Page:History of Art in Phœnicia and Its Dependencies Vol 1.djvu/409

 HARBOURS. 38; at once. Each took its turn to glide into the water, receive its cargo, and be off. It was only when a number arrived together that there was any danger of overcrowding ; and it must not be forgotten that during the summer those seas were, as a rule, so calm that ships could ride at anchor for two or three weeks at a time in such places as the roads of Beyrout or the south harbour of Sidon. The Phoenician mariners found more favourable conditions outside their own country. Cyprus had no good natural harbours, but the anchorages on the coasts of Greece, Malta, Sicily, Sardinia, and Spain were many and excellent. In all those countries the only difficulty was to make a choice. The Tyrians were the first to discover the vast and well-sheltered roads of CaMiari and o Cadiz. On the other hand there were no natural harbours, no closed basins, in that part of Africa in which the Phoenicians chose to settle. But here their Syrian experience in the working of rock came in useful, and they soon succeeded in making up for the churlishness of nature. They excavated ample basins on the very beach, which they put in communication with the sea by narrow and easily defensible openings. This Virgil knew : Hie portus alii effodiunt, 1 he says of the subjects of Dido in the passage where he describes the birth of the future enemy of Rome. In the Phoenician language these artificial harbours were called cot/ions (icdiOwva) ; at least that is the Greek and Latin transliteration of the term. 2 The word has not yet been encountered in its native form, either in Hebrew or Phoenician ; but the etymology proposed by the best Hebrew scholars confirms the definition given by lexicographers ; " according to the latter cot/ions are harbours not made by nature, but by the hands of man." It is in speaking of Carthage that historians and grammarians find occasion to explain this Punic term, but most of the Phoenician 1 Aineid, i. 427. ~ SERVIUS, ad &neidem, i. 427. 3 " Cothona sunt portus non naturales, sed manu et arte facti " (SERVIUS, 1. 1.). So too FESTUS, s. v. Catones, which is obviously an error of the copyist for cotones. Gesenius, and Brochart before him, derived this word from a root, k t, which in Semitic languages implied an idea of cutting, earring (GESENIUS, Scripturcc linguizque Phcenicft monumenta, p. 422 ; BRCCH^RT, Geographia sacra, p. 512).