Part 818

"The campaigns which the Pharaohs undertook against Syria and the land of the Euphrates after the expulsion of the Shepherds could not leave these cities [Sidon and others] unmoved. If the Zemar of the inscriptions of Tuthmosis III. is Zemar (Simyra) near Aradus, and Arathutu is Aradus itself, the territories of these cities were laid waste by this king in his sixth campaign (about the year 1580 B. C.); if Arkatu is Arka, south of Aradus, this place must have been destroyed in his fifteenth campaign (about the year 1570 B. C.). Sethos I. (1440-1400 B. C.) subdued the land of Limanon (i. e. the region of Lebanon). and caused cedars to be felled there. One of his inscriptions mentions Zor, i. e. Tyre, among the cities conquered by him. The son and successor of Sethos I., Ramses II., also forced his way in the first decades of the fourteenth century as far as the coasts of the Phenicians. At the mouth of the Nahr el Kelb, between Sidon and Berytus, the rocks on the coast display the memorial which he caused to be set up in the second and third year of his reign in honour of the successes obtained in this region. In the fifth year of his reign Ramses, with the king of the Cheta, defeats the king of Arathu in the neighbourhood of Kadeshu on the Orontes, and Ramses III., about the year 1310 B. C., mentions beside the Cheta who attack Egypt the people of Arathu, by which name in the one case as in the other, may be meant the warriors of Aradus. If Arathu, like Arathutu, is Aradus, it follows, from the position which Ramses II. and III. give to the princes of Arathu, that beside the power to which the kingdom of the Hittites had risen about the middle of the fifteenth century B. C., and which it maintained to the end of the fourteenth, the Phenician cities had assumed an independent position. The successes of the Pharaohs in Syria come to an end in the first decades of the fourteenth century. Egypt makes peace and enters into a contract of marriage with the royal house of the Cheta. … The overthrow of the kingdom of the Hittites, which succumbed to the attack of the Amorites soon after the year 1300 B. C., must have had a reaction on the cities of the Phenicians. Expelled Hittites must have been driven to the coast-land, or have fled thither, and in the middle of the thirteenth century the successes gained by the Hebrews who broke in from the East, over the Amorites, the settlement of the Hebrews on the mountains of the Amorites [see JEWS: CONQUEST OF CANAAN], must again have thrown the vanquished, i. e. the fugitives of this nation, towards the coast. With this retirement of the older strata of the population of Canaan to the coast is connected the movement which from this period emanates from the coasts of the Phenicians, and is directed towards the islands of the Mediterranean and the Ægean. It is true that on this subject only the most scanty statements and traces, only the most legendary traditions have come down to us, so that we can ascertain these advances only in the most wavering outlines. One hundred miles to the west off the coast of Phenicia lies the island of Cyprus. … The western writers state that before the time of the Trojan war Belus had conquered and subjugated the island of Cyprus, and that Citium belonged to Belus. The victorious Belus is the Baal of the Phenicians. The date of the Trojan war is of no importance for the settlement of the Phenicians in Cyprus, for this statement is found in Virgil only. More important is the fact that the settlers brought the Babylonian cuneiform writing to Cyprus. … The settlement of the Sidonians in Cyprus must therefore have taken place before the time in which the alphabetic writing, i. e. the writing specially known as Phenician, was in use in Syria, and hence at the latest before 1100 B. C. … In the beginning of the tenth century B. C. the cities of Cyprus stood under the supremacy of the king of Tyre. The island was of extraordinary fertility. The forests furnished wood for ship-building; the mountains concealed rich veins of the metal which has obtained the name of copper from this island. Hence it was a very valuable acquisition, an essential strengthening of the power of Sidon in the older, and Tyre in the later period. … {2532} As early as the fifteenth century B. C., we may regard the Phenician cities as the central points of a trade branching east and west, which must have been augmented by the fact that they conveyed not only products of the Syrian land to the Euphrates and the Nile, but could also carry the goods which they obtained in exchange in Egypt to Babylonia, and what they obtained beyond the Euphrates to Egypt. At the same time the fabrics of Babylon and Egypt roused them to emulation, and called forth an industry among the Phenicians which we see producing woven stuffs, vessels of clay and metal, ornaments and weapons, and becoming preeminent in the colouring of stuffs with the liquor of the purple-fish which are found on the Phenician coasts. This industry required above all things metals, of which Babylonia and Egypt were no less in need, and when the purple-fish of their own coasts were no longer sufficient for their extensive dyeing, colouring-matter had to be obtained. Large quantities of these fish produced a proportionately small amount of the dye. Copper-ore was found in Cyprus, gold in the island of Thasos, and purple-fish on the coasts of Hellas. When the fall of the kingdom of the Hittites and the overthrow of the Amorite princes in the south of Canaan augmented the numbers of the population on the coast, these cities were no longer content to obtain those possessions of the islands by merely landing and making exchanges with the inhabitants. Intercourse with semi-barbarous tribes must be protected by the sword. Good harbours were needed. … Thus arose protecting forts on the distant islands and coasts, which received the ships of the native land. … In order to obtain the raw material necessary for their industry no less than to carry off the surplus of population, the Phenicians were brought to colonise Cyprus, Rhodes, Crete, Thera, Melos, Oliarus, Samothrace, Imbros, Lemnos and Thasos. In the bays of Laconia and Argos, in the straits of Eubœa, purple–fish were found in extraordinary quantities. … We may conclude that the Phenicians must have set foot on Cyprus about the year 1250 B. C., and on the islands and coasts of Hellas about the year 1200 B. C. Thucydides observes that in ancient times the Phenicians had occupied the promontories of Sicily and the small islands lying around Sicily, in order to carry on trade with the Sicels. Diodorus Siculus tells us that when the Phenicians extended their trade to the western ocean they settled in the island of Melite (Malta), owing to its situation in the middle of the sea and excellent harbours, in order to have a refuge for their ships. … On Sardinia also, as Diodorus tells us, the Phenicians planted many colonies. The mountains of Sardinia contained iron, silver, and lead. … The legend of the Greeks makes Heracles, i. e. Baal Melkarth, lord of the whole West. As a fact, the colonies of the Phenicians went beyond Sardinia in this direction. Their first colonies on the north coast of Africa appear to have been planted where the shore runs out nearest Sicily; Hippo was apparently regarded as the oldest colony. In the legends of the coins mentioned above Hippo is named beside Tyre and Citium as a daughter of Sidon. … Ityke (atak, settlement, Utica), on the mouth of the Bagradas (Medsherda), takes the next place after this Hippo, if indeed it was not founded before it. Aristotle tells us that the Phenicians stated that Ityke was built 287 years before Carthage, and Pliny maintains that Ityke was founded 1,178 years before his time. As Carthage was founded in the year 846 B. C. [see CARTHAGE] Ityke, according to Aristotle's statement, was built in the year 1133 B. C. With this the statement of Pliny agrees. He wrote in the years 52-77 A. D., and therefore he places the foundation of Ityke in the year 1126 or 1100 B. C. About the same time, i. e. about the year 1100 B. C., the Phenicians had already reached much further to the west. … When their undertakings succeeded according to their desire and they had collected great treasures, they resolved to traverse the sea beyond the pillars of Heracles, which is called Oceanus. First of all, on their passage through these pillars, they founded upon a peninsula of Europe a city which they called Gadeira. … This foundation of Gades, which on the coins is called Gadir and Agadir, i. e. wall, fortification, the modern Cadiz, and without doubt the most ancient city in Europe which has preserved its name, is said to have taken place in the year 1100 B. C. If Ityke was founded before 1100 B. C. or about that time, we have no reason to doubt the founding of Gades soon after that date. Hence the ships of the Phenicians would have reached the ocean about the time when Tiglath Pilesar I. left the Tigris with his army, trod the north of Syria, and looked on the Mediterranean."

_M. Duncker, The History of Antiquity, book 3, chapter 3 (volume 3)._

"The typical Phœnician colony was only a trading station, inhabited by dealers, who had not ceased to be counted as citizens of the parent State. … In Phœnicia itself the chief object of public interest was the maintenance and extension of foreign trade. The wealth of the country depended on the profits of the merchants, and it was therefore the interest of the Government to encourage and protect the adventures of the citizens. Unlike the treasures or curiosities imported by the fleets of royal adventurers, Phœnician imports were not intended to be consumed within the country, but to be exchanged for the most part for other commodities. The products of all lands were brought to market there, and the market people, after supplying all their own wants in kind, still had commodities to sell at a profit to the rest of the world. The Government did not seek to retain a monopoly of this profit; on the contrary, private enterprise seems to have been more untrammelled than at any time before the present century. But individuals and the State were agreed in desiring to retain a monopoly of foreign traffic as against the rest of the world, hence the invention of 'Phœnician lies' about the dangers of the sea, and the real dangers which 'Tyrian seas' came to possess for navigators of any other nation. … Phœnician traders were everywhere first in the field, and it was easy for them to persuade their barbarous customers that foreigners of any other stock were dangerous and should be treated as enemies. They themselves relied more on stratagem than on open warfare to keep the seas, which they considered their own, free from other navigators. … Silver and gold, wool and purple, couches inlaid with ivory, Babylonish garments and carpets, unguents of all sorts, female slaves and musicians, are indicated by the comic poets as forming part of the typical cargo of a Phœnician merchantman, the value of which in many cases would reach a far higher figure than a small ship-owner or captain could command. {2533} As a consequence, a good deal of banking or money-lending business was done by the wealthy members of the great Corporation of Merchants and Ship-owners. The Phœnicians had an evil reputation with the other nations of the Mediterranean for sharp practices, and the custom of lending money at interest was considered, of course wrongly, a Phœnician invention, though it is possible that they led the way in the general substitution of loans at interest for the more primitive use of antichretic pledges. … To the Greeks the name Phœnician seems to have called up the same sort of association as those which still cling to the name of Jew in circles which make no boast of tolerance; and it is probable enough that the first, like the second, great race of wandering traders was less scrupulous in its dealings with aliens than compatriots. … So far as the Punic race may be supposed to have merited its evil reputation, one is tempted to account for the fact by the character of its principal staples. All the products of all the countries of the world circulated in Phœnician merchantmen, but the two most considerable, and most profitable articles of trade in which they dealt were human beings and the precious metals. The Phœnicians were the slave-dealers and the money-changers of the Old World. And it is evident that a branch of trade, which necessarily follows the methods of piracy, is less favourable to the growth of the social virtues than the cultivation of the ground, the domestication of animals, or the arts and manufactures by which the products of nature are applied to new and varied uses. Compared with the trade in slaves, that in metals—gold, silver, copper and tin—must seem innocent and meritorious; yet the experience of ages seems to show that, somehow or other, mining is not a moralizing industry. … Sidon was famous in Homer's time for copper or bronze, and Tyre in Solomon's for bronze (the 'brass' of the Authorized Version); and the Phœnicians retailed the work of all other metallurgists as well as their own, as they retailed the manufactures of Egypt and Babylonia, and the gums and spices of Arabia. … Two things are certain with regard to the continental commerce of Europe before the written history of its northern countries begins. Tin and umber were conveyed by more than one route from Cornwall and the North Sea to Mediterranean ports. In the latter case the traders proceeded up the Rhine and the Aar, along the Jura to the Rhone, and thence down to Marseilles; and also across the Alps, by a track forking off, perhaps at Grenoble, into the valley of the Po, and so to the Adriatic. … Apart from the Phœnician sea trade, Cornish tin was conveyed partly by water to Armorica and to Marseilles through the west of France; but also to the east of England' (partly overland by the route known later as the Pilgrims' Way), and from the east of Kent, possibly to the seat of the amber trade, as well as to a route through the east of France, starting from the short Dover crossing."

_E. J. Simcox, Primitive Civilizations, volume 1, pages 397-402._

"The epigraphic texts left us by the Phœnicians are too short and dry to give us any of those vivid glimpses into the past that the historian loves. When we wish to make the men of Tyre and Sidon live again, when we try to see them as they moved in those seven or eight centuries during which they were supreme in the Mediterranean, we have to turn to the Greeks, to Herodotus and Homer, for the details of our picture; it is in their pages that we are told how these eastern traders made themselves indispensable to the half-savage races of Europe. … The Phœnicians carried on their trade in a leisurely way. It consisted for the most part in exchanging their manufactured wares for the natural produce of the countries they visited; it was in conformity with the spirit of the time, and, although it inspired distrust, it was regular enough in its methods. Stories told by both Homer and Herodotus show them to us as abductors of women and children, but in the then state of the world even deeds like those described would soon be forgotten, and after a time the faithless traders would be readmitted for the sake of the wares they brought. … Seeing how great their services were to the civilization of Greece and Rome, and how admirable were those virtues of industry, activity, and splendid courage that they brought to their work, how is it that the classic writers speak of the Phœnicians with so little sympathy? and why does the modern historian, in spite of his breadth and freedom from bias, find it difficult to treat them even with justice? It is because, in spite of their long relations with them, the peoples of Greece and Italy never learnt to really know the Phœnicians or to understand their language, and, to answer the second question, because our modern historians are hardly better informed. Between Greece and Rome on the one hand and Phœnicia and Carthage on the other, there was a barrier which was never beaten down. They traded and fought, but they never concluded a lasting and cordial peace; they made no effort to comprehend each other's nature, but retained their mutual, ignorant antipathy to the very end. … That full justice has never been done to the Phœnicians is partly their own fault. They were moved neither by the passion for truth nor by that for beauty; they cared only for gain, and thanks to the condition of the world at the time they entered upon the scene, they could satisfy that lust to the full. In the barter trade they carried on for so many centuries the advantage must always have been for the more civilized, and the Phœnicians used and abused that advantage. Tyre and Sidon acquired prodigious wealth; the minds of their people were exclusively occupied with the useful; they were thinking always of the immediate profit to themselves in every transaction; and to such a people the world readily denies justice, to say nothing of indulgence. … No doubt it may be said that it was quite without their goodwill that the Phœnicians helped other nations to shake off barbarism and to supply themselves with the material of civilized life. That, of course, is true, but it does not diminish the importance of the results obtained through their means. Phœnicia appropriated for herself all the inventions and recipes of the old eastern civilizations and by more than one happy discovery, and especially by the invention of the alphabet, she added to the value of the treasure thus accumulated. Whether she meant it or not, she did, as a fact, devote her energies to the dissemination of all this precious knowledge from the very day on which she entered into relations with those tribes on the Grecian islands and on the continent of Europe which were as yet strangers to political life. … {2534} At the time of their greatest expansion, the true Phœnicians numbered, at the very most, a few hundreds of thousands. It was with such scanty numbers that they contrived to be present everywhere, to construct ports of refuge for their ships, factories for their merchants and warehouses for their goods. These 'English of antiquity,' as they have been so well called, upheld their power by means very similar to those employed by England, who has succeeded for two centuries in holding together her vast colonial empire by a handful of soldiers and a huge fleet of ships. The great difference lies in the fact that Tyre made no attempt to subjugate and govern the nations she traded with."

_G. Perrot and C. Chipiez, History of Art in Phœnicia, volume 2, chapter 6._

The ascendancy among Phœnician cities passed at some early day from Sidon to Tyre, and the decline of the former has been ascribed to an attack from the Philistines of Ascalon, which occurred about 1250 or 1200 B. C. But the explanation seems questionable.

_G. Rawlinson, History of Phœnicia, chapter 14._

See TYRE.

PHŒNICIANS: Coinage and Money.

See MONEY AND BANKING: PHŒNICIA.

PHŒNICIANS: B. C. 850-538. Subjection to Assyria and Babylonia.

About 850 B. C. "the military expeditions of the Assyrians began to reach Southern Syria, and Phœnician independence seems to have been lost. We cannot be sure that the submission was continuous; but from the middle of the ninth till past the middle of the eighth century there occur in the contemporary monuments of Assyria plain indications of Phœnician subjection, while there is no evidence of resistance or revolt. … About B. C. 743 the passive submission of Phœnicia to the Assyrian yoke began to be exchanged for an impatience of it, and frequent efforts were made, from this date till Nineveh fell, to re-establish Phœnician independence. These efforts for the most part failed; but it is not improbable that finally, amid the troubles under which the Assyrian empire succumbed, success crowned the nation's patriotic exertions, and autonomy was recovered. … Scarcely, however, had Assyria fallen when a new enemy appeared upon the scene. Nechoh of Egypt, about B. C. 608, conquered the whole tract between his own borders and the Euphrates. Phœnicia submitted or was reduced, and remained for three years an Egyptian dependency. Nebuchadnezzar, in B. C. 605, after his defeat of Nechoh at Carchemish, added Phœnicia to Babylon; and, though Tyre revolted from him eight years later, B. C. 598, and resisted for thirteen years all his attempts to reduce her, yet at length she was compelled to submit, and the Babylonian yoke was firmly fixed on the entire Phœnician people. It is not quite certain that they did not shake it off upon the death of the great Babylonian king; but, on the whole, probability is in favour of their having remained subject till the conquest of Babylon by Cyrus, B. C. 538."

_G. Rawlinson, Manual of Ancient History, book 1, part 1, section 6._

"It appears to have been only a few years after Nebuchadnezzar's triumphant campaign against Neco that renewed troubles broke out in Syria. Phœnicia revolted under the leadership of Tyre; and about the same time Jehoiakim, the Jewish king, having obtained a promise of aid from the Egyptians, renounced his allegiance. Upon this, in his seventh year (B. C. 598), Nebuchadnezzar proceeded once more into Palestine at the head of a vast army, composed partly of his allies, the Medes, partly of his own subjects. He first invested Tyre; but finding that city too strong to be taken by assault, he left a portion of his army to continue the siege, while he himself pressed forward against Jerusalem. … The siege of Tyre was still being pressed at the date of the second investment of Jerusalem. … Tyre, if it fell at the end of its thirteen years' siege, must have been taken in the very year which followed the capture of Jerusalem, B. C. 585. … It has been questioned whether the real Tyre, the island city, actually fell on this occasion (Heeren, As. Nat. volume ii. page 11, E. T.; Kenrick, Phœnicia, page 390), chiefly because Ezekiel says, about B. C. 570, that Nebuchadnezzar had 'received no wages for the service that he served against it.' (Ezekiel xxix. 18.) But this passage may be understood to mean that he had had no sufficient wages. Berosus expressly stated that Nebuchadnezzar reduced all Phœnicia."

_G. Rawlinson, Five Great Monarchies: Babylonia, chapter 8, and footnote._

PHŒNICIANS: Later commerce.