Part 6

The pretty little hotel of Rajpore, at the base of the mountain, was now reached; and before us lay the broad and excellent road, shaded with trees, which, in the course of another twenty minutes, brought us to the charming cantonment of Deyrah. All Nature seemed to be rejoicing; the birds were singing; the sounds of bubbling and splashing waters (mountain-streams diverted from their natural channels, and brought into every garden), and hedges of the double pink and crimson Bareilly rose[17] in full bloom, interspersed with the oleander, and the mehndi (henna of Scripture) with its fragrant clusters, filling the air with the perfume of mignonette, presented a scene of earthly beauty which cannot be surpassed.

"How stupid we were," I remarked, looking back at our late home, now a mere black speck on the top of the snowy mountain far above--"how very foolish and perverse to have fancied ourselves more English in the winter up there, when we might all this time have been leading the life of Eden, in this enchanting spot!"

"Indeed we were," replied my companion. "But it is the way with us in India. We give a rupee for an English daisy, and cast aside the honeyed champah."

In India there is no difficulty in housing oneself. No important agents are necessary, and advertising is scarcely known. Accordingly, without ceremony, we took quiet possession of the first vacant bungalow which we came to, and our fifteen domestics did not seem to question for a moment the propriety of the occupation. Under our somewhat despotic government, are not the sahib loeg[18] above petty social observances?

While A. was busily employed getting his guns ready and preparing for shikari in the adjacent forest and jungles, which swarm with peafowl, partridges, quail, pigeons, and a variety of other game, my first care was to summon the resident mali (gardener), and ascertain how the beautiful and extensive garden of which we had taken possession[19] might be further stocked.

"Mem sahib,"[20] said the quiet old gardener, with his hands in a supplicatory position, "there is abundance here of everything--aloo, lal sag, anjir, padina, baingan, piyaz, khira, shalgham, kobs, ajmud, kharbuza, amb, amrut, anar, narangi--"[21]

"Stay!" I interrupted; "that is enough."

But the old mali had something more to add:

"Mem sahib, all is your own, and your slave shall daily bring his customary offering, and flowers for the table; and the protector of the poor will not refuse bakshees for the bearer."

I promised to be liberal to the poor old man, and then proceeded to inspect the flower-garden.

Here I was surprised to find a perfect fraternisation between the tropical flora and our own. Amongst flowers not unfamiliar to the European were abundance of the finest roses, superb crimson and gold poincianas, the elegant hybiscus, graceful ipomoeas, and convolvuli of every hue, the purple amaranth, the variegated double balsam, the richest marigolds, the pale-blue clusters of the plantago, acacias, jasmines, oranges, and pomegranates, intermixed with our own pansies, carnations, cinerarias, geraniums, fuchsias, and a wealth of blossoms impossible to remember by name.

"If there is a paradise on earth, it is this, it is this!"

Far more beautiful to the homely eye are such gardens than those of Shalimar and Pinjore, with their costly marble terraces, geometrical walks, fountains and cascades falling over sculptured slabs.

Nor are we in India confined to the enjoyment of Nature. Art[22] finds its way to us from Europe, and literature here receives the warmest welcome. Our pianos, our musical-boxes--our costly and richly bound illustrated works, fresh from England--the most thrilling romances of fiction, and all the periodicals of the day, are regularly accumulated in these charming Indian retreats, and keep up the culture of the mind in a valley whose "glorious beauty" is, as I have said, no "fading flower," but the home of the missionary, and the resort of the war-worn soldier or truth-loving artist.

Nor is this all. Around Deyrah is some of the most exquisitely beautiful cave scenery, comparatively unknown even to Europeans; such, for example, as the wondrous natural tunnel, whose sides shine with the varied beauty of the most delicate mosaics, and are lit up by rents in the hill above; the "dropping cave" of Sansadhara, "bosomed high in tufted trees;" and the strange ancient shrines sculptured in the romantic glen of Tope-Kesur-Mahadeo.

Of these, Sansadhara has lately been made the subject of a beautiful photograph, which, however, fails to convey the exquisite charm of the original; but the natural tunnel and Tope-Kesur-Mahadeo have never been presented by the artist to the public, although there are unique sketches of them in the fine collection of a lady[23] who, as the wife of a former Indian Commander-in-Chief, had opportunities afforded to few of indulging her taste.

One might exhaust volumes in attempting to describe such scenes, and even then fail to do them the faintest justice. The Alps, with all their beauty, lose much of their grandeur after one has been in daily contemplation of the majestic snowy range of the Himalayas, while the forests and valleys that skirt its base have no counterpart in Europe. In these partial solitudes we lose much of our conventionality. The mind is to a certain extent elevated by the grand scale on which Nature around is presented. The occasional alarm of war teaches the insecurity of all earthly happiness. Our life is subject to daily introspection, and before the mind's eye is the sublime prospect, perhaps at no very distant period, of a Christian India rising from the ruins of a sensuous idolatry in immortal beauty.

L. A., _in London Society_.

FOOTNOTES:

[16] "Wild beast! Big wild beast, sir!"

L. M.--I.--2.

[17] A remarkable plant. It is in constant bloom. On every spray there is a central crimson blossom, which only lasts one day, surrounded by five or six pink ones, which remain for many days.

[18] Dominant class.

[19] House-rent is paid monthly in India, in arrear.

[20] My lady.

[21] Potato, spinach, fig, mint, egg-plant, onion, cucumber, turnip, cabbage, parsley, melon, mango, guava, pomegranate, orange.

[22] There is no intention of disparaging beautiful native art.

[23] Lady Gomm.

THE PHOENICIANS IN GREECE.

Herodotus begins his history by relating how Phoenician traders brought "Egyptian and Assyrian wares" to Argos and other parts of Greece, in those remote days when the Greeks were still waiting to receive the elements of their culture from the more civilized East. His account was derived from Persian and Phoenician sources, but, it would seem, was accepted by his contemporaries with the same unquestioning confidence as by himself. The belief of Herodotus was shared by the scholars of Europe after the revival of learning, and there were none among them who doubted that the civilization of ancient Greece had been brought from Asia or Egypt, or from both. Hebrew was regarded as the primaeval language, and the Hebrew records as the fountain-head of all history; just as the Greek vocabulary, therefore, was traced back to the Hebrew lexicon, the legends of primitive Greece were believed to be the echoes of Old Testament history. _Ex Oriente lux_ was the motto of the inquirer, and the key to all that was dark or doubtful in the mythology and history of Hellas was to be found in the monuments of the Oriental world.

But the age of Creuzer and Bryant was succeeded by an age of scepticism and critical investigation. A reaction sat in against the attempt to force Greek thought and culture into an Asiatic mould. The Greek scholar was repelled by the tasteless insipidity and barbaric exuberance of the East; he contrasted the works of Phidias and Praxiteles, of Sophocles and Plato, with the monstrous creations of India or Egypt, and the conviction grew strong within him that the Greek could never have learnt his first lessons of civilization in such a school as this. Between the East and the West a sharp line of division was drawn, and to look for the origin of Greek culture beyond the boundaries of Greece itself came to be regarded almost as sacrilege. Greek mythology, so far from being an echo or caricature of Biblical history and Oriental mysticism, was pronounced to be self-evolved and independent, and K. O. Mueller could deny without contradiction the Asiatic origin even of the myth of Aphrodite and Adonis, where the name of the Semitic sun-god seems of itself to indicate its source. The Phoenician traders of Herodotus, like the royal maiden they carried away from Argos, were banished to the nebulous region of rationalistic fable.

Along with this reaction against the Orientalizing school which could see in Greece nothing but a deformed copy of Eastern wisdom went another reaction against the conception of Greek mythology on which the labours of the Orientalizing school had been based. Key after key had been applied to Greek mythology, and all in vain; the lock had refused to turn. The light which had been supposed to come from the East had turned out to be but a will-o'-the-wisp; neither the Hebrew Scriptures nor the Egyptian hieroglyphics had solved the problem presented by the Greek myths. And the Greek scholar, in despair, had come to the conclusion that the problem was insoluble; all that he could do was to accept the facts as they were set before him, to classify and repeat the wondrous tales of the Greek poets, but to leave their origin unexplained. This is practically the position of Grote; he is content to show that all the parts of a myth hang closely together, and that any attempt to extract history or philosophy from it must be arbitrary and futile. To deprive a myth of its kernel and soul, and call the dry husk that is left a historical fact, is to mistake the conditions of the problem and the nature of mythology.

It was at this point that the science of comparative mythology stepped in. Grote had shown that we cannot look for history in mythology, but he had given up the discovery of the origin of this mythology as a hopeless task. The same comparative method, however, which has forced nature to disclose her secrets has also penetrated to the sources of mythology itself. The Greek myths, like the myths of the other nations of the world, are the forgotten and misinterpreted records of the beliefs of primitive man, and of his earliest attempts to explain the phenomena of nature. Restore the original meaning of the language wherein the myth is clothed, and the origin of the myth is found. Myths, in fact, are the words of a dead language to which a wrong sense has been given by a false method of decipherment. A myth, rightly explained, will tell us the beliefs, the feelings, and the knowledge of those among whom it first grew up; for the evidences and monuments of history we must look elsewhere.

But there is an old proverb that "there is no smoke without fire." The war of Troy or the beleaguerment of Thebes may be but a repetition of the time-worn story of the battle waged by the bright powers of day round the battlements of heaven; but there must have been some reason why this story should have been specially localized in the Troad and at Thebes. Most of the Greek myths have a background in space and time; and for this background there must be some historical cause. The cause, however, if it is to be discovered at all, must be discovered by means of those evidences which will alone satisfy the critical historian. The localization of a myth is merely an indication or sign-post pointing out the direction in which he is to look for his facts. If Greek warriors had never fought in the plains of Troy, we may be pretty sure that the poems of Homer would not have brought Akhilles and Agamemnon under the walls of Ilium. If Phoenician traders had exercised no influence on primaeval Greece, Greek legend would have contained no references to them.

But even the myth itself, when rightly questioned, may be made to yield some of the facts upon which the conclusions of the historian are based. We now know fairly well what ideas, usages, and proper names have an Aryan stamp upon them, and what, on the other hand, belong rather to the Semitic world. Now there is a certain portion of Greek mythology which bears but little relationship to the mythology of the kindred Aryan tribes, while it connects itself very closely with the beliefs and practices of the Semitic race. Human sacrifice is very possibly one of these, and it is noticeable that two at least of the legends which speak of human sacrifice--those of Athamas and Busiris--are associated, the one with the Phoenicians of Thebes, the other with the Phoenicians of the Egyptian Delta. The whole cycle of myths grouped about the name of Herakles points as clearly to a Semitic source as does the myth of Aphrodite and Adonis; and the extravagant lamentations that accompanied the worship of the Akhaean Demeter (Herod. v. 61) come as certainly from the East as the olive, the pomegranate, and the myrtle, the sacred symbols of Athena, of Hera, and of Aphrodite.[24]

Comparative mythology has thus given us a juster appreciation of the historical inferences we may draw from the legends of prehistoric Greece, and has led us back to a recognition of the important part played by the Phoenicians in the heroic age. Greek culture, it is true, was not the mere copy of that of Semitic Asia, as scholars once believed, but the germs of it had come in large measure from an Oriental seed-plot. The conclusions derived from a scientific study of the myths have been confirmed and widened by the recent researches and discoveries of archaeology. The spade, it has been said, is the modern instrument for reconstructing the history of the past, and in no department in history has the spade been more active of late than in that of Greece. From all sides light has come upon that remote epoch around which the mist of a fabulous antiquity had already been folded in the days of Herodotus; from the islands and shores of the AEgean, from the tombs of Asia Minor and Palestine, nay, even from the temples and palaces of Egypt and Assyria, have the materials been exhumed for sketching in something like clear outline the origin and growth of Greek civilization. From nowhere, however, have more important revelations been derived than from the excavations at Mykenae and Spata, near Athens, and it is with the evidence furnished by these that I now propose mainly to deal. A personal inspection of the sites and the objects found upon them has convinced me of the groundlessness of the doubts which have been thrown out against their antiquity, as well as of the intercourse and connection to which they testify with the great empires of Babylonia and Assyria. Mr. Poole has lately pointed out what materials are furnished by the Egyptian monuments for determining the age and character of the antiquities of Mykenae.[25] I would now draw attention to the far clearer and more tangible materials afforded by Assyrian art and history.

Two facts must first be kept well in view. One of these is the Semitic origin of the Greek alphabet. The Phoenician alphabet, originally derived from the alphabet of the Egyptian hieroglyphics, and imported into their mother-country by the Phoenician settlers of the Delta, was brought to Greece, not probably by the Phoenicians of Tyre and Sidon, but by the Aramaeans of the Gulf of Antioch, whose nouns ended with the same "emphatic aleph" that we seem to find in the Greek names of the letters, _alpha_, _beta_, _gamma_, (_gamla_). Before the introduction of the simpler Phoenician alphabet, the inhabitants of Asia Minor and the neighbouring islands appear to have used a syllabary of some seventy characters, which continued to be employed in conservative Cyprus down to a very late date; but, so far as we know at present, the Greeks of the mainland were unacquainted with writing before the Aramaeo-Phoenicians had taught them their phonetic symbols. The oldest Greek inscriptions are probably those of Thera, now Santorin, where the Phoenicians had been settled from time immemorial; and as the forms of the characters found in them do not differ very materially from the forms used on the famous Moabite Stone, we may infer that the alphabet of Kadmus was brought to the West at a date not very remote from that of Mesha and Ahab, perhaps about 800 B.C. We may notice that Thera was an island and a Phoenician colony, and it certainly seems more probable that the alphabet was carried to the mainland from the islands of the AEgean than that it was disseminated from the inland Phoenician settlement at Thebes, as the old legends affirmed. In any case, the introduction of the alphabet implies a considerable amount of civilizing force on the part of those from whom it was borrowed; the teachers from whom an illiterate people learns the art of writing are generally teachers from whom it has previously learnt the other elements of social culture. A barbarous tribe will use its muscles in the service of art before it will use its brains; the smith and engraver precede the scribe. If, therefore, the Greeks were unacquainted with writing before the ninth century, B.C., objects older than that period may be expected to exhibit clear traces of Phoenician influence, though no traces of writing.

The other fact to which I allude is the existence of pottery of the same material and pattern on all the prehistoric sites of the Greek world, however widely separated they may be. We find it, for instance, at Mykenae and Tiryns, at Tanagra and Athens, in Rhodes, in Cyprus, and in Thera, while I picked up specimens of it in the neighbourhood of the Treasury of Minyas and on the site of the Acropolis at Orchomenus. The clay of which it is composed is of a drab colour, derived, perhaps in all instances, from the volcanic soil of Thera and Melos, and it is ornamented with geometrical and other patterns in black and maroon-red. After a time the patterns become more complicated and artistic; flowers, animal forms, and eventually human figures, take the place of simple lines, and the pottery gradually passes into that known as Corinthian or Phoeniko-Greek. It needs but little experience to distinguish at a glance this early pottery from the red ware of the later Hellenic period.

Phoenicia, Keft as it was called by the Egyptians, had been brought into relation with the monarchy of the Nile at a remote date, and among the Semitic settlers in the Delta or "Isle of Caphtor" must have been natives of Sidon and the neighbouring towns. After the expulsion of the Hyksos, the Pharaohs of the eighteenth and nineteenth dynasties carried their arms as far as Mesopotamia and placed Egyptian garrisons in Palestine. A tomb-painting of Thothmes III. represents the Kefa or Phoenicians, clad in richly-embroidered kilts and buskins, and bringing their tribute of gold and silver vases and earthenware cups, some in the shape of animals like the vases found at Mykenae and elsewhere. Phoenicia, it would seem, was already celebrated for its goldsmiths' and potters' work, and the ivory the Kefa are sometimes made to carry shows that their commerce must have extended far to the east. As early as the sixteenth century B.C., therefore, we may conclude that the Phoenicians were a great commercial people, trading between Assyria and Egypt and possessed of a considerable amount of artistic skill.

It is not likely that a people of this sort, who, as we know from other sources, carried on a large trade in slaves and purple, would have been still unacquainted with the seas and coasts of Greece where both slaves and the murex or purple-fish were most easily to be obtained. Though the Phoenician alphabet was unknown in Greece till the ninth century B.C., we have every reason to expect to find traces of Phoenician commerce and Phoenician influence there at least five centuries before. And such seems to be the case. The excavations carried on in Thera by MM. Fouque and Gorceix,[26] in Rhodes by Mr. Newton and Dr. Saltzmann, and in various other places such as Megara, Athens, and Melos, have been followed by the explorations of Dr. Schliemann at Hissarlik, Tiryns, and Mykenae, of General di Cesnola in Cyprus, and of the Archaeological Society of Athens at Tanagra and Spata.

The accumulations of prehistoric objects on these sites all tell the same tale, the influence of the East, and more especially of the Phoenicians, upon the growing civilization of early Greece. Thus in Thera, where a sort of Greek Pompeii has been preserved under the lava which once overwhelmed it, we find the rude stone hovels of its primitive inhabitants, with roofs of wild olive, filled with the bones of dogs and sheep, and containing stores of barley, spelt, and chickpea, copper and stone weapons, and abundance of pottery. The latter is for the most part extremely coarse, but here and there have been discovered vases of artistic workmanship, which remind us of those carried by the Kefa, and may have been imported from abroad. We know from the tombs found on the island that the Phoenicians afterwards settled in Thera among a population in the same condition of civilization as that which had been overtaken by the great volcanic eruption. It was from these Phoenician settlers that the embroidered dresses known as Theraean were brought to Greece; they were adorned with animals and other figures, similar to those seen upon Corinthian or Phoeniko-Greek ware.

Now M. Fr. Lenormant has pointed out that much of the pottery used by the aboriginal inhabitants of Thera is almost identical in form and make with that found by Dr. Schliemann at Hissarlik, in the Troad, and he concludes that it must belong to the same period and the same area of civilization. There is as yet little, if any, trace of Oriental influence; a few of the clay vases from Thera, and some of the gold workmanship at Hissarlik, can alone be referred, with more or less hesitation, to Phoenician artists. We have not yet reached the age when Phoenician trade in the West ceased to be the sporadic effort of private individuals, and when trading colonies were established in different parts of the Greek world; Europe is still unaffected by Eastern culture, and the beginnings of Greek art are still free from foreign interference. It is only in certain designs on the terra-cotta discs, believed by Dr. Schliemann to be spindle-whorls, that we may possibly detect rude copies of Babylonian and Phoenician intaglios.

Among all the objects discovered at Hissarlik, none have been more discussed than the vases and clay images in which Dr. Schliemann saw a representation of an owl-headed Athena. What Dr. Schliemann took for an owl's head, however, is really a rude attempt to imitate the human face, and two breasts are frequently moulded in the clay below it. In many examples the human countenance is unmistakable, and in most of the others the representation is less rude than in the case of the small marble statues of Apollo (?) found in the Greek islands, or even of the early Hellenic vases where the men seem furnished with the beaks of birds. But we now know that these curious vases are not peculiar to the Troad. Specimens of them have also been met with in Cyprus, and in these we can trace the development of the owl-like head into the more perfect portraiture of the human face.[27] In conservative Cyprus there was not that break with the past which occurred in other portions of the Greek world.