium, Leptis, and, towards the year 800 B.C. " the new city," Kart-hadast, which the Greeks called Carchedon and the Romans Carthage.
o
Thanks to her splendid situation Carthage developed rapidly ; but she never forgot that she was the daughter of Tyre. Every year a solemn embassy left the colony to sacrifice in the temple of Melkart, the most august of the metropolitan shrines.4 After a successful war Carthage sent a tithe of the spoil to the same
1 DIODORUS tells us that Malta and Gozo were colonized by the Phoenicians, but he does not tell us when (v. xii. 3, 4).
2 JUSTIN, xviii. 3.
3 PH. BERGER, La Phcnicie, \\ 7.
4 POLYBIUS, xxxi. xx. 9, 12 ; CfKiiis, iv. ii. 8; DiODORUS, xx. xiv. i.
ORIGIN OF THE PHOENICIANS.
temple.1 If the two cities never combined for any great political action or even to resist a common enemy, their abstention was due to the distaste of the Phoenicians for such methods of work ; but between the merchants of Tyre and those of Carthage close and intimate relations sprang up wherever they met. They were in continual correspondence, and at a word or glance they would combine to defeat the rivalry of foreign traders, such as the Greeks and Etruscans, and to keep profitable transactions to themselves. There was no necessity for agreements in writing or for binding oaths. Their co-operation was founded upon community of blood, of language and religion, of habits; and, above all, on that strongest of all ties, community of loves, hates, and interests.
In spite of the increasing prosperity of Carthage, Tyre remained for two centuries more the richest and most powerful of Phoenician cities. By the time its great African colony was founded Tyre had already begun to pervade the westernmost basin of the Mediterranean ; she had visited all its shores and multiplied naval stations upon them. The great antiquity of the commercial relations between Italy and Tyre is proved by the words Serranus, SarraniLs, which survived in the Latin language down to the classic period ; 2 they are a corruption of the true Semitic form of the word Tyre, Tsor. Tyrius, a corruption from Serranus, did not begin to come into general use at Rome till much later, when the Latins had come under the influence of the Greeks, who had turned Tsor into Tyros (Tvpos}. The presence and persistence of the form Serramis proves that the former people had been in close connection with Phoenicia, through the maritime trade of Tyre, ' before intimate relations had sprung up between the natives of Italy and the Greeks. In the course of their movement west- ward the ships of Tyre put into the ports of the great island of Sardinia, where they found several useful metals in abundance. Their harbour was the magnificent anchorage of Caralis, now
1 JUSTIN, xviii. 7 ; DIODORUS, xx. xiv. 2.
2 VIRGIL, Georgic II. 505 :
" Hie petit excidiis urbem miserosque Penates Ut gemma bibat et Serrano dormiat ostro."
3 We take this observation from W. Helbig's interesting paper on the discoveries made a few years ago at Prseneste (Cenni sopra Varte fenicia, p. 210, in the Ann ales de t Institut de Correspondance Archeologique, 1878, pp. 197-257).
32 HISTORY or ART IN PHOENICIA AND ITS DEPENDENCIES.
Cagliari, and they founded stations on the western coast which afterwards became the towns of Nora and Tharros.
From these ports the coasts of Spain could be easily reached, either by hugging the shores of Mauritania* or by way of the Balearic Islands. To the Phoenicians the chief attraction of Spain lay in its mines, of which the more accessible seams had already per- haps been worked by the indigenous races. By following the coast southward and westward the Tyrian seamen would at last arrive at Calpe, whence they would look out on a boundless and unknown sea, suggesting that they had at last reached the end of the habit- able world. The fears that seized them have sent an echo down even to our times. They could not repress the misgivings they felt at the long rollers of the Atlantic and at the swing of its tides ; they hesitated on the threshold of the unknown. According to a tradition long current at Gades, it was only after having twice retreated that they at last nerved themselves to pass the straits and to land on the other side.1 A third expedition, led by a bolder captain, founded on a small island close to the main-land the colony which was afterwards to become famous as Gadira, Gades and Cadiz.' By its situation and its houses tightly packed into a narrow space, Gadira must have reminded its founders of Tyre and Arvad. It became a fruitful nursery of hardy sailors and rapidly attained a prosperity that still excited the admiration of Strabo in the first century of our era.3
Its insular site made this advanced post secure enough, while its proximity to the main land made business easy. The Phoenician merchants soon established intimate relations with the people of Betica, the Turtes, Turditani or Turdules of the Greek and Latin historians. It has sometimes been suggested that a connection should be sought between the name of these people and the word Tarshish, which was certainly borrowed by the Hebrew writers from the Phoenicians.4 We have some reason to believe, however, that at first the word Tarshish was applied by the Syrian navigators to southern Italy ; with time it became
1 STRABO, iii. v. 5,
2 From the Phoenician word gfidir, a "closed and fortified place." Sec FR. LENORM ANT'S Manuel de FHistoire aticienne, vol. iii. p. 58.
3 STRABO, iii. i. 8 ; v. 3 ; DIODORUS, v. xx. 2.
4 Genesis x. 4 ; i Chronicles \. 7; Psalms Ixxii. 10 ; ISAIAH xxiii. 6, 10, 14; Ixxi. 19; EZEKIEL xxvii. 12.
ORIGIN OF THE PHOENICIANS. 33
displaced, and as the horizon of the Phoenicians retired westwards so did the shores known to them by that name, which was never, in truth, very definite in its application. At the period when Phoenician power was at its zenith it signified generally the lands by which the Mediterranean was bordered on the west, just as to Europeans the West Indies meant for centuries the whole conti- nent of America, north and south, with the islands which cluster about it.1
But whatever the origin of the name may have been, it is certain that Tarshish occupied a very large space in the minds of the Phoenicians. " They called those vessels that went long voyages ships of Tarshish, just as the English called theirs Indiamen even when they did not go near India." These ships must have been more solidly built and of greater tonnage than those engaged in the coasting trade with the ports of Syria and the y£gaean, but unfortunately it is not their portraits that we must recognize in those sculptured reliefs of the Sargonid period in which Phoenician galleys are represented.3 Some of these by their rounded stems and sterns seem to be cargo-carriers (Fig. 8), while others, with a sharp beak or ram, are " men-of-war " (Fig. 9) ; we can point to no monument on which the form and aspect of
1 FR. LENOTJMANT, Tarschisch, Etude d' Ethnographic et de GcograpJ.ie liblique (Revue des Questions historiques, 1882, ist July).
2 PH. BERGER, La Ph'enicie, p. 32. The phrase "ships of Tarshish " is thus employed in several passages of the Bible (i Kings x. 23; 2 Chronicles ix. 31) where actual voyages to Tarshish cannot be referred to, as the question of the moment is the traffic with Ophir, which was carried on by the Red Sea. We may conclude that the expression has the same generic force in this verse from EZEKIEL (xxvii. 25) : " The ships of Tarshish did sing of thee in thy market ; and thou wast replenished, and made very glorious in the midst of the seas."
3 We are enabled to recognize Phoenician galleys in these sculptured ships by the words of the inscription known as The Annals of Sennacherib, where it is related that in order to reach the rebels from Lower Chaldasa, who had taken refuge in the land of Elam, Sennacherib crossed the Persian Gulf in vessels of Syria. The truth of this is, in all probability, that he caused a flotilla to be built by Phoenician carpenters, on the Lower Euphrates, whence he could descend towards the "great sea of the rising sun." The bas-reliefs discovered by Sir Henry Layard must be understood as dealing with the return of the rebels as captives. " The men of Bit-Yaken with their gods and the men of Elam, I captured them, says Senna- cherib, I did not leave one. I embarked them in vessels and transported them to the opposite shore." M. Oppert has furnished us with a translation of this text, which appears in Cuneiform Inscriptions of Western Asia, vol. i. p. 40, line 31 et seq.
VOL. I. 1'"
34 HISTORY OK ART IN PIUKNICIA AND ITS DEPENDENCIES.
the ship of Tarshish, the PluL-nician Indiaman or clipper, has been preserved.
The profits of the trade with Spain were so large and so nimble that the whole eastern coast of the peninsula was soon studded
FIG. 8. — Phoenician merchant galley. From Layard.
with Phoenician settlements. The chief of these were Malaca (Malaga], Sex (Motril), Abdera (Almcria), and Cartei'a (Al- %eciras) ; others of less importance might be named, or, at least,
^yiJffiij^i^ JlO
I-IG. 9. — Phoenician war galley. From Layard.
their situation guessed. The valleys of the interior and the fertile plains of the province we now call Andalusia supplied merchandise of various kinds to the Tyrian venturers, but the chief staple of the
i*~r^ fr^a^ . ••$* Vflii •, u
>-^s v^vic^-^1 • \ i ->ci^ O:ho^r^vr., •- t vrC= c- **J>M\ <•
ORIGIN OF THE PHOENICIANS. 37
trade was metal. " Tarshish," says Ezekiel in his address to Tyre,1 " Tarshish was thy merchant by reason of the multitude of all kind of riches ; with silver, iron, tin, and lead, they traded in thy fairs." Of all these metals doubtless the most important to the Phoenicians, and the most profitable, was tin. In the ancient world no sub- stance was more universally employed than bronze, and without tin there can be no bronze. It was therefore an enormous advantage to the Phoenicians to have made themselves masters of the source whence that metal was to be obtained. The length of a sea voyage has far less effect upon the cost of merchandize than that of a land journey, so that throughout the Levant the tin brought over sea from Spain could be sold cheaper than the same metal brought over-land from central Asia. Such an advantage gave Phoenicia the control of the market and insured the fortune of her merchants.2
We give a map which will enable the reader to see at a glance how far the Phoenicians had carried their commerce in the eighth century B.C. The names of their principal settlements and naval stations are given, with every indication necessary to help to a clear comprehension of the several parts played by Tyre and Sidon in the creation of a great chain of colonies, of which some of the less important links have faded altogether from history3 (Fig. 10).
The Tyrians were well inspired to seek these new outlets for their energies in the west of Europe, for in the other direction they saw markets closed to them in which they had once had a monopoly. Greece was developing fast ; her population was growing and beginning to give evidence of a love for maritime commerce. In the two or three centuries which followed the supercession of Sidon by Tyre the Phoenician merchants had every day to struggle harder to maintain their position in the
1 EZEKIEL xxvii. 12.
2 As to the profits accruing to the Phoenicians from their control of the mines in the Iberian peninsula, see DIODORUS, v., xxxv. 3-6 ; xxxviii. 2-4. He is speaking chiefly of silver, but he adds that " tin was found in many parts of the peninsula." In these days the chief metallic products of Spain and Portugal are iron, copper, and especially argentiferous lead. Veins of tin are known, but they are not rich enough to pay for the working.
3 We borrow this map from M. Maspero. The letter G at the end of a name indicates a colony from Gebal, S one from Sidon, and T one from Tyre. But some of these attributions are by no means certain.
3«S HISTORY OF ART IN PIM.NICIA AND ITS DEPENDENCIES.
/Egruan. Their goods were still bought, but they were no longer the sole purveyors of all those things by which life is made comfortable and luxurious ; they could no longer add the profits of piracy to those of trade ; the practice of kidnapping girls and boys and selling them into slavery l had to be given up as soon as the people of the islands learnt to build ships for themselves, and to retain the mastery of their own ports. The rich silver mines of Siphnos and Cimolos were no longer worked for the benefit of strangers to the soil. The isolated situation of
o
Thasos enabled the Phoenicians to maintain themselves there to a later period, but at the beginning of the eighth century they were chased even thence by a colony of Parians.- Long before this Miletus and her colonies had closed the straits to them, and under the Saite princes the lonians began to compete with them for the trade of Egypt. About the same period the Greeks established themselves first in Italy and soon afterwards in Sicily. Archias, at the head of a numerous band of Corinthians and Corcyrans, founded Syracuse in 733 ; the rest of the same coast was almost monopolized by other Greek settlements. All the Phoenicians had left to them was the western extremity of the island, with the three towns known to the Greeks as Motya, Kepher, afterwards called Solunte, and Machanath, or Panormus.
And, as if all the world were banded against Phoenicia, life became at the same time more precarious on the Syrian coast. After the disappearance of the Ramessids, Egypt, enfeebled and divided, retreated within herself, and her armies no longer appeared in Syria. Phoenicia lost much by the removal of that Egyptian suzerainty which had been a protection to her rather than a hindrance ; its disappearance left her without defence against the daily increasing ascendency of Assyria. From the ninth century onwards she paid annual tribute to the kings of Nineveh.
Why did she fail to accommodate herself to the domination of Assyria as she did to that of Egypt, and afterwards to that of the
1 HERODOTUS, i. i ; HOMER, Odyssey, xv. 415-484.
2 We have no good reason for doubting the date given by DIONYSIUS OF HALICARN. -\ssus as that of the establishment of the Parian colony, vi/., the Fifteenth Olympiad, 720-717 (Conf. CLEM. ALEXAND. Stromata* i. 21, p. 398). See G. PERROT, Mhnoire sur /'//e de Thasos, in the Archives t/es Missions, vol. i., 2nd series, 1864.
ORIGIN OF THE PHOENICIANS. 39
Achcemenids ? The reason is to be sought no doubt in the fact that the Assyrian conquerors were imbued with a religious fanaticism, a sternness of tyranny and a greediness, which hurt both the interests and the pride of the Tyrians ; the tribute claimed was too heavy, and the gods who had guarded the Phoenician mariners for so many centuries saw their temples dishonoured by the truculent votaries of Assur. But however this may be the fact remains that, although the other Phoenician cities submitted as a rule to the Assyrian generals as soon as they appeared in the country, Tyre held out against them again and again. More than once, and for years at a time, she defied the whole power of Sargon and Shalmanezer V. Sennacherib, indeed, succeeded in forcing a king of his own choice upon her, and, under the last princes of his dynasty, she seems to have accepted her lot as a vassal. After the fall of Nineveh, when a Babylonian empire succeeded to that of Assyria, Phoenicia made haste to secure the alliance of Judsea, and still more of Egypt, against the new masters of the east. At this moment a new life was breathed into the Nile kingdom by the princes of the Saite dynasty, and the desire to reconquer her ancient ascendency in Syria took hold upon her. But unhappily her Pharaoh, Apries, was defeated and Jerusalem taken, while Tyre was blockaded for thirteen long years by the armies of Nebuchadnezzar.' But as the island city still retained command of the sea, she in the end compelled the Chaldseans to treat with her and raise the siege1 (574 B.C.). A blockade so prolonged must have had a destructive effect upon Tyrian commerce. No merchandize could reach the city over land, her factories must have stood idle, her sailors must have been drawn from their proper trade to the work of war. The less stubborn Sidon must have profited by the enforced idleness of her rival to resume her ancient supremacy. But it was, indeed, a critical period for the whole of Phoenicia. While she was engaged in military and political resistance to the Ninevites and
1 Governed by the wish to show that prophecy was fulfilled, most ecclesiastical authors have tried to make out that Nebuchadnezzar took and sacked Tyre ; but Phoenician annals deny in the most formal manner that Tyre was ever taken by the Chaldaeans (MASPERO, Histoire ancienne, p. 503, No. 2). M. BERGER inclines to the same opinion. " The issue of the siege seems doubtful. The allusions to it in the sacred writings are ambiguous. But from certain other evidence it would seem that on this occasion also Tyre foiled her enemies, and that Nebuchadnezzar was obliged to come to terms " (La Phenicie, p. 10).
40 HISTORY 01 ART IN PIKKNICIA AND ITS DEPENDENCIES.
Babylonians, her merchants were supplanted in many markets by those of Greece and Etruria.
After the fall of Babylon Cyrus became sole master of western Asia, and the Phcunicians, like the Jews, made haste to accept the Persian rule. The Achsemenids had no religious fanaticism ; they left a large measure of liberty to the subject peoples of their empire, and their monetary exactions were moderate.1 They were especially tender with the Pruunicians. The Persians had no navy, and they required one for their contest with Greece ; they could not reckon on any cordial co-operation from the cities of Ionia, but two strong inducements led the Phoenicians to give the help required. In the first place the direct profit was great ; a never-ceasing stream of darics poured into their ports to pay for their ships of war and their hardy crews. Secondly, they had an opportunity for taking some kind of revenge on those enterprising rivals who had for centuries past been narrowing the field of their commerce. Down to the time of the Macedonian conquest the kings of Persia had no subjects more faithful than the Phoenicians.
History mentions but one case of refusal to co-operate with the Persians on the part of the Syrian coast towns ; and that was when Cambyses, fresh from the conquest of Egypt, wished to undertake an expedition against Carthage. The Phoenicians, says Herodotus, declared that it was quite impossible that they should take part in any such campaign, " because the most sacred oaths bound them to the Carthaginians, and in fighting against their own children they would be violating both ties of blood and scruples of religion." Such a scruple did honour both to their heads and hearts. At the end of the sixth century Carthage was on the high road to the foundation of a colonial power in the Mediter- ranean of which the mother city might well be proud, and it was impossible that the latter should help to nip it in the bud or to hinder the development of a commercial prosperity in which, thanks to the intimate relations that subsisted between the ports of Africa and those of Syria, Tyre and Sidon would be certain to share.
The fortune of Carthage was made by her distance from the
1 HERODOTUS (iii. 91) does not tell how much of the tribute of 350 talents which the fifth satrapy (Syria and the island of Cyprus) had to pay, fell to the share of Phoenicia.
2 HERODOTUS, iii. 19.
ORIGIN OF THE PHOENICIANS. 41
principal centres of Greek civilization. While the t\vo eastern basins of the Mediterranean became Greek seas, at least in their northern portion, as early as the end of the eighth century, Carthage had the western basin pretty well to herself; in it the Greek colonies were at no time either very numerous or very powerful ; they were too far from their base.
The supremacy Carthage then acquired she was not to lose until, in the third century before our era, the Roman people entered upon the full political inheritance of Greece ; and before the hour of her fall arrived she had time to play a part in the world whose importance and originality deserve to be brought into strong relief. " By its geographical situation the city of Dido belonged to Africa and the west ; by its manners, by its language, by its civilization and the descent of its inhabitants, it belonged to Asia and the east. It was an outpost of Asiatic civilization pushed forward into the western Mediterranean ; it was through Carthage that, in Africa, in Gaul, in Spain, even in the British Islands, oriental modes of life and thought preceded those of Greece and Rome." }
The country in which Carthage and those other Syrian colonies whose names we have mentioned were established, was after- wards the African province of the Romans, and is now Tunis, a province de facto of France. Its fertility is well known. The Phoenicians found it inhabited by a mixed population in which a race of Egyptian blood, the ancestors of the modern Berbers, are supposed to have predominated. The superior intelligence and higher skill of the Syrians soon gave them an influence over the native tribes — an influence which came all the easier, perhaps, by reason of some distant affinity of blood. They introduced better methods of agriculture, an industry which, like all others, had been carried very far on the Syrian coast. In the neighbourhood of Tyre and Sidon M. Renan found abundant evidence that the Phoenicians carried on their tillage with far better tools than those now in use in the country.2 In Africa the plains were very different both in size and in quality of soil from those on the narrow shores of Palestine. Wheat soon became an important article of export ; and the peasants of the interior rapidly learnt the language spoken by the merchants to whom they carried their
1 FR. LENORMANT, Manuel de fHistoire ancienne, vol. iii. p. 153.
2 E. RENAN, Mission de Ph'enicie, pp. 633, 634 and 639 ; plate xxxvi. VOL. I. <*
42 HISTORY OF ART IN PIKKNICIA AND ITS DEPENDENCIES.
grains and fruits in exchange for the stuffs, tools and jewellery sold in the city bazaars. These relations continued for centuries without interruption, and in time produced the mixed but strongly Semitic race of men whom the Greeks called Liby-Phomicians.
It was by the help of these half breeds that Carthage succeeded in an enterprise which Tyre had not even attempted. In two hundred years, from the end of the ninth to the end of the seventh centuries, she conquered, foot by foot, the whole of the region stretching from the Lesser Syrtes to the frontier of Numidia ; and her occupation was not confined to the littoral ; she founded, in the interior, a number of towns and fortified villages whose fidelity to the metropolis, like that of the Roman colonies in Italy, was secured by the enjoyment of important privileges.1 The earlier Tyrian colonies had been nothing more than factories with supre- macy over the land in their immediate neighbourhood, while the skilful policies of Carthage soon made her the mistress of a wide and fruitful territory supporting several millions of inhabitants. As for the other Tyrian and Sidonian cities on the same coast, they preserved for the most part the dignity implied by the name of allies, but Carthage was the permanent mistress of the confederacy and the disposer of its forces.
Neither Tyre nor Sidon ever had an army. In most cases they founded their settlements in islands to which the sea was a sufficient protection, and nothing more than a few ships to guard the straits was required. When they were compelled to raise factories on the main land, they surrounded them with a wall strong enough and high enough to defeat a coup-de-main, while they paid an annual subsidy to the chiefs of the nearest tribes,2 just as our modern merchants did on the coast of Guinea when- ever they wished to set up their establishments on the lands of some negro king. In these days the subsidies take the form of beads, barrels of rum or gunpowder and old muskets. The Phoenicians can have had no difficulty in supplying the natives
1 " It is thus," says ARISTOTLE, " that Carthage guards against the dangers of an oligarchy — she sends periodically colonies made up from among her own citizens into the countries round about, and insures them an easy existence." — Politics, ii. viii. 9.
2 "Statute annuo vectigali pro solo urbis" says JUSTIN (xviii. 5). He even says that Carthage herself paid such a subsidy for more than three centuries, which hardly seems likely (xix. i and 2).
ORIGIN OF THE PHOENICIANS. 43
with such things as they prized. Wine, for instance, must have been as greatly sought for as spirits are now. True to their national habits, the Tyrians preferred to buy a few acres of land in this fashion, than to take them by force and defend them with the sword.
Carthage found herself compelled by events to take another line ; as soon as she had conceived the desire to possess the sur- rounding country an army became necessary, and she found the first elements of it in the very native tribes for whose subjection it was intended. The liberal pay which she could so easily offer attracted recruits from all the races by which her own territories and those of her neighbours were peopled. She enrolled Liby- Phcenicians, Numidians and Moors, while her own citizens fashioned the rough material thus provided into efficient fighting units. Her army was at first purely African, but in later years, when she embarked on her great conflicts with the Sicilian Greeks and the Romans, she had to turn for help to all who chose to live by the profession of arms, and of all the people who dwelt on the Mediterranean coast, there was not one, speaking broadly, that was unrepresented in the great regiments of mercenaries with which Hamilcar, Hasdrubal and Hannibal disputed the empire of the world with Rome.
But long before she could put these great hosts into the field, that is, at the beginning of the sixth century, Carthage had what no Phoenician city had possessed before her, namely, a wide territory and a standing army. She was, therefore, in a condition to make the best of her opportunities when the long duel between Tyre and Babylon prevented the former city, for ten years and more, from supporting her stations beyond the sea. Disquieting events were taking place in every direction. In Betica the Turdetani had risen, had attacked the Phoenician settlements, and had massacred the African colonists whom Tyre had established in the valley of the Betis. And the gravity of the crisis was increased by the fact that the hand of Greece was felt behind it. As early as 640 Coleos of Samos had pushed a hardy prow as far as these distant coasts, and, favoured by fortune, had returned to vaunt the wonders of Betica and the treasures of Gades in his native island. From that day every Ionian captain had burned to reach Tartessos, as the Greeks called Tarshish. In making for Spain, a Greek of Phocsea, Euxenes by name, had landed in southern Gaul, not far
44 HISTOKV OF ART IN PIKKNICIA AND ITS DEPENDENCIES.
from the mouth of the Rhone, and founded Massilia. In 548 the Khodians and Cnidians made the same attempt, and, landing on the north-east of the peninsula, founded Rhoda, now Rosas. But it was by the Phocxans that these explorations were most energetically carried out. It seems probable that the story told by Herodotus of the sudden affection for his foreign visitors that seized the king of Tartessos,1 whom he calls Arganthonios, must date from the period of inaction forced upon Tyre by the blockades of Nebuchadnezzar. The Greeks perhaps were less greedy and more easy to get on with than their Syrian rivals, while fortune smiled here on their rising ambition as she did everywhere else. In Sicily the three cities still left to the Pruenicians were already threatened.
From one end of the Mediterranean to the other every Phoenician colony and every Phoenician merchant began to turn beseeching glances towards Carthage ; if Carthage refused to take up the broken policy of Tyre the whole fabric of Phoenician commerce was threatened with rapid extinction. Carthage re- sponded to the appeal and proved herself equal to the work that had to be done. She understood that the times had changed. As long as the Tyrians and Sidonians were confronted on every coast by nothing but savage and scanty populations, it was easy enough to insure the safety of their settlements. But the world had be- come peopled ; the indigenous tribes had learnt the use of bronze and iron ; finally a civilization, that of the Greeks, was to be encountered on every shore, was developing rapidly, and had already surpassed that of the Phoenicians in all matters of art and thought. A new situation called for new modes of action. Carthage did not hesitate a moment. She was not content with a defensive programme, by which she would have lost ground from year to year ; she chose the aggressive. The time of monopolies was past, but by her energetic action she secured for three centuries more a privileged situation over the whole western basin of the Mediterranean.
" A great expedition was sent to Spain which relieved the coast cities, reconquered the valley of the Betis, and resumed those mineral districts whose possession was of such capital importance. A large number of Liby-Phcenicians were transported into the country and there established as colonists, to keep the native
1 HKRODOTUS, i. 163.
ORIGIN OF THE PIKKNICIANS. 45
tribes in check. The system of government and colonisation which had been put in action in Zeugitania and Byzacenia was applied to Betica. In order to keep open their strategic and commercial communications with Spain by land as well as by sea, the Carthaginians occupied and fortified the towns, called Meta- gonites by the Greeks, which formed an unbroken chain along the whole coast of Mauretania as far as the pillars of Hercules. They had been founded by Tyre in the first instance as harbours of refuge and victualling stations for ships on their way to Gades and back. An intimate alliance was entered into with the Numidians, who were engaged to respect the ports established on their coasts —ports which served as recruiting stations for the Carthaginian armies among the warlike tribes in their neighbourhood."
Encouraged by these first successes, the Carthaginians deter- mined to cast an army into Sicily which might win the co-opera- tion of the tribes in the interior, the Siculi and Sicani. These tribes were beginning to feel some apprehension at the rapid growth of the Greek colonies, which encroached yearly upon their narrow territory. The Carthaginians soon succeeded in making themselves masters of the western part of the island and of the interior, throwing the Greek colonists back on the northern and eastern coasts.2 The towns which still belonged to the Syrian stock were relieved by the success of this bold policy ; garrisons were thrown into them and they were put in an efficient state of defence. Where the Tyrians had left only watchers and ware- house-keepers, there the Carthaginians put soldiers.
A no less successful effort was made to reconquer the Phoenician supremacy in the waters that lie between Sardinia and the north-eastern coasts of Spain. In 556 the Phocaeans founded the town of Alalia, or Aleria, on the eastern coast of Corsica, in a situation well chosen for the desired purpose of counter- acting the advantages given to the Phoenicians by their possession of a part of Sardinia ; it enabled its founders to command the whole of the Tyrrhenian Sea and the Ligurian Gulf. The capture and destruction of Phocsea by Harpagus in 547, at the time of the conquest of Ionia by the Persians, instead of ruining the Ionian possessions in the west, really added greatly to their importance.
1 FR. LENORMANT, Manuel cTHistoire antienne, vol. iii. p. 187.
2 This we learn from a few short and rather vague sentences of JUSTIN (xviii. 7).
46 HISTORY OF ART IN PIKKNICIA AND ITS DEPENDENCIES.
From a colony Massilia rose to be a metropolis j1 fugitives from Phoauu, energetic men and skilful sailors, took refuge with the wealth they had saved, some in Massilia, others at Aleria. The effect of this reinforcement was soon felt. The Ionian colonists captured and destroyed the stations established by the Phoenicians on the coasts of Liguria and north-eastern Spain, while in more than one encounter their squadrons defeated those of Carthage. The superiority thus won they enjoyed for some time.2
The Greeks were, then, in a fair way to gather the trade with Spain into their own hands, and, tempted by the mines of Sardinia, they would be likely in time to wish to add that island to the colony they had begun to form in Corsica. Carthage could not be indifferent to such ambitions as these, and she determined to resume, if possible, her ascendency in the north, as she had resumed it in Betica and Sicily ; and in the new enterprise she had the good fortune to rind allies.
At this moment the Etruscans, that strange people whose origin and language are still a mystery, were at the height of their prosperity. Their nation as a whole had its seat in Tuscany, but Campania also had a few Etruscan cities, and as these two groups of a single people were separated by Latium, where the power of Rome was gradually extending itself, they required the com- mand of the sea to enable them to communicate freely with one another. This freedom was compromised by the existence of the Ionian colony on the opposite coast of Corsica. It was natural then that Carthaginians and Etruscans, in both of whom similar apprehensions had been awakened by a single foe, should unite their forces against him. In 536 an Etruscan fleet sailed from Populonia, the chief port of Etruria, and, being joined by a fleet from Carthage, the combined squadrons turned their heads to- wards Aleria. The ensuing battle was won by the lonians, but their numbers were so scanty that even victory was fatal. They abandoned Aleria and fled, some to Massilia, others to southern Italy, where they founded the colony of Velia.3
Corsica had neither the fertile plains nor the mineral wealth of Sardinia. The Carthaginians, after establishing a few naval
1 LENORMANT, Histoire ancienne, vol. iii. p. 191. • THUCYDIDES, i. 13; PAUSANIAS, x. viii. 4. 3 HERODOTUS, i. 165-7 ; DIODORUS, v. xiii. 4.
ORIGIN OF THE PHOENICIANS. 47
stations, abandoned the rest of the island to the Etruscans.1 But on the other hand they razed to the ground most of the towns built by the lonians on the coast of Spain ; they re-established themselves in Liguria, where the rock of Monaco was one of their fortresses. Massilia lived a precarious life until the great victory, won by Hiero, tyrant of Syracuse, over the Etruscans in 474, re- stored freedom of movement to the Greek colonists in the Gulfs of Lyons and Genoa. The Massilians seem never to have resumed the great enterprises of a century before ; they were content to make the most of southern Gaul, and to leave Spain and the islands to the Phoenicians of Africa. By the force of events a tacit convention or formal agreement was entered into between these various commercial races ; in the rapid multiplica- tion of transactions there was profit for them all. The discovery at Marseilles of a table of charges, in the Punic language, for sacrifices in the temple of Baal, seems to prove that Carthage had a factory at Massilia. The tablet must have been engraved at Massilia, for the stone of which it consists has been recognized as that of a neighbouring quarry.2
Freed from the uneasiness inspired by the enterprise and armed competition of the lonians, the Carthaginians set to work to complete their network of strategic positions in the western Mediterranean. After a check or two they finished the conquest of Sardinia, and, as in Africa, they favoured its agricultural development. " Under their rule the island reached a prosperity it has never seen since. Sardinia, which is now so thinly peopled, so wild, so unhealthy, was, when the Romans took possession of it after three centuries of Carthaginian domination, a rich and flourishing garden, with a large rural and urban population."
Mago, the general who had brought the conquest of Sardinia to a happy conclusion, also succeeded in taking full possession of the Balearic group. In Minorca he founded a city which after- wards became one of the chief naval stations of the republic — a city which has preserved the name of its founder with but little
1 DIODORUS, v. xii. 3, 4.
2 Corpus Inscriptionum Semiticarum, part i. No. 164.
3 FR. LENORMANT, Manuel cFHistoire ancienne, vol. iii. p. 197. According to DIODORUS (x. xv. 4) a few savage tribes continued to maintain their independence in the mountains, but the whole of the plains were occupied by the Carthaginian colonists.
4^ HisTuKY OF ART IN PIKKNICIA AND ITS DEPENDENCIES.
alteration down to our own day, for Port Ala/ton is but a form of Port Jlfa?t>*
Towards the end of the sixth century, Carthage had established her supremacy over at least half the Mediterranean, but already her merchants and captains were beginning to find the boundaries of that land-locked sea too narrow for their energies. Her ships were every year becoming more ready to pass the Pillars of Hercules and to navigate the Atlantic. There the Tyrians had preceded them, but with less boldness. With a commission from the Carthaginian senate, a certain Hanno explored the coast of Africa as far as the eighth degree of south latitude.'2 As a result of that expedition the whole African coast from the straits to Cape Nun was colonized, more than three hundred settlements being established there, of which a few, such as Tingis (Tangier] and Sala (Rabat) are now represented by Moorish towns. Although most of these were abandoned, some retained a con- siderable commerce, such as Cerne (the island of Arguin), where great annual fairs used to be held.:!
In the course of these explorations the Carthaginians discovered the Canaries and touched at Madeira.1 " From a passage in Scylax, it would even appear that they attempted to push still farther west, and got as far as the Mcr dcs Sargasscs (?), but the quantity of weeds with which the surface of the waves was covered made them think it would be dangerous to venture farther, and they retraced their steps. 5 If the wars against the Sicilian Greeks and the Romans had not come to distract the
1 According to DIODORUS the Balearic Islands supported a large Phoenician population by the side of their indigenous tribes.
J The official report of Hanno's voyage, which was deposited in the temple of Baal-Ammon at Carthage, has been preserved to us in its entirety by a Greek translation. See the Geographi Grcvci Minores, Muller's edition (I)idot, vol. i. part i.), and the two maps prepared by that learned editor for the illustration of the text.
3 SCYLAX, Periple (?), 112.
4 This we may infer from many texts which it would take too long to discuss. Among them is a passage in DIODORUS, in which he gives a brilliant description of a fertile and well-watered island, with a delicious climate, which was situated " opposite Africa, in the ocean to the west, and separated from the main land by several days' sail" (v. xix.). After its discovery by the Phoenicians they paid periodical visits to it, he tells us, down to a very late period (v. xx.).
5 FR. LENORMANT, Manuel (THistoirc ancienne, vol. iii., p. 200 ; SCYLAX,
112.
ORIGIN OF THE PHOENICIANS. 49
attention of Carthage, a Phoenician Columbus might have dis- covered America twenty centuries before that event actually took place. We know that a Tyrian captain, subsidized by Nechao, king of Egypt, anticipated Vasco de Gama and circumnavigated Africa about the year 600 B.C.1
While Hanno steered towards the South Atlantic, another commander, Himilco, made his way north, reconnoitring the western coasts of Spain and Gaul and touching the British Isles.2 It has been said that the Tyrians also reached those coasts, but no evidence that they did so has been adduced. On the other hand we know that, during the Carthaginian period, ships of Gades went to an archipelago which they named the Cassiteridcs, or " tin islands." These were the Scilly Islands, to whose inhabitants they gave salt, bronze vases, arms and pottery in exchange for hides and metal.3 No doubt they landed at several points on the coast of Cornwall and Ireland, but according to their usual habits, they preferred to establish themselves on small islands, where their safety was more assured. There they would set up markets to which the tribes on the main-land could bring any merchandize they had to dispose of.4
This Atlantic trade was a monopoly. The Carthaginians spared no pains to keep away competitors. Their pilots jealously guarded their knowledge of the prevailing winds, of the currents and anchorages, while they spread such reports as to the difficulties and dangers of the navigation as would discourage any but the most dauntless souls. When a foreign captain refused to be frightened and attempted to follow the track of a Carthaginian ship, the crew of the latter were ready for any extreme, either of cruelty or enterprise, to choke him off and preserve the national secrets. If they felt themselves to be the stronger party, they would turn upon their pursuer and put him and his crew to death ; 5 if inferior strength made this impossible they would risk
1 HERODOTUS, ii. 42.
2 The report of Himilco has not been preserved, but some of its facts appear to have been utilized in the Latin poem of Festus Arienus.
3 STRABO, iii. v. n.
4 Without naming the Carthaginians, DIODORUS tells us that the inhabitants of the south-western extremity of Great Britain had their habits and manners much softened by their intercourse with the strangers who came to their shores for tin.
5 APPIAN, Punica, 5 ; STRABO, xvii. i. 19.
VOL. I. ir
5O HISTORY OF ART IN PHOENICIA AND ITS DEPENDENCIKS.
tlieir own existence to mislead their rival. Strabo tells us of the Phoenician captain who, seeing himself followed by a Roman ship along the western coast of Spain, deliberately steered upon a shoal, where his ship perished and with it the Roman galley. The Phoenician captain managed to swim ashore, and on his return to his own country he was rewarded for his heroism and ready resource with the full value of his lost ship and cargo.1
Such proceedings would not do in Italian waters. There the Carthaginians had to be content with admission to the ports on equal terms with Greeks and Etruscans. At a very early hour they had been compelled to renounce all idea of retaining a footing on the soil of the peninsula, and to content themselves with taking up positions which gave them ready access to it, as, for instance, on the island of Lipari, whence they could keep a watch upon the Straits of Messina and the whole coast of Southern Italy. These advanced posts they could make the bases both of trade and piracy. From the former very large profits were still to be won, as Carthage had a practical monopoly in the supply of African and oriental objects to European markets. They entered into commercial treaties. Aristotle had heard of treaties concluded between the Etruscans and the Carthaginians,2 and Polybius has preserved for us the text of the first convention signed between Carthage and Rome, the latter signing for her Latin allies, and the former for her own metropolis ; this was in 509, the year of the expulsion of the Tarquins.3 The excavations made in Etruria and Latium are continually affording evidence in support of these historical statements. In the cemeteries of both countries a large number of objects have been found which, speaking figuratively, bear the stamp of Carthage.
It was at about this period that the wealth and greatness of Carthage were at their zenith, and that her affairs were most skilfully managed. We shall not follow her into her wars against the Greeks of Sicily, which went on at the same time as the Medic wars in the East ; still less shall we dwell upon that long duel with Rome in which she at last succumbed. Long before the day of her fall, long before the day of that great
1 STRABO, iii. v. n. 2 ARISTOTLE, Politics, iii. v. 10.
3 POLYBIUS, iii. 22.
ORIGIN OF THE PHOENICIANS. 5 1
disaster which recalled to Scipio and Polybius the melancholy lines of Homer, the supremacy of the Greek civilization was assured. The art of Greece had arrived at perfection by the middle of the fifth century. From that date onwards the Hellenic world drew from the East nothing but raw material, to which it gave forms so superior to those hitherto known that they soon imposed themselves on every neighbouring people. Carthage no more escaped the action of this powerful rivalry than the Phcenician towns of Syria. In the middle of the fourth century the throne of Tyre was occupied by that Strato whose passion for all that was Greek gave him the name of the Phil-Hellene. Something of the same kind went on at Carthage. The Carthaginians waged a murderous war against the Greeks of Sicily, but in the sequel they carried off the statues from their enemy's shrines, and set them up in the temples and public places of their own city.1 They even copied the money of Greece, or rather they caused coins to be struck by Greek artists for their use (Figs, ii and i2).2 Finally, Greek architects found their way to Carthage long before Scipio and his legions. The temples which disappeared in the great conflagration, the shrines of Baal-Hammon and Tanit, cannot have preserved the look of Phcenician sanc- tuaries, they must have been reconstructed in the style made fashionable by the Greek artists of the time of Alexander and his successors ; at least we may fairly conclude that it was so from the fact that the military harbour was decorated with columns of the Ionic order.3 Not the slightest fragment of these structures has come down to our time ; but we find a trace of Greek influence even in the ornaments with which those steles
1 APPIAN, Punica, 133 ; CICERO, In Verrem, De Signis, xxxv.
2 For the chronology of the Carthaginian coinage see FR. LENORMANT, Essai sur la Propagation de V Alphabet phenicien dans F ancien Monde, vol. i. p. 156-161. The two specimens which we reproduce are thus described by DE SAULCY (in the notes to M. Duruy's Histoire romaine, vol. i- p. 419 and 420, and from which we borrow these two figures) : n. Obv. Head of the nymph Arethusa ; Rev. Pegasus. The legend BARAT signifies the wells, or perhaps more accurately Bi ARAT, at the wells, the Punic name for Syracuse, which possessed the famous well of Arethusa. Large silver piece, certainly struck in Sicily, and probably at Syracuse. — 12. Obv. Head of Arethusa. Rev. A horse supported by a palm-tree ; an especially Cartha- ginian type. Sub-division of No. n. The inscription on both has the same signification, so that the two coins must have originated in Sicily. Electrum.
3 Kioves 8' cKacrrou vewo-otKou Trpov^ov 'law/cot St'o. . . APPIAN, Punica, 96.
HISTORY OK ART IN PIKKNICIA AND ITS DEPENDENCIES.
consecrated to Tanit, of which such vast numbers have been discovered within the last few years, were decorated.1
In these curious monuments we find architectural motives thoroughly Greek in character reproduced side by side with forms and symbols that can only be explained by the Phoenician religion. Pavilions in which the figure of a worshipper (Fig. 13)
I'"IG. ii. — Carthaginian coin. Silver.
or a collection of sacred emblems (Fig. 14) are inclosed have triangular pediments supported by fluted pilasters, the latter crowned with Ionic capitals. There are acroteria at the three angles of the pediment. These acroteria appear again at the angles of a pediment in which we find the tympanum occupied by a mother-goddess (Fig. 15). Here the proportions of the
FIG 12. — Carthaginian coin. Liccirum.
pediment are not Greek, but, on the other hand, the cornice below is decorated with a well marked egg-moulding. In one of the most curious of these little monuments we encounter a clearly defined Ionic capital surmounted by a crescent moon, which supports in its turn a bust of Tanit. Above the face of the
1 PH. BERGER, Lettre a M. Fr. Lenormant stir ks Representations figurces des Steles puniques de la Bibliothcque nationale (Gazette archcologique, 1876-7).
ORIGIN OF THE PHOENICIANS.
goddess a row of oves and arrow-heads may be distinguished (Fig. 1 6). None of this is very pure either in form or proportion, but except in such symbols as the crescent moon, it includes nothing to remind us of Egypt or Assyria, nothing in fact that we can call Phoenician.
In order to follow the history of Carthage in the west and to trace her career down to the moment when her civilization became blended in that of Greece and Rome, we have for the
FIG. 13. — Votive stele from Carthage. French National Library.
moment lost sight of Tyre and Sidon. We must now return to them, for neither the Persian nor even the Macedonian conquest crushed the genius and prosperity of the industrious race by which they were inhabited. The Persian sovereignty had been accepted as a deliverance, and to the Persian kings the Phoenicians had given the assistance of their fleets in suppressing the revolts which broke out, every now and again, in Ionia, Cyprus, and Egypt. But their fidelity began to waver towards the middle
54 HISTORY OF ART IN PIICKNICIA AND ITS DEPENDENCIES.
of the fourth century, when the empire of the Achajmenids seemed on the point of dissolution. In 316, under Ochus, Sidon
~
FIG. 14. — Votive stele from Carthage. French National Library.
rose and massacred its Persian garrison. Betrayed by her king Tennes, she was retaken, reduced to ashes, and her inhabitants sold for slaves.1
FIG. 15. — Votive stele from Carthage. French National Library.
Again, after the battle of Issus (B.C. 333), Byblos, Arvad, Sidon,
1 DIODORUS, xvi., 41-45. Diodorus places these events three or four years too soon. According to him, the submission of Egypt and Phoenicia took place between
ORIGIN OF THE PHOENICIANS. 55
and the other cities of the coast hastened to submit to the con- queror. Tyre alone listened to her pride rather than to her interests. She was ready to acknowledge herself the vassal of Macedonia on the same terms as those granted by Persia, but she refused to allow Alexander to march at the head of his guard through those gates which had never yet been passed by a conqueror. She paid dearly for her resistance. After a siege of
FIG. 1 6. — Fragment of a, votive stele from Carthage. French National Library.
seven months she was taken and sacked. The mole by which the besiegers joined her to the mainland changed her situation for ever. She was no longer an island. To be mistress of the seas no longer sufficed to make her impregnable,
351 and 348. But GROTE gives us very good reasons for believing that neither Egypt nor Phoenicia can have been reduced before 346 and 345 (History of Greece. vol. xi. p. 4-43, n. 3, and 441 n. 3).
56 HISTORY OF ART IN PIKKNICIA AND ITS DEPENDENCIES.
Thenceforward Tyre also had to abandon the great ambitions renounced long before by the other cities of the coast, and the Phoenicians, as a whole, had to be content with the status of merchants ; merchants better informed, readier at a bargain, at once more enterprising, more wary, more economical, and richer than their rivals, but still only merchants ; subjects now of the Ptolemies, now of the Seleucidae, and, finally, of the Roman emperors, they had stations everywhere, at Alexandria and Athens, at Corinth and Antioch, and later at Puteoli in Italy. In all these towns they dwelt in their own quarter, they used among them- selves their native Semitic language, they had their own temples and forms of worship ; like the Jews and Armenians in modern Turkey, they formed a nation apart, devoted to gain. From the time that Greek art imposed itself upon all civilized nations they ceased to play a useful part as the disseminators of plastic types and industrial methods ; but in other respects their mission was not yet fulfilled. During the two first centuries of our era their dis- persed but strongly cohesive communities were among the most active agents in the diffusion of Christianity.1
§ 3. — Religion.
Our knowledge of the Phoenician religion is still very imperfect. The numerous inscriptions that have been found in recent years — they are for the most part dedications and fragments of ritual —have revealed the names of several deities previously unknown. A certain amount of information has also been gleaned by the study of onomatology, as nearly all the Phoenician proper names are what is called theophori, that is to say, composite words in which the name of a deity is included. Finally, we have a few fragments of Phoenician writings, and a considerable mass of information sprinkled over the works of Greek and Roman authors.2 But,
1 RENAN, Les Apotres, pp. 295-303.
2 MENANDER, who wrote a history of Phoenicia, was a native of Ephesus; but according to Josephus, to whom we owe the few fragments of his work which survive, he consulted Phoenician documents in the original (Fragmenta Historicum Gracorum, C. Muller, vol. iv. pp. 445-448). The remains of Sanchoniathon are to be found in the same collection, vol. iii. pp. 560-576. For the corrections that require to be made in the Greek text of these fragments, see several ingenious
RELIGION.
in spite of the industry of modern criticism, many points are still obscure. The epigraphic texts are dry and short ; they explain nothing, and the analysis of proper names gives little after all but the titles of gods ; the existing fragments of Sanchoniathon bear traces of the syncretism of the decadence, and can only be utilized with considerable caution ; and when we turn to the materials left us by the classic authors we must do so with no less prudence and reserve. The latter only knew Phoenicia in its decline, when it was already more or less Hellenized. Moreover, they did not always comprehend what they saw and heard. Finally, they were content with comparisons which were often forced and inaccurate.1
Traces of that bent of thought which we encounter in all pri- mitive societies and call fetishism may be found in the Phoeni- cian religion. The mountains had their gods, or, to speak more exactly, they were worshipped as gods. Their imposing mass, the majesty of the black forests with which they were clothed, the voices of their torrents, their snowy summits and the depths of their narrow gorges, gave them a mysterious power over the imaginations of the people (Fig. 17). The worship of the mountain gods dates certainly from the first days of the Phoenician occupation ; its persistence is attested by the epithets we meet with in the Semitic texts, such as Baal-Lebanon, Baal- Hermon, and in Greek transcriptions like Zeus-Casios? In the same spirit prayers and sacrifices were offered to rocks, to grottoes, to springs and rivers. The cavern whence the stream of the Nahr Ibrahim makes its " sudden sally " has been for thousands of years one of the most sacred spots in Syria. The temple of Astarte, developed into the Aphacan Aphrodite, was overthrown by Constantine, but it was restored after his day was past. The rites there performed doubtless dated back to the commencement of the Phoenician occupation. We cannot wonder that a religious senti- ment was excited by this scene, one of the loveliest in the world
conjectures by J. HALEVY, in his paper entitled : Les Principes pheniciens IIo(9os et Mwr (in the Comptes Rendus de V Academic des Inscriptions, 1883, p. 36).
1 Upon the nature and the inadequacy of our materials for the study of the Phoenician religion, see BERGER, La Phenicie, pp. 17-19.
2 The Baal-Lebanon is mentioned in the oldest Phoenician inscription we possess, viz., the dedication engraved upon a bronze cup the fragments of which are now in the French National Library {Corpus Inscriptionmn Semiticarum, part i., No. 5).
VOL. I. I
HISTORY OF ART IN PHOENICIA AND ITS DEPENDENCIES.
(Fig. iS).1 Certain trees received homage of the same kind. Under the Zeus-Demarous of Philo of Byblos we may recognize the Phoenician form Baal-T/iamar, " the Lord of the Palm-tree."
The worship of betyta, which we encounter in every country reached by Phoenician influence, may be traced to the same
FIG. 17. — Descent from the Pass of Lcgnia, in the Lebanon.
source. The word we have used above comes to us from the Greeks, and they took it with some slight alteration from the
1 RENAN, Mission de Phcnicie, pp. 296-301. Fig. 18, like i and 17, is borrowed from M. LORTET'S beautiful work, La Syrie d'Aujourdhui (Hachette, 1884).
2 BERGER, La Phenicie, p. 25. PHILO OF BYBLOS, Fragment i., 16-22. M.
Berger's explanation of the Zeus A^/zapou? of Philo is probable and ingenious, but the group Baal-Thamar has never yet been found in a Phoenician text.
FIG. 18.— The sources of the River Adonis
RELIGION.
61
Semitic group Beth-el, which means, "the house of God." This was a generic term used to denote all sacred stones, that is to say, all stones credited with the possession of any special and peculiar virtue. The form of these stones and the degree of respect in which they were held varied greatly. As a rule they were either conical or ovoid, but sometimes they were pyramidal, and, in a few sanctuaries, they were squared shafts with smooth faces. We are told that some were aerolites, a circumstance which greatly enhanced their credit.
The diffusion of Greek arts and ideas did not cause the worship of these stones to fall into disuse. Under the Roman emperors
FIG. 19. — Coin of Byblos ; enlarged. From Donaldson's Architectura Numismatica.
it was more popular than ever. In the time of Tacitus, Astarte, then called Aphrodite, was figured on a cone in the chief temple at Paphos,2 and so, at Byblos, was the great goddess of that place. This we may see from the reverse of a coin of Byblos, struck under Macrinus. The sacred stone rises in the middle of a court surrounded by a portico (Fig. 19). Another instance was
1 This etymology has been contested by M. HALEVY (Revue de t Histoire des Religions, vol. iv. pp. 392-3), but his alternative proposal has not met with general acceptance. See also a dissertation by M. FR. LENORMANT, entitled, Les Betyles {Revue de t Histoire des Religions, vol. iii. pp. 31-53), as well as M. HEUZEY'S paper: La Pierre sacree d'Aniipolis (Me moires de la Soriete des Antiquaires de France, 1874). 2 TACITUS, History, ii. 3.
62 HISTORY OF ART IN PIKKMCIA AND ITS L)KPKNI>ENCIKS.
the black stone of Emcsus, of which Heliogabalus was priest before he was raised to the purple.1
It was, then, not only on the coast, it was over all Syria that these stones were worshipped, and that down to the last hours of paganism. It is a form of worship as old as the religious senti- ment, and never, it would appear, has it flourished more than during the decline of the antique civilization.
Societies, like individuals, have their periods of dotage, and this was one. In the centuries to which we are transported by the oldest known monuments of Phoenician art and fragments of
o
writing, the Phoenicians were no longer in the stage when the sole divinities are rocks, trees, and stones. Towards the close of the Sidonian period, when the ships of Tyre and Sidon were ploughing the Mediterranean in every direction, the rites and beliefs of Phoenicia, taking them as a whole, represented a con- dition of religious thought in advance of that we have studied in Egypt. There were no sacred animals ; men were less pre- occupied with the worship of the dead. Their adoration was chiefly addressed to the stars and to those great phenomena of nature which seemed to them to be the results of deliberate action on the part of some powerful and mysterious god. Their polytheism was more abstract, more advanced, even than that of Chaldaea ; it was farther removed from the phase to which we give the name of polydemonism ; their pantheon was less numerous, and its members were more concrete. Already, perhaps, the idea of a single supreme being was beginning to disengage itself from the conception of a crowd of distinct divini- ties, and the latter to sink into the condition of mere embodiments of the different moods and phases of a god in whom they were all summed up.
It has been sometimes thought that this supreme god should be recognized in the Baal-Samdim or " Baal of the skies," to whom the great inscription of Oum-el-Awamid is dedicated ; - but when we meet him elsewhere, in the island of Sardinia, for instance, it is
1 " In the temple there is a large stone, rounded at the base, pointed at the top. conical in form, and black in colour; they say it fell from heaven." — HERODIAN,
v- 5-
2 MERGER, La I'hcniiie, p. 19; Corpus Inscriptwnum Scmiticarum, part i.
No." 7.
RELIGION. 63
with a geographical epithet that takes away much of his general and superior character.1
In the immediate neighbourhood of Phoenicia, i.e. among the Jews, monotheism had, by the time of the Assyrian triumphs, reached its logical conclusion. The Phoenicians lived in intimate relations with the Jews, especially with those belonging to the kingdom of Israel ; they spoke almost the same language ; a native of Gebal or Sidon would have no difficulty in understand- ing the passionate invectives of an Elijah, an Elisha, or an Isaiah ; and yet there is no evidence to prove that the words of those orators and poets ever found an echo in the cities of the Phoenician coast, or that the inhabitants of the latter associated themselves, even for a moment, with the great religious movement that was going on so near at hand. If certain expressions in the Phoenician texts seem to hint that, at Tyre as at Thebes, men sought now and then to raise themselves to the notion of a first
o
cause, it is none the less true that in the Phoenician spirit, which did not take kindly to metaphysics, the notion in question was never anything more than a vague and fleeting aspiration.
The example set by the Greeks must have counted for much in this indifference. Certain gods and goddesses disembarked with the Phoenicians on all the coasts of Europe ; it was to the Phoenicians that the antique world owed many of the divine types to which it was most attached. These types the Greek imagination clothed in more definite shapes and imbued with a warmer life than they had ever known before. As soon as the plastic genius of the Greeks arrived at its full development, the Phoenicians found themselves confronted, on every shore, by the gods whom they worshipped and whom their fathers had wor- shipped before them ; and they found them transfigured by an incomparable art and lodged in temples which compelled admira- tion by the unequalled grandeur of their lines. Merchants and sailors, the greater part of their lives was passed away from their native country, and wherever they went they were met by the rites of a frankly polytheistic religion. In every foreign sanctuary they saw presentments of the chief gods of their own pantheon, but saw them beautified and enlarged. In every country at which
1 In the Sardinian inscription to which we here allude he is called " the Baal-Samai'm of the isle of Hawks." Corpus Inscriptionum Semiticanun. par.t i.. No. 139.
64 HISTORY OF ART IN PHOENICIA AND ITS DEPENDENCIES.
they touched the same spectacle met their eyes, and the impres- sions they received were not of a nature to divert their faith from its ancient channels.
This is the true explanation of a phenomenon which at first appears so surprising. The Phoenicians seem never to have suspected that a great religious revolution was taking place in that neighbouring country of Judaea from which they were separated neither by any great social differences nor by any natural barrier. Enterprising traders as they were, they kept themselves au courant with the inventions and progress of the world with which they traded. Nothing new could appear in any market known to them without their at once taking measures to supply it to all their clients, near or distant. But what profit could they expect from spreading the worship of a God like the God of Israel ; of a God who refused all association or rivalry ; of a God who forbade sculpture to give Him a visible personality, and in His hatred of idolatry even went so far as to proscribe the representation of human or animal forms ? ]
Greece would never have obeyed such a command. Her love of fine forms was too great. When Christian societies accepted a religion that was the child of Judaism, they, too, were driven by their natural preferences to find some means of eluding these proscriptions. As for the Phoenicians, they were not like the Greeks, they were not tormented by any inborn desire to repro- duce the beautiful ; but regard for what seemed their own in- terests was enough to make them turn their backs on a creed to which such inconvenient conditions were attached. For centuries images were among their principle articles of commerce. Upon the objects of glass and ivory, of metal and terra-cotta, which they sewed broadcast over the Mediterranean basin, the figures of men and of real or fictitious animals abounded. They manufactured gods for exportation upon every island of the yEgxan, and upon all its coasts statues have been found of .their great goddess Astarte (Fig. 20), of Bes,2 a god borrowed perhaps from the Egyptians (Fig. 21), and of those dwarf gods in whom we see the originals of the Greek pygmies (Fig. 22).
1 Exodus xv. 3-5.
2 HEUZEV, Sur quelques Representations du Dieu grotesque appele Bes par les . Egyptians (in the Comptes Rendus de F Academic des Inscriptions, 1879, pp. 140-147).
RELIGION. 65
The scattered mode of life in which the Phoenicians perse- vered helped to make them indifferent to the higher faith of their immediate neighbours. Cities in which the municipal life is intense will not allow themselves to be absorbed in the unity of a vast and powerful State ; they resist what to them seems a degradation, and thus we often find that small countries, in which the feeling of patriotism is strong, are a hindrance to the formation of great States. The same remark applies to the growth of religious conceptions. Among a people with whom
FIG. 20. — Astarte. From a Phoenician terra-cotta in the Louvre.
P'IG 21. — Bes. From a Phoenician terra- cotta in the Louvre. Height 8 inches.
these jealous political habits have prevailed, each city has its own god or gods, and a combination of many exceptional circumstances is required before they can break their narrow moulds and enter upon a course of evolution by which they may, in time, become fused into a national god, and finally into a god of humanity.
The Greeks, indeed, succeeded in rising to a spiritual unity unknown to the Phoenicians. With them too the notion of a State was confounded with that of a city, but the lofty intellectual gifts of their race led them at a very early date to endow their gods with powers far above those of mere protecting divinities of a
VOL. i. K
HlSToKN
ART IN I'll"] \iri\ .\M» ITS 1 >KI'I£N1)KNCIKS.
city or tribe. Greece had great poets, a llesiod, and above all a Homer, whose words every Greek knew by heart; she had great festivals, such as those of Delphi and Olympia, where all the natives of Hellas could meet as brothers for at least a few days ; she had an art which, in its desire tor a universal audience, gave fixed types to each of the dwellers on Olympus. Phoenicia was not so fortunate. The. efforts she made to counteract the separating influence of her modes of life, and of the configuration of her soil, were slight, and consequently we find the particular municipal character much more strongly marked in her divinities than in the gods of Greece. All this must have had a great effect
I'ygmy. l-'ruin a I'liu-nidan teira-cotta in the I.mivre. Height 9^ inches.
in retarding the development of the religious idea, and of the plastic arts.
Among certain races, of which the Greeks were one, plurality of gods has been a direct result of the infinite variety of divine attributes imagined by the national intellect. The Hellenic polytheism implies a profound analysis of the qualities of man and of the laws of life ; it embodies the theology of a people who were in later days to give birth to philosophy. The second- ary deities of Phoenicia represent no such systematic effort of the intellect ; they correspond mainly to geographical and political divisions.
RELICIOX. 67
In the Phoenician texts, in Phoenician proper names, and in the historical books of the Old Testament, the divine name which crops up oftenest is that of Baal. Baal means tlic master ; a title of honour which seems to have been applied to all divinities ; hence the term in the Bible, Baalim, or Baals. There were as many Baals, that is to say, masters, as cities or places devoted to the rites of any particular worship. The Baal adored at Tyre, at Sidon, on Lebanon, on Peor, became Baal-Tsoitr, Baal-Sidon, Baal-Lebanon, Baal-Pcor. But even behind these local dis- tinctions, a confused notion of primordial unity may be traced, as in the terms Astoret-sem-Baal, or Astarte, name of Baal, in Phoenicia, and Tanit-Pene-Baal, or Tanit, face of Baal, at Carthage. In these formulae and a few others the term Baal -is put, by a kind of abbreviation, as the proper name of the supreme deity, but it never quite lost its wider and more general sense, which was completed by the apposition of the name of a town or mountain. Thus we find that Melkart, the great god of Tyre, whose name and fame were carried so far by the Tyrian colonists, was neither more nor less than the Baal of the Metropolis. " To the Lord Melkart, Baal of Tyre",' runs a dedication found at Malta.2
In this name Melkart, handed down to us by the Greeks, is included another of those epithets with which the Phoenicians loved to honour their gods, namely, the word Moloch, or Melek , "the king." 3 As an isolated divine title this word has never yet been encountered, but it is often found in composition in proper names of people, and its importance is proved by its use in the title borne by the chief god of Tyre, that Melkart whom the Greeks called " the sea-god Melikertes." Melkart is a contraction of yJ/<?/£/£-kart, "the God of the City." His complete name was Baal- Melkart) or Mclkart-Baal-Tsour, " Melkart, master of Tyre." The word Adon, " the lord," was employed in the same fashion. It was only at a comparatively recent date that it became the
1 PH. BERGER, La Ph'eiiide, p. 19; FR. LEXORMANT, M amid d' Histoire aiicienne > vol. iii. p. 127; DE VOGUE, Mcmoires sur les Inscriptions phenidennes de /'/<•/<• de Cypre, and part (Considerations mythologiques, in the Melanges c? Archeologi e Orientale, 8vo. Paris, 1878).
2 Corpus Inscriptioniim Semiticarum, 122 and 122 (bis).
3 As only the consonants are noted in the Phoenician writing, we can only guess at the pronunciation of the name.
68 HISTORY OF ART IN PIKKNICIA AND ITS DEPENDENCIES.
proper name of a god, worshipped especially at Gebal, whose cult was afterwards carried as far as Greece, and finally became one of the most famous in the antique world.
From all this it follows that the titles given by the Phoenicians to the more august of their gods were determined chiefly by geographical limitations, and that they must have been far from awaking such clearly defined ideas as those attached by the Greeks to their Zeus, to their Poseidon or Hades, to their Hermes or Apollo. For the same reason they lent themselves much less kindly to plastic figuration, and the critic who attempts to define in words the conceptions embodied in the terms Baal, Melek, Adon, has no easy task.1 The examination of certain rites and epithets allows us to catch a glimpse of a nature-god, worshipped chiefly in the most striking of his manifestations, namely, as a sun-god. All the Baalim seem to have had that character, but he in whom it was most strongly marked was the Baal of Gebal, that Tammouz who was invoked by cries of Adoni, Adorn, " My lord, my lord." This famous being, who was afterwards to become the simple Syrian hunter of the Greeks, was for the Phoenicians the great sun-god himself, the star that appeared to languish every year with the frosts of winter and to revive every spring ; and those seasons of alternate joy and sorrow had their counterpart in the rites with which Adon was worshipped.
As in Egypt and Chaldata, the spectacle of an organic world in which all life sprang from the union of the sexes suggested the application of the same condition to the divine world. Every god had a goddess ; by the side of each Baal, or " master/' there was a Baalat, or " mistress." At Gebal this mistress was adored under the name of Baalat-Gcbal, or the " Mistress of Gebal." She is represented on the upper part of the stele of Jehawmelek (Fig. 23). Her reputation was great over the whole coast, and has come down to us through the Greeks as that of Beltis. At Carthage Tank shared the throne of Baal- Mammon ; at Tyre and Sidon Astoret was the Baalat of Baal-Melkart and Baal-Sidon.
Astoret, or, to use a form to which we are better accustomed, Astarte, seems to have had a more real personality than any other Phoenician goddess. Her pre-eminence in that respect was due
1 M. BERGER mentions another title of the same kind, El^ which is found associated with the names both of gods and goddesses.
- Hence, in all probability, the Greek form Adonis. BERGER, La Phenia'e, p. 20.
RELIGION.
69
to the fact that she had already a long life behind her when she first came to establish herself on the Syrian coasts. She was the Istar of Mesopotamia, with the same name, slightly modified, and the same attributes. The double of a male god, Astarte was identified with the moon, the pale reflection of the sun.1 She was also the goddess of the planet Venus. The Jewish prophets must have had her in their minds when they spoke of the " Queen of Heaven"2 (Meleket-has-sama'im), who must have formed a pair with (Baal-samdim), or " King of Heaven," and been worshipped with him.
FIG. 23. — Upper part of the stele of Jehawmelek. In M. L. de Clercq's collection.
Astarte was, as it were, nature herself ; she was the true sovereign of the world, presiding over a never-ending process of creation and destruction, destruction and creation. By war, by disease and plagues of every kind, she thinned out the useless and aged ; she removed those who had played their parts and finished
1 " Astarte, in my belief, is the moon," says the intelligent and well instructed author of the treatise Upon the Syrian Goddess, which has been handed down to us among the works of Lucian (§ 4).
2 JEREMIAH vii. 18; xliv. 17, 18, 19, 25.
70 HISTORY OF ART IN PIKKXICIA AND ITS DEI
their work, while in presiding over love and generation she in- sured the perpetual renovation of life on earth.1 To take part under her auspices in the work of nourishing that flame of sexual desire upon which the duration of the species depended, was to perform a meritorious act, and one of worship to the goddess ; hence the sacred prostitutions and the habit of attaching to the temples of Astarte those bands of hieroduli, who, under other names, continued the traditions of the Phoenician sanctuaries in Greece. Cyprus, Cythera, Kryx in Sicily, borrowed the worship of the Syro- Phoenician nature-goddess from the Sidonians." First Grcecicisecl under the name of Aphrodite, she also appears in the classic writers as Cypris, Cytheraea, and Erycina, titles which are so many certificates of origin;''
The dove, the most prolific of birds, was the favourite sacrifice to Astarte, and afterwards to Aphrodite. In Phoenicia, in Cyprus, in Sardinia, small tcrra-cotta figures have been found which represent either the goddess herself, or one of her priestesses. They are shown pressing a dove to their bosoms with one hand (Fig. 20).
As a natural effect of a system that ordered the celestial on the same lines as the terrestrial world, these divine couples were
1 This double character of the great Oriental goddess is well expressed by Plautus, in a few lines put by him into the mouth of an Athenian :
" Diva Astarte, hominum deorumque vis, vita, salus : rursus eadem qune cst Pernicies, mors, interitus. Mare, tellus ccelum, sidera Jovis qurectmque templa colimus, ejus ducuntur nutu, illi obtemperant Earn spectant " — Mtrcator, iv., sc. vi., v. 825.
The origin of the passage must be sought for in Philemon. Towards the end ot the fourth century these Oriental religions were well understood in Athens; the Phoenicians had temples of Melkart and Astarte at the Piraeus.
- In the first century B.C. the temple of Venus Erycina still possessed such tracts of land and troops of slaves of both sexes who, after having served the goddess, became her freedmen and freedwomen and lived under her protection. They formed a class with special rights, which were respected by the Roman governors ; they were called in Latin renerii (CicKRo, /;/ Q. Ccccilium dirinatio, § 55, 56 ; Pn> Clucntio § 43). A Phoenician inscription found at Eryx, related, in all probability, to an offering or donation made to this goddess ; but the stone has been lost, and it is impossible to re-establish the text from the bad copy by which alone it is now represented (Corpus Inscriptionum Scmiticarum, part i. No. 135).
:i The ancients were fully alive to this identity of Astarte and Aphrodite ; it will here suffice to quote the testimony of Pmr.o of Byblos : TT/I> An-rdprrjv SWvocc? rryv .\(f>po?>i-rr)v eivat Ae'yowi (Fragm. Hist. Grcrc., ed. C. Mri.LKR, vol. iii. p. 569). See also MOVERS, Die Phcenizicr, \. p. 606, where many analogous passages are cited.
RELIGION. 7 1
completed by the birth of a son, who is often made the lover of his mother. Like Egypt and Chaldaea, Phoenicia had its triads, but they appear to have been less clearly fixed and defined than in the valleys of the Nile and the Euphrates. It would seem that at Sidon there was a bond of this nature between Baal-Sidon, Astarte, and Esmoun,1 a god whom the Greeks in later days assimilated to their own ^Esculapius. The female element in these triads was nearly always embodied in Astarte, at least, among the oriental Phoenicians. As a rule her name was preceded by the honorific title Rabbat, " the Great Lady," which was, moreover, applied sometimes to other goddesses.'2 Anat, or Anahit, the Anaitis of the Greeks, was another name for the same deity ; under this title also she was worshipped in Syria, whence her cult passed into Egypt. We know from a Phoenician inscrip- tion that she was domiciled in Cyprus.3 The name changed with the place, but the conception remained.
Beside these great gods Phoenicia had several minor divinities, with whom we are as yet very imperfectly acquainted. Reshep, Resef, or Resef-Mikal, was the Phoenician Apollo. At least a bi-lingual cypriot inscription identifies him, in its Greek part, with the Amy clean Apollo.4 Resef penetrated into Egypt, and judging from the way he was figured there we should be tempted to see in him a god of war, an Ares or Mars (Fig. 24). Other deities, Semes, or "the sun," Sakon, and Powiiai. the pygmy god of the Greeks, have been revealed to us by the proper names of men. It is among such gods as these and others of the same class that we must, no doubt, look for the seven Cabeiri, or " powerful ones," whose worship was imported by the Sidonians into Thrace, there to endure until the very last clays of paganism. The Cabciri were planetary gods, as their number alone is enough to show. Esmoun — •" the eighth," if we may accept the Semitic origin of his name — was their chief. He was the third person of the triad which we encounter, under different names, in every Phoenician city. Esmoun was, in fact, the supreme manifestation of the divinity,
1 Corpus Inscriptionum Semiticarum, vol. i. part i. No. 3.
2 BERGER, La Phenicie, p. 22.
3 Corpus Inscriptionum Semiticarum, part i. No. 95. It is in speaking of this inscription that M. DE VOGUE has presented us with those keen remarks on the Phoenician religion that we quote so often in these chapters.
4 Corpus Inscriptionum Scwiticarum, part i. No. 89.
72 HISTORY <»K ART IN PIKKNICIA AND ITS DEPENDENCIES.
summing up in his own person all other manifestations of the creative force, just as the universe incloses the seven planetary heavens. '
The whole of this group of gods is characterized by one distinctive feature. They were all dwarf, or child, gods, two things which both from the mythological and iconographical points of view came to much the same thing. Herodotus remarks upon their strange disproportions (Figs. 21 and 22); they
Fir.. 24. — Resef. From Wilkinson.
reminded him of one of the forms given by the Egyptians to their Ptah, or, as he called him, to their Hephaestus.2
The Phoenicians passed so much of their time away from home that they could not fail to adopt many notions from foreign religions. We do not allude to their fundamental beliefs ; those seem to have been brought with them from their original home on the Persian Gulf; between Bel and Baal, between Istar and
1 BERGER, La Ph'enirie, p. 24.
2 HERODOTUS, iii. 37. Ptah has long been recognised as identical with the 'E<£ai'o-Tos of Herodotus.
RELIGION.
/ \J
Astarte, there are similarities upon which it is needless to insist. As our knowledge of the Chaldsean religion increases, we shall perhaps come upon still more striking evidence of the parental relation in which it stood to that of Phoenicia ; we may, perhaps, be enabled to trace a descent which is for the present only a very great probability. Like the other tribes by whom the Syrian coast has been peopled, the Phoenicians arrived there with all the elements of a religion whose cradle must be sought about the lower waters of the Euphrates, but in the course of the cosmopolitan existence they led for so long they never ceased to borrow deities and forms of worship from the nations with whom they had dealings, and from those under whose sceptre their country successively passed. The influence of the great empires on the Tigris and Euphrates may be traced in many things. In an inscription at Athens a Phoenician calls himself " Priest of Nergal." A bi-lingual inscription found at Larnaca of Lapethus, in the island of Cyprus, contains a dedication to the goddess Anat, whose name is rendered in the Greek part by Athene.2 But a far greater influence was exercised by Egypt, with whom Phoenicia had such long and intimate relations. Osiris, Horus, Bast, Harpocrates, all had their worshippers in the coast cities. And their status was not that of foreign gods to which a few individuals turned in temporary and dilettante fashion. This is proved by the place their titles occupy in Phoenician proper names, and by the parallelism established between them and purely Phoenician gods. As the Phoenicians said Melek-Baal, so they said Melek-Osir. Osiris certainly had his place in the pantheon, although his admission must have taken place at a comparatively late period, and as a consequence of the confidential intercourse between the two countries, that lasted from the days of the Theban Pharaohs to those of the Ptolemies.
Carthage came so late upon the scene, and her relations with her mother city were so intimate, that her religious beliefs cannot have sensibly differed from those of her eastern cousins. Her chief divine couple, the Baalim in whose protection the city mainly trusted, were Baal-Hamnwn and Tanit ; Esnwun completed the
1 Corpus Inscriptionum Semiticarum, part i. No. 119.
2 Ibid. No. 95.
VOL. I. I.
74 HISTORY OF ART IN PIKKXICIA AND ITS DEPENDENCIES.
triad. Jlaal-Ilatntnon means " the burning Baal" ; ' he was, as his name suggests, a fire or sun god.1 Baal-Hammon was figured as a man in the prime of life with rams' horns ; the arms of his throne were also carved in the shape of rams (Fig. 25). As for Tanit she was a Carthaginian Astarte ; she was the great Syrian nature goddess, but with her siderial and lunar character rather more strongly marked.3 The Greeks identified her with Artemis and
-'
•: ...Nv.V--i'
V^
Fir.. 25. — Baal-Hammon. Terra cotta. In the Barre collection.
the Romans with Juno; sometimes classic authors call her " the
1 This follows, at least, from the most probable etymology of the word. Others have been proposed, but have failed to meet with general approval.
- Upon the type of Baal-Hammon, upon the rites with which he was worshipped at Carthage, and upon his association with Tanit, see M. BERGER'S Memoire sur un Bandeau troitrc dans les Environs de Batna et conserve au Afus'ee de Constantine (Gazette ari/ieofogiqite, 1879, p. 133).
3 A connection between the names Anat and Tanit may be devined rather than proved ; the intervening links are missing. But the conception is the same, and the two words are so much alike that they must have had a common origin. Our readers will remember that in the myth used by Virgil for his story of Dido, the queen's sister is named Anna.
RELIGION. 75
celestial virgin " or " the genius of Carthage." Melkart, in whom the Greeks saw a form of their Heracles, also had a temple, close to the harbour, in all the Phoenician colonies."
Besides these great gods there were, at Carthage, others of less importance, of whom we know little more than the names : Sakon, Aris, Tsaphon, males, Illat and Astorct, females, and others who are alluded to in the texts by such phrases as " the great mother," " the mistress of the sanctuary."
During the two centuries which preceded the fall of Carthage, her religion became stongly tinged with Hellenic elements,3 but down to the very end certain rites held their own, which by their cruelty bear witness to the hardness of the Phoenician character. With the Carthaginians, as with all other races of antiquity, the sacrifice was the chief act of worship ; it was the rite which brought man nearest to his god and gave him the strongest claim upon the protection of heaven. We can easily understand how savage nations thought they could not do honour to their ferocious deities better than by sacrificing members of their own race ; but as manners softened under the influence of civilization, the idea of a substitute won gradual but universal acceptance. The substitu- tion was effected in many different ways. " Sometimes a domestic animal, a ram, an ox, a bird, or a stag, was immolated in place of the being to be spared ; sometimes the substitute was a stone, which was erected in honour of the god and became a kind of metaphorical sacrifice." 4
Neither in Egypt nor in Chaldaea have we yet found any trace of human sacrifices, while the Greeks abandoned the custom at a very early date. But among the Phoenicians, and especially the Phoenicians of Africa, these holocausts lasted as long as the gods in whose honour they had first been instituted. They were celebrated at Carthage at a time when human sacrifices roused no
1 Upon the Virgo Celestis of classic writers, of coins and inscriptions, see ECKHEL, Doct. num. ret., vol. vii. p. 183. In the text of the treaty between Philip and Hannibal, which has been handed down to us by POLYBIUS (vii. ix. 2), it must be Tanit who is disguised under the name Ka/mxr/Soi/iW Sat/iwv, in a triad where that deity is followed by Heracles (Melkart) and lolaos (Esmoun).
~ BERGER, La Phenicie, p. 22. FR. LEXORMANT, Manuel d'Histoire ancienne, vol. iii. p. 227.
3 DIODORUS, xiv. xxvii. 5.
4 PH. BERGER, La Phenicie, p. 26.
76 HISTORY OF ART IN PHU.NICIA AND ITS DEPENDENCIES.
feeling but disgust and horror in the rest of the civilized world.1 The Phoenicians had been hardened to the practice by long" tradi- tion. Its commonest form was the sacrifice of first-born children, or more generally, of newly-born infants. It was a way of devot- ing first-fruits to heaven. At one time this custom was imported from Phoenicia into Judaea. The Bible speaks of children burnt in the fire, and passing through the fire in honour of Moloch,2 that is of the solar or fire element worshipped by the Phoenicians under several different names/' The fervour with which they entered upon these holocausts was partly caused too by the idea that fire purifies all it touches, that it takes away every stain. It was by such complex sentiments as these that the Carthaginians were led to turn to these horrible sacrifices whenever they found themselves in a critical situation ; their fanaticism then blazed up afresh, and from the open palms of the gigantic statue of Baal-Hammon children of the noblest families rolled into the flames that played about its feet.
The originality of the Phoenician religion lay chiefly in the violence of its rites and in the contrasts they presented. The voluptuous scenes which were being enacted hourly within the precincts of Astarte were immediately followed by paroxysms of barbarous devotion and by the murderous rites they provoked.4 How much more truculent and passionate all this proves the Pruenicians to have been than such a people as the Egyptians, to say nothing of the Greeks. They were, in fact, merchants and sailors. There was no room in their lives either for literary and philosophic culture, or for those aesthetic pleasures which soften
1 PHILO speaks of human sacrifices as a rite peculiar to the Phoenician race (Fragm. Hist. Grac.t vol. iii. p. 570) ; but it would seem that, acting under Greek influence, the Syrians abandoned them at an early hour. There is nothing to suggest that the Tynans had recourse to them during the terrible siege by Alexander, when the religious sentiment of the people must have been excited to its highest pitch.
2 II. KINGS xvii. 31 : xxi. 6.
3 According to TERTUI.LIAN these sacrifices were still openly persevered 'in as late as the first century of our era (Apologia, cap. ix.). Their open celebration ceased only when the Roman Emperors, beginning with Tiberius, decreed the penalty ot death against any priest who should be accessory to them.
4 DIODORUS, xx. xiv. 5-6. JUSTIN, xviii. 6; PLUTARCH, De Superstitione, xiii. We could quote numerous passages to show with what energy the conscience ot the civilized world protested against these holocausts. We are told (JUSTIN, xix. i) that Darius and Gelo wished to compel the Carthaginians by treaty to renounce human sacrifices (PLUTARCH, De sera J\Tn»iiitis V'indicta, 6.
RELIGION. 77
the heart and elevate the mind. Torn on the one hand by their sensual desires and on the other by greed of gain, hardened by conflict with the sea and softened by the pleasures that awaited them ashore, the Phoenicians swung from one extreme to another. When their ventures were turning out badly, when their fleets were threatened by storms or their armies pressed by the enemy, they turned in despair to their gods and made those impious vows which they carried out only too well. A people of traders and harsh to their own debtors, they believed their gods to be as exacting and pitiless as themselves ; hence the terrors which led them to sacrifice so many young and innocent lives.
Under the impulse of sentiments which are to be explained by the national habits, the Syrians and Carthaginians had, then, given a peculiar character to their religion ; but they had not created the gods whom they adored, and when they wished to give them visible bodies they were quite unable to invent for themselves. They borrowed the types and names of their gods from without, and especially from Chalda^a. Baal is much the same as Bel, and Tammouz is but little removed from the Dommouzi of the Assyrian texts ; l Astarte and Tar.it do not greatly differ from Istar and Anahit, while Baal-Hammon is neither more nor less than the great Libyan god, the supreme deity of Egypt.2
Although the Phoenicians imported most of their gods from Mesopotamia, they gave them Egyptian disguises. The Phoenician civilization had its first development during the period of Theban supremacy, and it borrowed types for its deities from the gods of its Egyptian masters. The "great Lady of Gebal," on the stele of Jehawmelek (Fig. 23), is very like an Isis-Hathor, and here (Fig. 26) is a bronze, less ancient no doubt, which also comes from Syria : its workmanship is not quite that of Egypt ; there is reason, in fact, to believe that it was cast in Syria. It can be meant for none but Astarte ; the disk and horns of the moon seem decisive on that point ; but the forehead is surmounted by an asp, like the
1 FR. LENORMANT, Sovra /'/ mito d'Adone Tamuz (extracted from the proceedings of the Congress of Orientalists, held at Florence in 1878).
2 The influence exercised by the rites and beliefs of Egypt over those of Phoenicia did not escape the ancients. The pseudo-Lucian (Upon the Syrian Goddess, § 5) declares its existence in so many words. According to Silius Italicus, a mediocre poet, but a fairly well-informed savant, the rites celebrated in the temple of Gades were Egyptian (iii. v. 20 et seq).
78 HISTORY OTF ART IN PIKKNICIA AND ITS DEPENDENCIES.
brow of I sis. So, too, the Phoenicians adapted the form of the child Ptah to their Cabeiri and Pygmies (Fig. 27).
It was perhaps a sense of their shortcomings as plastic artists that prevented the Phoenicians from placing statues of their great
v^/ 4^;^J
^'m
fe +W? /,*/&,.•,,-. Jsf'S,
FK;. 26— From a bron/e in M. I'erctie's collection. Ileiglit, l6| inches.
gods in their principal temples. It seems certain, from the often quoted text of Herodotus,1 that the temple of Baal-Melkart, at Tyre, inclosed no statute of the god ; he was represented only by
1 HERODOTUS, ii. 44.
RELIGION.
79
two columns, the one of gold, the other of emerald, or perhaps of green glass, in which we must recognize betylae of an especially sumptuous kind. These columns are figured on the two Maltese pedestals consecrated to Melkart towards the beginning of the second century B.C., by Abdosir and Osirsamar (Fig. 28).' Even in the temple of Tanit at Carthage, whose august character is
FIG. 27. — Child god. From a Cypriot terra-cotta in the Louvre. Actual size.
attested by the thousands of votive steles set up in its precincts •yve doubt whether there was any statue of the goddess ; and our doubts are confirmed when we remember how rudely she is figured on most of the steles set up in her honour. These figures are nothing more than naive renderings of a conical stone, sometimes
1 Corpus Inscriplionum Setniti(&rum,^a.rl i. No. 122 and 122 fas.
80 HISTORY OF ART IN PHUINICIA AND ITS DEPENDENCIES.
with suggestions of a head and arms (Fig. 29), sometimes with lunar symbols (Fig. 30) added to it.
The highest aim the artist can put before himself is to endow the divinity with features that shall correspond to an ideal con- ception of his majesty. Where no such effort is demanded of him he may acquire great skill of hand and eye, but he will never reach a hiorh decree of nobilitv and beautv. The relic from
Go * •/
Malta, which we reproduce in Fig. 28, allows us to draw the horoscope of Phcenician sculpture. Two Greeks in a similar case would have commissioned an image of Hercules in marble or bronze, but these Phcenicians, who wished to do honour to their
Fir.s. 29 and 30. — From a Carthaginian votive stele.
, were content with such a shaft as the first workman at hand could make.
But although the worship of betylae was not likely to favour the progress of the plastic arts, we find in another part of the Phcenician character a propensity which must have had useful effects. Pupils as they were of Egypt, they never borrowed those composite deities of hers with the heads of hawks, ibises, cats, crocodiles, and hippopotamuses ; they only adopted such divine types as were taken from humanity. How this reserve is to be explained we cannot tell, but the fact is certain. Whenever the Phoenicians had to provide a head or a complete body for any one of their gods, they were as frankly anthropomorphic as the Greeks
FIG. 28.— Votive stele. From Malta. In the Louvre. Height 42 inches.
VOL. I.
M
THE PHOENICIAN WRITING.
themselves. The consequences, to which we shall have to draw attention hereafter, may be guessed. When the Phoenicians began to provide the still barbarous Greeks with those models which the latter at once hastened to imitate, they did not put into their hands any of those strange and graceless combinations of human and animal forms of which the dwellers in the Nile valley were so fond ; in the idols they exported no features but those of men and women were to be found ; their execution was awkward and rough, but it had at least the advantage of pointing to the right way, to the only path by which a great art could be reached. Even the brutality with which Syrian art insisted sometimes upon the dis- tinctive features of the sexes had its uses. It excited the curiosity of those who attempted to copy the Phoenician images, and awoke in them the desire to make a close and patient study of the human frame, the most delicate and complex of organic bodies. Thus were they led to understand the difference between the two plans on which Nature has built every living thing, a difference which shrinks almost to effacement in those animals with which the religious
o
iconography of Egypt was content. As often happens when the pupil is both more intelligent than his master and placed in more favourable conditions, the Greeks learnt many 'things from the Phoenicians that the latter did not know at all or knew but ill. So that, in the statuettes of stone or clay which the Phoenician merchants scattered broadcast over the whole Mediterranean basin, we must recognize the elder sisters, or rather the grand-parents, of those marvellous statues, of those noble and smiling goddesses, before whom the Greeks bent in worship, and before whose fragments we moderns bow in worship too.
§ 4. — The Phoenician Writing.
In this history of art we have been compelled to reserve an important place for the written character of Egypt and Chaldaea. In the older Mesopotamian monuments the cuneiform characters are such that we can easily carry our thoughts to the time when they were nothing less than pictures ; while the Egyptian hiero- glyphs preserved that character to the end of their days. Some peculiarities of treatment in Egyptian sculpture are even to be
84 HISTORY OK ART IN PIKENICIA AND ITS DEPENDENCIES.
accounted for, as we have elsewhere explained,1 by habits con- tracted in the carving of hieroglyphs upon stone, wood, and other materials.
There is nothing of the kind in Phoenicia. There we find no trace of a time when thoughts were expressed in ideographic characters. The Phoenicians learnt to write when they invented the alphabet. No one believes that they created it " all standing," but it is still doubtful whether they took their materials from the wedges or from the writing of Egypt."' Most scholars who have recently studied the question believe with M. de Rouge, that the borrowing was made from Egypt, and that it was made at a time when a people related to the Phoenicians, the Hyksos of Manetho, ruled in the valley, or at least in the delta, of the Nile.3 No doubt, however, attaches to the right of the Phoenicians to the honour of having made the decisive step which has given us the alphabet ; the opinion of antiquity on the matter is summed up in two famous lines of Lucan :—
" Phocnices prinii, famre si creditur, ausi Mnnsuram rudibus vocem signare figuris." 4
1 Art in Ancient Egypt, Vol. II. pp. 315, 316.
2 M. DECKK has lately returned to the Assyrian cuneiform characters for the originals of the alphabetical signs of Phoenicia (Der Ursprung des altsemitischen Alphabets aus der Assyrischen Kdhchrift, in the /.eitschrift der dentschen Morgen- Uecndischen Gesellschaft, 1877, pp. 102-154). As M. PH. BERGER has remarked, the theory of M. Decke (which has, however, found few supporters) has authority on its side which the learned German has failed to invoke, namely, that of PLINY. " So far as I am concerned," says the latter, " I persist in believing the alphabet to be of Assyrian origin. Literas semper arbitros Assyrias fuisse." He adds, however, " Sed alii apud /Egyptios a Mercurio, ut Gellius, alii apud Syros repertas volunt." l\rat. Hist., i. 412.
3 The work of M. DE ROUGE, which was read before the Academy as long ago as 1 859, was only published in 1874, under the title Memoire sur F Origineeg)'ptienne deF Alphabet phenicien. For more complete information on all these difficult questions we must refer our readers to the work of the late M. FR. LENORMANT : Essai sur la Propa- gation de r 'Alphabet phenicien dans Fancim Monde ; the first volume only has been published (i vol. 8vo., Maisonneuve, 1872). M. PH. BERGER'S article in the Encyclopedic des Sciences religieuscs (L Ecriture et les Inscriptions semitiques) may also be profitably consulted. It is later in date (1880), and its author has been able to make use of the information collected in preparing the Corpus Inscriptionum Semiticarum. Finally, we may point to the article Alphabet (FR. LENORMANT) in the Dictionnaire des Antiquites grecques et romaines.
4 LUCAN, Pharsalia, iii. v. 220-222. So, too, PLINY: " Ipsa gens Phcenicum in magna gloria est litterarum inventionis " (Nat. Hist. v. xii. 13); DIODORUS SICULUS : 2upoi evperai TWV ypa/x/xaTwv curt (v. 74).
THE PIKKNICIAM WRITIXC. 85
" Here the evidence of writers is fully confirmed by the dis- coveries of modern science. We know no alphabet, properly speaking, which is earlier than that of the Phoenicians, and every alphabet that has survived to our own day, or of which we have any fragments, grows more or less directly out of the first alphabet elaborated by the sons of Canaan and spread by them over the whole surface of the ancient world."
Whether the Phoenician letters were derived, as M. de Rouge believes, from the cursive writing employed on the papyri of the first Theban empire, or whether, as some have lately contended, they were taken directly, or at least in their chief elements, from a few phonetic symbols occurring in the monumental character,2 it now appears certain that the invention dates from a much earlier period than wras formerly supposed. The oldest known alphabetical inscription is that of Mesa, King of Moab, which dates from the year 896 B.C., and it already contains evidence of great fluency and of very long habit in the use of a written character.8 In such a matter we can hardly suggest a date, but it seems very probable that the Phoenicians were already in possession of their alphabet when they first began to navigate the Levant.4 In any case the invention
o o J
was known to the first Sidonian sailors who landed on the coasts of Greece and her islands. Thenceforward, on every shore frequented by the Syrian ships, the savage ancestors of the Greeks might group themselves about the stranger merchants, and with growing curiosity watch them as they recorded the results of each day's trade. The little writing-case (Fig. 31) which they drew from some fold of their robes, the slender kalem, dipped in ink, which moved so rapidly over clay tablet or papyrus strip, the small, crowded, queer-shaped marks which were continually repeated, but ever in some new combination, must all, for some time, have seemed parts of some magic and therefore disquieting rite. We cannot say how many years or centuries were required to carry the power and purpose of those mysterious figures into their minds, but we may be sure that as soon as a full comprehension dawned upon them they became eager to apply them to their own language.
1 FR. LENORMANT, Essai sitr la Propagation de r Alphabet phcnirien, vol. i. p. 84
2 This is the opinion of M. HALEVY (.Melanges tf Epigraphie s'emitique. p. 168). " PH. BERGER, L Ecriture et les Inscriptions semitiques, p. 15.
4 FR. LENORMANT, Essai, vol. i. pp. 95 and 101.
86 HISTORY 01 ART IN PIKKNICIA AND ITS I)FI>F.NDENCIFS.
FlG. 31. — Egyptian \\riting-c.ise.
I low were the Phoenicians themselves led to embark on the path which ended in their alphabet ? They borrowed her arts and industries from Egypt, why did they not borrow her writing' also ? It was no doubt because they found it too inconvenient, too complex, too diffi- cult to master. The Egyptian writing included ideographic symbols, some of which were taken in their natural, others in a metaphorical, sense. These were combined with phonetic signs represent- ing sometimes syllables, sometimes iso- lated consonants. The same word or idea might be rendered here by a single ideogram, there by a combination of various figures. This led to confusion, and finally to the embarrassment of the reader and to the possibility on his part of continual mistakes. The people who invented such a system, and persevered in its use for thousands of years, did not suspect its defects. There is no instru- ment of which long hereditary custom will not make man a complete master. Scribes of the Ptolemaic and Roman times sometimes arranged their symbols as if they were amusing themselves by making the inscriptions with which they covered the temple walls as obscure as they could. Was this because, as some have declared, they did not want to be understood ? Not at all ; they were merely showing their skill by playing with a difficulty, just as a modern virtuoso plays with a difficult passage on the pianoforte.
Drilled by constant practice from in- fancy upwards into the use of this delicate machine, the lettered Egyptian might
THE PHOENICIAN WRITING. 87
well have a genuine admiration for it, and speak of jt as a present to men from Thoth, the ibis-headed god ; but to strangers wishing to master it its merits would be less evident. To them the task would be facilitated neither by native predisposition, nor by the effects of a professional education begun at an age when the freshness and elasticity of the memory allow much to be asked from it. I doubt very much whether any man of foreign race, either Greek or Syrian, ever managed to work his way into the ranks of the Egyptian scribes, or even entertained such a hopeless ambition. And yet to the Syrians wrho frequented the ports and principal towns of Lower Egypt it must have been very tantalizing to see the king's overseers and the nome princes taking account of frontier dues, of the quantities of grain, and of the heads of cattle and game which were sold in the markets.1 Such a sight must have roused their envy much more readily than the pompous inscriptions on the pylons and temple wTalls. Their ambition was not of the grandiose kind. In this world, where other men thought so much of gaining battles, their only wish was to gain money. For their purposes it was all-important that they should master some form of cursive writing. What an advantage it would be to be able to write down day by day, or rather hour by hour, all transactions begun or ended, and every engagement entered into ; what a pleasure to have something to trust to beyond memory, and especially beyond the memory of a debtor !
But the cursive writing of Egypt \vas hardly less difficult for the stranger than the hieroglyphs. Like the latter it included characters of very different values, and before it could be used with any ease, the hieroglyphs themselves, of which it was in fact an abbreviation, had to be learnt. Before a foreigner could manage such a machine it required to be simplified ; the multitude of symbols had to be reduced to a comparatively small number ; and there was only one way of doing this with any success. In any ideographic system of writing the symbols are no doubt less numerous than the objects and ideas to be symbolized, but the difference is comparatively small, and it is clear that any figurative method requires a very large number of signs. The different vowel-sounds in their union with the various consonants also give rise to a good many combinations, so that a writing founded on the notation of syllables requires a great many characters — there 1 Art in Ancient Egypt, \Q\. I. Figs. 19 and 21.
88 HISTORY OF ART IN PHOENICIA AND ITS DEPENDENCIES.
are a hundred or so in the cuneiform syllabary. But it is a different matter if each separate character stands for nothing beyond one of the elementary articulations of the human voice. In no existing alphabet are there more than about twenty letters corresponding to sounds between which the ear will make a real distinction.
Among the phonetic elements of Egyptian writing there were signs of this kind, real letters. The thing to be done was to separate them from the signs of syllables, of objects, and ideas, to take these letters and to leave to the scribes of Memphis those other modes of notation which only served to complicate and encumber their graphic system. How did the necessity for such an operation suggest itself? Was it seen from the beginning that only a portion of the Egyptian signs should be borrowed ? Were there long periods of probation, or was the alphabet constituted at once, on the principle which has given it such a prodigious success, by the genius of a single man ? This question we shall never be able to answer. The date of the invention of the alphabet, if it had a date, is still more important in the history of civilization than that of the invention of printing. To resolve a word into its primitive elements certainly required a much greater effort of the brain than to invent movable letters and print with them by pressure. WTe can hardly look without emotion upon the Forty- two-line Bible, which was printed at Mayence in 1456, but how much more deeply should we be moved could we have placed before our eyes the first inscription in which a Syrian scribe made use of those twenty-two letters that, by a long series of insen- sible changes, have taken the forms they bear on this page! Gutenberg has his statues everywhere, the work of sculptors such as Thorwaldsen and David d'Angers. Those honours are well deserved, and yet the Phoenician who presented his country with this marvellous instrument deserved them better ; but his name was forgotten even by his countrymen. If we could catch a glimpse into the profound darkness of the past, and recognize the inventor of the alphabet among the innumerable ancestors of our race, should we not lead him from the crowd and place him at the head of the long procession of benefactors to humanity ?
One of the chief merits of the Phoenician alphabet lies in what we may call its universal character. The elementary articulations of the human voice are much the same among all peoples. Every
THE PHOENICIAN WRITING.
national keyboard lacks, indeed, one or two notes, but the chief difference between one language and another can hardly be ex- pressed in written characters ; it lies in the timbre, in the intona- tion, or, if we may use the term, in the colour of the sounds. Nothing is easier than to note, either by means of the Phoenician alphabet, or of others founded upon it, the various articulations that make up a local dialect or language. Any race in whom a sight of this alphabet and of what it could do aroused a desire to write on the same principle themselves could, no doubt, invent an alphabet for their own use ; but, in those long ages of gradual progress whose results are summed up for us in the word civili- zation, the human intellect worked on no such lines. Man under- stood how to utilize the discoveries of his ancestors, and to make them points of departure for new adventures ; he did not waste his time in doing over again what had been done, and well done, already ; he set himself rather to revise and perfect.
To this rule the alphabet was no exception. All those peoples who were in communication with Phoenicia by sea or land bor- rowed her characters and adapted them by a few additions and retouches to the notation of their own idiom. The Phoenicians took the forms and values of their symbols from the cursive writing of Egypt. By slow stages these symbols passed to the Hebrews, to the northern Semites, or Aramaeans, to the Libyans through Southern Arabia, and even to the Hindoos ; westwards they spread among the Greeks, the Italiots, and even the distant tribes of Spain. We cannot be surprised that in travelling so far their aspect was greatly modified. To these changes many things con- tributed ; different habits of hand, different materials, and different social conditions among those who wrote. It is when we go back to the oldest forms of the Phoenician alphabet itself, and of its direct issue, that we find resemblances so strong that all doubt as to their original identity is dispelled. Compare, for example, the characters in the oldest Greek inscriptions from Thera with those on the stele of Mesa or on the bronze cup inscribed with the name of Hiram (Fig. 32). l The student of these early alphabets will soon find, too, that it was not only the shapes of the characters that changed, but also, though in comparatively few cases, their phonetic values.
The Phoenician alphabet had no vowels. The reader was left
1 Corpus Inscriptionum Semiticarum, pars i. No. 6, and plate iv. VOL. I. N
9O HISTORY OF ART IN PIUKNICIA AND ITS
to fill them in according to the sense of the phrase. Such a want of definition must have been very inconvenient to the Greeks. We know how great a part is played by vowels in their methods of derivation, in their declensions and conjugations. " To provide themselves with vowels the Greeks took the semi- vowels of the Phoenicians, and as even these were not enough.
o '
they turned to the gutturals, so numerous in the Phoenician alphabet, and there only used to make the language clear and sonorous ; ioa and vav became I and Y ; alepk became A, ht E, hctk H, ain O. Over vav the Greeks seem to have hesitated; they took it up again and again as if they found it difficult to exhaust the possibilities of a letter whose value, as in Hebrew, was somewhat vague and floating. Thus we find that vav gave birth successively to the Greek digamma and upsilon, and in Latin to four letters : F, answering to the digamma, U, V, and Y." *
Fi<;. 32. — Fragment of a bronze cup French National Library.
By these observations we are enabled to form a fair judgment of the services rendered to phonetic writing by the Greeks ; at the first attempt they solved a problem which had always puzzled the Semites. The latter tried now and then to note the vowel sounds with precision, but during the whole existence of their idiom they never quite succeeded ; the system of their primitive alphabet was, in fact, unequal to the task. The vowel-points of the rabbis of the sixth century of our era were applied, in a very artificial way, to a language which was then dead. We have complete proof that those signs give a false idea of the way the words of the Old Testament were pronounced at the time they were first written.2
1 BERGER, L ' Ecriture et les Inscriptions scmitiques, p. 17. - Ibid.
THE PHOENICIAN WRITING. 91
The Phoenicians were very far from exhausting the uses of the admirable instrument they had invented. They used it for " keeping their books," but not for expressing their higher thoughts ; they had no literature in the true sense of the word. They seem to have written by preference on precious stones, where there was room only for very short texts, and upon bronze, most of which has long ago disappeared. " Before the discovery of Mesa's inscription, one might have doubted whether epigraphy was made use of by any Canaanitish people. Steles like those of Mesa must have been rare, and as for the habit of putting inscriptions on monumental buildings, on tombs, on coins, it cannot have dated back beyond the day when imitation of the Greeks began. It is so with the Phoenician coinage. There is no Phoenician money anterior to the coinage of Greece and Persia. The inscription of Esmounazar is equally modern ; and the awkward, laboured way in which it is turned differs widely enough from the firm and simple style of men who have written much upon stone. In place of the grand manner of Greece and Rome, the only considerable inscription that has yet been found in Phoenicia is nothing but the long-winded verbiage of a narrow-souled individual oppressed by terrors as to the fate of his own bones.1 . . . The very execution of the inscription betrays a little-practised hand. The carver has begun twice over, and the second time he has altered his process. There is, too, something very strange in the monotony of the Carthaginian epigraphy. Of two thousand five hundred known inscriptions from Carthage, all but three or four are practically identical.2 In short, the inventors of writing do not seem to have written much, "and we may at least affirm that the public monuments of Phoenicia were without inscriptions down to the Greek period." Since attention was turned to this question by the action of the Acadtmie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres, the number of Phoenician texts has increased with great rapidity ; and yet, in the whole of
1 When M. Renan wrote these lines, in 1874, the stele of Jehawmelek had not been published. There is nothing in it, however, to modify the judgment we have quoted.
2 We may now be permitted to modify the figures given by M. Renan twenty years ago. When he wrote the page we have quoted, M. de Sain te- Marie had not yet collected and despatched to France those hundreds of steles on all of which homage to " Tanit, face of Baal," is rendered in identical terms.
3 RENAN, Mission de P/ienicie, pp. 832, 833.
g2 HISTORY OF ART IN PIKKXICIA AND ITS DEPENDENCIES.
the vast repertory which we owe to the industry of M. Renan and his colleagues, \ve cannot cite a single text that may be fairly compared to those inscriptions of Greece and Rome in which the voice of a great and free people makes itself heard across the ages.
And in Phoenicia the form is worthy of the matter. There is nothing in the appearance of the letters to captivate the eye or to induce the mind to seriously weigh the sense. Phoenicia had no special form of letters for monumental use. Her epigraphic alphabet never lost its cursive look (Fig. 33). " In Phoenician inscriptions we find none of those expedients with which the Greeks and
iJP?
''l(;- 33- — Fragment of a sepulchral cippu>. From Cypru-.'
Latins contrived to give an architectural character to their texts on stone." : There is no care for symmetry, no variation in the calibre of letters, no indication of proper names or important words by capital letters. The characters are all the same height, and their angular forms with long tails and variously sloping strokes follow each other in well drilled ranks. The lines are not always straight, and they are limited only by the field on which they are traced. It certainly never dawned upon the mind of a Phoenician scribe that an inscription might have its beauty even for those who
1 RENAN, Mission de Fhenide, p. 834.
2 Corpus Inscriptionum Semiticarum, pars i. plate 8.
GENERAL REMARKS UPON THE STUDY OF PHOENICIAN ART. 93
could not read its words. All he thought about was to cut his texts correctly on the stone. In its writing, as in its colonial system, its art, and its industry, the Phoenician genius thought only of the immediate practical result ; it was essentially utilitarian.
§ 5. — General Remarks upon the Study of Phoenician Art.
The study of Phoenician art is surrounded by quite peculiar difficulties.. When we had to explain the arts of Egypt, Chaldaea, and Assyria, and to form a judgment on their merits, we had only to transport ourselves in imagination to the valleys of the Nile, the Euphrates, and the Tigris ; it was enough to explore the ruins of their buildings, and to examine the series of remains of every kind which have been collected into public and private museums. Phoenician art is not to be studied under such con- ditions as these. Upon its native soil it has left but feeble traces. Its debris must be sought for from one end of the Mediterranean
O
to the other. In that great collection of Phoenician texts in which every inscription should at last find a place, there are only nine from the Syrian coast ; ' Athens and the Piraeus have given nearly as many, namely seven ; 2 Cyprus has furnished eighty-six ; 3 Malta and Gozo twelve ; 4 and Sardinia twenty-four.5 Those from Carthage are counted in thousands.
The same observation applies to the remains of Phoenician art ; these are nowhere so uncommon as in Syria. M. Renan, who devoted a whole year to the exploration of Phoenicia, insists upon this curious fact and explains it historically.
" The ancient civilization of Phoenicia has been more thoroughly broken up than any other. A reason for this is to be found in the fact that its habitat has always been very thickly peopled. During the Greek, Roman, Byzantine, Crusading, and Mussulman periods, they have never ceased to bufld, to re-work old stones, to beat the great blocks left from ancient days into smaller units. We may say that, for the last fifteen or sixteen centuries, very few
1 Corpus Inscriptionum Semiticarum, pars i. 1-9.
2 Ibid, pars i. 115-121. 3 Ibid. Nos. 10-96. 4 Ibid. Nos. 122-132 (including 122 bis and 123 bis).
0 Ibid. 139-162.
94 HISTORY or ART IN PHOENICIA AND ITS DEPENDENCIES.
stones have been cut from any quarry in Syria. The old blocks have been made to serve again and again, until nothing of their original physiognomy is left. The Crusades especially were disastrous in this respect. The Templars, the Hospitallers, the whole of the great feudal bodies of Syria, built gigantic walls for their own defence, and as they were good builders and seldom used a stone without having it first re-worked, the evidences of the early civilization were widely obliterated. Hence the archaeo- logical destitution of the coasts of Syria and Cyprus
" The situation of Phoenicia has Ind a great deal to do with the destruction of its antiquities. Buildings near the seaboard run a much greater risk of destruction than those hidden away in the interior, especially in a country like Syria, where there were neither roads nor vehicles, and where anything that was too heavy for a camel had to stay where it was. But on the Phut:nician coast a ship could be brought up close to any ancient building and its stones removed with ease. It was thus that the pagan Ephesus (which is distinct from the Christian Ephesus or A'ia- Solo2tk) served as a marble quarry for the builders of Constantinople. The enterprises of Djezzar, of Abdallah Pacha, of the Emir Beschir, and, at an earlier period, those of Fakhreddin, had an analogous effect in Syria. Similar causes have led to the rapid disappearance of Athlith in our own days
" In Syria religious reactions were no less fatal to the monuments. Christianity, so tender to antique works in Greece, was a great destroyer in the Lebanon.1 The natives of the Lebanon, both Mussulman and Christian, are, if I may venture to say so, quite without the sentiment of art ; their feelings cannot be reached by plastic beauty ; their first impulse at the sight of a statue is to
break it Finally, the greed of the natives has also been
the cause of wide destruction. They have broken up tombs and destroyed inscriptions in their haste to get at the treasures within ; every sepulchre that was not hidden has been broken to pieces. .... Political anarchy and the absence of all public control have
contributed to the same result When we reckon up
all these conditions, and add to them the zeal of those modern searchers for antique wealth who overrun the whole country, we
1 See the Mission de Phenicic, pp. 220, 287; and M. A.MKDKK THIERRY'S account of the destructive missions of St. John Chrysostom, in the Rente des deux Monties of ist January, 1870, pp. 52 et seg.
GENERAL REMARKS UPON THE STUDY or PHCENICIAN ART. 95
are surprised that a single vestige of the past remains in it. We can hardly understand how it is that a few points on the coast, such as Oum-cl-Aiuamid and Amrit,s\.\\\ preserve a few fragments that have come down from a very remote antiquity."
Like the philologist and the epigraphist, the historian of art would condemn himself to know very little indeed of the work accomplished by this industrious people if he confined himself to what he could learn within the narrow limits of Phoenicia proper, a country of which we may say in the words of the poet that "its very ruins have perished." The lives of the Phoenicians were passed anywhere but at home. Many of them were born in the colonies, and many no doubt lived and died without visiting their mother city. If we wish to become well acquainted with the people, and to trace out the various directions in which their ac- tive intelligence made itself felt, we must imitate them in these particulars ; we must take passage on their ships, and disembark on all the shores they so long frequented. We must stay for a time in their company, wherever they rested longest, and where consequently there is the best chance of finding evidence of their action and presence.
Acting on this plan we shall, in the first place, follow them to Cyprus. Cyprus was not Phoenicia. At a very early date Greek colonists landed on the island, and, establishing themselves side by side with the Semites, soon contrived to divide the whole country with them. But the chief maritime city, Kition, preserved its almost exclusively Syrian character down at least to the prrtition of Alexander's empire ; it was situated on the eastern coast of the island, and formed a pendant to Tyre and Sidon. In other parts also, as at Paphos on the southern coast, and in the interior at Idalion and Golgos, Phoenician ideas had taken such deep root that all the progress of the Greeks did not efface their traces. We have already noticed the large number of Phoenician inscrip- tions found in Cyprus, and, as might be expected, the number of Phoenician objects made either in those Syrian towns with which the island was in such constant communication or in the colony itself, is also very great. At Kition, and in other towns, manu- factories existed which were in fact no more than branch houses of
1 RENAN, Mission de Phenicie, pp. 816-819. See also pp. 154 and 155 in the same book, where M. Renan gives details of the destruction by the modern vandal of the antiquities of Byblos.
96 HISTORY OK ART i\ PIKKMCIA AND ITS DEPENDENCIES.
those at Tyre and Sklon. It was the same at Carthage. As her commerce and political importance developed, it became more and more necessary that she herself should be in a position to produce the objects with which she trafficked in the markets of the West ; all the industries of the metropolis must in time have been acclimatized within her walls, with their hereditary secrets and their accumulations of motives and models. In most cases we are quite unable to distinguish between a Phoenician vase made in Syria and one turned out from an African workshop.
But Carthage is as bare as the Syrian coast of the works of Phoenician architects and artisans. The real Carthage, the Punic city, was twice destroyed by conquerors, who burnt, dismantled, and demolished as soon as the place had fallen, and the ruins they left were finally removed by the rebuilders of a few generations later. Old materials were used again, and their original features destroyed. The few monuments that may have escaped destruction are now buried under such heaps of debris that modern explorers of the site have hardly touched them at any point. It is in Sicily, in Sardinia, and in Italy, that we shall find the products of Carthage, just as we find those of Syria in the islands and on the mainland of Greece. The remains of antiquity are everywhere better preserved in Greece and Italy than in Syria or Africa. Their vast cemeteries have handed down to modern curiosity great collections of sepulchral furniture, in which Phoenician art is largely represented both by works which really belong to it and by the imitations which it provoked.
But it may be asked, How do we recognize this art in the absence of examples found in Syria itself, or at least at Carthage, which might give us types of the style and taste of Phoenicia ? To this we answer, in the first place, that such examples are not entirely wanting. Exhausted as it is, the soil of Phoenicia has yielded a certain number of monuments by the careful examination of which we can arrive at certain well defined conclusions. By comparing these one with another, we obtain at least the rough outlines of the formula we seek, and these outlines become clearer in the light of Phoenician history.
Phoenicia was the vassal successively of Egypt and Assyria, and in the objects that left her workshops she must have mingled elements taken from both those great civilizations. Phoenicia alone was in a position, by her geographical situation and the part
GENERAL REMARKS UPON THE STUDY OF PHOENICIAN ART. 97
she played in the antique world, to produce all those objects, now so numerous and so well known, which are neither frankly Egyptian, nor frankly Assyrian, and yet contain no important elements from any other source. Finally, the Phoenicians now
FIG. 34. — Phoenician wall of Eryx.1
and then signed their works. In the ramparts of the great city of Eryx, so famous for its shrine of the Syrian Astarte, the marks of the Carthaginian masons have been found quite lately on the stones of the lower courses (Fig. 34). This is almost always
1 Corpus Inscriptionum Semiticarum, pars i. plate 29 (p. 96). VOL. I. O
9^ HISTORY OF ART IN PIKKNICIA AND ITS DEPENDENCIES.
the same letter, a belli, usually from five to twelve inches
hitfh (I;'K- 35)-'
Our readers will remember the bronze platters which were
found at Nineveh ; many like them were found at distant points on the Mediterranean, and from the first archaeologists have never hesitated to ascribe them to a Phoenician origin. But that which after all was no more than a very probable conjecture was changed into certainty by the famous discovery at Palestrina : upon one of these platters, found in 1876 in the necropolis of the ancient Prameste, in the interior of Latium, a short but very clearly engraved Phcenician inscription was discovered and read ; " in all likelihood it gives us the name of the first owner of the dish, rather than that of its maker :! it runs Esmunj air-ben- A sto (Fig. 36). This point, however, is of slight importance; the value of the discovery lies in the fact that vases, diadems, jewels, etc., were found in the same tomb ; that they were made in
IMC. 35. — Crmhayiiiian mason's mark.1
the same way and decorated in the same spirit as the platter, and that no reason can be named for giving them a different origin. Here then we have a whole collection of objects, with the
1 Corpus Inscriptionum Semiticarum, pars i. No. 136. Beside beth, plic has been tound once and ain seven times.
2 Corpus Inscriptionum Semiticarum, p. i. No. 164. At the head of the article devoted to this inscription by the editors of the Corpus will be found a list of all the writings to which its discovery has given birth. The original of our reduction (Fig. 36) is plate 32 of vol. x. of the Monimenti of the Jnstitut de Correspondancc archeologique ; but aided by a fine photograph, for which we are indebted to the kindness of M. Fiorelli, our draughtsman has endeavoured to give his figures a sharper contour and to mark their relief with more accuracy.
1 M. RLNAN suggests that the name is that of some person deceased, to whose memory the dish was consecrated, and whose person was symbolized by the hawk which occupies the centre. We find it difficult to admit this explanation for an object which was destined, by its very nature, to pass from hand to hand, and, as the place of the discovery proves, to become an object of commerce.
4 Corpus Inscriptionum Semiticarum, pars i. plate 29.
GENERAL REMARKS UPON THE STUDY OF PHOENICIAN ART. 99
label, if we may use the word, of a Phoenician agent attached to them. If we take them one by one, we may surely arrive at an idea of the taste and methods of the Carthaginian worker in precious metal ; I say Carthaginian because philologists have marked a peculiarity in the text of this platter which suggests an African rather than a Syrian origin.
FIG. 36. — Phoenician platter; silver. Diameter 7f inches. Drawn by Wallctt.
It will be seen, then, that the method we propose to follow is less uncertain than it seems. No doubt we shall take our examples from points very far apart, but that does not mean that we shall take them at hazard. When we refer some object found in a tomb at Mycense, in Etruria, or Sardinia to
ioo HISTORY <>i- ART IN PIKKNICTA AND ITS DEPENDENCIES.
Phd-nician workmen, \ve do so because its treatment is different from that of any known local workshop, and because the salient features of its decoration harmonize at all points with those with which we have become familiar in our study of monuments drawn from Phiunicia proper and with the few pieces that bear Semitic inscriptions. In order to widen our field of choice we shall bring back to the quays of Tyre and Sidon the objects carried by their commerce to the four corners of the ancient world ; but, before admitting a vase or a trinket into our museum, we shall look at every side of it, and reject it unless it bears the undoubted stamp of some industrial centre of the Phoenicians.
The Greek genius soon emancipated itself from the precepts and example of Phoenicia ; it created an art far superior to that of its masters, an art of great and commanding originality ; but it was otherwise with some of the pupils of Tyre and Sidon. Neither the Cypriots nor the Hebrews succeeded in shaking off the ascendency of the Phoenician types. At Jerusalem, as at Golgos, types were modified to a certain degree, for in the one place the faith of the people was different, in the other their social habits and the materials of which their artists and artisans made use ; but in neither country did they examine nature closely enough, in neither were their inventive faculties sufficiently alive, for their art to win a really national and original physiognomy. Cypriot art and Jewish art are no more than varieties, or, as a grammarian would say, dialects, of the art of Phoenicia. We shall therefore include them in the art history of the famous nation on the Syrian coast. We shall also have to devote a short chapter to some structures and bronze figures of a quite peculiar character, which are found only in Sardinia. The fantastic statuettes and other objects which have been met with in the ruins of the Sardinian towers are, no doubt, the products of a local and indigenous art, but that art was only developed on contact with the Phoenicians and while they were masters of the seaboard. As we shall have no occasion to revert to these rude works in the sequel of our history, our examination of them will be given in the form of an appendix to the present volume.