Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 11.djvu/103

Rh coasts of Asia Minor, where Phoenician colonists gradually blended with the natives, until the entire seaboard had become in a great measure subject to Phoenician influences. Thus the Solymi, settled in Lycia, were akin to the Canaan- ites ; and the Carians, originally kinsmen of the Greeks, were strongly affected by Phoenician contact. It was at Miletus especially that the Ionian Greeks came into com mercial intercourse with the Phoenicians. Unlike the dwellers on the southern seaboard of Asia Minor, they showed no tendency to merge their nationality in that of the Syrian strangers. But they learned from them much that concerned the art of navigation, as, for instance, the use of the round-built merchant vessels called yavXoi, and probably also a system of weights and measures, as well as the rudiments of some useful arts. The Phoenicians had been first drawn to the coasts of Greece in quest of the purple-fish which was found in abundance off the coasts of the Peloponnesus and of Boeotia ; other attractions were furnished by the plentiful timber for shipbuilding which the Greek forests supplied, and by veins of silver, iron, and copper ore.

Two periods of Phoenician influence on early Greece may be distinguished : first, a period during which they were brought into intercourse with the Greeks merely by traffic in occasional voyages ; secondty, a period of Phoenician trading settlements in the islands or on the coasts of the Greek seas, when their influence became more penetrating and thorough. It was probably early in this second period, perhaps about the end of the 9th century B.C., that the Phoenician alphabet became diffused through Greece. This alphabet was itself derived from the alpha bet of the Egyptian hieroglyphics, which was brought into Phoenicia by the Phoenician settlers in the Delta. It was imported into Greece, probably, by the Aramseo-Phcenicians of the Gulf of Antioch, not by the Phosnicians of Tyre and Sidon, and seems to have superseded, in Asia Minor and the islands, a syllabary of some seventy characters, which continued to be used in Cyprus down to a late time. The direct Phoenician influence on Greece lasted to about 600 B.C. Commerce and navigation were the provinces in which the Phoenician influence, strictly so called, was most felt by the Greeks. In art and science, in everything that concerned the higher culture, the Phoenicians seem to have been little more than carriers from East to West of Egyptian, Assyrian, or Babylonian ideas.

The legends of European Greece speak clearly of foreign elements in civilization and in religious worship which came in from the East. But they do not constrain us to suppose that those who brought in these new elements were always, or as a rule, strangers to the people among whom they brought them. On the contrary the myths constantly say, or imply, that the new comers were akin to the people among whom they came ; as the sons of ^Egyptus are first cousins to the daughters of Danaus ; as Cadmus and Pelops, though nominally of foreign origin, are thoroughly national heroes and founders. Hence it appears reasonable to con clude that the East by which European Hellas was most directly and vitally influenced was net the Semitic but the Hellenic East ; that the Ionian Greeks of Asia Minor, after having themselves been in intercourse with Phoenicia and Egypt, were the chief agents in diffusing the new ideas among their kinsmen on the western side of the /Egean. Asiatic Greeks, who had settled among Egyptians in the Delta, or who had lived amid Phoenician colonies in Asia Minor, would easily be confounded, in popular rumour, with Egyptians or Phoenicians. The Asiatic Greeks, as pioneers of civilization in European Greece, appear some times under the name of Carians, when they are little more than teachers of certain improvements in the art of war, and have a decidedly foreign character, sometimes as Leleges, who are associated especially with Lycia, Miletus, and the Troad, and who, as compared with the &quot; Carians,&quot; are the representatives of a more advanced civilization. In the east the seafaring lonians gave their name to the whole Greek people, as in the Hebrew Scriptures the Greeks are &quot; the sons of Javan,&quot; the Uinim of the Egyptians, the launa of the Persians. It does not appear that the European Greeks of early days used &quot;Ionian&quot; in this way as a collective name for the Asiatic Greeks. But such names as lasion, lason, lasian Argos point to a sense that the civilization which came from Asia Minor was connected with Ionia. At a later time the Greeks forgot the lonians and Phoenicians who had brought an Eastern civilization to the western side of the ^Egean. Vividly impressed by the great antiquity of this civilization itself, especially in Egypt, they preferred to suppose that they had derived it directly from the source.

The appearance of new elements in religious worship is one great mark of the period during which Greece in Europe was still being changed by influences, Greek or foreign, from the East. The worship which the fathers of the Hellenes had brought with them from the common home in Asia was the worship of the &quot; Heaven-father,&quot; the unseen father who dwells in aether, whose temple is the sky, and whose altar is most fitly raised on the mountain top, as the ancient shrine of the Arcadian Zeus was the grove on the summit of Mount Lycaeus. This is the &quot; Pelasgian Zeus, dwelling afar,&quot; to whom the Homeric Achilles prays. But as the united Hellenic race parted into tribes, so to the first simple worship of the Heaven-father was added a variety of local cults. And as mariners from other lands began to visit the coasts, they brought in their own gods with them. Thus Melcarth, the city-god of Tyre, is re cognized in Melicertes as worshipped at the isthmus of Corinth. In one Greek form of the worship of Heracles, Astarte the goddess of the Phoenician sailors becomes Aphrodite, who springs from the sea. The myth of Adonis, the worship of the Achaean Demeter, are other examples. There are, again, other divinities who came to European Greece, not directly from the non-Hellenic East, but as deities already at home among the lonians. Such was Poseidon, and, above all, Apollo, whose coming is every where a promise of light and joy.

Little precise knowledge of the earliest kingdoms and states can be extracted from the legends as they have come down to us, but some general inferences are warranted. The tradition that Minos cleared the archipelago of pirates and established a wide maritime dominion, that he was the first to sacrifice to the Charites, and that Daedalus wrought for him, may be taken at least as indicating that Crete played a prominent part in the early history of Greek culture, and that there was a time when Cretan kings were strong enough to protect commerce in the /Egean waters. Again, though Gordius and Midas have passed into the region of fable, there are reasonable grounds for the belief that the ancient kings of Phrygia once exercised dominion over Asia Minor. The Lydians, in Lydia. whose origin Semitic and Aryan elements appear to have been mingled, have a twofold interest in this dawn of Hellenic history. First, they represent the earliest kingdom in Asia Minor of which anything is certainly known. Secondly, they are on land what the Phoenicians are on the sea, carriers or mediators between the Greeks and the East. In the north-west corner of Asia Minor, a branch of Troy, the Dardani whose ancestor is described as worshipping the Pelasgian Zeus founded the kingdom of the Troas, the land of Troy. It has been remarked that the double names of the Trojan heroes, Alexander, Paris, Hector, Darius, point to the twofold relationship of the Trojans, on the one side to Hellas, on the other to Asia. In 