PHENICIANS.
Of the Phenicians, Assyrians, and Egyptians, it is necessary for me
to speak so far as they acted upon the condition, or occupied the
thoughts, of the early Greeks, without undertaking to investigate
thoroughly their previous history. Like the Lydians, all three
became absorbed into the vast mass of the Persian empire, retaining,
however, to a great degree, their social character and peculiarities
after having been robbed of their political independence.
The Persians and Medes,—portions of the Arian race, and members
of what has been classified, in respect of language, as the great
Indo-European family,—occupied a part of the vast space comprehended
between the Indus on the east, and the line of Mount Zagros (running
eastward of the Tigris and nearly parallel with that river) on
the west. The Phenicians as well as the Assyrians belonged to the
Semitic, Aramæan, or Syro-Arabian family; comprising, besides,
the Syrians, Jews, Arabians, and in part the Abyssinians. To what
established family of the human race the swarthy and curly-haired
Egyptians are to be assigned, has been much disputed; we cannot
reckon them as members of either of the two preceding, and the most
careful inquiries render it probable that their physical type was
something purely African, approximating in many points to that of the
negro.[502]
[502] See the discussion in Dr. Prichard, Natural History of Man,
sect. xvii, p. 152.
Μελαγχρόες καὶ οὐλότριχες (Herodot. ii, 104: compare Ammian.
Marcell. xxii, 16, “subfusculi, atrati,” etc.) are certain
attributes of the ancient Egyptians, depending upon the evidence
of an eye-witness.
“In their complexion, and in many of their physical peculiarities
(observes Dr. Prichard, p. 138), the Egyptians were an African
race. In the eastern, and even in the central parts of Africa,
we shall trace the existence of various tribes in physical
characters nearly resembling the Egyptians; and it would not
be difficult to observe among many nations of that continent a
gradual deviation from the physical type of the Egyptian to the
strongly-marked character of the negro, and that without any very
decided break or interruption. The Egyptian language, also, in
the great leading principles of its grammatical construction,
bears much greater analogy to the idioms of Africa than to those
prevalent among the people of other regions.”
It has already been remarked that the Phenician merchant and trading
vessel figures in the Homeric poems as a well-known visitor, and that
the variegated robes and golden ornaments fabricated at Sidon are
prized among the valuable ornaments belonging to the chiefs.[503]
We have reason to conclude generally, that in these early times,
the Phenicians traversed the Ægean sea habitually, and even formed
settlements for trading and mining purposes upon some of its islands:
on Thasos, especially, near the coast of Thrace, traces of their
abandoned gold-mines were visible even in the days of Herodotus,
indicating both persevering labor and considerable length of
occupation. But at the time when the historical era opens, they seem
to have been in course of gradual retirement from these regions,[504]
and their commerce had taken a different direction. Of this change
we can furnish no particulars; but we may easily understand that
the increase of the Grecian marine, both warlike and commercial,
would render it inconvenient for the Phenicians to encounter such
enterprising rivals,—piracy (or private war at sea) being then an
habitual proceeding, especially with regard to foreigners.
[503] Homer, Iliad, vi, 290: xxiii, 740; Odyss. xv, 116:—
... πέπλοι παμποίκιλοι, ἔργα γυναικῶν
Σιδονίων.
Tyre is not named either in the Iliad or Odyssey, though a
passage in Probus (ad Virg. Georg. ii, 115) seems to show that it
was mentioned in one of the epics which passed under the name of
Homer: “Tyrum Sarram appellatam esse, Homerus docet: quem etiam
Ennius sequitur cum dicit, Pœnos Sarrâ oriundos.”
The Hesiodic catalogue seems to have noticed both Byblus and
Sidon: see Hesiodi Fragment. xxx, ed. Marktscheffel, and
Etymolog. Magnum, v. Βύβλος.
[504] The name Adramyttion or Atramyttion—very like the
Africo-Phenician name _Adrumêtum_—is said to be of Phenician
origin (Olshausen, De Origine Alphabeti, p. 7, in Kieler
Philologische Studien, 1841). There were valuable mines
afterwards worked for the account of Crœsus near Pergamus, and
these mines may have tempted Phenician settlers to those regions
(Aristotel. Mirab. Auscult. c. 52).
The African Inscriptions, in the Monumenta Phœnic. of Gesenius,
recognize Makar as a cognomen of Baal: and Movers imagines that
the hero Makar, who figures conspicuously in the mythology of
Lesbos, Chios, Samos, Kôs, Rhodes, etc., is traceable to this
Phenician god and Phenician early settlements in those islands
(Movers, Die Religion der Phönizier, p. 420).
The Phenician towns occupied a narrow strip of the coast of Syria
and Palestine, about one hundred and twenty miles in length, never
more, and generally much less, than twenty miles in breadth,—between
Mount Libanus and the sea. Aradus—on an islet, with Antaradus and
Marathus over against it on the main land—was the northernmost, and
Tyre the southernmost (also upon a little island, with Palæ-Tyrus
and a fertile adjacent plain over against it). Between the two were
situated Sidon, Berytus, Tripolis, and Byblus, besides some smaller
towns[505] attached to one or other of these last mentioned, and
several islands close to the coast occupied in like manner; while
the colony of Myriandrus lay farther north, near the borders of
Kilikia. Whether Sidon or Tyre was the most ancient, seems not
determinable: if it be true as some authorities affirmed, that Tyre
was originally planted from Sidon, the colony must have grown so
rapidly as to surpass its metropolis in power and consideration, for
it became the chief of all the Phenician towns.[506] Aradus, the next
in importance after these two, was founded by exiles from Sidon,
and all the rest either by Tyrian or Sidonian settlers. Within this
confined territory was concentrated a greater degree of commercial
wealth and enterprise, and manufacturing ingenuity, than could be
found in any other portion of the contemporary world. Each town was
an independent community, having its own surrounding territory and
political constitution and its own hereditary prince,[507] though
the annals of Tyre display many instances of princes assassinated by
men who succeeded them on the throne. Tyre appears to have enjoyed
a certain presiding, perhaps a controlling authority, over all of
them, which was not always willingly submitted to; and examples occur
in which the inferior towns, when Tyre was pressed by a foreign
enemy,[508] took the opportunity of revolting, or at least stood
aloof. The same difficulty of managing satisfactorily the relations
between a presiding town and its confederates, which Grecian history
manifests, is found also to prevail in Phenicia, and will be
hereafter remarked in regard to Carthage; while the same effects are
also perceived, of the autonomous city polity, in keeping alive the
individual energies and regulated aspirations of the inhabitants.
The predominant sentiment of jealous town-isolation is forcibly
illustrated by the circumstances of Tripolis, established jointly by
Tyre, Sidon, and Aradus. It consisted of three distinct towns, each
one furlong apart from the other two, and each with its own separate
walls; though probably constituting to a certain extent one political
community, and serving as a place of common meeting and deliberation
for the entire Phenician name.[509] The outlying promontories of
Libanus and Anti-Libanus touched the sea along the Phenician coast,
and those mountainous ranges, while they rendered a large portion of
the very confined area unfit for cultivation of corn, furnished what
was perhaps yet more indispensable,—abundant supplies of timber for
ship-building: the entire want of all wood in Babylonia, except the
date-palm, restricted the Assyrians of that territory from maritime
traffic on the Persian gulf. It appears, however, that the mountains
of Lebanon also afforded shelter to tribes of predatory Arabs, who
continually infested both the Phenician territory and the rich
neighboring plain of Cœle-Syria.[510]
[505] Strabo, xiv, pp. 754-758; Skylax, Peripl. c. 104; Justin,
xviii, 3; Arrian, Exp. Al. ii, 16-19; Xenophon, Anab. i, 4, 6.
Unfortunately, the text of Skylax is here extremely defective,
and Strabo’s account is in many points perplexed, from his not
having travelled in person through Phenicia, Cœle-Syria, or
Judæa: see Groskurd’s note on p. 755 and the Einleitung to his
Translation of Strabo, sect. 6.
Respecting the original relation between Palæ-Tyrus and Tyre,
there is some difficulty in reconciling all the information,
little as it is, which we possess. The name Palæ-Tyrus (it has
been assumed as a matter of course: compare Justin, xi, 10) marks
that town as the original foundation from which the Tyrians
subsequently moved into the island: there was, also, on the
main land a place named Palæ-Byblos (Plin. H. N. v, 20; Ptolem.
v, 15) which was in like manner construed as the original seat
from whence the town properly called Byblus was derived. Yet the
account of Herodotus plainly represents the insular Tyrus, with
its temple of Hêraklês, as the original foundation (ii, 44), and
the Tyrians are described as living in an island even in the
time of their king Hiram, the contemporary of Solomon (Joseph.
Ant. Jud. viii, 2, 7). Arrian treats the temple of Hêraklês in
the island-Tyre as the most ancient temple within the memory of
man (Exp. Al. ii, 16). The Tyrians also lived on their island
during the invasion of Salmaneser king of Nineveh, and their
position enabled them to hold out against him, while Palæ-Tyrus
on the terra firma was obliged to yield itself (Joseph. _ib._
ix, 14, 2). The town taken (or reduced to capitulate), after
a long siege, by Nebuchadnezzar, was the insular Tyrus, not
the continental or Palæ-Tyrus, which had surrendered without
resistance to Salmaneser. It is not correct, therefore, to
say—with Volney (Recherches sur l’Hist. Anc. ch. xiv, p. 249),
Heeren (Ideen über den Verkehr der Alten Welt, part i, abth.
2, p. 11), and others—that the insular Tyre was called new
Tyre, and that the site of Tyre was changed from continental to
insular, in consequence of the taking of the continental Tyre
by Nebuchadnezzar: the site remained unaltered, and the insular
Tyrians became subject to him and his successors until the
destruction of the Chaldæan monarchy by Cyrus. Hengstenberg’s
Dissertation, De Rebus Tyriorum (Berlin, 1832), is instructive
on many of these points: he shows sufficiently that Tyre was,
from the earliest times traceable, an insular city; but he wishes
at the same time to show, that it was also, from the beginning,
joined on to the main land by an isthmus (pp. 10-25),—which is
both inconsistent with the former position and unsupported by any
solid proofs. It remained an island strictly so called, until the
siege by Alexander: the mole, by which that conqueror had stormed
it, continued after his day, perhaps enlarged, so as to form a
permanent connection from that time forward between the island
and the main land (Plin. H. N. v, 19; Strabo, xvi, p. 757), and
to render the insular Tyrus capable of being included by Pliny
in one computation of circumference jointly with Palæ-Tyrus, the
main-land town.
It may be doubted whether we know the true meaning of the word
which the Greeks called Παλαι-Τύρος. It is plain that the Tyrians
themselves did not call it by that name: perhaps the Phenician
name which this continental adjacent town bore, may have been
something resembling Palæ-Tyrus in sound, but not coincident in
meaning.
The strength of Tyre lay in its insular situation; for the
adjacent main-land, whereon Palæ-Tyrus was placed, was a fertile
plain, thus described by William of Tyre during the time of the
Crusaders:—
“Erat prædicta civitas non solum munitissima, sed etiam
fertilitate præcipuâ et amœnitate quasi singularis: nam licet in
medio mari sita est, et in modum insulæ tota fluctibus cincta;
habet tamen pro foribus latifundium per omnia commendabile, et
planitiem sibi continuam divitis glebæ et opimi soli, multas
civibus ministrans commoditates. Quæ licet modica videatur
respectu aliarum regionum, exiguitatem suam multâ redimit
ubertate, et infinita jugera multiplici fœcunditate compensat.
Nec tamen tantis arctatur angustiis. Protenditur enim in
Austrum versus Ptolemaidem usque ad eum locum, qui hodie vulgo
dicitur districtum Scandarionis, milliaribus quatuor aut
quinque: e regione in Septentrionem versus Sareptam et Sidonem
iterum porrigitur totidem milliaribus. In latitudinem vero ubi
minimum ad duo, ubi plurimum ad tria, habens milliaria.” (Apud
Hengstenberg, _ut sup._ p. 5.) Compare Maundrell, Journey from
Aleppo to Jerusalem, p. 50, ed. 1749; and Volney, Travels in
Egypt and Syria, vol. ii, pp. 210-226.
[506] Justin (xviii, 3) states that Sidon was the metropolis of
Tyre, but the series of events which he recounts is confused
and unintelligible. Strabo also, in one place, calls Sidon the
μητρόπολις τῶν Φοινίκων (i, p. 40); in another place he states it
as a point disputed between the two cities, which of them was the
μητρόπολις τῶν Φοινίκων (xvi, p. 756).
Quintus Curtius affirms both Tyre and Sidon to have been founded
by Agênôr (iv, 4, 15).
[507] See the interesting citations of Josephus from Dius and
Menander, who had access to the Tyrian ἀναγραφαὶ, or chronicles
(Josephus cont. Apion. i, c. 17, 18, 21; Antiq. J. x, 11, 1).
[508] Joseph. Antiq. J. ix, 14, 2.
[509] Diodor. xvi, 41; Skylax, c. 104.
[510] Strabo, xvi, p. 756.
The splendid temple of that great Phenician god (Melkarth) whom the
Greeks called Hêraklês,[511] was situated in Tyre, and the Tyrians
affirmed that its establishment had been coeval with the first
foundation of the city, two thousand three hundred years before the
time of Herodotus. This god is the companion and protector of their
colonial settlements, and the ancestor of the Phœnico-Libyan kings:
we find him especially at Carthage, Gadês, and Thasos.[512] Some
supposed that they had migrated to their site on the Mediterranean
coast, from previous abodes near the mouth of the Euphrates,[513]
or on islands (named Tylus and Aradus) of the Persian gulf, while
others treated the Mediterranean Phenicians as original, and the
others as colonists. Whether such be the fact or not, history knows
them in no other portion of Asia earlier than in Phenicia proper.
[511] A Maltese inscription identifies the Tyrian Melkarth with
Ἡρακλῆς (Gesenius, Monument. Phœnic. tab. vi).
[512] Herodot. ii, 44; Sallust, Bell. Jug. c. 18; Pausan. x, 12,
2; Arrian, Exp. Al. ii, 16; Justin, xliv, 5; Appian, vi, 2.
[513] Herodot. i, 2; Ephorus, Fragm. 40, ed. Marx; Strabo,
xvi, pp. 766-784; Justin, xviii, 3. In the animated discussion
carried on among the Homeric critics and the great geographers of
antiquity, to ascertain where it was that Menelaus actually went
during his eight years’ wandering (Odyss. iv, 85)—
... ἢ γὰρ πολλὰ παθὼν καὶ πόλλ᾽ ἐπαληθεὶς
Ἠγαγόμην ἐν νηυσὶ, καὶ ὀγδοάτῳ ἔτει ἦλθον,
Κύπρον, Φοινίκην τε, καὶ Αἰγυπτίους ἐπαληθεὶς,
Αἰθίοπάς θ᾽ ἱκόμην, καὶ Σιδονίους, καὶ Ἐρεμβοὺς,
καὶ Λιβύην, etc.
one idea started was, that he had visited these Sidonians in
the Persian gulf, or in the Erythræan sea (Strabo, i, p. 42).
The various opinions which Strabo quotes, including those of
Eratosthenês and Kratês, as well as his own comments, are very
curious. Kratês supposed that Menelaus had passed the straits
of Gibraltar and circumnavigated Libya to Æthiopia and India,
which voyage would suffice, he thought, to fill up the eight
years. Others supposed that Menelaus had sailed first up the
Nile, and then into the Red sea, by means of the canal (διωρὺξ)
which existed in the time of the Alexandrine critics between
the Nile and that sea; to which Strabo replies that this canal
was not made until after the Trojan war. Eratosthenês started a
still more remarkable idea: he thought that in the time of Homer
the strait of Gibraltar had not yet been burst open, so that
the Mediterranean was on that side a closed sea; but, on the
other hand, its level was then so much higher that it covered
the isthmus of Suez, and joined the Red sea. It was, he thought,
the disruption of the strait of Gibraltar which first lowered
the level of the water, and left the isthmus of Suez dry; though
Menelaus, in _his_ time, had sailed from the Mediterranean into
the Red sea without difficulty. This opinion Eratosthenês had
imbibed from Stratôn of Lampsakus, the successor of Theophrastus:
Hipparchus controverted it, together with many other of the
opinions of Eratosthenês (see Strabo, i, pp. 38, 49, 56; Seidel,
Fragmenta Eratosthenis, p. 39).
In reference to the view of Kratês,—that Menelaus had sailed
round Africa,—it is to be remarked that all the geographers of
that day formed to themselves a very insufficient idea of the
extent of that continent, believing that it did not even reach so
far southward as the equator.
Strabo himself adopts neither of these three opinions, but
construes the Homeric words describing the wanderings of Menelaus
as applying only to the coasts of Egypt, Libya, Phenicia, etc; he
suggests various reasons, more curious than convincing, to prove
that Menelaus may easily have spent eight years in these visits
of mixed friendship and piracy.
Though the invincible industry and enterprise of the Phenicians
maintained them as a people of importance down to the period of the
Roman empire, yet the period of their widest range and greatest
efficiency is to be sought much earlier,—anterior to 700 B. C. In
these remote times they and their colonists were the exclusive
navigators of the Mediterranean: the rise of the Greek maritime
settlements banished their commerce to a great degree from the Ægean
sea, and embarrassed it even in the more westerly waters. Their
colonial establishments were formed in Africa, Sicily, Sardinia, the
Balearic Isles, and Spain: the greatness as well as the antiquity
of Carthage, Utica, and Gadês, attest the long-sighted plans of
Phenician traders, even in days anterior to the 1st Olympiad. We
trace the wealth and industry of Tyre, and the distant navigation
of her vessels through the Red sea and along the coast of Arabia,
back to the days of David and Solomon. And as neither Egyptians,
Assyrians, Persians, nor Indians, addressed themselves to a seafaring
life, so it seems that both the importation and the distribution of
the products of India and Arabia into Western Asia and Europe, was
performed by the Idumæan Arabs, between Petra and the Red sea,—by the
Arabs of Gerrha on the Persian gulf, joined as they were in later
times by a body of Chaldæan exiles from Babylonia,—and by the more
enterprising Phenicians of Tyre and Sidon in these two seas as well
as in the Mediterranean.[514]
[514] See Ritter, Erdkunde von Asien, West-Asien, Buch iii,
Abtheilung iii, Abschnitt i, s. 29, p. 50.
The most ancient Phenician colonies were Utica, nearly on the
northernmost point of the coast of Africa, and in the same gulf, (now
known as the gulf of Tunis) as Carthage, over against cape Lilybæum
in Sicily,—and Gadês, or Gadeira, on the south-western coast of
Spain; a town which, founded perhaps near one thousand years before
the Christian era,[515] has maintained a continuous prosperity, and
a name (Cadiz) substantially unaltered, longer than any town in
Europe. How well the site of Utica was suited to the circumstances of
Phenician colonists may be inferred from the fact that Carthage was
afterwards established in the same gulf and near to the same spot,
and that both the two cities reached a high pitch of prosperity. The
distance of Gadês from Tyre seems surprising, and if we calculate
by time instead of by space, the Tyrians were separated from their
Tartêssian colonists by an interval greater than that which now
divides an Englishman from Bombay; for the ancient navigator always
coasted along the land, and Skylax reckons seventy-five days[516]
of voyage from the Kanôpic (westernmost) mouth of the Nile to
the Pillars of Hêraklês (strait of Gibraltar); to which some more
days must be added to represent the full distance between Tyre and
Gadês. But the enterprise of these early mariners surmounted all
difficulties consistent with the principle of never losing sight
of the coast. Proceeding along the northern coast of Libya, at a
time when the mouths of the Nile were still closed by Egyptian
jealousy against all foreign ships, they appear to have found little
temptation to colonize[517] on the dangerous coast near to the two
gulfs called the great and little Syrtis,—in a territory for the most
part destitute of water, and occupied by rude Libyan nomades, who
were thinly spread over the wide space between the western Nile[518]
and cape Hermæa, now called cape Bona. The subsequent Grecian towns
of Kyrênê and Barka, whose well-chosen site formed an exception to
the general character of the region, were not planted with any view
to commerce,[519] and the Phenician town of Leptis, near the gulf
called the great Syrtis, was founded by exiles from Sidon, and not
by deliberate colonization. The site of Utica and Carthage, in the
gulf immediately westward of cape Bona, was convenient for commerce
with Sicily, Italy, and Sardinia; and the other Phenician colonies,
Adrumêtum, Neapolis, Hippo (two towns so called), the lesser Leptis,
etc., were settled on the coast not far distant from the eastern or
western promontories which included the gulf of Tunis, common to
Carthage and Utica.
[515] Strabo speaks of the earliest settlements of the Phenicians
in Africa and Iberia as μικρὸν τῶν Τρωϊκῶν ὕστερον (i, p. 48).
Utica is affirmed to have been two hundred and eighty-seven years
earlier than Carthage (Aristot. Mirab. Auscult. c. 134): compare
Velleius Paterc. i, 2.
Archaleus, son of Phœnix, was stated as the founder of Gadês in
the Phenician history of Claudius Julius, now lost (Etymolog.
Magn. v. Γαδεῖρα). Archaleus is a version of the name Hercules,
in the opinion of Movers.
[516] Skylax, Periplus, c. 110. “Carteia, ut quidam putant,
aliquando Tartessus; et quam transvecti ex Africâ Phœnices
habitant, atque unde nos sumus, Tingentera.” (Mela, ii, 6, 75.)
The expression, _transvecti ex Africâ_ applies as much to the
Phenicians as to the Carthaginians: “_uterque Pœnus_” (Horat. Od.
ii, 11) means the Carthaginians, and the Phenicians of Gadês.
[517] Strabo, xvii, p. 836.
[518] Cape Soloeis, considered by Herodotus as the westernmost
headland of Libya, coincides in name with the Phenician town
Soloeis in western Sicily, also, seemingly, with the Phenician
settlement _Suel_ (Mela, ii, 6, 65) in southern Iberia or
Tartêssus. Cape Hermæa was the name of the north-eastern headland
of the gulf of Tunis, and also the name of a cape in Libya, two
days’ sail westward of the Pillars of Hêraklês (Skylax, c. 111).
Probably, all the remarkable headlands in these seas received
their names from the Phenicians. Both Mannert (Geogr. d. Gr. und
Röm. x, 2, p. 495) and Forbiger (Alte Geogr. sect. 111, p. 867)
identify cape Soloeis with what is now called cape Cantin; Heeren
considers it to be the same as cape Blanco; Bougainville as cape
Boyador.
[519] Sallust, Bell. Jug. c. 78. It was termed Leptis Magna, to
distinguish it from another Leptis, more to the westward and
nearer to Carthage, called Leptis Parva; but this latter seems
to have been generally known by the name Leptis (Forbiger, Alte
Geogr. sect. 109, p. 844). In Leptis Magna, the proportion of
Phenician colonists was so inconsiderable that the Phenician
language had been lost, and that of the natives, whom Sallust
calls Numidians, spoken: but these people had embraced Sidonian
institutions and civilization. (Sall. _ib._)
These early Phenician settlements were planted thus in the territory
now known as the kingdom of Tunis and the western portion of the
French province of Constantine. From thence to the Pillars of
Hêraklês (strait of Gibraltar), we do not hear of any others; but
the colony of Gadês, outside of the strait, formed the centre of a
flourishing and extensive commerce, which reached on one side far to
the south, not less than thirty days’ sail along the western coast of
Africa,[520]—and on the other side to Britain and the Scilly Islands.
There were numerous Phenician factories and small trading-towns along
the western coast of what is now the empire of Morocco; and the
island of Kernê, twelve days’ sail along the coast from the strait
of Gibraltar, formed an established dépôt for Phenician merchandise
in trading with the interior. There were, moreover, towns not far
distant from the coast, of Libyans or Ethiopians, to which the
inhabitants of the central regions resorted, and where they brought
their leopard skins and elephants’ teeth, to be exchanged against the
unguents of Tyre and the pottery of Athens.[521] So distant a trade,
with the limited navigation of that day, could not be made to embrace
very bulky goods.
[520] Strabo, xvii, pp. 825-826. He found it stated by some
authors that there had once been three hundred trading
establishments along this coast, reaching thirty days’ voyage
southward from Tingis or Lixus (Tangier); but that they had been
chiefly ruined by the tribes of the interior,—the Pharusians
and Nigritæ. He suspects the statement of being exaggerated,
but there seems nothing at all incredible in it. From Strabo’s
language we gather that Eratosthenês set forth the statement as
in his judgment a true one.
[521] Compare Skylax, c. 111, and the Periplus of Hanno, ap.
Hudson, Geogr. Græc. Min. vol. i, pp. 1-6. I have already
observed that the τάριχος (salt provisions) from Gadeira was
currently sold in the markets of Athens, from the Peloponnesian
war downward.—Eupolis, Fragm. 23; Μαρικᾶς, p. 506, ed. Meineke,
Comic. Græc.
Πότερ᾽ ἦν τὸ τάριχος; Φρύγιον ἢ Γαδειρικόν;
Compare the citations from the other comic writers, Antiphanês
and Nikostratus ap. Athenæ. iii, p. 118. The Phenician merchants
bought in exchange Attic pottery for their African trade.
But this trade, though seemingly a valuable one, constituted only a
small part of the sources of wealth open to the Phenicians of Gadês.
The Turditanians and Turduli, who occupied the south-western portion
of Spain, between the Anas river (Guadiana) and the Mediterranean,
seem to have been the most civilized and improvable section of
the Iberian tribes, well suited for commercial relations with the
settlers who occupied the isle of Leon, and who established the
temple, afterwards so rich and frequented, of the Tyrian Hêraklês.
And the extreme productiveness of the southern region of Spain, in
corn, fish, cattle, and wine, as well as in silver and iron, is a
topic upon which we find but one language among ancient writers. The
territory round Gadês, Carteia, and the other Phenician settlements
in this district, was known to the Greeks in the sixth century B. C.
by the name of Tartêssus, and regarded by them somewhat in the same
light as Mexico and Peru appeared to the Spaniards of the sixteenth
century. For three or four centuries the Phenicians had possessed
the entire monopoly of this Tartêssian trade, without any rivalry
on the part of the Greeks; probably, the metals there procured were
in those days their most precious acquisition, and the tribes who
occupied the mining regions of the interior found a new market and
valuable demand, for produce then obtained with a degree of facility
exaggerated into fable.[522] It was from Gadês as a centre that these
enterprising traders, pushing their coasting voyage yet farther,
established relations with the tin-mines of Cornwall, perhaps also
with amber-gatherers from the coasts of the Baltic. It requires
some effort to carry back our imaginations to the time when, along
all this vast length of country, from Tyre and Sidon to the coast
of Cornwall, there was no merchant-ship to buy or sell goods except
these Phenicians. The rudest tribes find advantage in such visitors;
and we cannot doubt, that the men, whose resolute love of gain braved
so many hazards and difficulties, must have been rewarded with
profits on the largest scale of monopoly.
[522] About the productiveness of the Spanish mines, Polybius
(xxxiv, 9, 8) ap. Strabo, iii, p. 147; Aristot. Mirab. Ausc. c.
135.
The Phenician settlers on the coast of Spain became gradually more
and more numerous, and appear to have been distributed, either in
separate townships or intermingled with the native population,
between the mouth of the Anas (Guadiana) and the town of Malaka
(Malaga) on the Mediterranean. Unfortunately, we are very little
informed about their precise localities and details, but we find no
information of Phenician settlements on the Mediterranean coast of
Spain northward of Malaka; for Carthagena, or New Carthage, was a
Carthaginian settlement, founded only in the third century B. C.,
after the first Punic war.[523] The Greek word Phenicians being used
to signify as well the inhabitants of Carthage as those of Tyre and
Sidon, it is not easy to distinguish what belongs to each of them;
nevertheless, we can discern a great and important difference in
the character of their establishments, especially in Iberia. The
Carthaginians combined with their commercial projects large schemes
of conquest and empire: it is thus that the independent Phenician
establishments in and near the gulf of Tunis, in Africa, were reduced
to dependence upon them,—while many new small townships, direct
from Carthage itself, were planted on the Mediterranean coast of
Africa, and the whole of that coast from the great Syrtis westward
to the Pillars of Hêraklês (strait of Gibraltar) is described as
their territory in the Periplus of Skylax (B. C. 360). In Iberia,
during the third century B. C., they maintained large armies,[524]
constrained the inland tribes to subjection, and acquired a dominion
which nothing but the superior force of Rome prevented from being
durable: in Sicily, also, the resistance of the Greeks prevented a
similar consummation. But the foreign settlements of Tyre and Sidon
were formed with views purely commercial. In the region of Tartêssus
as well as in the western coast of Africa outside of the strait
of Gibraltar, we hear only of pacific interchange and metallurgy;
and the number of Phenicians who acquired gradually settlements in
the interior was so great, that Strabo describes these towns—not
less than two hundred in number—as altogether Phenicized.[525] In
his time, the circumstances favorable to new Phenician emigrations
had been long past and gone, and there can be little hesitation in
ascribing the preponderance, which this foreign element had then
acquired, to a period several centuries earlier, beginning at a time
when Tyre and Sidon enjoyed both undisputed autonomy at home, and the
entire monopoly of Iberian commerce, without interference from the
Greeks.
[523] Strabo, iii, pp. 156, 158, 161; Polybius, iii, 10, 3-10.
[524] Polyb. i, 10; ii, 1.
[525] Strabo, iii, pp. 141-150. Οὗτοι γὰρ Φοίνιξιν οὕτως ἐγένοντο
ὑποχείριοι, ὥστε τὰς πλείους τῶν ἐν τῇ Τουρδιτανίᾳ πολέων καὶ τῶν
πλήσιον τόπων ὑπ᾽ ἐκείνων ~νῦν~ οἰκεῖσθαι.
The earliest Grecian colony founded in Sicily was that of Naxos,
planted by the Chalkidians in 735 B. C.: Syracuse followed in the
next year, and during the succeeding century many flourishing Greek
cities took root on the island. These Greeks found the Phenicians
already in possession of many outlying islets and promontories
all around the island, which served them in their trade with
the Sikels and Sikans who occupied the interior. The safety and
facilities of this established trade were to so great a degree
broken up by the new-comers, that the Phenicians, relinquishing
their numerous petty settlements round the island, concentrated
themselves in three considerable towns at the south-western angle
near Lilybæum,[526]—Motyê, Soloeis, and Panormus,—and in the island
of Malta, where they were least widely separated from Utica and
Carthage. The Tyrians of that day were hard-pressed by the Assyrians
under Salmaneser, and the power of Carthage had not yet reached its
height; otherwise probably this retreat of the Sicilian Phenicians
before the Greeks would not have taken place without a struggle.
But the early Phenicians, superior to the Greeks in mercantile
activity, and not disposed to contend, except under circumstances
of very superior force, with warlike adventurers bent on permanent
settlement, took the prudent course of circumscribing their sphere
of operations. A similar change appears to have taken place in
Cyprus, the other island in which Greeks and Phenicians came into
close contact. If we may trust the Tyrian annals consulted by the
historian Menander, Cyprus was subject to the Tyrians even in the
time of Solomon.[527] We do not know the dates of the establishment
of Paphos, Salamis, Kitium, and the other Grecian cities there
planted,—but there can be no doubt that they were posterior to this
period, and that a considerable portion of the soil and trade of
Cyprus thus passed from Phenicians to Greeks; who on their part
partially embraced and diffused the rites, sometimes cruel, sometimes
voluptuous, embodied in the Phenician religion.[528] In Cilicia, too,
especially at Tarsus, the intrusion of Greek settlers appears to
have gradually Hellenized a town originally Phenician and Assyrian;
contributing, along with the other Grecian settlements—Phasêlis,
Aspendus, and Sidê—on the southern coast of Asia Minor, to narrow the
Phenician range of adventure in that direction.[529]
[526] Thucyd. vi, 3; Diodor. v, 12.
[527] See the reference in Joseph. Antiq. Jud. viii, 5, 3, and
Joseph. cont. Apion. i, 18; an allusion is to be found in Virgil,
Æneid, i, 642, in the mouth of Dido.—
“Genitor tum Belus opimam
Vastabat Cyprum, et late ditione tenebat.” (t. v.)
[528] Respecting the worship at Salamis (in Cyprus) and Paphos,
see Lactant. i, 21; Strabo, xiv, p. 683.
[529] Tarsus is mentioned by Dio Chrysostom as a colony from the
Phenician Aradus (Orat. Tarsens. ii, p. 20, ed. Reisk.), and
Herodotus makes Kilix brother of Phœnix and son of Agênôr (vii,
92).
Phenician coins of the city of Tarsus are found, of a date
towards the end of the Persian empire: see Movers, Die Phönizier,
i, p. 13.
Such was the manner in which the Phenicians found themselves affected
by the spread of Greek settlements; and if the Ionians of Asia Minor,
when first conquered by Harpagus and the Persians, had followed
the advice of the Prienean Bias to emigrate in a body, and found
one great Pan-Ionic colony in the island of Sardinia, these early
merchants would have experienced the like hindrance[530] carried
still farther westward,—perhaps, indeed, the whole subsequent history
of Carthage might have been sensibly modified. But Iberia, and the
golden region of Tartêssus, remained comparatively little visited,
and still less colonized, by the Greeks; nor did it even become known
to them until more than a century after their first settlements had
been formed in Sicily. Easy as the voyage from Corinth to Cadiz may
now appear to us, to a Greek of the seventh or sixth centuries B.
C. it was a formidable undertaking. He was under the necessity of
first coasting along Akarnania and Epirus, then crossing, first to
the island of Korkyra, and next to the gulf of Tarentum; he then
doubled the southernmost cape of Italy and followed the sinuosities
of the Mediterranean coast, by Tyrrhenia, Liguria, southern Gaul, and
eastern Iberia, to the Pillars of Hêraklês or strait of Gibraltar: or
if he did not do this, he had the alternative of crossing the open
sea from Krête or Peloponnesus to Libya, and then coasting westward
along the perilous coast of the Syrtes until he arrived at the same
point. Both voyages presented difficulties hard to be encountered;
but the most serious hazard of all, was the direct transit across
the open sea from Krête to Libya. It was about the year 630 B. C.
that the inhabitants of the island of Thêra, starved out by a seven
years’ drought, were enjoined by the Delphian god to found a colony
in Libya. Nothing short of the divine command would have induced them
to obey so terrific a sentence of banishment; for not only was the
region named quite unknown to them, but they could not discover, by
the most careful inquiries among practised Greek navigators, a single
man who had ever intentionally made the voyage to Libya.[531] One
Kretan only could they find,—a fisherman named Korôbius,—who had been
driven thither accidentally by violent gales, and he served them as
guide.
[530] Herodot. i, 170.
[531] Herodot. iv, 151.
At this juncture, Egypt had only been recently opened to Greek
commerce,—Psammetichus having been the first king who partially
relaxed the jealous exclusion of ships from the entrance of the Nile,
enforced by all his predecessors; and the incitement of so profitable
a traffic emboldened some Ionian traders to make the direct voyage
from Krête to the mouth of that river. It was in the prosecution of
one of these voyages, and in connection with the foundation of Kyrênê
(to be recounted in a future chapter), that we are made acquainted
with the memorable adventure of the Samian merchant Kôlæus. While
bound for Egypt, he had been driven out of his course by contrary
winds, and had found shelter on an uninhabited islet called Platea,
off the coast of Libya,—the spot where the emigrants intended for
Kyrênê first established themselves, not long afterwards. From hence
he again started to proceed to Egypt, but again without success;
violent and continuous east winds drove him continually to the
westward, until he at length passed the Pillars of Hêraklês, and
found himself, under the providential guidance of the gods,[532] an
unexpected visitor among the Phenicians and Iberians of Tartêssus.
What the cargo was which he was transporting to Egypt, we are not
told; but it sold in this yet virgin market for the most exorbitant
prices: he and his crew (says Herodotus)[533] “realized a profit
larger than ever fell to the lot of any known Greek except Sostratus
the Æginetan, with whom no one else can compete.” The magnitude of
their profits may be gathered from the votive offering which they
erected on their return, in the sacred precinct of Hêrê at Samos, in
gratitude for the protection of that goddess during their voyage,—a
large bronze vase, ornamented with projecting griffins’ heads, and
supported by three bronze kneeling figures of colossal stature: it
cost six talents, and represented the tithe of their gains. The
aggregate of sixty talents[534] (about sixteen thousand pounds,
speaking roughly), corresponding to this tithe, was a sum which not
many even of the rich men of Athens in her richest time, could boast
of possessing.
[532] Herodot. iv, 152. Θείῃ πομπῇ χρεώμενος.
[533] Herodot. iv, 152. Τὸ δὲ ἐμπόριον τοῦτο (Tartêssus) ἦν
ἀκήρατον τοῦτον τὸν χρόνον· ὥστε ἀπονοστήσαντες οὗτοι ὀπίσω
μέγιστα δὴ Ἑλλήνων πάντων, τῶν ἡμεῖς ἀτρεκέως ἴδμεν, ἐκ φορτίων
ἐκέρδησαν, μετά γε Σώστρατον τὸν Λαοδάμαντος, Αἰγινήτην· τούτῳ
γὰρ οὐκ οἷά τε ἐρίσαι ἄλλον.
Allusions to the prodigious wealth of Tartêssus in Anakreon,
Fragm. 8, ed. Bergk; Stephan. Byz. Ταρτησσός; Eustath. ad Dionys.
Periêgêt. 332, Ταρτησσὸς, ἣν καὶ ὁ Ἀνακρέων φησὶ πανευδαίμονα;
Himerius ap. Photium, Cod. 243, p. 599,—Ταρτεσσοῦ βίον, Ἀμαλθείας
κέρας, πᾶν ὅσον εὐδαιμονίας κεφαλαῖον.
[534] These talents cannot have been Attic talents; for the
Attic talent first arose from the debasement of the Athenian
money-standard by Solon, which did not occur until a generation
after the voyage of Kôlæus. They may have been either Euboic
or Æginæan talents; probably the former, seeing that the case
belongs to the island of Samos. Sixty Euboic talents would
be about equivalent to the sum stated in the text. For the
proportion of the various Greek monetary scales, see above, vol.
ii, part 2, ch. iv, p. 425 and ch. xii, p. 171 in the present
volume.
To the lucky accident of this enormous vase and the inscription
doubtless attached to it, which Herodotus saw in the Hêræon at Samos,
and to the impression which such miraculous enrichment made upon his
imagination,—we are indebted for our knowledge of the precise period
at which the secret of Phenician commerce at Tartêssus first became
known to the Greeks. The voyage of Kôlæus opened to the Greeks of
that day a new world hardly less important—regard being had to their
previous aggregate of knowledge—than the discovery of America to
the Europeans of the last half of the fifteenth century. But Kôlæus
did little more than make known the existence of this distant and
lucrative region: he cannot be said to have shown the way to it: nor
do we find, in spite of the foundation of Kyrênê and Barka, which
made the Greeks so much more familiar with the coast of Libya than
they had been before, that the route by which he had been carried
against his own will was ever deliberately pursued by Greek traders.
Probably the Carthaginians, altogether unscrupulous in proceedings
against commercial rivals,[535] would have aggravated its natural
maritime difficulties by false information and hostile proceedings.
The simple report of such gains, however, was well calculated to act
as a stimulus to other enterprising navigators; and the Phôkæans,
during the course of the next half-century, pushing their exploring
voyages both along the Adriatic and along the Tyrrhenian coast,
and founding Massalia in the year 600 B. C., at length reached the
Pillars of Hêraklês and Tartêssus along the eastern coast of Spain.
These men were the most adventurous mariners[536] that Greece had
yet produced, creating a jealous uneasiness even among their Ionian
neighbors:[537] their voyages were made, not with round and bulky
merchant-ships, calculated only for the maximum of cargo, but with
armed pentekonters,—and they were thus enabled to defy the privateers
of the Tyrrhenian cities on the Mediterranean, which had long
deterred the Greek trader from any habitual traffic near the strait
of Messina.[538] There can be little doubt that the progress of the
Phôkæans was very slow, and the foundation of Massalia (Marseilles),
one of the most remote of all Greek colonies, may for a time have
absorbed their attention: moreover, they had to pick up information
as they went on, and the voyage was one of discovery in the strict
sense of the word. The time at which they reached Tartêssus may
seemingly be placed between 570-560 B. C. They made themselves so
acceptable to Arganthônius,—king of Tartêssus, or at least king of
part of that region,—that he urged them to relinquish their city
of Phôkæa and establish themselves in his territory, offering to
them any site which they chose to occupy. Though they declined this
tempting offer, yet he still continued anxious to aid them against
dangers at home, and gave them a large donation of money,—whereby
they were enabled at a critical moment to complete their
fortifications. Arganthônius died shortly afterwards, having lived,
we are told, to the extraordinary age of one hundred and twenty
years, of which he had reigned eighty. The Phôkæans had probably
reason to repent of their refusal, since in no very long time their
town was taken by the Persians, half their citizens became exiles,
and were obliged to seek a precarious abode in Corsica, in place of
the advantageous settlement which old Arganthônius had offered to
them in Tartêssus.[539]
[535] Strabo, xvii, p. 802; Aristot. Mirab. Ausc. c. 84-132.
[536] Herodot. i, 163. Οἱ δὲ Φωκαιέες οὗτοι ναυτιλίῃσι μακρῇσι
πρῶτοι Ἑλλήνων ἐχρήσαντο, καὶ τὸν Ἀδρίην καὶ τὴν Τυρσηνίην καὶ
τὴν Ἰβηρίην καὶ τὸν Ταρτησσὸν οὗτοί εἰσιν οἱ καταδείξαντες·
ἐναυτίλλοντο δὲ οὐ στρογγύλῃσι νηυσὶν, ἀλλὰ πεντηκοντέροισιν,—the
expressions are remarkable.
[537] Herodot. i, 164-165, gives an example of the jealousy of
the Chians in respect to the islands called Œnussæ.
[538] Ephorus, Fragm. 52, ed. Marx; Strabo, vi, p. 267.
[539] Herodot. i, 165.
By such steps did the Greeks gradually track out the lines of
Phenician commerce in the Mediterranean, and accomplish that vast
improvement in their geographical knowledge,—the circumnavigation
of what Eratosthenes and Strabo termed “our sea,” as distinguished
from the external ocean.[540] Little practical advantage, however,
was derived from the discovery, which was only made during the last
years of Ionian independence. The Ionian cities became subjects of
Persia, and Phôkæa especially, was crippled and half-depopulated in
the struggle. Had the period of Ionian enterprise been prolonged,
we should probably have heard of other Greek settlements in Iberia
and Tartêssus, over and above Emporia and Rhodus, formed by the
Massaliots between the Pyrenees and the Ebro,—as well as of
increasing Grecian traffic with those regions. The misfortunes of
Phôkæa and the other Ionic towns saved the Phenicians of Tartêssus
from Grecian interference and competition, such as that which their
fellow-countrymen in Sicily had been experiencing for a century and a
half.
[540] Ἡ καθ᾽ ἡμᾶς θάλασσα (Strabo); τῆσδε τῆς θαλάττης (Herod.
iv, 41).
But though the Ephesian Artemis, the divine protectress of Phôkæan
emigration, was thus prevented from becoming consecrated in Tartêssus
along with the Tyrian Hêraklês, an impulse not the less powerful was
given to the imaginations of philosophers like Thalês and poets like
Stesichorus,—whose lives cover the interval between the supernatural
transport of Kôlæus on the wings of the wind, and the persevering,
well-planned exploration which emanated from Phôkæa. While, on the
one hand, the Tyrian Hêraklês with his venerated temple at Gadês
furnished a new locality and details for mythes respecting the
Grecian Hêraklês,—on the other hand, intelligent Greeks learned
for the first time that the waters surrounding their islands and
the Peloponnesus formed part of a sea circumscribed by assignable
boundaries; continuous navigation of the Phôkæans round the coasts,
first of the Adriatic, next of the gulf of Lyons to the Pillars of
Hêraklês and Tartêssus, first brought to light this important fact.
The hearers of Archilochus, Simonidês of Amorgus, and Kallinus,
living before or contemporary with the voyage of Kôlæus, had known
no sea-limit either north of Korkyra or west of Sicily: those of
Anakreon and Hippônax, a century afterwards, found the Euxine, the
Palus Mæotis, the Adriatic, the western Mediterranean, and the Libyan
Syrtes, all so far surveyed as to present to the mind a definite
conception, and to admit of being visibly represented by Anaximander
on a map. However familiar such knowledge has now become to us,
at the time now under discussion it was a prodigious advance. The
Pillars of Hêraklês, especially, remained deeply fixed in the Greek
mind, as a terminus of human adventure and aspiration: of the ocean
beyond, men were for the most part content to remain ignorant.
It has already been stated, that the Phenicians, as coast explorers,
were even more enterprising than the Phôkæans; but their jealous
commercial spirit induced them to conceal their track,—to
give information designedly false,[541] respecting dangers and
difficulties,—and even to drown any commercial rivals when they
could do so with safety.[542] One remarkable Phenician achievement,
however, contemporary with the period of Phôkæan exploration, must
not be passed over. It was somewhere about 600 B. C. that they
circumnavigated Africa; starting from the Red sea, by direction of
the Egyptian king Nekôs, son of Psammetichus,—going round the cape of
Good Hope to Gadês,—and from thence returning to the Nile.
[541] The geographer Ptolemy, with genuine scientific zeal,
complains bitterly of the reserve and frauds common with the old
traders, respecting the countries which they visited (Ptolem.
Geogr. i, 11).
[542] Strabo, iii, pp. 175-176; xvii, p. 802.
It appears that Nekôs, anxious to procure a water communication
between the Red sea and the Mediterranean, began digging a canal
from the former to the Nile, but desisted from the undertaking after
having made considerable progress. In prosecution of the same object,
he despatched these Phenicians on an experimental voyage round Libya,
which was successfully accomplished, though in a time not less than
three years; for during each autumn, the mariners landed and remained
on shore a sufficient time to sow their seed and raise a crop of
corn. They reached Egypt again, through the strait of Gibraltar,
in the course of the third year, and recounted a tale,—“which
(says Herodotus) others may believe if they choose, but I cannot
believe,”—that, in sailing round Libya, they had the sun on their
right hand, _i. e._ to the north.[543]
[543] Herodot. iv, 42. Καὶ ἔλεγον, ἐμοὶ μὲν οὐ πιστὰ, ἄλλῳ δὲ δή
τεῳ, ὡς περιπλώοντες τὴν Λιβύην, τὸν ἡέλιον ἔσχον ἐς τὰ δεξιά.
The reality of this circumnavigation was confirmed to Herodotus by
various Carthaginian informants,[544] and he himself fully believes
it. There seems good reason for sharing in his belief, though
several able critics reject the tale as incredible. The Phenicians
were expert and daring masters of coast navigation, and in going
round Africa they had no occasion ever to lose sight of land: we may
presume that their vessels were amply stored, so that they could
take their own time, and lie by in bad weather; we may also take for
granted that the reward consequent upon success was considerable.
For any other mariners then existing, indeed, the undertaking might
have been too hard, but it was not so for them, and that was the
reason why Nekôs chose them. To such reasons, which show the story
to present no intrinsic incredibility (that, indeed, is hardly
alleged even by Mannert and others who disbelieve it), we may add
one other, which goes far to prove it positively true. They stated
that, in the course of their circuit, they had the sun on their right
hand (_i. e._ to the northward); and this phenomenon, observable
according to the season even when they were within the tropics,
could not fail to force itself on their attention as constant, after
they had reached the southern temperate zone. But Herodotus at once
pronounces this part of the story to be incredible, and so it would
probably appear to every Greek[545], Phenician, or Egyptian, not
only of the age of Nekôs, but even of the time of Herodotus, who
heard it; since none of them possessed either actual experience of
the phenomenon of a southern latitude, or a sufficiently correct
theory of the relation between sun and earth, to understand the
varying direction of the shadows; and few men would consent to set
aside the received ideas with reference to the solar motions, from
pure confidence in the veracity of these Phenician narrators. Now
that under such circumstances the latter should invent the tale, is
highly improbable; and if they were not inventors, they must have
experienced the phenomenon during the southern portion of their
transit.
[544] Herodot. Οὕτω μὲν αὐτὴ ἐγνώσθη τοπρῶτον· (_i. e._ ἡ
Λιβύη ἐγνώσθη ἐοῦσα περίῤῥυτος·) μετὰ δὲ, Καρχηδόνιοί εἰσιν οἱ
λέγοντες. These Carthaginians, to whom Herodotus here alludes,
told him that Libya was circumnavigable; but it does not seem
that they knew of any other actual circumnavigation except that
of the Phenicians sent by Nekôs; otherwise, Herodotus would have
made some allusion to it, instead of proceeding, as he does
immediately, to tell the story of the Persian Sataspês, who tried
and failed.
The testimony of the Carthaginians is so far valuable, as it
declares their persuasion of the truth of the statement made by
those Phenicians.
Some critics have construed the words, in which Herodotus alludes
to the Carthaginians as his informants, as if what they told him
was the story of the fruitless attempt made by Sataspês. But this
is evidently not the meaning of the historian: he brings forward
the opinion of the Carthaginians as confirmatory of the statement
made by the Phenicians employed by Nekôs.
[545] Diodorus (iii, 40) talks correct language about the
direction of the shadows southward of the tropic of Cancer
(compare Pliny, H. N. vi, 29),—one mark of the extension of
geographical and astronomical observations during the four
intervening centuries between him and Herodotus.
Some critics disbelieve this circumnavigation, from supposing that
if so remarkable an achievement had really taken place once, it must
have been repeated, and practical application must have been made
of it. But though such a suspicion is not unnatural, with those who
recollect how great a revolution was operated when the passage was
rediscovered during the fifteenth century,—yet the reasoning will not
be found applicable to the sixth century before the Christian era.
Pure scientific curiosity, in that age, counted for nothing: the
motive of Nekôs for directing this enterprise was the same as that
which had prompted him to dig his canal,—in order that he might
procure the best communication between the Mediterranean and the Red
sea. But, as it has been with the north-west passage in our time, so
it was with the circumnavigation of Africa in his,—the proof of its
practicability at the same time showed that it was not available for
purposes of traffic or communication, looking to the resources then
at the command of navigators,—a fact, however, which could not be
known until the experiment was made. To pass from the Mediterranean
to the Red sea by means of the Nile still continued to be the easiest
way; either by aid of the land-journey, which in the times of the
Ptolemies was usually made from Koptos on the Nile to Berenikê on the
Red sea,—or by means of the canal of Nekôs, which Darius afterwards
finished, though it seems to have been neglected during the Persian
rule in Egypt, and was subsequently repaired and put to service under
the Ptolemies. Without any doubt the successful Phenician mariners
underwent both severe hardship and great real perils, besides
those still greater supposed perils, the apprehension of which so
constantly unnerved the minds even of experienced and resolute
men in the unknown ocean. Such was the force of these terrors and
difficulties, to which there was no known termination, upon the mind
of the Achæmenid Sataspês (upon whom the circumnavigation of Africa
was imposed as a penalty “worse than death” by Xerxes, in commutation
of a capital sentence), that he returned without having finished the
circuit, though by so doing he forfeited his life. He affirmed that
he had sailed “until his vessel stuck fast, and could move on no
farther,”—a persuasion not uncommon in ancient times, and even down
to Columbus, that there was a point, beyond which the ocean,—either
from mud, sands, shallows, fogs, or accumulations of sea-weed,—was no
longer navigable.[546]
[546] Skylax, after following the line of coast from the
Mediterranean outside of the strait of Gibraltar, and then
south-westward along Africa as far as the island of Kernê, goes
on to say, that “beyond Kernê the sea is no longer navigable
from shallows, and mud, and sea-weed:” Τῆς δὲ Κέρνης νήσου τὰ
ἐπέκεινα οὐκέτι ἐστὶ πλωτὰ διὰ βραχύτητα θαλάττης καὶ πηλὸν καὶ
φῦκος. Ἐστὶ δὲ τὸ φῦκος τῆς δοχμῆς τὸ πλάτος καὶ ἄνωθεν ὀξὺ, ὥστε
κεντεῖν (Skylax, c. 109). Nearchus, on undertaking his voyage
down the Indus, and from thence into the Persian gulf, is not
certain whether the external sea will be found navigable—εἰ δὴ
πλωτός γέ ἐστιν ὁ ταύτῃ πόντος (Nearchi Periplus, p. 2: compare
p. 40, ap. Geogr. Minor. vol. i, ed. Hudson). Pytheas described
the neighborhood of Thulê as a sort of chaos—a medley of earth,
sea, and air, in which you could neither walk nor sail: οὔτε γῆ
καθ᾽ αὑτὴν ὕπηρχεν ἔτι οὔτε θάλασσα οὔτε ἀὴρ, ἀλλὰ σύγκριμά τι
ἐκ τούτων πλεύμονι θαλασσίῳ ἐοικὸς, ἐν ᾧ φησὶ τὴν γῆν καὶ τὴν
θάλασσαν αἰωρεῖσθαι καὶ τὰ σύμπαντα, καὶ τοῦτον ὡς ἂν δεσμὸν
εἶναι τῶν ὅλων, μήτε πορευτὸν μήτε πλωτὸν ὑπάρχοντα· τὸ μὲν οὖν
τῷ πλεύμονι ἐοικὸς αὐτὸς (Pytheas) ἑωρακέναι, τἄλλα δὲ λέγειν ἐξ
ἀκοῆς. (Strabo, ii, p. 104). Again, the priests of Memphis told
Herodotus that their conquering hero Sesostris had equipped a
fleet in the Arabian gulf, and made a voyage into the Erythræan
sea, subjugating people everywhere, “until he came to a sea
no longer navigable from shallows,”—οὐκέτι πλωτὴν ὑπὸ βραχέων
(Herod. ii, 109). Plato represents the sea without the Pillars of
Hêraklês as impenetrable and unfit for navigation, in consequence
of the large admixture of earth, mud, or vegetable covering,
which had arisen in it from the disruption of the great island or
continent Atlantis (Timæus, p. 25; and Kritias, p. 108); which
passages are well illustrated by the Scholiast, who seems to have
read geographical descriptions of the character of this outer
sea: τοῦτο καὶ οἱ τοὺς ἐκείνῃ τόπους ἱστοροῦντες λέγουσιν, ὡς
πάντα τεναγώδη τὸν ἐκεῖ εἶναι χῶρον· τέναγος δὲ ἐστὶν ἰλύς τις,
ἐπιπολάζοντος ὕδατος οὐ πολλοῦ, καὶ βοτάνης ἐπιφαινομένης τούτῳ.
See also Plutarch’s fancy of the dense, earthy, and viscous
Kronian sea (some days to the westward of Britain), in which a
ship could with difficulty advance, and only by means of severe
pulling with the oars (Plutarch, De Facie in Orbe Lunæ, c. 26, p.
941). So again in the two geographical productions in verse by
Rufus Festus Avienus (Hudson, Geogr. Minor. vol. iv, Descriptio
Orbis Terræ, v, 57, and Ora Maritima, v, 406-415): in the first
of these two, the density of the water of the western ocean is
ascribed to its being saturated with salt,—in the second, we have
shallows, large quantities of sea-weed, and wild beasts swimming
about, which the Carthaginian Himilco affirmed himself to have
seen:—
“Plerumque porro tenue tenditur salum,
Ut vix arenas subjacentes occulat;
Exsuperat autem gurgitem fucus frequens
Atque impeditur æstus ex uligine:
Vis vel ferarum pelagus omne internatat,
Mutusque terror ex feris habitat freta.
Hæc olim Himilco Pœnus Oceano super
_Spectasse_ semet et probasse rettulit:
Hæc nos, ab imis Punicorum annalibus
Prolata longo tempore, edidimus tibi.”
Compare also v, 115-130 of the same poem, where the author again
quotes from a voyage of Himilco, who had been four months in the
ocean outside of the Pillars of Hercules:—
“Sic nulla late flabra propellunt ratem,
Sic segnis humor æquoris pigri stupet.
Adjicit et illud, plurimum inter gurgites
Extare fucum, et sæpe virgulti vice
Retinere puppim,” etc.
The dead calm, mud, and shallows of the external ocean are
touched upon by Aristot. Meteorolog. ii, 1, 14, and seem to have
been a favorite subject of declamation with the rhetors of the
Augustan age. See Seneca, Suasoriar. i, 1.
Even the companions and contemporaries of Columbus, when
navigation had made such comparative progress, still retained
much of these fears respecting the dangers and difficulties
of the unknown ocean: “Le tableau exagéré (observes A. von
Humboldt, Examen Critique de l’Histoire de la Géographie, t. iii,
p. 95) que la ruse des Phéniciens avait tracé des difficultés
qu’opposaient à la navigation au delà des Colonnes d’Hercule, de
Cerné, et de l’Ile Sacrée (Ierné), le fucus, le limon, le manque
de fond, et le calme perpétuel de la mer, ressemble d’une manière
frappante aux récits animés des premiers compagnons de Colomb.”
Columbus was the first man who traversed the sea of Sargasso,
or area of the Atlantic ocean south of the Azores, where it
is covered by an immense mass of sea-weed for a space six or
seven times as large as France: the alarm of his crew at this
unexpected spectacle was considerable. The sea-weed is sometimes
so thickly accumulated, that it requires a considerable wind to
impel the vessel through it. The remarks and comparisons of M.
von Humboldt, in reference to ancient and modern navigation, are
highly interesting. (Examen, _ut sup._ pp. 69, 88, 91, etc.)
J. M. Gesner (Dissertat. de Navigationibus extra Columnas
Herculis, sects. 6 and 7) has a good defence of the story told
by Herodotus. Major Rennell also adopts the same view, and shows
by many arguments how much easier the circumnavigation was from
the East than from the West (Geograph. System of Herodotus, p.
680); compare Ukert, Geograph. der Griechen und Römer. vol. i, p.
61; Mannert, Geog. d. G. und Römer, vol. i, pp. 19-26. Gossellin
(Recherches sur la Géogr. des Anc. i, p. 149) and Mannert both
reject the story as not worthy of belief: Heeren defends it
(Ideen über den Verkehr der Alten Welt, i, 2, pp. 86-95).
Agatharchides, in the second century B. C., pronounces the
eastern coast of Africa, southward of the Red sea, to be as yet
unexamined: he treats it as a matter of certainty, however, that
the sea to the south-westward is continuous with the Western
ocean (De Rubro Mari, Geog. Minores, ed. Huds. v, i, p. 11).
Now we learn from hence that the enterprise, even by those who
believed the narrative of Nekôs’s captains, was regarded as at once
desperate and unprofitable; but doubtless many persons treated it as
a mere “Phenician lie,”[547] (to use an expression proverbial in
ancient times). The circumnavigation of Libya is said to have been
one of the projects conceived by Alexander the Great,[548] and we
may readily believe that if he had lived longer, it would have been
confided to Nearchus, or some other officer of the like competence:
nor can there be any reason why it should not have succeeded,
especially since it would have been undertaken from the eastward,
to the great profit of geographical knowledge among the ancients,
but with little advantage to their commerce. There is then adequate
reason for admitting that these Phenicians rounded the cape of Good
Hope from the East about 600 B. C., more than two thousand years
earlier than Vasco de Gama did the same thing from the West: though
the discovery was in the first instance of no avail, either for
commerce or for geographical science.
[547] Strabo, iii, p. 170. Sataspês (the unsuccessful Persian
circumnavigator of Libya, mentioned just above) had violated the
daughter of another Persian nobleman, Zopyrus son of Megabyzus,
and Xerxês had given orders that he should be crucified for this
act; his mother begged him off by suggesting that he should be
condemned to something “_worse than death_”—the circumnavigation
of Libya (Herod. iv, 43). Two things are to be remarked in
respect to his voyage: 1. He took with him a ship and seamen
from Egypt; we are not told that they were Phenician: probably
no other mariners than Phenicians were competent to such a
voyage,—and even if the crew of Sataspês had been Phenicians,
he could not offer rewards for success equal to those at the
disposal of Nekôs. 2. He began his enterprise from the strait
of Gibraltar instead of from the Red sea; now it seems that
the current between Madagascar and the eastern coast of Africa
sets very strongly towards the cape of Good Hope, so that while
it greatly assists the southerly voyage, on the other hand, it
makes return by the same way very difficult. (See Humboldt,
Examen Critique de l’Histoire de la Géographie, t. i, p. 343.)
Strabo, however, affirms that all those who had tried to
circumnavigate Africa, both from the Red sea and from the strait
of Gibraltar, had been forced to return without success (i, p.
32), so that most people believed that there was a continuous
isthmus which rendered it impracticable to go by sea from the one
point to the other: he is himself, however, persuaded that the
Atlantic is σύῤῥους on both sides of Africa, and therefore that
circumnavigation is possible. He as well as Poseidonius (ii, pp.
98-100) disbelieved the tale of the Phenicians sent by Nekôs.
He must have derived his complete conviction, that Libya might
be circumnavigated, from geographical theory, which led him to
contract the dimensions of that continent southward,—inasmuch
as the thing in his belief never had been done, though often
attempted. Mannert (Geog. d. G. und Röm. i, p. 24) erroneously
says that Strabo and others founded their belief on the narrative
of Herodotus.
It is worth while remarking that Strabo cannot have read the
story in Herodotus with much attention, since he mentions
Darius as the king who sent the Phenicians round Africa, not
Nekôs; nor does he take notice of the remarkable statement of
these navigators respecting the position of the sun. There
were doubtless many apocryphal narratives current in his
time respecting attempts, successful and unsuccessful, to
circumnavigate Africa, as we may see by the tale of Eudoxus
(Strabo, ii, 98; Cornel. Nep. ap. Plin. H. N. ii, 67, who gives
the story very differently; and Pomp. Mela, iii, 9).
[548] Arrian, Exp. Al. vii, 1, 2.
Besides the maritime range of Tyre and Sidon, their trade by land in
the interior of Asia was of great value and importance. They were
the speculative merchants who directed the march of the caravans
laden with Assyrian and Egyptian products across the deserts which
separated them from inner Asia,[549]—an operation which presented
hardly less difficulties, considering the Arabian depredators whom
they were obliged to conciliate and even to employ as carriers, than
the longest coast-voyage. They seem to have stood alone in antiquity
in their willingness to brave, and their ability to surmount, the
perils of a distant land-traffic;[550] and their descendants at
Carthage and Utica were not less active in pushing caravans far into
the interior of Africa.
[549] Herodot. i, 1. Φοίνικας—ἀπαγινέοντας φορτία Ἀσσύριά τε καὶ
Αἰγύπτια.
[550] See the valuable chapter in Heeren (Ueber den Verkehr der
Alten Welt i, 2, Abschn. 4, p. 96) about the land trade of the
Phenicians.
The twenty-seventh chapter of the prophet Ezekiel presents a
striking picture of the general commerce of Tyre.