Page:The American Cyclopædia (1879) Volume XIII.djvu/469

 PHCENICIA 455 a creature of Ms own. With the exception of an effort to shake off the Assyrian yoke, made about 30 years later, Phoenicia quietly continued in vassalage until the destruction of the Assyrian monarchy, and the arrival of Pharaoh Necho, whom it acknowledged as su- zerain (about 606). Nebuchadnezzar's defeat of Necho brought the Phoenicians under the rule of Babylon. They rebelled shortly after, but were again subjugated, though Tyre with- stood a siege of 13 years. Soon afterward the Phoenicians went out in the service of the Babylonians to resist an Egyptian fleet, but were defeated, and their country was plundered by the Egyptians. From a recently discovered inscription, it appears that in the reign of the Sidonian king Eshmunazar the Phoenicians had obtained possession of the towns of Dor and Joppa, at the extremities of the plain of Sharon. The fall of Babylon before the arms of the Persians was soon followed by the submission of the whole of Phoenicia to Cyrus or his suc- cessor Oambyses. Under the Persian monar- chy the Phoenician navy was a regular and very important element of the imperial power ; but the internal constitution of the cities does not seem to have been disturbed, and the native line of kings continued to reign under the pro- tection of the Persian sovereigns. The com- merce of the cities flourished by the rich traffic of Arabia and the East which passed through their hands, and their manufactures of purple and glass were in full activity. Throughout the long struggle between Greece and Persia the Phoenicians contributed the chief naval forces of the Persian monarchs. During the reign of Artaxerxes Ochus, Sidon, which had now taken the lead among the Phoenician cities, revolted, and after a desperate struggle was betrayed by Tennes its king to the Persians in 350, and was utterly destroyed with all its inhabitants, ex- cept a few who were absent, and by whom the city was rebuilt. When Alexander invaded the Persian empire, the Sidonian s submitted to him readily, but Tyre resisted, and after a siege of seven months was taken by treachery and reduced to ashes, part of the inhabitants being slain and the rest sold as slaves. Alexander rebuilt the city, but it never regained its for- mer importance. Phoenicia was incorporated into a Macedonian province with Syria and Cilicia, and its commerce again flourished as in former ages. It afterward fell under the dominion of the Seleucidse. In 64 B. 0. the Romans conquered the country, and from that time till now Phoenicia has shared the fate of Syria. During the crusades Tyre was a port of consequence, but under the rule of the Turks, and especially after the commercial changes consequent upon the discovery of the passage to India by the way of the cape of Good Hope, it became what it remains to this day, " a rock for fishermen to spread their nets upon." The religious and mythological con- ceptions of the Phoenicians have been treated at length in the article MYTHOLOGY. Their language bore a very close affinity to the He- brew, with which most names and words preserved as Phoenician or Carthaginian by the Hebrew, Greek, and Latin writers corre- spond very nearly ; and the only satisfactory results in interpreting the Phoenician monu- ments and coins have been obtained by ma- king the Hebrew the key to their explanation. But as the ancient writers merely represented the sound of the Phoenician words, and not their orthography, one must be cautious in using them for linguistic purposes. It some- times happens also that words are given as Phoenician which are not such. More impor- tant than the isolated words scattered through the writings of the ancients are the connected Punic texts .found in the first three scenes of the fifth act of Plautus's Pcenulus, which are the only specimens we possess of the colloquial language of the people. No remains of Phoe- nician literature proper have come down to us. There is no doubt that the people had religious books, written laws, and archives and records. A court poet is mentioned on the Egyptian monuments as having been among the reti- nue of a Hittite (presumably Phoenician) king, and Debir, a Canaanitish (probably Phoenician) town in Palestine, was called Kirjath Sepher, "the city of the book." The Greek writers Theodotus, Hypsicrates, and Mochus are said to have translated some Phoenician books, but none of their works have been preserved. Dius and Menander of Ephesus made some extracts from the annals of Tyre which are still extant, and Eusebius gives a fragment of a transla- tion, made by Philo of Byblos, of a cosmogony by Sanchuniathon of Berytus, but its authen- ticity is questioned. (See SANCHUNIATH'ON.) The monuments of the language which we have received directly from the Phoenicians are all inscriptions, engraved either in stone or in metal. It is to be observed, however, that only five of these inscriptions have been found in Phoenicia proper; the others come from Carthage, Numidia, Mauritania, Cyprus, Sicily, Sardinia, Marseilles, Malta, Athens, and Egypt. They are written in an alphabet which, like all Semitic alphabets, is composed wholly of consonants. This Phoenician alphabet forms the basis of all the Semitic and Indo-Euro- pean graphic systems, yet to all appearance the Phoenicians based their own on the Egyptian hieratic writing. The alphabet consists of 22 signs, the forms of which vary with every age and district. The words are written from right to left, and are rarely disconnected. One may distinguish three main styles or periods of writing. The first, the archaic Phoenician, was employed from an unknown time to the Tth or 6th century B. C., not only by the Ca- naanites but by the Aramasans ; its character- istic is great angularity in some letters, and a certain undulation in others. The second is the proper Phoenician alphabet, employed from a period subsequent to the Yth or 6th century down to the beginning of our era. The for-