Page:History of Art in Phœnicia and Its Dependencies Vol 1.djvu/58

 3S HISTORY OF ART IN PIM.NICIA AND ITS DEPENDENCIES. /Egruan. Their goods were still bought, but they were no longer the sole purveyors of all those things by which life is made comfortable and luxurious ; they could no longer add the profits of piracy to those of trade ; the practice of kidnapping girls and boys and selling them into slavery l had to be given up as soon as the people of the islands learnt to build ships for themselves, and to retain the mastery of their own ports. The rich silver mines of Siphnos and Cimolos were no longer worked for the benefit of strangers to the soil. The isolated situation of o Thasos enabled the Phoenicians to maintain themselves there to a later period, but at the beginning of the eighth century they were chased even thence by a colony of Parians.- Long before this Miletus and her colonies had closed the straits to them, and under the Saite princes the lonians began to compete with them for the trade of Egypt. About the same period the Greeks established themselves first in Italy and soon afterwards in Sicily. Archias, at the head of a numerous band of Corinthians and Corcyrans, founded Syracuse in 733 ; the rest of the same coast was almost monopolized by other Greek settlements. All the Phoenicians had left to them was the western extremity of the island, with the three towns known to the Greeks as Motya, Kepher, afterwards called Solunte, and Machanath, or Panormus. And, as if all the world were banded against Phoenicia, life became at the same time more precarious on the Syrian coast. After the disappearance of the Ramessids, Egypt, enfeebled and divided, retreated within herself, and her armies no longer appeared in Syria. Phoenicia lost much by the removal of that Egyptian suzerainty which had been a protection to her rather than a hindrance ; its disappearance left her without defence against the daily increasing ascendency of Assyria. From the ninth century onwards she paid annual tribute to the kings of Nineveh. Why did she fail to accommodate herself to the domination of Assyria as she did to that of Egypt, and afterwards to that of the 1 HERODOTUS, i. i ; HOMER, Odyssey, xv. 415-484. 2 We have no good reason for doubting the date given by DIONYSIUS OF HALICARN. -ssus as that of the establishment of the Parian colony, vi/., the Fifteenth Olympiad, 720-717 (Conf. CLEM. ALEXAND. Stromata* i. 21, p. 398). See G. PERROT, Mhnoire sur /'//e de Thasos, in the Archives t/es Missions, vol. i., 2nd series, 1864.