Page:A general history for colleges and high schools (Myers, 1890).djvu/91

Rh earliest tombs of the Greeks, the Etruscans, and the Romans; and in very many of the manufactures of these peoples may be traced the influence of Phœnician art.

Great Enterprises aided by the Phœnicians.—While scattering the germs of civilization and culture broadcast over the entire Mediterranean area, the enterprising Phœnicians were also lending aid to almost every great undertaking of antiquity.

King Hiram of Tyre furnished Solomon with artisans and skilled workmen, and with great rafts of timber from Lebanon, for building the splendid temple at Jerusalem. The Phœnicians also provided timber from their fine forests for the construction of the great palaces and temples of the Assyrians, the Babylonians, and the Egyptians. They built for the Persian king Xerxes the Hellespontine bridges over which he marched his immense army into Greece (see p. 81). They furnished contingents of ships to the kings of Nineveh and Babylon for naval operations both upon the Mediterranean and the Persian and Arabian gulfs. Their fleets served as transports and convoys to the expeditions of the Persian monarchs aiming at conquest in Asia Minor or in Europe. They formed, too, the naval branch of the armaments of the Pharaohs; for the Egyptians hated the sea, and never had a native fleet. And it was Phœnician sailors that, under the orders of Pharaoh-Necho, circumnavigated Africa (see p. 26)—an undertaking which, although attended perhaps with less advantage to the world, still is reckoned quite as remarkable, considering the remote age in which it was accomplished, as the circumnavigation of the globe by the Portuguese navigator Magellan, more than two thousand years later.