Page:History of Art in Phœnicia and Its Dependencies Vol 2.djvu/472

 432 HISTORY OF ART IN PHOENICIA AND ITS DEPENDENCIES. process which gave enormous profits to the more civilized party to a bargain. The habit of many centuries must have made the Phoenicians tenacious of such a mode of dealing, but as time passed on, they can hardly have failed to seek some surer and more convenient means of exchange ; but by that time their former pupils had become their rivals, and had made a decisive step in advance. In Lydia and in ^Egina they had begun to strike gold and silver money ; the Phoenicians were not slow to avail themselves of so convenient an invention, and from the beginning of the sixth century the towns of Syria and Cyprus had coins of their own. The anomaly is then no more than an apparent one. The Phoenicians^ did not invent money because they could do without it ; but they did invent alphabetical writing, because it was necessary to the proper " keeping of their books," which would have been next to impossible in the complex notation of Egypt or Mesopotamia. And this invention is sufficient for their glory. So far as they themselves were concerned they made but a restricted use of it, but they transmitted it to every nation with which they trafficked. It was, as it were, one of their staple exports. In every market to which they went they took good care, as they thought, to get the better of every bargain they struck, but after all, the profit was to those with whom they dealt. For when they sailed away elated with success they left behind them the knowledge of that wonderful machine through which the Greeks were to create philosophy, history, and science ; they left behind them, too, those figurines of bronze, of ivory, of glazed earthenware, and stone, and those vessels of painted clay or chiselled metal, by which the sentiment of plastic art was awakened in the race that was to produce Phidias and Praxiteles. When we strive to get at a lively knowledge of how things passed on the shores to which the Phoenician merchant sent his cargoes, it is not without a real emotion that we see in our mind's eye the sailing of the Sidonian galley ; that we watch first its timid clinging to the coast and its quick rush for the nearest haven at the least sign of dirty weather ; then its braver transit across some narrow sea, to Rhodes perhaps, or Cyprus ; and finally, when courage and skill are mature, its bold attack of the open water, its stubborn battling with the contrary winds of Hadria, and its