Page:History of Art in Phœnicia and Its Dependencies Vol 1.djvu/61

 ORIGIN OF THE PHOENICIANS. 41 principal centres of Greek civilization. While the tvo eastern basins of the Mediterranean became Greek seas, at least in their northern portion, as early as the end of the eighth century, Carthage had the western basin pretty well to herself; in it the Greek colonies were at no time either very numerous or very powerful ; they were too far from their base. The supremacy Carthage then acquired she was not to lose until, in the third century before our era, the Roman people entered upon the full political inheritance of Greece ; and before the hour of her fall arrived she had time to play a part in the world whose importance and originality deserve to be brought into strong relief. " By its geographical situation the city of Dido belonged to Africa and the west ; by its manners, by its language, by its civilization and the descent of its inhabitants, it belonged to Asia and the east. It was an outpost of Asiatic civilization pushed forward into the western Mediterranean ; it was through Carthage that, in Africa, in Gaul, in Spain, even in the British Islands, oriental modes of life and thought preceded those of Greece and Rome." } The country in which Carthage and those other Syrian colonies whose names we have mentioned were established, was after- wards the African province of the Romans, and is now Tunis, a province de facto of France. Its fertility is well known. The Phoenicians found it inhabited by a mixed population in which a race of Egyptian blood, the ancestors of the modern Berbers, are supposed to have predominated. The superior intelligence and higher skill of the Syrians soon gave them an influence over the native tribes an influence which came all the easier, perhaps, by reason of some distant affinity of blood. They introduced better methods of agriculture, an industry which, like all others, had been carried very far on the Syrian coast. In the neighbourhood of Tyre and Sidon M. Renan found abundant evidence that the Phoenicians carried on their tillage with far better tools than those now in use in the country. 2 In Africa the plains were very different both in size and in quality of soil from those on the narrow shores of Palestine. Wheat soon became an important article of export ; and the peasants of the interior rapidly learnt the language spoken by the merchants to whom they carried their 1 FR. LENORMANT, Manuel de fHistoire ancienne, vol. iii. p. 153. 2 E. RENAN, Mission de Ph'enicie, pp. 633, 634 and 639 ; plate xxxvi. VOL. I. <*