Part 1190

"Though the invincible industry and enterprise of the Phenicians maintained them as a people of importance down to the period of the Roman empire, yet the period of their widest range and greatest efficiency is to be sought much earlier—anterior to 700 B. C. In these remote times they and their colonists [the Carthaginians especially] were the exclusive navigators of the Mediterranean: the rise of the Greek maritime settlements banished their commerce to a great degree from the Ægean Sea, and embarrassed it even in the more westerly waters. Their colonial establishments were formed in Africa, Sicily, Sardinia, the Balearic Isles, and Spain. The greatness as well as the antiquity of Carthage, Utica, and Gades, attest the long-sighted plans of Phenician traders, even in days anterior to the first Olympiad. We trace the wealth and industry of Tyre, and the distant navigation of her vessels through the Red Sea and along the coast of Arabia, back to the days of David and Solomon. And as neither Egyptians, Assyrians, Persians, or Indians, addressed themselves to a sea-faring life, so it seems that both the importation and the distribution of the products of India and Arabia into Western Asia and Europe were performed by the Idumæan Arabs between Petra and the Red Sea—by the Arabs of Gerrha on the Persian Gulf, joined as they were in later times by a body of Chaldæan exiles from Babylonia—and by the more enterprising Phenicians of Tyre and Sidon in these two seas as well as in the Mediterranean."

_G. Grote, History of Greece, part 2, chapter 18._

"The Commerce of Carthage may be conveniently considered under its two great branches—the trade with Africa, and the trade with Europe. The trade with Africa … was carried on with the barbarous tribes of the inland country that could be reached by caravans, and of the sea-coast. Of both we hear something from Herodotus, the writer who furnishes us with most of our knowledge about these parts of the ancient world. … The goods with which the Carthaginian merchants traded with the African tribes were doubtless such as those which civilized nations have always used in their dealings with savages. Cheap finery, gaudily coloured cloths, and arms of inferior quality, would probably be their staple. Salt, too, would be an important article. … The articles which they would receive in exchange for their goods are easily enumerated. In the first place comes … gold. Carthage seems to have had always at hand an abundant supply of the precious metal for use, whether as money or as plate. Next to gold would come slaves. … Ivory must have been another article of Carthaginian trade, though we hear little about it. The Greeks used it extensively in art. … Precious stones seem to have been another article which the savages gave in exchange for the goods they coveted. … Perhaps we may add dates to the list of articles obtained from the interior. The European trade dealt, of course, partly with the things already mentioned, and partly with other articles for which the Carthaginian merchants acted as carriers, so to speak, from one part of the Mediterranean to another. Lipara, and the other volcanic islands near the southern extremity of Italy, produced resin; Agrigentum, and possibly other cities of Sicily, traded in sulphur brought down from the region of Etna; wine was produced in many of the Mediterranean countries. Wax and honey were the staple goods of Corsica. Corsican slaves, too, were highly valued. The Iron of Elba, the fruit and the cattle of the Balearic islands, and, to go further, the tin and copper of Britain, and even amber from the Baltic, were articles of Carthaginian commerce. Trade was carried on not only with the dwellers on the coast, but with inland tribes. Thus goods were transported across Spain to the interior of Gaul, the jealousy of Massilia (Marseilles) not permitting the Carthaginians to have any trading stations on the southern coast of that country."

_A. J. Church and A. Gilman, The Story of Carthage, part 3, chapter 3._

A high authority on questions of intercourse in ancient times throws doubt on the supposed African caravan trade of the Carthaginians—as follows: "There seems no doubt that the existing system of caravan trade dates only from the introduction of Islamism into Africa. It was the Arabs who first introduced the camel into Northern Africa, and without camels any extensive intercourse with the interior was impossible. The Negro races have never shown any disposition to avail themselves of this mode of transport, and at the present day the commerce of the interior is carried on almost entirely by Moorish, that is, by Mohammedan, traders. The spread of Islamism has doubtless led to increased communication from another cause, the necessity for the Mohammedan inhabitants of the outlying and detached regions of the continent to make the pilgrimage to Mecca. Even in the most flourishing times of the Carthaginians they do not appear to have made any use of camels; and as late as the days of Strabo the communications with the tribes of Western Africa who dwelt beyond the Sahara were scanty and irregular. In the time of Herodotus there is certainly no indication that either the Carthaginians or the Greeks of the Cyrenaica had any commercial intercourse with the regions beyond the Great Desert."

_E. H. Bunbury, History of Ancient Geography, chapter 8, note I (volume 1)._

See, also, PHŒNICIANS (pages 2530-2534); and CARTHAGE (pages 392-395).

{3699}

COMMERCE: Jews.

Beginning early in his reign, Solomon made great and enlightened efforts to promote the commerce and industries of the people of Israel. "To increase the land traffic, he had small cities built in advantageous localities, in which goods of all sorts in large quantities were kept in suitable storehouses; a practice similar to that which had from ancient times prevailed in Egypt. … They were established chiefly in the most northern districts of Israel, towards the Phœnician boundaries, as well as in the territories of the kingdom of Hamath, which was first conquered by Solomon himself.—The main road for the land traffic between Egypt and the interior of Asia must have been the great highway leading past Gaza and further west of Jerusalem to the Northern Jordan and Damascus. Here it was joined by the road from the Phœnician cities, and continued as far as Thapsacus, on the Euphrates. This was entirely in the dominions of the king; and here, under the peaceful banner of a great and powerful monarchy, commerce could flourish as it had never flourished before. It was clearly for the improvement of this route, which had to traverse the Syrian desert on the north, that Solomon built, in a happily chosen oasis of this wilderness, the city of Thammor, or Tadmor, of which the Greek version is Palmyra. There is not a single indication that this city was of importance before Solomon's time, but from that era it flourished for more than a thousand years. … For any distant navigation, however, Solomon was obliged to rely on the aid of the Phœnicians, inasmuch as they were in that age the only nation which possessed the necessary ability and inclination for it. It is true that the idea of competing with the Phœnicians upon the Mediterranean could hardly have occurred to him, since they had long before that time attracted all the commerce upon it to themselves, and would scarcely have desired or even tolerated such a rival. … But the Red Sea, which had been thrown open to the kings of Israel by the conquest of the Idumeans, offered the finest opportunity for the most distant and lucrative undertakings, the profit of which might perfectly satisfy a nation in the position of Israel in the dawn of maritime activity; and on their part, the Phœnicians could not fail to be most willing helpers in the promotion of undertakings which it lay in the hands of the powerful king of Israel entirely to cut off from them, or at any rate to encumber with great difficulties. In this way the mutual desires and needs of two nations coincided without any injury to the one or the other. … Phœnician sailors were at first, it is true, the teachers of the Israelite. It was they who aided them in constructing and manning the tall ships, which, destined to distant voyages upon uncertain seas, needed to be strongly built; but yet how many new ideas and what varied knowledge the nation would in this way acquire! The ships were built in Ezion-geber, the harbour of the town of Elath (or Eloth), probably on the very spot where Akaba now stands. The cargo brought back each time from the three years' voyage consisted of 420 talents of gold, besides silver, ivory, red sandal-wood, apes, and peacocks, probably also nard and aloe."

_H. Ewald, History of Israel, volume 3, page 261-264._

COMMERCE: Greeks.

"When the Greeks had established themselves, not only on the peninsula, but also on the islands and on the east coast of the Ægean Sea, their navigation was greatly extended. That this, even in the first half of the 8th century, was profitable in its results, we see from the instance of Dius of Cyme, the father of Hesiod, who maintained himself in this manner. The works of art in which Lydia and Caria excelled, together with the products and manufactures of the east, which reached the western coasts of Asia, the products of these coasts, and wine and oil from Lesbos and Samos—all these could be shipped from the Greek maritime cities of Asia Minor, and carried to the peninsula. It was through this commerce … that Chalcis and Eretria laid the foundation of their greatness. To what proportions it had attained, even in the course of the 8th century, we find from the mint marks of Phocæa and Cyme, the standards of Chalcis and Eretria, the coins and weights and measures of Phidon of Argos. … From the middle of the 8th century, the Greeks no longer merely practised navigation; they became, in an eminent sense, a maritime nation. At the time when Sinope and Trapezus were founded in the east, Naxos, Catana, and Syracuse in Sicily, and Cyme in Campania, a nautical discovery had already been made, by means of which the Greeks surpassed the Phœnicians, the ancient voyagers of Syria; this was the building of triremes. To what an extent and proficiency must seamanship have attained, what importance naval battles must have assumed, to give rise to the attempt to replace the ancient war vessels by others of a far more powerful kind! When the first triremes were built at Corinth and Samos, about the year 700 B. C., Greek cities already existed on the southern shore of the Black Sea, on the coasts of Thrace, in Corcyra and Sicily; the southern coast of Italy had also been colonised. The products of Greek industry, pottery, implements, and weapons, were advantageously bartered on the coasts of the Thracians, Scythians, Illyrians, Sicilians, and Oscans, for the fruits of the soil, and for the cattle of those regions. The need of the means of exchange must have given great encouragement and impetus to manufactures in the Greek cities of the peninsula, on the coasts of Asia, and in the newly-founded Asiatic settlements themselves. … Navigation and commerce must have become permanent occupations. And the great increase of manufactures must also have given employment to numbers of the country people. Thus there grew up under the very rule of the aristocracy a powerful rival to itself; a nautical, artisan, commercial class, side by side with the land population. If the protecting walls of the chief place of the canton had previously been sought only in time of need, in case of surprises or hostile landings, the new industrial classes were now settled together in the harbours and centres of trade. Handicrafts, navigation, and commerce, could not exist without one another. In the maritime cantons on the east of the peninsula, and in the cantons on the coasts of the Peloponnesus, there sprang up simultaneously with the burgher class a town population."

_M. Duncker, History of Greece, book 4, chapter 2 (volume 2)._

{3700}

"Between 700 B. C. and 530 B. C., we observe … an immense extension of Grecian maritime activity and commerce—but we at the same time notice the decline of Tyre and Sidon, both in power and traffic. The arms of Nebuchadnezzar reduced the Phenician cities to the same state of dependence as that which the Ionian cities underwent half a century later from Crœsus and Cyrus; while the ships of Miletus, Phokæa and Samos gradually spread over all those waters of the Levant which had once been exclusively Phenician. In the year 704 B. C., the Samians did not yet possess a single trireme: down to the year 630 B. C. not a single Greek vessel had yet visited Libya. But when we reach 550 B. C. we find the Ionic ships predominant in the Ægean, and those of Corinth and Korkyra in force to the west of Peloponnesus—we see the flourishing cities of Kyrene and Barka already rooted in Libya, and the port of Naukratis a busy emporium of Grecian commerce with Egypt. The trade by land—which is all that Egypt had enjoyed prior to Psammetichus, and which was exclusively conducted by Phenicians—is exchanged for a trade by sea, of which the Phenicians have only a share, and seemingly a smaller share than the Greeks. Moreover the conquest by Amasis of the island of Cyprus, half-filled with Phenician settlements and once the tributary dependency of Tyre—affords an additional mark of the comparative decline of that great city. In her commerce with the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf she still remained without a competitor, the schemes of the Egyptian king Nekos having proved abortive. Even in the time of Herodotus, the spices and frankincense of Arabia were still brought and distributed only by the Phenician merchant. But on the whole, both political and industrial development of Tyre are now cramped by impediments, and kept down by rivals, not before in operation. … The 6th century B. C., though a period of decline for Tyre and Sidon, was a period of growth for their African colony Carthage, which appears during this century in considerable traffic with the Tyrrhenian towns on the southern coast of Italy, and as thrusting out the Phokæan settlers from Alalia in Corsica."

_G. Grote, History of Greece, part 2, chapter 21._

"It is a remarkable fact in the history of Greek colonies that the exploration of the extreme west of the Mediterranean was not undertaken either by the adventurers who settled at Cyme, or by the powerful cities of Sicily. A century or more elapsed from the foundation of Syracuse before any Greek vessel was seen on the coast of Spain or Liguria, and when the new beginning was made, it was not made by any of the colonies, Chalcidian, Dorian, or Rhodian, which had taken part in the discovery of the West. It was the Phocaeans of Ionia, Herodotus tells us, who first made the Greeks acquainted with the Hadriatic, with Tyrrhenia, Iberia (Spain), and Tartessus (the region round Cadiz). The first impulse to these distant voyages arose from a mere accident. At the time of the foundation of Cyrene, about the year 630 B. C., a Greek of Samos, by name Colaeus, when on his way to Egypt, was carried by contrary winds beyond the pillars of Heracles to Tartessus. There he found a virgin market, from which he returned to realise a profit of 60 talents (£12,000), an amount only surpassed by the gains of Sostratus of Aegina, who was the premier of Greek merchants. But this was the beginning and the end of Samian trade to the West; why they left it to the Phocaeans to enter into the riches which they had discovered, we cannot say, but within thirty years of this date, the enterprising Ionian town sent out a colony to Massilia near the mouth of the Rhone, in the district known as Liguria. … The mouth of the Rhone was the point where all the routes met which traversed France from the English Channel to the Gulf of Genoa. Of these Strabo specifies three. Merchandise was carried by boats up the Rhone and Saône, from which it was transferred to the Seine, and so passed down the river; or it was taken by land from Marseilles (or Narbo) to the Loire; or again carried up the Aude and transported thence to the Garonne. By one or other of these routes, the wares collected by the Gaulish merchants—more especially the tin, which they imported from Britain—was brought into the Greek market, if indeed it was not carried on pack-horses straight across the narrowest part of the country. The importance of these lines of transit at a time when the western Mediterranean was held by the Carthaginians, and the northern Hadriatic by the Tyrrhenians, can hardly be over-estimated. The colonists extended their borders by degrees, though not without severe contests with the Ligurians and Tyrrhenians by sea and land. New cities were founded to serve as outposts against the enemy; Agatha in the direction of the barbarians of the Rhone; Olbia, Antipolis, and Nicaea in the direction of the Salyans and Ligurians of the Alps. They also spread themselves down the coast of Spain."

_E. Abbott, History of Greece, part 2, chapter 13._

COMMERCE: Rome.