Semitic origin of the Phoenicians--Characteristics of the
Semites--Place of the Phoenicians within the Semitic group--
Connected linguistically with the Israelites and the Assyro-
Babylonians--Original seat of the nation, Lower Babylonia--
Special characteristics of the Phoenician people--Industry
and perseverance--Audacity in enterprise--Pliability and
adaptability--Acuteness of intellect--Business capacity--
Charge made against them of bad faith--Physical
characteristics.
The Phoenician people are generally admitted to have belonged to the
group of nations known as Semitic. This group, somewhat irrelevantly
named, since the descent of several of them from Shem is purely
problematic, comprises the Assyrians, the later Babylonians, the
Aramæans or Syrians, the Arabians, the Moabites, the Phoenicians, and
the Hebrews. A single and very marked type of language belongs to
the entire group, and a character of homogeneity may, with certain
distinctions, be observed among all the various members composing it.
The unity of language is threefold: it may be traced in the roots, in
the inflections, and in the general features of the syntax. The roots
are, as a rule, bilateral or trilateral, composed (that is) of two or
three letters, all of which are consonants. The consonants determine
the general sense of the words, and are alone expressed in the primitive
writing; the vowel sounds do but modify more or less the general sense,
and are unexpressed until the languages begin to fall into decay. The
roots are, almost all of them, more or less physical and sensuous. They
are derived in general from an imitation of nature. “If one looked
only to the Semitic languages,” says M. Renan,[31] “one would say, that
sensation alone presided over the first acts of the human intellect, and
that language was primarily nothing but a mere reflex of the external
world. If we run through the list of Semitic roots, we scarcely meet
with a single one which does not present to us a sense primarily
material, which is then transferred, by transitions more or less direct
and immediate, to things which are intellectual.” Derivative words are
formed from the roots by a few simple and regular laws. The noun is
scarcely inflected at all; but the verb has a marvellous wealth of
conjugations, calculated to express excellently well the external
relations of ideas, but altogether incapable of expressing their
metaphysical relations, from the want of definitely marked tenses and
moods. Inflections in general have a half-agglutinative character, the
meaning and origin of the affixes and suffixes being palpable. Syntax
scarcely exists, the construction of sentences having such a general
character of simplicity, especially in narrative, that one might compare
it with the naïve utterances of an infant. The utmost endeavour of the
Semites is to join words together so as to form a sentence; to join
sentences is an effort altogether beyond them. They employ the {lexis
eiromene} of Aristotle,[32] which proceeds by accumulating atom on atom,
instead of attempting the rounded period of the Latins and Greeks.
The common traits of character among Semitic nations have been summed up
by one writer under five heads:--1. Pliability combined with iron
fixity of purpose; 2. Depth and force; 3. A yearning for dreamy ease;
4. Capacity for the hardest work; and 5. Love of abstract thought.[33]
Another has thought to find them in the following list:--1. An intuitive
monotheism; 2. Intolerance; 3. Prophetism; 4. Want of the philisophic
and scientific faculties; 5. Want of curiosity; 6. Want of appreciation
of mimetic art; 7. Want of capacity for true political life.[34]
According to the latter writer, “the Semitic race is to be recognized
almost entirely by negative characteristics; it has no mythology, no
epic poetry, no science, no philosophy, no fiction, no plastic arts,
no civil life; everywhere it shows absence of complexity; absence of
combination; an exclusive sentiment of unity.”[35] It is not very easy
to reconcile these two views, and not very satisfactory to regard a race
as “characterised by negatives.” Agreement should consist in positive
features, and these may perhaps be found, first, in strength and depth
of the religious feeling, combined with firm belief in the personality
of the Deity; secondly, in dogged determination and “iron fixity of
purpose;” thirdly, in inventiveness and skill in the mechanical arts and
other industries; fourthly, in “capacity for hard work;” and, fifthly,
in a certain adaptability and pliability, suiting the race for expansion
and for commerce. All these qualities are perhaps not conspicuous in
all the branches of the Semites, but the majority of them will be found
united in all, and in some the combination would seem to be complete.
It is primarily on account of their language that the Phoenicians are
regarded as Semites. When there are no historical grounds for believing
that a nation has laid aside its own original form of speech, and
adopted an alien dialect, language, if not a certain, is at least a
very strong, evidence of ethnic character. Counter-evidence may no doubt
rebut the _prima facie_ presumption; but in the case of the Phoenicians
no counter-evidence is producible. They belong to exactly that
geographic zone in which Semitism has always had its chief seat; they
cannot be shown to have been ever so circumstanced as to have had any
inducement to change their speech; and their physical character and
mental characteristics would, by themselves, be almost sufficient ground
for assigning them to the type whereto their language points.
The place which the Phoenicians occupy within the Semitic group is a
question considerably more difficult to determine. By local position
they should belong to the western, or Aramaic branch, rather than to
the eastern, or Assyro-Babylonian, or to the southern, or Arab. But
the linguistic evidence scarcely lends itself to such a view, while
the historic leads decidedly to an opposite conclusion. There is a far
closer analogy between the Palestinian group of languages--Phoenician,
Hebrew, Moabite, and the Assyro-Babylonian, than between either of these
and the Aramaic. The Aramaic is scanty both in variety of grammatical
forms and in vocabulary; the Phoenician and Assyro-Babylonian are
comparatively copious.[36] The Aramaic has the character of a degraded
language; the Assyro-Babylonian and the Phoenician are modelled on
a primitive type.[37] In some respects Phoenician is even closer to
Assyro-Babylonian than Hebrew is--e.g. in preferring _at_ to _ah_ for
the feminine singular termination.[38]
The testimony of history to the origin of the Phoenicians is the
following. Herodotus tells us that both the Phoenicians themselves, and
the Persians best acquainted with history and antiquities, agreed in
stating that the original settlements of the Phoenician people were upon
the Erythræan Sea (Persian Gulf), and that they had migrated from that
quarter at a remote period, and transferred their abode to the shores
of the Mediterranean.[39] Strabo adds that the inhabitants of certain
islands in the Persian Gulf had a similar tradition, and showed temples
in their cities which were Phoenician in character.[310] Justin, or
rather Trogus Pompeius, whom he abbreviated, writes as follows:--“The
Syrian nation was founded by the Phoenicians, who, being disturbed by
an earthquake, left their native land, and settled first of all in the
neighbourhood of the Assyrian Lake, and subsequently on the shore of
the Mediterranean, where they built a city which they called Sidon on
account of the abundance of the fish; for the Phoenicians call a fish
_sidon_.”[311] The “Assyrian lake” of this passage is probably the Bahr
Nedjif, or “Sea of Nedjif,” in the neighbourhood of the ancient Babylon,
a permanent sheet of water, varying in its dimensions at different
seasons, but generally about forty miles long, and from ten to twenty
broad.[312] Attempts have been made to discredit this entire story,
but the highest living authority on the subject of Phoenicia and the
Phoenicians adopts it as almost certainly true, and observes:--“The
tradition relative to the sojourn of the Phoenicians on the borders
of the Erythræan Sea, before their establishment on the coast of the
Mediterranean, has thus a new light thrown upon it. It appears from the
labours of M. Movers, and from the recent discoveries made at Nineveh
and Babylon, that the civilisation and religion of Phoenicia and Assyria
were very similar. Independently of this, the majority of modern critics
admit it as demonstrated that the primitive abode of the Phoenicians
ought to be placed upon the Lower Euphrates, in the midst of the great
commercial and maritime establishments of the Persian Gulf, agreeable to
the unanimous witness of all antiquity.”[313]
If we pass from the probable origin of the Phoenician people, and their
place in the Semitic group, to their own special characteristics, we
shall find ourselves upon surer ground, though even here there are
certain points which are debateable. The following is the account of
their general character given by a very high authority, and by one who,
on the whole, may be regarded as an admirer:--
“The Phoenicians form, in some respects, the most important fraction
of the whole group of antique nations, notwithstanding that they sprang
from the most obscure and insignificant families. This fraction, when
settled, was constantly exposed to inroad by new tribes, was utterly
conquered and subjected by utter strangers when it had taken a great
place among the nations, and yet by industry, by perseverance, by
acuteness of intellect, by unscrupulousness and wait of faith, by
adaptability and pliability when necessary, and dogged defiance at other
times, by total disregard of the rights of the weaker, they obtained
the foremost place in the history of their times, and the highest
reputation, not only for the things that they did, but for many that
they did not. They were the first systematic traders, the first miners
and metallurgists, the greatest inventors (if we apply such a term to
those who kept an ever-watchful lookout for the inventions of others,
and immediately applied them to themselves with some grand improvements
on the original idea); they were the boldest mariners, the greatest
colonisers, who at one time held not only the gorgeous East, but the
whole of the then half-civilised West in fee--who could boast of a form
of government approaching to constitutionalism, who of all nations of
the time stood highest in practical arts and sciences, and into whose
laps there flowed an unceasing stream of the world’s entire riches,
until the day came when they began to care for nothing else, and the
enjoyment of material comforts and luxuries took the place of the thirst
for and search after knowledge. Their piratical prowess and daring was
undermined; their colonies, grown old enough to stand alone, fell
away from them, some after a hard fight, others in mutual agreement or
silently; and the nations in whose estimation and fear they had held the
first place, and who had been tributary to them, disdained them, ignored
them, and finally struck them utterly out of the list of nations, till
they dwindled away miserably, a warning to all who should come after
them.”[314]
The prominent qualities in this description would seem to be industry
and perseverance, audacity in enterprise, adaptability and pliability,
acuteness of intellect, unscrupulousness, and want of good faith. The
Phoenicians were certainly among the most industrious and persevering of
mankind. The accounts which we have of them from various quarters,
and the remains which cover the country that they once inhabited,
sufficiently attest their unceasing and untiring activity through almost
the whole period of their existence as a nation. Always labouring in
their workshops at home in mechanical and æsthetic arts, they were at
the same time constantly seeking employment abroad, ransacking the
earth for useful or beautiful commodities, building cities, constructing
harbours, founding colonies, introducing the arts of life among wild
nations, mining and establishing fisheries, organising lines of land
traffic, perpetually moving from place to place, and leaving wherever
they went abundant proofs of their diligence and capacity for hard work.
From Thasos in the East, where Herodotus saw “a large mountain turned
topsy-turvy by the Phoenicians in their search for gold,”[315] to the
Scilly Islands in the West, where workings attributable to them are
still to be seen, all the metalliferous islands and coast tracts bear
traces of Phoenician industry in tunnels, adits, and air-shafts,
while manufactured vessels of various kinds in silver, bronze, and
terra-cotta, together with figures and gems of a Phoenician type, attest
still more widely their manufacturing and commercial activity.
Audacity in enterprise can certainly not be denied to the adventurous
race which, from the islands and coasts of the Eastern Mediterranean,
launched forth upon the unknown sea in fragile ships, affronted the
perils of waves and storms, and still more dreaded “monsters of
the deep,”[316] explored the recesses of the stormy Adriatic and
inhospitable Pontus, steered their perilous course amid all the islets
and rocks of the Ægean, along the iron-bound shores of Thrace, Euboea,
and Laconia, first into the Western Mediterranean basin, and then
through the Straits of Gibraltar into the wild and boundless Atlantic,
with its mighty tides, its huge rollers, its blinding rains, and its
frequent fogs. Without a chart, without a compass, guided only in their
daring voyages by their knowledge of the stars, these bold mariners
penetrated to the shores of Scythia in one direction; to Britain, if
not even to the Baltic, in another; in a third to the Fortunate Islands;
while, in a fourth, they traversed the entire length of the Red Sea,
and entering upon the Southern Ocean, succeeded in doubling the Cape
of Storms two thousand years before Vasco di Gama, and in effecting the
circumnavigation of Africa.[317] And, wild as the seas were with which
they had to deal, they had to deal with yet wilder men. Except in Egypt,
Asia Minor, Greece, and perhaps Italy, they came in contact everywhere
with savage races; they had to enter into close relations with men
treacherous, bloodthirsty, covetous--men who were almost always
thieves, who were frequently cannibals, sometimes wreckers--who regarded
foreigners as a cheap and very delicious kind of food. The pioneers of
civilisation, always and everywhere, incur dangers from which ordinary
mortals would shrink with dismay; but the earliest pioneers, the first
introducers of the elements of culture among barbarians who had never
heard of it, must have encountered far greater peril than others
from their ignorance of the ways of savage man, and a want of those
tremendous weapons of attack and defence with which modern explorers
take care to provide themselves. Until the invention of gunpowder,
the arms of civilised men--swords, and spears, and javelins, and
the like--were scarcely a match for the cunningly devised
weapons--boomerangs, and blow-pipes, and poisoned arrows, and
lassoes[318]--of the savage.
The adaptability and pliability of the Phoenicians was especially shown
in their power of obtaining the favourable regard of almost all the
peoples and nations with which they came into contact, whether civilised
or uncivilised. It is most remarkable that the Egyptians, intolerant as
they usually were of strangers, should have allowed the Phoenicians to
settle in their southern capital, Memphis, and to build a temple and
inhabit a quarter there.[319] It is also curious and interesting that
the Phoenicians should have been able to ingratiate themselves with
another most exclusive and self-sufficing people, viz. the Jews.
Hiram’s friendly dealings with David and Solomon are well known; but
the _continued_ alliance between the Phoenicians and the Israelites has
attracted less attention. Solomon took wives from Phoenicia;[320]
Ahab married the daughter of Ithobalus, king of Sidon;[321] Phoenicia
furnished timber for the second Temple;[322] Isaiah wound up his
prophecy against Tyre with a consolation;[323] our Lord found faith in
the Syro-Phoenician woman;[324] in the days of Herod Agrippa, Tyre
and Sidon still desired peace with Judæa, “because their country was
nourished by the king’s country.”[325] And similarly Tyre had friendly
relations with Syria and Greece, with Mesopotamia and Assyria, with
Babylonia and Chaldæa. At the same time she could bend herself to meet
the wants and gain the confidence of all the varieties of barbarians,
the rude Armenians, the wild Arabs, the barbarous tribes of northern
and western Africa, the rough Iberi, the passionate Gauls, the painted
Britons, the coarse Sards, the fierce Thracians, the filthy Scyths, the
savage races of the Caucasus. Tribes so timid and distrustful as those
of Tropical Africa were lured into peaceful and friendly relations by
the artifice of a “dumb commerce,”[326] and on every side untamed
man was softened and drawn towards civilisation by a spirit of
accommodation, conciliation, and concession to prejudices.
If the Phoenicians are to be credited with acuteness of intellect,
it must be limited to the field of practical enquiry and discovery.
Whatever may be said with regard to the extent and variety of their
literature--a subject which will be treated in another chapter--it
cannot be pretended that humanity owes to them any important conquests
of a scientific or philosophic character. Herodotus, who admires the
learning of the Persians,[327] the science of the Babylonians,[328]
and the combined learning and science of the Egyptians,[329] limits
his commendation of the Phoenicians to their skill in navigation, in
mechanics, and in works of art.[330] Had they made advances in the
abstract, or even in the mixed, sciences, in mathematics, or astronomy,
or geometry, in logic or metaphysics, either their writings would have
been preserved, or at least the Greeks would have made acknowledgments
of being indebted to them.[331] But it is only in the field of practical
matters that any such acknowledgments are made. The Greeks allow
themselves to have been indebted to the Phoenicians for alphabetic
writing, for advances in metallurgy, for improvements in shipbuilding,
and navigation, for much geographic knowledge, for exquisite dyes, and
for the manufacture of glass. There can be no doubt that the Phoenicians
were a people of great practical ability, with an intellect quick to
devise means to ends, to scheme, contrive, and execute, and with a happy
knack of perceiving what was practically valuable in the inventions of
other nations, and of appropriating them to their own use, often with
improvements upon the original idea. But they were not possessed of any
great genius or originality. They were, on the whole, adapters rather
than inventors. They owed their idea of alphabetic writing to the
Accadians,[332] their weights and measures to Babylon,[333] their
shipbuilding probably to Egypt,[334] their early architecture to the
same country,[335] their mimetic art to Assyria, to Egypt, and to
Greece. They were not poets, or painters, or sculptors, or great
architects, much less philosophers or scientists; but in the practical
arts, and even in the practical sciences, they held a high place,
in almost all of them equalling, and in some exceeding, all their
neighbours.
We should be inclined also to assign to the Phoenicians, as a special
characteristic, a peculiar capacity for business. This may be said,
indeed, to be nothing more than acuteness of intellect applied in a
particular way. To ourselves, however, it appears to be, in some sort,
a special gift. As, beyond all question, there are many persons of
extremely acute intellect who have not the slightest turn for business,
or ability for dealing with it, so we think there are nations, to whom
no one would deny high intellectual power, without the capacity in
question. In its most perfect form it has belonged but to a small number
of nations--to the Phoenicians, the Venetians, the Genoese, the English,
and the Dutch. It implies, not so much high intellectual power, as a
combination of valuable, yet not very admirable, qualities of a lower
order. Industry, perseverance, shrewdness, quickness of perception,
power of forecasting the future, power of organisation, boldness,
promptness, are among the qualities needed, and there may be others
discoverable by the skilful analyst. All these met in the Phoenicians,
and met in the proportions that were needed for the combination to take
full effect.
Whether unscrupulousness and want of good faith are rightly assigned
to the Phoenicians as characteristic traits, is, at the least, open
to doubt. The Latin writers, with whom the reproach contained in the
expression “Punica fides” originated, are scarcely to be accepted as
unprejudiced witnesses, since it is in most instances a necessity that
they should either impute “bad faith” to the opposite side, or admit
that there was “bad faith” on their own. The aspersions of an enemy are
entitled to little weight. The cry of “perfide Albion” is often heard
in the land of one of our near neighbours; but few Englishmen will admit
the justice of it. It may be urged in favour of the Phoenicians that
long-continued commercial success is impossible without fair-dealing and
honesty; that where there is commercial fair-dealing and honesty,
those qualities become part and parcel of the national character, and
determine national policy; and, further, that in almost every one of the
instances of bad faith alleged, there is at the least a doubt, of which
the accused party ought to have the benefit. At any rate, let it be
remembered that the charges made affect the Liby-Phoenicians alone, and
not the Phoenicians of Asia, with whom we are here primarily concerned,
and that we cannot safely, or equitably, transfer to a mother-country
faults which are only even alleged against one of her colonies.
Physically, the Phoenicians appear to have resembled the Assyrians and
the Jews. They had large frames strongly made, well-developed muscles,
curled beards, and abundant hair. In their features they may have
borne a resemblance, but probably not a very strong resemblance, to
the Cypriots,[336] who were a mixed people recruited from various
quarters.[337] In complexion they belonged to the white race, but were
rather sallow than fair. Their hair was generally dark, though it may
have been sometimes red. Some have regarded the name “Phoenician” as
indicating that they were of a red or red-brown colour;[338] but it is
better to regard the appellation as having passed from the country to
its people, and as applied to the country by the Greeks on account of
the palm-trees which grew along its shores.