CARTEIA.--TYRE AND HER WARES.--GLASS.
Every time I left the “Rock,” or returned to it, I had to pass round or
through the ruins of Carteia, always deferring an examination of them
to a special day. At last that day was fixed, and I went with three
friends, who more or less indulged in Phœnician predilections--the
French consul, M. Bero, Mr. Cornwell, and Dr. Dunbreck. We talked
over its old fortunes and great names, until it seemed that we were
paying a visit to Balbus, and had made an excursion of some thousand
years. We wandered over the red earth, which is a mass of pounded
brick, interspersed with broken marble of all colours, and fragments
of mortar which here and there showed surfaces smooth and painted
like those of the walls of Pompeii. We gathered tiles of sundry
dimensions, some grooved so as to fit together like those which have
been recently discovered in Arabia; some two feet square, with borders
raised like trays. They are quarrying still here, to build little boxes
like those on Hampstead Heath. In one place they had opened rows of
amphoræ standing on end. The only building which can be made out is
Roman,--the amphitheatre,--it is on the side of the hill, overlooking
the bay: the part resting against the hill still stands, even to the
upper stories, to commemorate the importance of this first colony,
and of the Romans, the settlement of the Hybrides, the Creoles of
antiquity; a race produced from Roman fathers and Iberian mothers,--as
before them the Bastuli were from Carthaginian fathers and Iberian
mothers. It is curious to see the instinct with which a Spaniard,--I
mean, of course, the educated class,--will catch at any allusion to
those races: they do not relish it, and do, therefore, understand the
intellectual bastardy of their own nature. It is, however, strange,
that they should be ashamed of association with a cross which produced
Hannibal and Asdrubal. I should like to see how _they_ would have taken
the assimilation with the dry and rootless stumps of men[107] to whom
Spain is now given over.
After we had completed our researches and concluded our homilies, we
repaired to a ruined convent to get figs. The inmates deal in relics,
and the stock was principally composed of flattened drops of blue
glass, in shape and size resembling peppermint lozenges. They must have
been in enormous quantities, for they are even yet picked up along
the beach at Cadiz and other places. Some suppose that the Phœnicians
circulated them as money--they made money out of them by disposing
of them. The ancients did not cut stones in facets; their cups,
arms,[108] horse-trappings, even their ships,[109] were studded with
gems: these drops were adapted to this purpose. These were gems (glass
in the East still goes by that name):[110] so that in these drops we
had the staple of Tyre, hinted at by Ezekiel, when he spoke of “her
riches in the sand.”
In like manner, on the Guinea coast, they still find drops of
Phœnician glass, which they sell for their weight in gold. We have
in vain attempted to imitate them. They retain this value although
Africa is deluged with glass from every work-shop in Europe. The fact
is of importance, as bearing on traffic, which Herodotus makes the
Carthaginians carry on, and which moderns dispute. What must glass
have been when the knowledge of its manufacture was a secret; when the
people who possessed it worked with system, and neither glutted the
market nor undersold one another.
Observing at the bottom of a large chest in which their curiosities
were kept, a quantity of rubbish, I had it turned out. There were all
sorts of strange things, from glass lustre drops to blacking labels. I
selected some fragments of what seemed then earthen jars: when wetted
they proved to be glass of brilliant and variegated colours; some
opaque, some translucent. On one there was a flower with yellow leaves
and a red centre; the ground was green and translucent; the leaves
were opaque, the leaves twisted in passing through, so that the yellow
appeared through the green as if shaded with a brush. On the other
side it came out a comet with a red head and a yellow tail. From the
tombs of Egypt and Etruria have been obtained specimens of the same
manufacture; but I have seen none equal to this.
These broken fragments seemed to change in my hands into a magic
mirror, in which were reflected the workshops of Sidon and Aradus,
smelting to order the gems of Golconda. What is the Philosopher’s Stone
to their daily craft!
But it will be objected that the Egyptians were acquainted with
it--that it is found as far back as the tombs of the fourth dynasty,
and in the old Pyramids of Memphis; and that glass-blowing is recorded
on the walls of Beni Hassan, in a tomb of the eleventh or twelfth
dynasty.[111] Nevertheless, I think I shall very easily show that this
art, so far as the Egyptians are concerned, was the peculiar property
of the Phœnicians.
The invention is by all antiquity attributed to the Tyrians. When Pliny
wrote there were still histories of Tyre extant; still traditions
as well as interpretations of the hieroglyphics. It is difficult to
imagine that if it had been Egyptian, it should have been given to any
other people; and, if not Tyrian, claimed by and surrendered to them.
Even if communicated to the Egyptians at the period when it figures
on their walls, it may have been for many previous centuries the
exclusive possession of Tyre, for the Phœnicians were of equal date
with the Egyptians.[112] The monuments of Egypt were not pictures of
common things, but records of extraordinary ones. They were designed to
illustrate the lives of kings and heroes; representing their triumphal
entries; their trophies; the tribute offered; the captives brought
home; the arts they introduced; the inventions and incidents of their
time. We have in them a few repetitions: elephants are there: they
are seen but once; a cart but once; brick-making once; glass-blowing
once, and that is in the reign of Sesu Sesen, consequently I will not
say that this record proves, but that it at least suggests, that up
to that time the manufacture was unknown in Egypt. The representation
is not, however, of glass-making; it is of blowing only: no where is
glass-making seen. If the Egyptians had the art of blowing glass only,
they must have imported the raw material.
The monument of Carnac enumerates among the tribute paid to Tathmes
III., “ingots of enamel;” and this tribute was paid four hundred years
after the glass-blowing figures on the walls. The material for glass
abounded in Egypt. They were dexterous in preparing mineral compounds
for colouring: had they understood the manufacture they would not have
imported it; and had the manufacture been known, we should have seen
it figured with the blowing. But the Egyptians, having learnt the art
of blowing, would desire to have the unmanufactured material in order
to adapt it to their own fashions. This is entirely confirmed by the
description given by the Egyptian priests to Herodotus; for it must be
after them that he designates the ornaments of the sacred crocodiles
(which we know to be glass), λίθανα χύτα, _fused stones_.
This tribute came from “Maharama,” or Mesopotamia, in the first cities
of which the Phœnicians had establishments.
Having set aside the claims put in for Egypt, no other people making
any, I have, I think, restored the invention to the Phœnicians.
A new claim has now been set up for the Assyrians, according to Mr.
Layard. “They had acquired the art of making glass. Several small
bottles or vases of elegant shape in this material were found at
Nimroud and Konyunjik.”[113] But, strange to say, in the very spot
where he came upon the first glass vase he found pottery, with letters
which he supposes to be Phœnician.
The Greeks knew nothing of the art, though they possessed the
substance. Prometheus, in Eschylus, claims the honour of almost every
invention--glass is not enumerated among his titles to the hatred of
Jupiter. Socrates, in “The Clouds,” tricks a bum-bailiff out of his wit
by means of a burning-glass.[114] From the Scholiast we learn, that
these were sold at the apothecaries.
This burner may now seem of another substance, of which the Phœnicians
had possession--amber. I have seen it so used on the coast of the
Baltic, being formed in the most primitive manner by rubbing between
the palms of the hands. Amber was supposed to attract the sun’s rays,
as it did various substances, whence its name, ἔλεκτρον. The word was
also applied to glass,[115] from its possessing a similar quality.
There may be more in the association than we have yet discovered. Pliny
mentions the magnet as used in the preparation of glass. The Tyrians
employed glass as artillery; they discharged what was called “melted
sand” at Alexander’s troops in storms which inflicted torture, and
carried dismay and agonies against which no defensive armour could
avail. The Venetians, following in their steps, likewise made glass
their artillery. The first shells, and perhaps the most effectual, were
of glass; they are still to be seen used as ink-bottles.
But the art seems to have extended from burning glasses to microscopes
and telescopes, or they must have had eyes differently constituted from
ours; for without such aid we could not make out valleys and mountains
in the Moon; the milky-way[116] to be composed of stars; or count, as
there is reason to believe they had done, the satellites of Jupiter
and Saturn: and, supposing reflectors, and not lenses, were employed
to survey the heavens, we can hardly escape from acknowledging their
claim to microscopes and magic lanterns.[117] Their gems could not have
been engraved without such aid; indeed, we require glass to make out
the figures of some of them.[118] Eye-glasses we know they had, from
Nero, who, being short-sighted, used one in the amphitheatre: it is
called an emerald. One of the personages on the Greek stage had eyes of
different colours, which was represented in his mask, and of course by
coloured glasses. All these were the “wares of Tyre.”
In after times the manufacture of glass was transferred to Rome; but in
the early period the Phœnicians must have supplied glass to Greece and
Italy, as they did to Egypt, Assyria, Spain, and Africa.
In the chapter of Ezekiel, in which Tyre is described, a very
different country is represented as sending to Tyre their produce
for “her wares;” but what the “ten thousand”[119] wares of Tyre were
nowhere appears, unless in the “treasures hid in the sand.” We know
of no wares that she had except dyes and glass;--dyes implies the
dyeing of stuffs; but in Phœnicia there were no manufactories; and
she is herself represented as importing manufactured stuffs. A few
glass-houses, according to our notion, would not suffice to compel an
exchange of the metal of Ogg, and the beasts of Deden, and the pearls
of Chittim, and the gold of Tarshish. The wares consisted in the dye
itself which she extracted from the shells of her own coast, and from
that portion of the coast of Africa, where they were in like manner
found, and the drops of glass equivalent to gems, to prepare which a
few hands sufficed, and on which the profits must have exceeded all
calculation.[120]
The great nations of antiquity eschewed commerce and navigation: they
lived at home. It is the property of a primitive people so to live; and
that concentration of life upon the spot must be the character of all
institutions which are calculated to last long. To the Egyptian the
sea was unclean: the Hindoo, the Persian, the Chinese, all avoided the
sea-trade. Of the tribes nearly allied to the Phœnicians, one only, the
Arabs, were a transporting people;[121] the two monopolised the trade
of early times, the Arab carrying on the traffic of the desert by his
camels, the Phœnician that of the sea by his ships.
The great nations I have referred to were not anti-commercial: they
received the stranger who came amongst them as a friend; he was
more--he was a guest--the rites of hospitality extended to whole tribes
who came to settle wherever there was room for them. How much then
must have been the favour which attended the arrival and settlement
of trading strangers? There could have been in Tyre no competitions,
no under-sellings, no combinations. From the beginning to the end of
their exchanges there must have been an adaptation of the profits
of the community and of the individual--a union of traffic and
government.[122] This endured for not less than one thousand, and may
have extended to nearly two thousand, years.
The Phœnicians, in the structure of the old world, may be compared to
the lime cementing the blocks, or to the veins and arteries spreading
life through the body. Phœnicia was the smallest of states: arms had no
part in her growth, conquest no share in her greatness. She gathered
and spread around the produce of the earth and of the toil of man;
its business was on homely and vulgar things. More than the mystery
which shrouds the antiquity of the most visionary, is spread over the
origin of this most practical of people; our profoundest writers are at
variance as to whether she gave to, or borrowed from, Greece her gods;
as to the form of government which prevailed in her cities; as to the
taxes imposed on her merchandise. The avowed introducers of letters
into the Western world alone remain without the record of a written
page, or of a chiselled stone.
We see in this society dominion without conquest; greatness without
ambition; permanency without numbers; freedom without turbulence;
commerce without legislation;[123] and riches without pauperism.
Neither arrogant in their strength, nor servile in their weakness,
they could abstain from encroachments on the Lybian or Iberian
populations, who afforded them a settlement, and maintain their
peculiar character in Memphis, Babylon, and Persepolis. Their commerce
paid to, while it received tribute from, every shore it visited; and
was enriched in the aggregate wealth of all the wealth it bestowed.
Thus did it take tithe of the spices of Malabar and the Philippines; of
the frankincense of Abyssinia and Arabia; of the fine linen of Egypt;
of the herds and camels of Deden; of the corn and oil of Judæa; of
the ivory and ebony of Lybia and Hindoostan; of the gold of Spain; of
the tin of the Cassiterides; of the amber of the Baltic. It had its
colonies and its stores at Taprobane, as it had them at Cadiz and in
Britain.
[Illustration]
A few days after my visit to Carteia, I was looking over some coins
which a gentleman at Gibraltar had collected, and was astounded
to come upon one which is not copied, but which is represented in
the accompanying wood-cut.[124] This told the whole story of the
glass-houses and the tin. I wonder if the coin was censured as
indiscreet at Tyre. How is it that by putting the hand in this fashion
to the nose the fancy should be tickled? Whence did the custom come?
how did it travel to Britain? One is not prepared to have to search
for such a gesture in the Hebrew Talmudists, or the Greek scholiasts;
but here it is raised to numismatic dignity, and is worthy of the
philosopher.
There is a ludicrously supercilious animal, very strong and very
stupid, with a horn on his nose, belonging to Africa, the Holy Land,
Mesopotamia--in fact, all the Phœnician countries. He was the Behemoth,
for of no other animal could Job be thinking when he said, “With his
nose he pierceth through snares”--the horn, emblem of victorious
strength, denoting by its exaltation its own achievements, and the
proud bearing of the brow on which it is planted. Each year gives to
it increase, and each increase is marked by a wrinkle which comes to
signify acquirement. There are false acquirements as there are true;
and the horn of the nose is the burlesque of the horn of the forehead.
The motion that is given to the hand shows that it is the spiral
wreathings of a horn that are imitated: the rhinoceros represents the
one, the unicorn the other.
Of the two images, the African has preserved the grave one, we the
grotesque. The Abyssinian warrior, when he has gained a victory, adorns
his forehead with a horn. The London coalheaver, when he has made a
hit, puts his thumb to his nose.
This gesture in its grotesque form was known not long ago in Spain,
although at present it appears to have died out. Cervantes unmistakably
describes it, and in the person of Sancho Panza; the English have
therefore the sole honour and distinction of preserving this
peculiarity of the Phœnicians and Etruscans.[125]
I might be inclined to place beside this, the groups of lions and
unicorns at Persepolis, which so closely resemble the supporters of the
English arms, as scarcely to be referable to coincidence. They are,
indeed, of recent adoption as the arms of England, but of ancient date
in those of Scotland. The emblematic plants of England were, however,
those of Phœnicia--the oak and the ivy; and the rose of England is
still the flower of Spain. The blood-red hand of Ulster is in Morocco
stuck above every door. It wants not so much to raise the thought, or
justify the association. Instinctively one seeks for some sympathetic
deed, which shall link us to the Phœnicians; and Spain lies between,
and is bound therewith: she too at length prides herself on her Moorish
blood, and exalts herself (or at least did so till we robbed her
fortress) on her British friendship recorded in the proverb:--
Guerra con toda la tierra,
Pero par con Ynglaterra.
The extinction of written records has given importance in these
countries to every trifling usage or tradition, as will be best felt
by reviewing the catalogue of mischances which have befallen the
literature of Africa, and of the great people, who in the West have
given to it its celebrity.
Alexander destroyed the libraries of Tyre: those of Sidon perished in
the flames with their wealth and themselves. The whole mass of the
literature of Carthage was destroyed by the Romans, except a small
portion given to Massinissa.
The Alexandrian library was burnt by the troops of Julius Cæsar.
The various collections made at Rome by Asinius Pollio, Augustus,
and Tiberius, were lost in the fires under Nero and Titus. Domitian
endeavoured to repair the disaster by getting the manuscripts of
private collections copied, and ransacking Africa for the lost works:
these were deposited in the Temple of Peace, and destroyed by fire
under Commodus.
Finally, the gleanings of Rome were carried off by Genseric and _lost
at sea_. The persecution of the Donatists led to the burning, all
over Africa, of books and manuscripts. The Mussulman conquests led to
fresh burnings, and the great African collections of Alexandria again
perished under Omar.
The 600,000 volumes of Cordova, and the enormous collections of the
learned cities of the Moors, perished by Christian and Gothic hands.
The library of Tunis was destroyed by Charles V.; Muley Hassan lamented
it more than his city. After the ravages of war had ceased, Cardinal
Ximenes, the munificent patron of literature, consigned to the flames
88,000 African manuscripts. Lastly came the capture of the library of
the King of Morocco, a portion of which constitutes the collection of
the Escurial, and this again has suffered by fire.
Thus have been swept away the literary records of this quarter of
the globe, as completely as devouring sands and the human ravages of
more recent times have effaced all local signs. The curiosity of the
traveller is arrested on its inhospitable shores; the research of the
antiquarian baffled by the scantiness or uncertainty of data. Her
history remains what her interior still is: we can wander, guided only
by the stars--little points of light that shine only because of the
surrounding darkness.
FOOTNOTES:
[107] A late Queen of Spain, speaking of colonization,
said,--“Spaniards now-a-days have no roots.”
[108] Stellatus cuspide fulva ensis erat. _Æn._
[109] The antique Turkish galleys, some of which still continued to
navigate the Black Sea fifteen years ago, had their stems and sterns
largely ornamented in Venetian glass.
[110] In Turkish, _jam_ is applied generally to glass: the Arabs
restrict it to the bowl when empty.
[111] The Egyptians “were not only acquainted with glass, but excelled
in staining it of diverse hues, and their ingenuity had pointed out to
them the method of carrying devices of various colours directly through
the fused substance.”--WILKINSON. Abulfaragus says, it was known to the
Egyptians soon after the flood; and Diodorus says the Ethiopians used
it.
[112] Josephus, scouting the arrogance of the Greeks, who might be said
“to be of yesterday,” in presuming to speak of Jewish history, refers
them to the “Phœnicians and Egyptians.”
[113] Nineveh, vol. ii. p. 421.
[114] Servius in commenting on Æneid, xii. 200, says, “The first
inhabitants of the earth never carried fire to their altars, but by
their prayers brought it down from heaven.” The Parsees of India, when
by any accident their fire is extinguished, _use burning glasses_.
[115] See Scholiast to the Clouds of Aristophanes.
[116] Salanti, vol. i. p. 285. Aboulala (4th century) says, “The
stars which form the milky-way.” Aristotle speaks of the mirrors for
surveying the heavens. Those of Memphis and Pharos are often mentioned.
Strabo speaks of tubes for magnifying objects; such tubes are mentioned
in old Arabic writers.
[117] Damascius (apud Photium. Biblioth, cap. 242) describes the figure
of a head thrown upon the wall of the temple in this manner, which
could only be done by a magic lantern.
[118] Theodorus, who constructed the labyrinth of Samos, placed a
chariot and four horses on the finger of a statue of himself; the
chariot, horses, and charioteer could all be covered by the wings
of a fly, which he also devised. The same is related of Myrmecedes.
Callicrates cut insects, the limbs of which could not be discovered by
the naked eye. See Pliny, Nat. Hist., b. xxxiv. c. 5; B. xxxvi. c. 5.
[119] Μύρ’ ἄγοντες ἀθύρματα νηἱ μελαίνη.
[120] Ἀγοράζοντες τὸν ἄργυρον μικρὸς τινὸς ὰντιδότες ἄλλων
φορτιων.--STRABO.
[121] “We neither inhabit a maritime country,” says Josephus, “nor
do we delight in merchandise, nor in the mixture with other men that
arises from it. Our cities are remote from the sea, and having a
fruitful country, we take care in cultivating that only.”
In the expeditions under Solomon it is expressly stated that the men of
Tyre went to navigate their ships.
[122] I have described a similar state of things as existing in our own
times at Ambelakia in Thessaly, and the Mademo Choria in Macedonia. See
“The Spirit of the East.”
[123] “Nothing was known of the balance of trade, and consequently
all the violent measures resulting from it were unknown to the Greeks
... as everything was decided by examinations and not by theories,
there may have been exceptions, where the state for a time usurped a
monopoly. But how far was this from the mercantile and restrictive
system of the moderns.”--HEEREN _Pol. Hist. Ancient Greece_, c. x. 163.
[124] The coin is in one of the addenda to Flores;--it is not in the
copy at the British Museum. The coin is, however, known in the medal
room.
[125] It is figured on a vase in the Museo Borbonico.