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coasts, and even ventured to try the ocean winds and visit the habitations of barbarians, from whom they sought the ores and natural productions which had been denied them in their own homes. In return, the Phoenicians appear to have scattered the seeds of the arts and the sciences they had themselves obtained, among the people with whom their intercourse connected them; and though it would be far too much to ascribe to their pursuits, that they had been undertaken, or even supported, by a desire to increase the civilization of the ancient world, the voice of Ezekiel the Prophet is still repeating to Tyre, -"Thou filledst many people; thou didst enrich the kings of the earth with the multitude of thy riches and of thy merchandise."6

The spread of civilization amongst other nations, and the growth of wealth amongst themselves, were not accomplished by the Phoenicians as simple navigators. Wherever they sailed, in the times of their early and active labors, they left behind them some of their own number to assist them in their purposes of gain and to acquire new resources for themselves. Though a scanty nation upon the borders of the great empires which rose and fell like tempest-waves around them, they had their own visions of dominion. They would have cast their net over the world by trade and settlements; and when they themselves

5 One of their gifts was writing; another, arithmetic. They contributed greatly to the improvement of weights and measures. Goguet, Origine des Lois, etc., Ep. I. liv. VOL. I.

13

4, art. 1. See 1 Kings, VII. 13 et seq., for the works with which Hiram of Tyre adorned the temple at Jerusalem.

6 Ezekiel, XXVII. 33.

submitted to the conquerors who came against them, their colonies stood aloof, firm in the faith and the occupations of the mother land. The names of these colonies belong to geography rather than to history, because little besides is known about them; but the fact of their establishment is a part of the history of the people who founded them in the midst of the destruction which the warlike career of other nations entailed upon the neighbouring lands.

These works of the Phoenicians could not have been done under any despotism. The moment a race distinguishes itself for industry and enterprise, it is in some way free. The Phoenicians did not live upon the sea, breathing its bracing air, in vain. They could not lay the plans of commerce, much less embark upon their execution, without sufficient liberty to promote the energies on which adventures of the sort, in those times especially, depended. Their voyages, it is true, might be generally prosecuted by mercenary seamen, so that the class of merchants, strictly speaking, was comparatively small; yet the glory which the latter gained, unlike that of arms.

8

7 Besides their settlements on the shores and in the islands of the Mediterranean, the Phoenicians occupied Cadiz, and sailed thence, perhaps, to Madeira and the Canaries, perhaps to Britain and the Baltic Sea. They also pushed their expeditions to the East, and some writers have claimed for them the credit of circumnavigating Africa and reaching America beyond the ocean. See Cantu, Hist. Univ., Ch. XXV. at the end.

"L'histoire de la colonisation des pays situés sur les côtes de la Méditerranée pourrait tout aussi bien s'appeler l'histoire de la civilisation du genre humain." Sismondi, Études sur l'Écon. Polit., Douzième Essai.

8"Thou wast replenished," said Ezekiel (XXVII. 25) unto Tyre, "and made very glorious in the midst of thy seas."

or mysteries, would be diffused amongst the entire people, in encouraging their industry as much as in compelling their submission. If it were so, the Phonicians are the first real people of whom any idea has yet presented itself in our inquiry amongst the races of the South and the East beyond their land.

The progress represented by the name of Phoenicia is not in government, nor in law, nor in faith, so much as in occupation. The first adventurers who crossed the seas came back to become the dignitaries amongst their countrymen; others, following their example, rose to equal rank; and until commerce had become an ordinary employment, already too extended to bring in sudden wealth or lead to new discovery, the successful navigator was sure to become the eminent citizen at home, or the powerful colonist on stranger shores. Afterwards, when the individual found it more difficult to rise, because it was then more unusual to make great gains, he was still secure of being employed, and in most instances of being rewarded for his toil; though, in supposing this to be the case, we must exclude the lower classes, whose services were probably exacted without consideration or requital. It was a middle class, to use a modern phrase not altogether applicable to an ancient people, that grew up in Phoenicia beneath the expanding influences of activity and civilization; it was the same class that obtained the authority which we find established at a later period of their history.

Sidon, the first-born, as it was proudly styled, and

Tyre were the chief cities among several with which the Phoenician coast was dotted in ancient times. Each of these was inhabited by a distinct people, and governed by a separate king, whose powers were originally hereditary and absolute. But as the activity and opulence of their subjects were extended, and especially as the people of one city were brought into contact with those of another, the royal authority declined, and was in some instances totally overturned. A general confederacy was finally instituted, in which the merchant princes and the honorable traffickers, of whom the Prophet spoke, obtained, in all probability, the direction of public affairs," without much reference to the royal personages who yet, like autumn trees, retained a little while their honors.12 The means, however, of describing the formation of this league and of its assemblies have wholly vanished. It is only known that Tyre and Sidon were at one time 13 its prominent members, and that Tyre alone1 became the capital, if not the sovereign,

9 When Tyre was besieged by Nebuchadnezzar, the king was actually displaced by judges, dikaoral. Josephus, Contra Apionem, I. 21.

Flavius Josephus, born at Jerusalem in 37, died at the age of sixty or upwards, in Rome. He wrote two histories on the Antiquities and the Later War of his people, whose reputation he defended in this treatise Contra Apionem.

10 Isaiah, XXIII. 8.

11 Περὶ τῶν μεγίστων, says Diodorus, XVI. 41.

10

12 See Joseph., Contra Apionem, I. 17, 18, 21, for various particulars concerning the royal power and the vicissitudes of the nation.

13 Strabo, XVI. 2, sect. 22. It is mentioned in an extract preserved in the treatise of Josephus above cited (I. 18), that the tributaries of Tyre once revolted, and were reduced by a war to obedience.

14 See the twenty-seventh chapter of Ezekiel.

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city, in after years. Nor can we trace in any way the growth of the popular magistracies established under the confederacy, and doubtless strengthened by the spirit which is clearly visible in the history of the nation. The old city of Tyre, for example, resisted Nebuchadnezzar thirteen years, " until every head was bald and every shoulder peeled" 15 in the Assyrian army; and the new city of Tyre withstood Alexander with a resolution 16 he did not find in many places of the earth. Even when the whole country submitted to Cyrus, its laws were preserved, and its inhabitants compelled to no other service, besides the payment of tribute," than that of manning the Persian fleets, 18-at once the most tolerable and the most honorable charge to such a people as the Phoenician.

The great deity of the Phoenicians was, Melkarth, known to other nations under the name, but not the character, of Hercules. The strength of the god adored in Greece and Rome as the healer of pestilence and the subduer of oppression was previously recognized in Phoenicia as consisting of craft and ferocity, which needed to be appeased in times of prosperity rather than to be invoked in times of danger. Yearly, in the spring-time, a multitude came to the spot selected for the horrid rites which made their service acceptable to the deity whom they never ceased to fear. If one had the heart to fix his eyes upon the scene,

and watch the figure of the pontiff 19 who presided at

15 A. C. 567. Ezek., XXIX. 18. 16 A. C. 332. See Thirlwall's History of Greece, Ch. L. 17 Herod., III. 91.

Diod. Sic.,

18 As under Xerxes.
XI. 3. Cf. Herod., IV. 89.

19 Whom Justin calls the next in honor, "honos secundus," etc., to

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