Page:History of Art in Phœnicia and Its Dependencies Vol 1.djvu/35

 ORIGIN OF THE PIKENICIANS. account. But even when science has discovered the key to those inscriptions which are still mute, the Hittites will never loom so large as the Phoenicians in the great picture of the progress of human civilization. Phoenicia takes up but a narrow space on the map ; it was about 130 miles from north to south, by a few miles wide at the broadest part ; but its ships carried the products of its own workshops, as well as of those of Egypt and Chald^ea, to the utmost limits of the ancient world ; by its models and the knowledge of its processes it acted on the intelligence of every country to which its merchants made their way. Scholars are not all agreed as to the force of that influence and the extent of its r"> effects, but none of them dispute the great importance of the Phoenicians as manufacturers and as agents of distribution. Nothing that concerns such a people is without interest, and in order properly to understand the part they played in the work of civilization we must begin by making ourselves acquainted with the mode in which their cities sprang up and developed, with their political institutions and their religious beliefs. The first Egyptian documents to mention the Phoenicians date from the eighteenth dynasty, or from a period sixteen to seventeen centuries before our era. 1 If we allow two or three centuries, which is none too much, for these tribes to explore the country, to choose sites for their towns and to build their walls, we find ourselves carried back to the nineteenth or twentieth century for their first appearance in Syria which is very near the date to which we believe the invasion of the Canaanites should be 1 The report of an Egyptian officer who visited the basin of the Dead Sea in the time of the twelfth Theban dynasty is still extant. No Canaanitish tribe is mentioned in it (FR. LENORMANT, Manud de FHisloire andenne, vol. iii. p. 9). On the other hand, in the account of an imaginary journey made by an Egyptian functionary into Syria towards the end of the reign of Rarneses II., an account contained in a precious papyrus of the British Museum, the hero, who penetrated as far as Helbon, the Aleppo of to-day, comes back by the Phoenician coast; he mentions Gebal, Beryta, Sidon, Sarepta, A vat ha, whose ruins now bear the name of Adloun, and he finally arrives at " the maritime Tyre," which he describes as a tovvnlet perched on a rock amid the waves. "Water is taken to it in boats," he says, "and the sea is full of fishes'* (FR. LKNORMANT, ibid, p. 34). Mr. Lieblein thinks he has found traces of the Phoenicians in Egypt as eaily as the sixth dynasty (Proceedings of /he Society of Biblical Archeology, 1882; p. 108) ; but the presump- tions he invokes in favour of his hypothesis do not seem to give it any high degree of probability.