Page:History of Art in Phœnicia and Its Dependencies Vol 1.djvu/361

 FORTIFIED WALLS. 339 We have already hinted as to how this danger was provided for ; thus, at the north-eastern gate the besiegers would find them- selves squeezed into a narrow passage between the precipice and the bastion-shaped end of the wall ; while before they could get within striking distance of the gates giving upon the plateau, they would have to advance between salient angles of the wall for some thirty or forty yards. The traveller who has here been our guide considers this rampart to be the work of Pelasgians. But who were the Pelasoqans ? That term has no real meaning for the historian o o unless it signifies the fathers of the Hellens and Italiots, the oldest and first established in Europe of those tribes whose descendants were to speak Greek and Latin. Now can any text be named from which we may infer that one of these Aryan tribes ever dwelt upon the Syrian coast, and dwelt there in such a permanent fashion that they built fortified cities ? There is nothing to show that the Pelasgians even made a flying visit to these shores. On the other hand nothing could be more natural than the existence of a Phoenician stronghold at this point ; it may well have been the northern covering fortress for that Arvadite kingdom whose borders stretched eastward to the Orontes and southward to Orthosia. Banias is only ten leagues from Antarados, and un- mistakable traces of Phoenician worship have been found still farther, on Mount Casius, for instance, which rises close to the mouth of the Orontes. Moreover there is nothing foreign to the habits of the Phoenician builder in the character of the wall itself. The stones are not so large as at Arvad, but as a whole the physiognomy of the work is quite similar ; we find in both the same horizontally of the courses and the same coincidence of the vertical joints. Neither at Kition nor at any other Cypriot town of Phoenician origin has any well-preserved rampart yet been found which can be ascribed to Syrian builders. 1 But if we cross the sea and seek them in one of those islands in which first the Syrians and afterwards their heirs, the Carthaginians, established themselves so strongly, we shall be more successful. Mount Eryx, at the western extremity of Sicily, played for three centuries a capital 1 Cesnola tells us that at Golgos he found the remains of the ancient wall, but he neither reproduces the fragments nor gives us any details as to their workmanship (Cyprus, p. 109).