Page:History of Art in Phœnicia and Its Dependencies Vol 1.djvu/42

 22 HISTORY OF ART IN PHOENICIA AND ITS DEPENDENCIES. very much in situation, and at one time was a maritime centre almost of the first order, while it managed to give house room to more than 12,000 people on a surface less than that of the Syrian island by more than two-thirds. 1 As we reflect upon all the advantages offered by the site of Tyre, at once close to the main land and separated effectively from it, we are tempted to believe that it must have been one of the first points occupied by the Phoenicians, who had already, in the Persian Gulf, learnt the safety that attends life on an island. Tyre was perhaps as old, then, as Sidon, but Sidon was the first to rise into prosperity. Neither in the tenth chapter of Genesis nor in Homer do we hear a word of Tyre." Ve have now glanced rapidly down the Phoenician coast from Arvad to Joppa ; we have called the attention of our readers to its principal cities, to those which have left the most conspicuous traces in history, and in doing so we have, we hope, given them some idea as to what 'Phoenicia really was. It was not a compact nation occupying a large and continuous territory. It had no resemblance to such countries as Egypt, Chaldaea and Assyria. To describe it accurately, it was no more than a series of ports each of which was set in a more or less narrow frame of cultivated land. These towns, situated one or two days' march from each other, were the centres of a life wholly municipal, like that of a Greek city. Yhen their independence was menaced by the formidable monarchies of Egypt or Assyria, of Babylon, Persia or Macedonia, even the pressure of a common danger could not make them unite for common defence. The only bonds between the different townships were those due to identity of origin, language, and written character, and those arising from community of interests in business, from similarity of social habits and religious beliefs. It would seem that there were three distinct Phoenician communities until the Macedonian conquest, and especially the 1 Afission de Fhcnicie, p. 553. Perhaps a more apt comparison, at least to English readers, would he one with Venice, which, thanks to a situation similar in all essentials to that of Tyre, was in the middle ages enabled to hold a position in the world differing very little from that enjoyed by the Syrian city fifteen hundred years before. ED. 2 STRABO notices this in the case of Homer, xv. ii. 22.