Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 18.djvu/840

 804 PHOENICIA Eleutherus, so that Orth6sia was the last town of Phoenicia and the whole region of Aradus was excluded. 1 Under the Roman empire the southern boundary was unchanged, but the northern advanced to a little south of Balanea. 2 A still narrower definition of Canaan is that in Gen. x. 19 and Josh. xiii. 2-6, where Sidon or its territory is the northern limit ; but the reference is only to the land destined to be occupied by Israel, for a younger hand has added to Sidon (the firstborn of Canaan) and Heth a list of other nations, sons of Canaan, extending northwards as far as Hamath. 8 It is a singular fact that alike in the Old Testament and in Homer, in the time of Tyre s greatest might, we con stantly read of Sidonians and not of Tyrians. The explan ation that Sidonians is a synonym of Phoenicians in general is defended on 1 Kings v. 1 [15] compared with ver. 6 [20], but is not adequate ; the same chapter distinguishes between the Sidonians and the Giblites or men of Byblus (E.V., &quot;stone squarers,&quot; ver. 18 [32]). And in Gen. x. we have besides Sidon the peoples of Arce, Sinna, Aradus, and Simyra enumerated in order from south to north mostly unimportant towns afterwards absorbed in the land of Aradus and yet Tyre is lacking, though one fancies that we could better miss even Aradus, which was a colony from Sidon (Strabo, xvi. p. 753), only Aradus was founded by fugitives, and so must, from the first, have been inde pendent. Hence we may conjecture that the list in Genesis is political in principle ; and this gives us a solution of the whole difficulty, viz., that, during the flourishing period of Phoenicia, Sidon and Tyre formed a single state whose kings reigned first in Sidon and then in Tyre, but whose inhabitants continued to take their name from the old metropolis. The first unambiguous example of two dis tinct kings in Tyre and Sidon is in the end of the 8th century B.C., on an inscription of Sennacherib (Schrader, K.A.T., 2d ed., p. 286 s^.}, and there is every reason to think that the revolt of Sidon from Tyre about 726 spoken of by Menander (Jos., Ant., ix. 14, 2) was a revolt not from Tyrian hegemony but from the Tyrian kingdom. The several Phoenician cities had lists of their kings back to a very early date. Abedbalus 4 reigned at Berytus in the time which Philo had ciphered out as that of the judge Jerubbaal, i.e., about the beginning of the 13th century B.C., and in Sidon there is word of kings at the time to which the Greeks referred the rape of Europa (15th cen tury ; see Laetus, in Tatian, Adv. Grs&cos, 58). The leading Phoenician towns are mentioned in connexion with the Syrian wars of the Pharaohs of the XVIIIth, XlXth, and XXth Dynasties (16th-13th century) ; thus under Thothmes III. we read of Berytus, Ace, Joppe, and repeatedly of Aradus, which is commonly spoken of along with Haleb (Aleppo) and other eastern districts. The mention of Tyre is less certain, as there were two cities which the Egyptians called T ar ; but there is no mistake as to the city on the sea called &quot; T aru the haven &quot; in the journey of an Egyptian of the 14th century (Rec. of the Past, ii. 107 sq.), &quot; water is carried to it in barks, it is richer in fish than in sands &quot; ; the noble aqueducts therefore, of which the ruins are still seen, were not yet constructed. The oldest parts of Tyre were taken to be the town on the main land, afterwards known as Palaetyrus, and the so-called temple of Hercules built on a rocky islet, which Hiram by and by united with the insular part of the town. According to native historians this temple was more properly one of Olympian Zeus, that is, of Baal- Shamaim, the Lord of Heaven. 5 Herodotus, after inquiries made 1 Strabo, xvi. p. 753 ; Ptol., v. 15, 4, 5, both seemingly from Artemidorus. The Eleutherus as boundary appears also in Jos., Ant., xv. 4, 1 et stKp. 2 Plin., .V. H., v. 69, 79 ; I tin. Ilieros., pp. 582, 585 (Wess.). See Wellhausen in Jahrb. f. d. Theol., 1876, p. 403. 4 Xoldeke s conjecture for A^X/3aos, in Porphyry, ap. Euseb. , Prvep. E., x. 9. 5 This appears by comparing Herod., ii. 44, with the mention of the same golden stele by Menander (Jos., Cunt. Ap., i. 18). on the spot, fixes the founding of the city in 2756 n.r. ; but Tyre did not attain great importance till the later island city was built. According to Trogus (Justin, xviii. 3, 5) the Phoenicians (not the people of Sidon, as the passage is often misread to mean), who had been subdued by the king of Ascalon, took ship and founded Tyre a year before the taking of Troy. This goes well with the spread of the Philistine power in the time of the later judges and with the fact that Ascalon was still a Canaanite town under Barneses II. (c. 1385 B.C.), while in the eighth year of Rameses III. (c. 1246) the Pulosata made a raid into Egypt. 6 Philistus (in Euseb., Can., No. 803) gives us without knowing it the era used in Tyre and in early times also in Carthage when he says that Zorus (i.e., Cor, Tyre) and Carchedon built Carthage in 1213 B.C., or rather, according to a very good MS. (Regin. ), in 1209, which agrees with the date 1208 for the fall of Troy on the Parian marble, and also may be recon ciled with the notice (taken from Philistus) in Appian, Piniica, i., that the founding of Zorus and Carchedon was fifty years before the fall of Troy, if we suppose that Philistus took for the latter event the latest date we know of, viz. , that assigned by Democritus. 7 Now Josephus (Ant., viii. 3, 1) counts 229 years from the building of Tyre to Hiram, and places the foundation of Carthage (Cont. Ap., i. 18) in the 155th year from Hiram s accession. The best authority for the last-named event is Timreus, who puts it in 814 B.C. This gives us for the founding of Tyre a date twelve years later than that of Philistus, but it is probable that Josephus in summing up the individual reigns between Hiram and the building of Carthage as given by Menander departed from the intention of his author in assuming that the twelve years of Astartus and the twelve of the contemporaneous usurper were not to be reckoned separately. 8 This hypothesis enables us to give a restored chronology which cannot be far from the truth (see infra). Manufactures and Inventions. The towns of the Phoeni cian coast were active from a very early date in various manufactures. Glass work, for which the sands of the Belus gave excellent material, had its chief seat in Sidon ; embroidery and purple-dyeing were favoured by the preva lence of the purple-giving murex all along the coast. The ancients ascribed to the Phoenicians the invention of all three industries, but glass -making seems to have been borrowed from Egypt, where this manufacture is of im memorial antiquity ; and several circumstances indicate that the other two arts probably came from Babylon in particular, the names of the two main tints of purple dark red (argaman) and dark blue (tokheleth) seem not to be Phoenician. The Phoenicians, however, brought these arts to perfection and spread the knowledge of them. In other particulars also the ancients looked on the Phoeni cians as the inventive people par excellence : to them as the great trading nation was ascribed the invention of arithmetic, measure, and weight, which are really Babylon ian in origin, and also of writing, although it is not even quite certain that it was the Phoenicians who adapted the Egyptian hieroglyphic alphabet to Semitic use. Yet here again the Phoenicians have undisputedly the scarcely inferior merit of having communicated the art to all the nations of the Mediterranean basin. Navigation, Trade, Colonies. The beginnings of navi gation lie beyond all human memory, but it is not hard to understand how the ancients made this also an inven tion of the Phoenicians, whose skill as seamen was never matched by any ancient people before or after them. Even in later times Greek observers noted with admiration the exact order kept on board Phoenician ships, the skill with which every corner of space was utilized, the careful disposition of the cargo, the vigilance of the steersmen and their mates (Xen., (Ec., viii. 11 .*/.). They steered by the pole-star, which the Greeks therefore called the Phoenician star (Hyginus, Po. Ant., ii. 2); and all their 6 See Brugsch, Gfeschichte Aegyptens, pp. 516, 598. 7 If Democritus was born in 470 (Thrasyllus), his date for the fall of Troy is 1160. 8 He is contemporaneous on the reading Me0 o& &quot;A.ffTapros given by Theophilus, Ad Avtol, iii. 19. If Josephus took it so, then according to the best readings he would get exactly 155 years. 9 That the Semitic alphabet did not come from cuneiform writing may be taken as certain ; but also it is not probable that it came from the hieratic character of the Egyptians.