Page:History of Art in Phœnicia and Its Dependencies Vol 1.djvu/48

 28 HISTORY ov ART IN PIKKNICIA AND ITS DEPENDENCIES. himself and for her. By enforcing on each individual a sense of his own personal value, this regime made him capable at certain critical moments of extraordinary devotion and energy. " Tyre was the first town to defend its autonomy against those redoubt- able monarchies which, from their seats on the Tigris and Euphrates, threatened to extinguish all life on the shores of the Mediterranean. When all the rest of Phoenicia had bent to the tempest, the dwellers on this isolated rock alone held the mighty Assyrian machine in check, and after supporting hunger and thirst for years had their reward in seeing the hosts of Shalmaneser and Nebuchadnezzar decamp from the neighbouring plain. A modern traveller cannot stand upon the mole which has made Tyre a peninsula without remembering with emotion that she was once the last bulwark of liberty." 1 Thanks to this heroic resistance Tyre appears to the eyes of the historian the chief representative of the ambitions of Phoenicia and of the part she was called on to fill in the world ; but she was not the first to open the sea routes ; and even when every distant harbour was filled with her ships, even when her sailors excelled all their rivals in courage and enterprise, they were never alone in the work. Phoenicia never had what we should call a capital. During the Roman period Tyre and Sidon disputed the title of metropolis, that is, of mother city and foundress of Phoenician civilization. 2 Tyre could boast of the more glorious services, Sidon of the greater antiquity. The earliest maritime enterprises and the first factories established in foreign countries dated from the hegemony of Sidon. Like all the rest of Phoenicia, Sidon had accepted without resistance the sovereignty of the Theban Pharaohs, when they were masters of Syria ; but the tribute paid to them by the Phoenicians was no heavy price to pay for the right of frequenting the Delta ports. The relations thus established with Egypt secured, in fact, a double monopoly to the Phoenicians. Almost everything drawn by Egypt from the markets of Asia, whether raw material or manufactured articles, passed through their hands ; while, per contra, the export trade of the Nile valley was carried on almost entirely through them ; from such a state of things, clever traders like the Phoenicians must have reaped enormous profits. Moreover the empire of 1 RENAN, Mission de Phenide, p. 574. - STRABO, xvi. ii. 22.