History of Phoenicia (page 4)

discredited, but perhaps without sufficient reason. He is supported to a considerable extent by Theophrastus, the disciple of Aristotle, who says:[67] “Frankincense, myrrh, and cassia grow in the Arabian districts of Saba and Hadramaut; frankincense and myrrh on the sides or at the foot of mountains, and in the neighbouring islands. The trees which produce them grow sometimes wild, though occasionally they are cultivated; and the frankincense-tree grows sometimes taller than the tree producing the myrrh.” Modern authorities declare the frankincense-tree (/Boswellia thurifera/) to be still a native of Hadramaut;[68] and there is no doubt that the myrrh-tree (/Balsamodendron myrrha/) also grows there. If cinnamon and cassia, as the terms are now understood, do not at present grow in Arabia, or nearer to Phœnicia than Hindustan, it may be that they have died out in the former country, or our modern use of the terms may differ from the ancient one. On the other hand, it is no doubt possible that the Phœnicians imagined all the spices which they obtained from Arabia to be the indigenous growth of the country, when in fact some of them were importations.

Next to her spices, Arabia was famous for the production of a superior quality of wool. The Phœnicians imported this wool largely. The flocks of Kedar are especially noted,[69] and are said to have included both sheep and goats.[70] It was perhaps a native woollen manufacture, in which Dedan traded with Tyre, and which Ezekiel notices as a trade in “cloths for chariots.”[71] Goat’s hair was largely employed in the production of coverings for tents.[72] Arabia also furnished Phœnicia with gold, with precious stones, with ivory, ebony, and wrought iron.[73] The wrought iron was probably from Yemen, which was celebrated for its manufacture of sword blades. The gold may have been native, for there is much reason to believe that anciently the Arabian mountain ranges yielded gold as freely as the Ethiopian,[74] with which they form one system; or it may have been imported from Hindustan, with which Arabia had certainly, in ancient times, constant communication. Ivory and ebony must, beyond a doubt, have been Arabian importations. There are two countries from which they may have been derived, India and Abyssinia. It is likely that the commercial Arabs of the south-east coast had dealings with both.[75]

Of Phœnician imports into Arabia we have no account; but we may conjecture that they consisted principally of manufactured goods, cotton and linen fabrics, pottery, implements and utensils in metal, beads, and other ornaments for the person, and the like. The nomadic Arabs, leading a simple life, required but little beyond what their own country produced; there was, however, a town population[76] in the more southern parts of the peninsula, to which the elegancies and luxuries of life, commonly exported by Phœnicia, would have been welcome.

The Phœnician trade with Babylonia and Assyria was carried on probably by caravans, which traversed the Syrian desert by way of Tadmor or Palmyra, and struck the Euphrates about Circesium. Here the route divided, passing to Babylon southwards along the course of the great river, and to Nineveh eastwards by way of the Khabour and the Sinjar mountain-range. Both countries seem to have supplied the Phœnicians with fabrics of extraordinary value, rich in a peculiar embroidery, and deemed so precious that they were packed in chests of cedar-wood, which the Phœnician merchants must have brought with them from Lebanon.[77] The wares furnished by Assyria were in some cases exported to Greece,[78] while no doubt in others they were intended for home consumption. They included cylinders in rock crystal, jasper, hematite, steatite, and other materials, which may sometimes have found purchasers in Phœnicia Proper, but appear to have been specially affected by the Phœnician colonists in Cyprus.[79] On her part Phœnicia must have imported into Assyria and Babylonia the tin which was a necessary element in their bronze; and they seem also to have found a market in Assyria for their own most valuable and artistic bronzes, the exquisite embossed pateræ which are among the most precious of the treasures brought by Sir Austen Layard from Nineveh.[80]

The nature of the Phœnician trade with Upper Mesopotamia is unknown to us; and it is not impossible that their merchants visited Haran,[81] rather because it lay on the route which they had to follow in order to reach Armenia than because it possessed in itself any special attraction for them. Gall-nuts and manna are almost the only products for which the region is celebrated; and of these Phœnicia herself produced the one, while she probably did not need the other. But the natural route to Armenia was by way of the Cœlesyrian valley, Aleppo and Carchemish, to Haran, and thence by Amida or Diarbekr to Van, which was the capital of Armenia in the early times.

Armenia supplied the Phœnicians with “horses of common and of noble breeds,”[82] and also with mules.[83] Strabo says that it was a country exceedingly well adapted for the breeding of the horse,[84] and even notes the two qualities of the animal that it produced, one of which he calls “Nisæan,” though the true “Nisæan plain” was in Media. So large was the number of colts bred each year, and so highly were they valued, that, under the Persian monarchy the Great King exacted from the province, as a regular item of its tribute, no fewer than twenty thousand of them annually.[85] Armenian mules seem not to be mentioned by any writer besides Ezekiel; but mules were esteemed throughout the East in antiquity,[86] and no country would have been more likely to breed them than the mountain tract of Armenia, the Switzerland of Western Asia, where such surefooted animals would be especially needed.

Armenia adjoined the country of the Moschi and Tibareni–the Meshech and Tubal of the Bible. These tribes, between the ninth and the seventh centuries B.C., inhabited the central regions of Asia Minor and the country known later as Cappadocia. They traded with Tyre in the “persons of men” and in “vessels of brass” or copper.[87] Copper is found abundantly in the mountain ranges of these parts, and Xenophon remarks on the prevalence of metal vessels in the portion of the region which he passed through–the country of the Carduchians.[88] The traffic in slaves was one in which the Phœnicians engaged from very early times. They were not above kidnapping men, women, and children in one country and selling them into another;[89] besides which they seem to have frequented regularly the principal slave marts of the time. They bought such Jews as were taken captive and sold into slavery by the neighbouring nations,[90] and they looked to the Moschi and Tibareni for a constant supply of the commodity from the Black Sea region.[91] The Caucasian tribes have always been in the habit of furnishing slave-girls to the harems of the East, and the Thracians, who were not confined to Europe, but occupied a great part of Asia Minor, regularly trafficked in their children.[92]

Such was the extent of the Phœnician land trade, as indicated by the prophet Ezekiel, and such were, so far as is at present known, the commodities interchanged in the course of it. It is quite possible– nay, probable–that the trade extended much further, and certain that it must have included many other articles of commerce besides those which we have mentioned. The sources of our information on the subject are so few and scanty, and the notices from which we derive our knowledge for the most part so casual, that we may be sure what is preserved is but a most imperfect record of what was–fragments of wreck recovered from the sea of oblivion. It may have been a Phœnician caravan route which Herodotus describes as traversed on one occasion by the Nasamonians,[93] which began in North Africa and terminated with the Niger and the city of Timbuctoo; and another, at which he hints as lying between the coast of the Lotus-eaters and Fezzan.[94] Phœnician traders may have accompanied and stimulated the slave hunts of the Garamantians,[95] as Arab traders do those of the Central African nations at the present day. Again, it is quite possible that the Phœnicians of Memphis designed and organised the caravans which, proceeding from Egyptian Thebes, traversed Africa from east to west along the line of the “Salt Hills,” by way of Ammon, Augila, Fezzan, and the Tuarik country to Mount Atlas.[96] We can scarcely imagine the Egyptians showing so much enterprise. But these lines of traffic can be ascribed to the Phœnicians only by conjecture, history being silent on the subject.

The sea trade of the Phœnicians was still more extensive than their land traffic. It is divisible into two branches, their trade with their own colonists, and that with the natives of the various countries to which they penetrated in their voyages. The colonies sent out from Phœnicia were, except in the single instance of Carthage, trading settlements, planted where some commodity or commodities desired by the mother-country abounded, and were intended to secure to the mother-country the monopoly of such commodity or commodities. For instance, Cyprus was colonised for the sake of its copper mines and its timber; Cilicia and Lycia for their timber only; Thasos for its gold mines; Salamis and Cythera for the purple trade; Sardinia and Spain for their numerous metals; North Africa for its fertility and for the trade with the interior. Phœnicia expected to derive, primarily, from each colony the commodity or commodities which had caused the selection of the site. In return she supplied the colonists with her own manufactured articles; with fabrics in linen, wool, cotton, and perhaps to some extent in silk; with every variety of pottery, from dishes and jugs of the plainest and most simple kind to the most costly and elaborate vases and amphoræ; with metal utensils and arms, with gold and silver ornaments, with embossed shields and pateræ, with faïnce and glass, and also with any foreign products or manufactures that they desired and that the countries within the range of her influence could furnish. Phœnicia must have imported into Cyprus, to suit a peculiar Cyprian taste, the Egyptian statuettes, scarabs, and rings,[97] and the Assyrian and Babylonian cylinders, which have been found there. The tin which she brought from the Cassiterides she distributed generally, for she did not discourage her colonists from manufacturing for themselves to some extent. There was probably no colony which did not make its own bronze vessels of the commoner sort and its own coarser pottery.

In her trade with the nations who peopled the coasts of the Mediterranean, the Propontis, and the Black Sea, Phœnicia aimed primarily at disposing to advantage of her own commodities, secondarily at making a profit in commodities which she had obtained from other countries, and thirdly on obtaining commodities which she might dispose of to advantage elsewhere. Where the nations were uncivilised, or in a low condition of civilisation, she looked to making a large profit by furnishing them at a cheap rate with all the simplest conveniences of life, with their pottery, their implements and utensils, their clothes, their arms, the ornaments of their persons and of their houses. Underselling the native producers, she soon obtained a monopoly of this kind of trade, drove the native products out of the market, and imposed her own instead, much as the manufacturers of Manchester, Birmingham, and the Potteries impose their calicoes, their cutlery, and their earthenware on the savages of Africa and Polynesia. Where culture was more advanced, as in Greece and parts of Italy,[98] she looked to introduce, and no doubt succeeded in introducing, the best of her own productions, fabrics of crimson, violet, and purple, painted vases, embossed pateræ, necklaces, bracelets, rings–“cunning work” of all manner of kinds[99] –mirrors, glass vessels, and smelling-bottles. At the same time she also disposed at a profit of many of the wares that she had imported from foreign countries, which were advanced in certain branches of art, as Egypt, Babylonia, Assyria, possibly India. The muslins and ivory of Hindustan, the shawls of Kashmir, the carpets of Babylon, the spices of Araby the Blest, the pearls of the Persian Gulf, the faïence and the papyrus of Egypt, would be readily taken by the more civilised of the Western nations, who would be prepared to pay a high price for them. They would pay for them partly, no doubt, in silver and gold, but to some extent also in their own manufactured commodities, Attica in her ceramic products, Corinth in her “brass,” Etruria in her candelabra and engraved mirrors,[100] Argos in her highly elaborated ornaments.[101] Or, in some cases, they might make return out of the store wherewith nature had provided them, Eubœa rendering her copper, the Peloponnese her “purple,” Crete her timber, the Cyrenaica its silphium.

Outside the Pillars of Hercules the Phœnicians had only savage nations to deal with, and with these they seem to have traded mainly for the purpose of obtaining certain natural products, either peculiarly valuable or scarcely procurable elsewhere. Their trade with the Scilly Islands and the coast of Cornwall was especially for the procuring of tin. Of all the metals, tin is found in the fewest places, and though Spain seems to have yielded some anciently,[102] yet it can only have been in small quantities, while there was an enormous demand for tin in all parts of the old world, since bronze was the material almost universally employed for arms, tools, implements, and utensils of all kinds, while tin is the most important, though not the largest, element in bronze. From the time that the Phœnicians discovered the Scilly Islands–the “Tin Islands” (Cassiterides), as they called them –it is probable that the tin of the civilised world was almost wholly derived from this quarter. Eastern Asia, no doubt, had always its own mines, and may have exported tin to some extent, in the remoter times, supplying perhaps the needs of Egypt, Assyria, and Babylon. But, after the rich stores of the metal which our own islands possess were laid open, and the Phœnicians with their extensive commercial dealings, both in the West and in the East, became interested in diffusing it, British tin probably drove all other out of use, and obtained the monopoly of the markets wherever Phœnician influence prevailed. Hence the trade with the Cassiterides was constant, and so highly prized that a Phœnician captain, finding his ship followed by a Roman vessel, preferred running it upon the rocks to letting a rival nation learn the secret of how the tin-producing coast might be approached in safety.[103] With the tin it was usual for the merchants to combine a certain amount of lead and a certain quantity of skins or hides; while they gave in exchange pottery, salt, and articles in bronze, such as arms, implements, and utensils for cooking and for the table.[104]

If the Phœnicians visited, as some maintain that they did,[105] the coasts of the Baltic, it must have been for the purpose of obtaining amber. Amber is thrown up largely by the waters of that land-locked sea, and at present especially abounds on the shore in the vicinity of Dantzic. It is very scarce elsewhere. The Phœnicians seem to have made use of amber in their necklaces from a very early date;[106] and, though they might no doubt have obtained it by land-carriage across Europe to the head of the Adriatic, yet their enterprise and their commercial spirit were such as would not improbably have led them to seek to open a direct communication with the amber-producing region, so soon as they knew where it was situated. The dangers of the German Ocean are certainly not greater than those of the Atlantic; and if the Phœnicians had sufficient skill in navigation to reach Britain and the Fortunate Islands, they could have found no very serious difficulty in penetrating to the Baltic. On the other hand, there is no direct evidence of their having penetrated so far, and perhaps the Adriatic trade may have supplied them with as much amber as they needed.

The trade of the Phœnicians with the west coast of Africa had for its principal objects the procuring of ivory, of elephant, lion, leopard, and deer-skins, and probably of gold. Scylax relates that there was an established trade in his day (about B.C. 350) between Phœnicia and an island which he calls Cerne, probably Arguin, off the West African coast. “The merchants,” he says,[107] “who are Phœnicians, when they have arrived at Cerne, anchor their vessels there, and after having pitched their tents upon the shore, proceed to unload their cargo, and to convey it in smaller boats to the mainland. The dealers with whom they trade are Ethiopians; and these dealers sell to the Phœnicians skins of deer, lions, panthers, and domestic animals–elephants’ skins also, and their teeth. The Ethiopians wear embroidered garments, and use ivory cups as drinking vessels; their women adorn themselves with ivory bracelets; and their horses also are adorned with ivory. The Phœnicians convey to them ointment, elaborate vessels from Egypt, castrated swine(?), and Attic pottery and cups. These last they commonly purchase [in Athens] at the Feast of Cups. These Ethiopians are eaters of flesh and drinkers of milk; they make also much wine from the vine; and the Phœnicians, too, supply some wine to them. They have a considerable city, to which the Phœnicians sail up.” The river on which the city stood was probably the Senegal.

It will be observed that Scylax says nothing in this passage of any traffic for gold. We can scarcely suppose, however, that the Phœnicians, if they penetrated so far south as this, could remain ignorant of the fact that West Africa was a gold-producing country, much less that, being aware of the fact, they would fail to utilise it. Probably they were the first to establish that “dumb commerce” which was afterwards carried on with so much advantage to themselves by the Carthaginians, and whereof Herodotus gives so graphic an account. “There is a country,” he says,[108] “in Libya, and a nation, beyond the Pillars of Hercules, which the Carthaginians are wont to visit, where they no sooner arrive than forthwith they unlade their wares, and having disposed them after an orderly fashion along the beach, there leave them, and returning aboard their ships, raise a great smoke. The natives, when they see the sample, come down to the shore, and laying out to view so much gold as they think the wares are worth, withdraw to a distance. The Carthaginians upon this come ashore again and look. If they think the gold to be enough, they take it and go their way; but if it does not seem to them sufficient, they go aboard ship once more, and wait patiently. Then the others approach and add to their gold, till the Carthaginians are satisfied. Neither party deals unfairly by the other: for they themselves never touch the gold till it comes up to the worth of their goods, nor do the natives ever carry off the goods until the gold has been taken away.”

The nature of the Phœnician trade with the Canaries, or Fortunate Islands, is not stated by any ancient author, and can only be conjectured. It would scarcely have been worth the Phœnicians’ while to convey timber to Syria from such a distance, or we might imagine the virgin forests of the islands attracting them.[109] The large breed of dogs from which the Canaries derived their later name[110] may perhaps have constituted an article of export even in Phœnician times, as we know they did later, when we hear of their being conveyed to King Juba;[111] but there is an entire lack of evidence on the subject. Perhaps the Phœnicians frequented the islands less for the sake of commerce than for that of watering and refitting the ships engaged in the African trade, since the natives were less formidable than those who inhabited the mainland.[112]

There was one further direction in which the Phœnicians pushed their maritime trade, not perhaps continuously, but at intervals, when their political relations were such as to give them access to the sea which washed Asia on the south and on the southeast. The nearest points at which they could embark for the purpose of exploring or utilising the great tract of ocean in this quarter were the inner recesses of the two deep gulfs known as the Persian and the Arabian. It has been thought by some[113] that there were times in their history when the Phœnicians had the free use of both these gulfs, and could make the starting-point of their eastern explorations and trading voyages either a port on one of the two arms into which the Red Sea divides towards the north, or a harbour on the Persian Gulf near its north- western extremity. But the latter supposition rests upon grounds which are exceedingly unsafe and uncertain. That the Phœnicians migrated at some remote period from the shores of the Persian Gulf to the Mediterranean may be allowed to be highly probable; but that, after quitting their primitive abodes and moving off nearly a thousand miles to the westward, they still maintained a connection with their early settlements and made them centres for a trade with the Far East, is as improbable a hypothesis as any that has ever received the sanction of men of learning and repute. The Babylonians, through whose country the connection must have been kept up, were themselves traders, and would naturally keep the Arabian and Indian traffic in their own hands; nor can we imagine them as brooking the establishment of a rival upon their shores. The Arabians were more friendly; but they, too, would have disliked to share their carrying trade with a foreign nation. And the evidence entirely fails to show that the Phœnicians, from the time of their removal to the Mediterranean, ever launched a vessel in the Persian Gulf, or had any connection with the nations inhabiting its shores, beyond that maintained by the caravans which trafficked by land between the Phœnician cities and the men of Dedan and Babylon.[114]

It was otherwise with the more western gulf. There, certainly, from time to time, the Phœnicians launched their fleets, and carried on a commerce which was scarcely less lucrative because they had to allow the nations whose ports they used a participation in its profits. It is not impossible that, occasionally, the Egyptians allowed them to build ships in some one or more of their Red Sea ports, and to make such port or ports the head-quarters of a trade which may have proceeded beyond the Straits of Babelmandeb and possibly have reached Zanzibar and Ceylon. At any rate, we know that, in the time of Solomon, two harbours upon the Red Sea were open to them–viz. Eloth and Ezion-Geber–both places situated in the inner recess of the Elanitic Gulf, or Gulf of Akaba, the more eastern of the two arms into which the Red Sea divides. David’s conquest of Edom had put these ports into the possession of the Israelites, and the friendship between Hiram and Solomon had given the Phœnicians free access to them. It was the ambition of Solomon to make the Israelites a nautical people, and to participate in the advantages which he perceived to have accrued to Phœnicia from her commercial enterprise. Besides sharing with the Phœnicians in the trade of the Mediterranean,[115] he constructed with their help a fleet at Ezion-Geber upon the Red Sea,[116] and the two allies conjointly made voyages to the region, or country, called Ophir, for the purpose of procuring precious stones, gold, and almug-wood.[117] Ophir is, properly speaking, a portion of Arabia,[118] and Arabia was famous for its production of gold,[119] and also for its precious stones.[120] Whether it likewise produced almug-trees is doubtful;[121] and it is quite possible that the joint fleet went further than Ophir proper, and obtained the “almug-wood” from the east coast of Africa, or from India. The Somauli country might have been as easily reached as South-eastern Arabia, and if India is considerably more remote, yet there was nothing to prevent the Phœnicians from finding their way to it.[122] We have, however, no direct evidence that their commerce in the Indian Ocean ever took them further than the Arabian coast, about E. Long. 55º.

CHAPTER X

MINING

Surface gathering of metals, anterior to mining–Earliest known mining operations–Earliest Phœnician mining in Phœnicia Proper– Mines of Cyprus–Phœnician mining in Thasos and Thrace–in Sardinia–in Spain–Extent of the metallic treasures there– Phœnician methods not unlike those of the present day–Use of shafts, adits, and galleries–Roof of mines propped or arched– Ores crushed, pounded, and washed–Use of quicksilver unknown– Mines worked by slave labour.

The most precious and useful of the metals lie, in many places, so near the earth’s surface that, in the earliest times, mining is unneeded and therefore unpractised. We are told that in Spain silver was first discovered in consequence of a great fire, which consumed all the forests wherewith the mountains were clothed, and lasted many days; at the end of which time the surface of the soil was found to be intersected by streams of silver from the melting of the superficial silver ore through the intense heat of the conflagration. The natives did not know what to do with the metal, so they bartered it away to the Phœnician traders, who already frequented their country, in return for some wares of very moderate value.[1] Whether this tale be true or no, it is certain that even at the present day, in what are called “new countries,” valuable metals often show themselves on the surface of the soil, either in the form of metalliferous earths, or of rocks which shine with spangles of a metallic character, or occasionally, though rarely, of actual masses of pure ore, sometimes encrusted with an oxide, sometimes bare, bright, and unmistakable. In modern times, whenever there is a rush into any gold region–whether California, or Australia, or South Africa–the early yield is from the surface. The first comers scratch the ground with a knife or with a pick-axe, and are rewarded by discovering “nuggets” of greater or less dimensions; the next flight of gold-finders search the beds of the streams; and it is not until the supply from these two sources begins to fail that mining, in the proper sense of the term, is attempted.

The earliest mining operations, whereof we have any record, are those conducted by the Egyptian kings of the fourth, fifth and twelfth dynasties, in the Sinaitic region. At two places in the mountains between Suez and Mount Sinai, now known as the Wady Magharah and Sarabit-el-Khadim, copper was extracted from the bosom of the earth by means of shafts laboriously excavated in the rocks, under the auspices of these early Pharaohs.[2] Hence at the time of the Exodus the process of mining was familiar to the Hebrews, who could thus fully appreciate the promise,[3] that they were about to be given “a good land”–“a land whose stones were iron, and out of whose hills they might /dig brass/.” The Phœnicians, probably, derived their first knowledge of mining from their communications with the Egyptians, and no doubt first practised the art within the limits of their own territory–in Lebanon, Casius, and Bargylus. The mineral stores of these regions were, however, but scanty, and included none of the more important metals, excepting iron. The Phœnicians were thus very early in their history driven afield for the supply of their needs, and among the principal causes of their first voyages of discovery must be placed the desire of finding and occupying regions which contained the metallic treasures wherein their own proper country was deficient.

It is probable that they first commenced mining operations on a large scale in Cyprus. Here, according to Pliny,[4] copper was first discovered; and though this may be a fable, yet here certainly it was found in great abundance at a very early time, and was worked to such an extent, that the Greeks knew copper, as distinct from bronze, by no other name than that of {khalkos Kuprios}, whence the Roman /Æs Cyprium/, and our own name for the metal. The principal mines were in the southern mountain range, near Tamasus,[5] but there were others also at Amathus, Soli, and Curium.[6] Some of the old workings have been noticed by modern travellers, particularly near Soli and Tamasus,[7] but they have neither been described anciently nor examined scientifically in modern times. The ore from which the metal was extracted is called /chalcitis/ by Pliny,[8] and may have been the “chalcocite” of our present metallurgical science, which is a sulphide containing very nearly eighty per cent. of copper. The brief account which Strabo gives of the mines of Tamasus shows that the ore was smelted in furnaces which were heated by wood fires. We gather also from Strabo that Tamasus had silver mines.

That the Phœnicians conducted mining operations in Thasos we know from Herodotus,[9] and from other writers of repute[10] we learn that they extended these operations to the mainland opposite. Herodotus had himself visited Thasos, and tells us that the mines were on the eastern coast of the island, between two places which he calls respectively Ænyra and Cœnyra. The metal sought was gold, and in their quest of it the Phœnicians had, he says, turned an entire mountain topsy-turvy. Here again no modern researches seem to have been made, and nothing more is known than that at present the natives obtain no gold from their soil, do not seek for it, and are even ignorant that their island was ever a gold-producing region.[11] The case is almost the same on the opposite coast, where in ancient times very rich mines both of gold and silver abounded,[12] which the Phœnicians are said to have worked, but where at the present day mining enterprise is almost at a standstill, and only a very small quantity of silver is produced.[13]

Sardinia can scarcely have been occupied by the Phœnicians for anything but its metals. The southern and south-western parts of the island, where they made their settlements, were rich in copper and lead; and the position of the cities seems to indicate the intention to appropriate these metals. In the vicinity of the lead mines are enormous heaps of scoriæ, mounting up apparently to a very remote era.[14] The scoriæ are not so numerous in the vicinity of the copper mines, but “pigs” of copper have been found in the island, unlike any of the Roman period, which are perhaps Phœnician, and furnish specimens of the castings into which the metal was run, after it had been fused and to some extent refined. The weight of the pigs is from twenty-eight to thirty-seven kilogrammes.[15] Pigs of lead have also been found, but they are less frequent.

But all the other mining operations of the Phœnicians were insignificant compared with those of which the theatre was Spain. Spain was the Peru of the ancient world, and surpassed its modern rival, in that it produced not only gold and silver, but also copper, iron, tin, and lead. Of these metals gold was the least abundant. It was found, however, as gold dust in the bed of the Tagus;[16] and there were mines of it in Gallicia,[17] in the Asturias, and elsewhere. There was always some silver mixed with it, but in one of the Gallician mines the proportion was less than three per cent. Elsewhere the proportion reached to ten or even twelve and a half per cent.; and, as there was no known mode of clearing the gold from it, the produce of the Gallician mine was in high esteem and greatly preferred to that of any other. Silver was yielded in very large quantities. “Spain,” says Diodorus Siculus,[18] “has the best and most plentiful silver from mines of all the world.” “The Spanish silver,” says Pliny,[19] “is the best.” When the Phœnicians first visited Spain, they found the metal held in no esteem at all by the natives. It was the common material of the cheapest drinking vessels, and was readily parted with for almost anything that the merchants chose to offer. Much of it was superficial, but the veins were found to run to a great depth; and the discovery of one vein was a sure index of the near vicinity of more.[20] The out-put of the Spanish silver mines during the Phœnician, Carthaginian, and Roman periods was enormous, and cannot be calculated; nor has the supply even yet failed altogether. The iron and copper of Spain are also said to have been exceedingly abundant in ancient times,[21] though, owing to the inferior value of the metals, and to their wider distribution, but little is recorded with regard to them. Its tin and lead, on the other hand, as being metals found in comparatively few localities, receive not infrequent mention. The Spanish tin, according to Posidonius, did not crop out upon the surface,[22] but had to be obtained by mining. It was produced in some considerable quantity in the country of the Artabri, to the north of Lusitania,[23] as well as in Lusitania itself, and in Gallicia;[24] but was found chiefly in small particles intermixed with a dark sandy earth. Lead was yielded in greater abundance; it was found in Cantabria, in Bætica, and many other places.[25] Much of it was mixed with silver, and was obtained in the course of the operations by means of which silver was smelted and refined.[26] The mixed metal was called /galena/.[27] Lead, however, was also found, either absolutely pure,[28] or so nearly so that the alloy was inappreciable, and was exported in large quantities, both by the Phœnicians and the Carthaginians, and also by the Romans. It was believed that the metal had a power of growth and reproduction, so that if a mine was deserted for a while and then re-opened, it was sure to be found more productive than it was previously.[29] The fact seems to be simply that the supply is inexhaustible, since even now Spain furnishes more than half the lead that is consumed by the rest of Europe. Besides the ordinary metals, Spain was capable of yielding an abundance of quicksilver;[30] but this metal seems not to have attracted the attention of the Phœnicians, who had no use for it.

The methods employed by the Phœnicians to obtain the metals which they coveted were not, on the whole, unlike those which continue in use at the present day. Where surface gold was brought down by the streams, the ground in their vicinity, and such portions of their beds as could be laid bare, were searched by the spade; any earth or sand that was seen to be auriferous was carefully dug out and washed, till the earthy particles were cleared away, and only the gold remained. Where the metal lay deeper, perpendicular shafts were sunk into the ground to a greater or less depth–sometimes, if we may believe Diodorus,[31] to the depth of half a mile or more; from these shafts horizontal adits were carried out at various levels, and from the adits there branched lateral galleries, sometimes at right angles, sometimes obliquely, which pursued either a straight or a tortuous course.[32] The veins of metal were perseveringly followed up, and where faults occurred in them, filled with trap,[33] or other hard rock, the obstacle was either tunnelled through or its flank turned, and the vein still pursued on the other side. As the danger of a fall of material from the roofs of the adits and galleries was well understood, it was customary to support them by means of wooden posts, or, where the material was sufficiently firm, to arch them.[34] Still, from time to time, falls would occur, with great injury and loss of life to the miners. Nor was there much less danger where a mountain was quarried for the sake of its metallic treasures. Here, too, galleries were driven into the mountain-side, and portions of it so loosened that after a time they detached themselves and fell with a loud crash into a mass of /débris/.[35] It sometimes happened that, as the workings proceeded, subterranean springs were tapped, which threatened to flood the mine, and put an end to its further utilisation. In such cases, wherever it was possible, tunnels were constructed, and the water drained off to a lower level.[36] In the deeper mines this, of course, could not be done, and such workings had to be abandoned, until the invention of the Archimedes’ screw (ab. B.C. 220-190), when the water was pumped up to the surface, and so got rid of.[37] But before this date Phœnicia had ceased to exist as an independent country, and the mines that had once been hers were either no longer worked, or had passed into the hands of the Romans or the Carthaginians.

When the various ores were obtained, they were first of all crushed, then pounded to a paste; after which, by frequent washings, the non- metallic elements were to a large extent eliminated, and the metallic ones alone left. These, being collected, were placed in crucibles of white clay,[38] which were then submitted to the action of a furnace heated to the melting point. This point could only be reached by the use of the bellows. When it was reached, the impurities which floated on the top of the molten metal were skimmed off, or the metal itself allowed, by the turning of a cock, to flow from an upper crucible into a lower one. For greater purity the melting and skimming process was sometimes repeated; and, in the case of gold, the skimmings were themselves broken up, pounded, and again submitted to the melting pot.[39] The use of quicksilver, however, being unknown, the gold was never wholly freed from the alloy of silver always found in it, nor was the silver ever wholly freed from an alloy of lead.[40]

The Romans and Carthaginians worked their mines almost wholly by slave labour; and very painful pictures are drawn of the sufferings undergone by the unhappy victims of a barbarous and wasteful system.[41] The gangs of slaves, we are told, remained in the mines night and day, never seeing the sun, but living and dying in the murky and fœtid atmosphere of the deep excavations. It can scarcely be hoped that the Phœnicians were wiser or more merciful. They had a large command of slave labour, and would naturally employ it where the work to be done was exceptionally hard and disagreeable. Moreover, the Carthaginians, their colonists, are likely to have kept up the system, whatever it was, which they found established on succeeding to the inheritance of the Phœnician mines, and the fact that they worked them by means of slaves makes it more than probable that the Phœnicians had done so before them.[42]

When the metals were regarded as sufficiently cleansed from impurities, they were run into moulds, which took the form of bars, pigs, or ingots. Pigs of copper and lead have, as already observed, been found in Sardinia which may well belong to Phœnician times. There is also in the museum of Truro a pig of tin, which, as it differs from those made by the Romans, Normans, and later workers, has been supposed to be Phœnician.[43] Ingots of gold and silver have not at present been found on Phœnician localities; but the Persian practice, witnessed to by Herodotus,[44] was probably adopted from the subject nation, which confessedly surpassed all the others in the useful arts, in commerce, and in practical sagacity.

CHAPTER XI

RELIGION

Strength of the religious sentiment among the Phœnicians–Proofs– First stage of the religion, monotheistic–Second stage, a polytheism within narrow limits–Worship of Baal–of Ashtoreth–of El or Kronos–of Melkarth–of Dagon–of Hadad–of Adonis–of Sydyk –of Esmun–of the Cabeiri–of Onca–of Tanith–of Beltis–Third stage marked by introduction of foreign deities–Character of the Phœnician worship–Altars and sacrifice–Hymns of praise, temples, and votive offerings–Wide prevalence of human sacrifice and of licentious orgies–Institution of the Galli–Extreme corruption of the later religion–Views held on the subject of a future life– Piety of the great mass of the people earnest, though mistaken.

There can be no doubt that the Phœnicians were a people in whose minds religion and religious ideas occupied a very prominent place. Religiousness has been said to be one of the leading characteristics of the Semitic race;[1] and it is certainly remarkable that with that race originated the three principal religions, two of which are the only progressive religions, of the modern world. Judaism, Christianity, and Mohammedanism all arose in Western Asia within a restricted area, and from nations whose Semitic origin is unmistakable. The subject of ethnic affinities and differences, of the transmission of qualities and characteristics, is exceedingly obscure; but, if the theory of heredity be allowed any weight at all, there should be no difficulty in accepting the view that particular races of mankind have special leanings and aptitudes.

Still, the religiousness of the Phœnicians does not rest on any /à priori/ arguments, or considerations of what is likely to have been. Here was a nation among whom, in every city, the temple was the centre of attraction, and where the piety of the citizens adorned every temple with abundant and costly offerings. The monarchs who were at the head of the various states showed the greatest zeal in continually maintaining the honour of the gods, repaired and beautified the sacred buildings, and occasionally added to their kingly dignity the highly esteemed office of High Priest.[2] The coinage of the country bore religious emblems,[3] and proclaimed the fact that the cities regarded themselves as under the protection of this or that deity. Both the kings and their subjects bore commonly religious names–names which designated them as the worshippers or placed them under the tutelage of some god or goddess. Abd-alonim, Abdastartus, Abd-osiris, Abdemon (which is properly Abd-Esmun), Abdi-milkut, were names of the former kind, Abi-baal (= “Baal is my father”), Itho-bal (= “with him is Baal”), Baleazar or Baal-azur (= “Baal protects”), names of the latter. The Phœnician ships carried images of the gods[4] in the place of figure-heads. Wherever the Phœnicians went, they bore with them their religion and their worship; in each colony they planted a temple or temples, and everywhere throughout their wide dominion the same gods were worshipped with the same rites and with the same observances.

In considering the nature of the Phœnician religion, we must distinguish between its different stages. There is sufficient reason to believe that originally, either when they first occupied their settlements upon the Mediterranean or before they moved from their primitive seats upon the shores of the Persian Gulf, the Phœnicians were Monotheists. We must not look for information on this subject to the pretentious work which Philo of Byblus, in the first or second century of our era, put forth with respect to the “Origines” of his countrymen, and attributed to Sanchoniatho;[5] we must rather look to the evidence of language and fact, records which may indeed be misread, but which cannot well be forged or falsified. These will show us that in the earliest times the religious sentiment of the Phœnicians acknowledged only a single deity–a single mighty power, which was supreme over the whole universe. The names by which they designated him were El, “great;” Ram or Rimmon, “high;” Baal, “Lord;” Melek or Molech, “King;” Eliun, “Supreme;” Adonai, “My Lord;” Bel-samin, “Lord of Heaven,” and the like.[6] Distinct deities could no more be intended by such names as these than by those under which God is spoken of in the Hebrew Scriptures, several of them identical with the Phœnician names–El or Elohim, “great;” Jehovah, “existing;” Adonai, “my Lord;” Shaddai, “strong;” El Eliun,[7] “the supreme Great One.” How far the Phœnicians actually realised all that their names properly imply, whether they went so far as to divest God wholly of a material nature, whether they viewed Him as the Creator, as well as the Lord, of the world, are problems which it is impossible, with the means at present at our disposal, to solve. But they certainly viewed Him as “the Lord of Heaven,”[8] and, if so, no doubt also as the Lord of earth; they believed Him to be “supreme” or “the Most High;” and they realised his personal relation to each one of his worshippers, who were privileged severally to address Him as Adonai–“/my/ Lord.” It may be presumed that at this early stage of the religion there was no idolatry; when One God alone is acknowledged and recognised, the feeling is naturally that expressed in the Egyptian hymn of praise– “He is not graven in marble; He is not beheld; His abode is unknown; there is no building that can contain Him; unknown is his name in heaven; He doth not manifest his forms; vain are all representations.”[9]

But this happy state of things did not–perhaps we may say, could not –in the early condition of the human intelligence, last long. Fallen man, left to himself, very soon corrupts his way upon the earth; his hands deal with wickedness; and, in a little while, “every imagination of the thoughts of his heart is only evil continually.”[10] When he becomes conscious to himself of sin, he ceases to be able to endure the thought of One Perfect Infinite Being, omnipotent, ever-present, who reads his heart, who is “about his path, and about his bed, and spies out all his ways.”[11] He instinctively catches at anything whereby he may be relieved from the intolerable burden of such a thought; and here the imperfection of language comes to his aid. As he has found it impossible to express in any one word all that is contained in his idea of the Divine Being, he has been forced to give Him many names, each of them originally expressive of some one of that Being’s attributes. But in course of time these words have lost their force–their meaning has been forgotten–and they have come to be mere proper names, designative but not significative. Here is material for the perverted imagination to work upon. A separate being is imagined answering to each of the names; and so the /nomina/ become /numina/.[12] Many gods are substituted for one; and the idea of God is instantly lowered. The gods have different spheres. No god is infinite; none is omnipotent, none omnipresent; therefore none omniscient. The aweful, terrible nature of God is got rid of, and a company of angelic beings takes its place, none of them very alarming to the conscience.

In its second stage the religion of Phœnicia was a polytheism, less multitudinous than most others, and one in which the several divinities were not distinguished from one another by very marked or striking features. At the head of the Pantheon stood a god and a goddess–Baal and Ashtoreth. Baal, “the Lord,” or Baal-samin,[13] “the Lord of Heaven,” was compared by the Greeks to their Zeus, and by the Romans to their Jupiter. Mythologically, he was only one among many gods, but practically he stood alone; he was the chief of the gods, the main object of worship, and the great ruler and protector of the Phœnician people. Sometimes, but not always, he had a solar character, and was represented with his head encircled by rays.[14] Baalbek, which was dedicated to him, was properly “the city of the Sun,” and was called by the Greeks Heliopolis. The solar character of Baal is, however, far from predominant, and as early as the time of Josiah we find the Sun worshipped separately from him,[15] no doubt under a different name. Baal is, to a considerable extent, a city god. Tyre especially was dedicated to him; and we hear of the “Baal of Tyre”[16] and again of the “Baal of Tarsus.”[17] Essentially, he was the embodiment of the generative principle in nature–“the god of the creative power, bringing all things to life everywhere.”[18] Hence, “his statue rode upon bulls, for the bull was the symbol of generative power; and he was also represented with bunches of grapes and pomegranates in his hand,”[19] emblems of productivity. The sacred conical stones and pillars dedicated in his temples[20] may have had their origin in a similar symbolism. As polytheistic systems had always a tendency to enlarge themselves, Baal had no sooner become a separate god, distinct from El, and Rimmon, and Molech, and Adonai, than he proceeded to multiply himself, and from Baal became Baalim,[21] either because the local Baals–Baal-Tzur, Baal-Sidon, Baal-Tars, Baal-Libnan, Baal-Hermon–were conceived of as separate deities, or because the aspects of Baal–Baal as Sun-God, Baal as Lord of Heaven, Baal as lord of flies,[22], &c.–were so viewed, and grew to be distinct objects of worship. In later times he was identified with the Egyptian Ammon, and worshipped as Baal-Hammon.

Baal is known to have had temples at Baalbek, at Tyre, at Tarsus, at Agadir[23] (Gades), in Sardinia,[24] at Carthage, and at Ekron. Though not at first worshipped under a visible form, he came to have statues dedicated to him,[25] which received the usual honours. Sometimes, as already observed, his head was encircled with a representation of the solar rays; sometimes his form was assimilated to that under which the Egyptians of later times worshipped their Ammon. Seated upon a throne and wrapped in a long robe, he presented the appearance of a man in the flower of his age, bearded, and of solemn aspect, with the carved horn of a ram on either side of his forehead. Figures of rams also supported the arms of his throne on either side, and on the heads of these two supports his hands rested.[26]

The female deity whose place corresponded to that of Baal in the Phœnician Pantheon, and who was in a certain sense his companion and counterpart, was Ashtoreth or Astarte. As Baal was the embodiment of the generative principle in nature, so was Ashtoreth of the receptive and productive principle. She was the great nature-goddess, the Magna Mater, regent of the stars, queen of heaven, giver of life, and source of woman’s fecundity.[27] Just as Baal had a solar, so she had a lunar aspect, being pictured with horns upon her head representative of the lunar crescent.[28] Hence, as early as the time of Moses, there was a city on the eastern side of Jordan, named after her, Ashtoreth- Karnaim,[29] or “Astarte of the two horns.” Her images are of many forms. Most commonly she appears as a naked female, with long hair, sometimes gathered into tresses, and with her two hands supporting her two breasts.[30] Occasionally she is a mother, seated in a comfortable chair, and nursing her babe.[31] Now and then she is draped, and holds a dove to her breast, or else she takes an attitude of command, with the right hand raised, as if to bespeak attention. Sometimes, on the contrary, her figure has that modest and retiring attitude which has caused it to be described by a distinguished archæologist[32] as “the Phœnician prototype of the Venus de Medici.” The Greeks and Romans, who identified Baal determinately with their Zeus or Jupiter, found it very much more difficult to fix on any single goddess in their Pantheon as the correspondent of Astarte. Now they made her Hera or Juno, now Aphrodite or Venus, now Athene, now Artemis, now Selene, now Rhea or Cybele. But her aphrodisiac character was certainly the one in which she most frequently appeared. She was the goddess of the sexual passion, rarely, however, represented with the chaste and modest attributes of the Grecian Aphrodite-Urania, far more commonly with those coarser and more repulsive ones which characterise Aphrodite Pandemos.[33] Her temples were numerous, though perhaps not quite so numerous as those of Baal. The most famous were those at Sidon, Aphaca, Ashtoreth-Karnaim, Paphos, Pessinus, and Carthage. At Sidon the kings were sometimes her high-priests;[34] and her name is found as a frequent element in Phœnician personal names, royal and other: e.g.–Astartus, Abdastartus, Delæastartus, Am-ashtoreth, Bodoster, Bostor, &c.

The other principal Phœnician deities were El, Melkarth, Dagon, Hadad, Adonis, Sydyk, Eshmun, the Cabeiri, Onca, Tanith, Tanata, or Anaitis, and Baalith, Baaltis, or Beltis. El, or Il, originally a name of the Supreme God, became in the later Phœnician mythology a separate and subordinate divinity, whom the Greeks compared to their Kronos[35] and the Romans to their Saturn. El was the special god of Gebal or Byblus,[36] and was worshipped also with peculiar rites at Carthage.[37] He was reckoned the son of Uranus and the father of Beltis, to whom he delivered over as her especial charge the city of Byblus.[38] Numerous tales were told of him. While reigning on earth as king of Byblus, or king of Phœnicia, he had fallen in love with a nymph of the country, called Anobret, by whom he had a son named Ieoud. This son, much as he loved him, when great dangers from war threatened the land, he first invested with the emblems of royalty, and then sacrificed.[39] Uranus (Heaven) married his sister Ge (Earth), and Il or Kronos was the issue of this marriage, as also were Dagon, Bætylus, and Atlas. Ge, being dissatisfied with the conduct of her husband, induced her son Kronos to make war upon him, and Kronos, with the assistance of Hermes, overcame Uranus, and having driven him from his kingdom succeeded to the imperial power. Besides sacrificing Ieoud, Kronos murdered another of his sons called Sadid, and also a daughter whose name is not given. Among his wives were Astarte, Rhea, Dioné, Eimarmené, and Hora, of whom the first three were his sisters.[40] There is no need to pursue this mythological tangle. If it meant anything to the initiated, the meaning is wholly lost; and the stories, gravely as they are related by the ancient historian, to the modern, who has no key to them, are almost wholly valueless.

Originally, Melkarth would seem to have been a mere epithet, representing one aspect of Baal. The word is formed from the two roots /melek/ and /kartha/[41] (= Heb. /kiriath/, “city”), and means “King of the City,” or “City King,” which Baal was considered to be. But the two names in course of time drifted apart, and Melicertes, in Philo Byblius, has no connection at all with Baal-samin.[42] The Greeks, who identified Baal with their Zeus, viewed Melkarth as corresponding to their Heracles, or Hercules; and the later Phœnicians, catching at this identification, represented Melkarth under the form of a huge muscular man, with a lion’s skin and sometimes with a club.[43] Melkarth was especially worshipped at Tyre, of which city he was the tutelary deity, at Thasos, and at Gades. Herodotus describes the temple of Hercules at Tyre, and attributes to it an antiquity of 2,300 years before his own time.[44] He also visited a temple dedicated to the same god at Thasos.[45] With Gades were connected the myths of Hercules’ expedition to the west, of his erection of the pillars, his defeat of Chrysaor of the golden sword, and his successful foray upon the flocks and herds of the triple Geryon.[46] Whether these legends were Greek or Phœnician in origin is uncertain; but the Phœnicians, at any rate, adopted them, and here have been lately found on Phœnician sites representations both of Geryon himself,[47] and the carrying off by Hercules of his cattle.[48] The temple of Heracles at Gades is mentioned by Strabo[49] and others. It was on the eastern side of the island, where the strait between the island and the continent was narrowest. Founded about B.C. 1100, it continued to stand to the time of Silius Italicus, and, according to the tradition, had never needed repair.[50] An unextinguished fire had burnt upon its altar for thirteen hundred years; and the worship had remained unchanged–no image profaned the Holy of Holies, where the god dwelt, waited on by bare-footed priests with heads shaved, clothed in white linen robes, and vowed to celibacy.[51] The name of the god occurs as an element in a certain small number of Phœnician names of men–e.g. Bomilcar, Himilcar, Abd-Melkarth, and the like.

Dagon appears in scripture only as a Philistine god,[52] which would not prove him to have been acknowledged by the Phœnicians; but as Philo of Byblus admits him among the primary Phœnician deities, making him a son of Uranus, and a brother of Il or Kronis,[53] it is perhaps right that he should be allowed a place in the Phœnician list. According to Philo, he was the god of agriculture, the discoverer of wheat, and the inventor of the plough.[54] Whether he was really represented, as is commonly supposed,[55] in the form of a fish, or as half man and half fish, is extremely doubtful. In the Hebrew account of the fall of Dagon’s image before the Ark of the Covenant at Ashdod there is no mention made of any “fishy part;” nor is there anything in the Assyrian remains to connect the name Dagon, which occurs in them, with the remarkable figure of a fish-god so frequent in the bas- reliefs. That figure would seem rather to represent, or symbolise, either Hea or Nin. The notion of Dagon’s fishy form seems to rest entirely on an etymological basis–on the fact, i.e. that /dag/ means “fish,” in Hebrew. In Assyrian, however, /kha/ is “fish,” and not /dag/; while in Hebrew, though /dag/ is “fish,” /dagan/ is “corn.” It may be noted also that the Phœnician remains contain no representation of a fish deity. On the whole, it is perhaps best to be content with the account of Philo, and to regard the Phœnician Dagon as a “Zeus Arotrios”–a god presiding over agriculture and especially worshipped by husbandmen. The name, however, does not occur in the Phœnician remains which have come down to us.

Hadad, like Dagon, obtains his right to be included in the list of Phœnician deities solely from the place assigned to him by Philo. Otherwise he would naturally be viewed as an Aramean god, worshipped especially in Aram-Zobah, and in Syria of Damascus.[56] In Syria, he was identified with the sun;[57] and it is possible that in the Phœnician religion he was the Sun-God, worshipped (as we have seen) sometimes independently of Baal. His image was represented with the solar rays streaming down from it towards the earth, so as to indicate that the earth received from him all that made it fruitful and abundant.[58] Macrobius connects his name with the Hebrew /chad/, “one;” but this derivation is improbable.[59] Philo gives him the title of “King of Gods,” and says that he reigned conjointly with Astarte and Demaroüs,[60] but this does not throw much light on the real Phœnician conception of him. The local name, Hadad-rimmon,[61] may seem to connect him with the god Rimmon, likewise a Syrian deity,[62] and it is quite conceivable that the two words may have been alternative names of the same god, just as Phœbus and Apollo were with the Greeks. We may conjecture that the Sun was worshipped under both names in Syria, while in Phœnicia Hadad was alone made use of. The worship of Baal as the Sun, which tended to prevail ever more and more, ousted Hadad from his place, and caused him to pass into oblivion.

Adonis was probably, like Hadad, originally a sun-god; but the myths connected with him gave him, at any rate in the late Phœnician times, a very distinct and definite personality. He was made the son of Cinryas, a mythic king of Byblus,[63] and the husband of Astarte or Ashtoreth. One day, as he chased the wild boar in Lebanon, near the sources of the river of Byblus, the animal which he was hunting turned upon him, and so gored his thigh that he died of the wound. Henceforth he was mourned annually. At the turn of the summer solstice, the anniversary of his death, all the women of Byblus went in a wild procession to Aphaca, in the Lebanon, where his temple stood, and wept and wailed on account of his death. The river, which his blood had once actually stained, turned red to show its sympathy with the mourners, and was thought to flow with his blood afresh. After the “weeping for Tammuz”[64] had continued for a definite time, the mourning terminated with the burial of an image of the god in the sacred precinct. Next day Adonis was supposed to return to life; his image was disinterred and carried back to the temple with music and dances, and every circumstance of rejoicing.[65] Wild orgies followed, and Aphaca became notorious for scenes to which it will be necessary to recur hereafter. The Adonis myth is generally explained as representing either the perpetually recurrent decay and recovery of nature, or the declension of the Sun as he moves from the summer to the winter constellations, and his subsequent return and reappearance in all his strength. But myths obtained a powerful hold on ancient imaginations, and the worshippers of Adonis probably in most cases forgot the symbolical character of his cult, and looked on him as a divine or heroic personage, who had actually gone through all the adventures ascribed to him in the legend. Hence the peculiarly local character of his worship, of which we find traces only at Byblus and at Jerusalem.

Sydyk, “Justice,” or, the “Just One,”[66] whose name corresponds to the Hebrew Zadok or Zedek, appears in the Phœnician mythology especially as the father of Esmun and the Cabeiri. Otherwise he is only known as the son of Magus (!) and the discoverer of salt.[67] It is perhaps his name which forms the final element in Melchizedek, Adoni-zedek,[68] and the like. We have no evidence that he was really worshipped by the Phœnicians.

Esmun, on the other hand, the son of Sydyk, would seem to have been an object of worship almost as much as any other deity. He was the special god of Berytus,[69] but was honoured also in Cyprus, at Sidon, at Carthage, in Sardinia, and elsewhere.[70] His name forms a frequent element in Phœnician names, royal and other:–e.g. Esmun-azar, Esmun- nathan, Han-Esmun, Netsib-Esmun, Abd-Esmun, &c. According to Damascius,[71] he was the eighth son of Sydyk, whence his name, and the chief of the Cabeiri. Whereas they were dwarfish and misshapen, he was a youth of most beautiful appearance, truly worthy of admiration. Like Adonis, he was fond of hunting in the woods that clothe the flanks of Lebanon, and there he was seen by Astronoë, the Phœnician goddess, the mother of the gods (in whom we cannot fail to recognise Astarte), who persecuted him with her attentions to such an extent that to escape her he was driven to the desperate resource of self- emasculation. Upon this the goddess, greatly grieved, called him Pæan, and by means of quickening warmth brought him back to life, and changed him from a man into a god, which he thenceforth remained. The Phœnicians called him Esmun, “the eighth,” but the Greeks worshipped him as Asclepius, the god of healing, who gave life and health to mankind. Some of the later Phœnicians regarded him as identical with the atmosphere, which, they said, was the chief source of health to man.[72] But it is not altogether clear that the earlier Phœnicians attached to him any healing character.[73]

The seven other Cabeiri, or “Great Ones,” equally with Esmun the sons of Sydyk, were dwarfish gods who presided over navigation,[74] and were the patrons of sailors and ships. The special seat of their worship in Phœnicia Proper was Berytus, but they were recognised also in several of the Phœnician settlements, as especially in Lemnos, Imbrus, and Samothrace.[75] Ships were regarded as their invention,[76] and a sculptured image of some one or other of them was always placed on every Phœnician war-galley, either at the stern or stem of the vessel.[77] They were also viewed as presiding over metals and metallurgy,[78] having thus some points of resemblance to the Greek Hephæstus and the Latin Vulcan. Pigmy and misshapen gods belong to that fetishism which has always had charms for the Hamitic nations; and it may be suspected that the Phœnicians adopted the Cabeiri from their Canaanite predecessors, who were of the race of Ham.[79] The connection between these pigmy deities and the Egyptian Phthah, or rather Phthah-Sokari, is unmistakable, and was perceived by Herodotus.[80] Clay pigmy figurines found on Phœnician sites[81] very closely resemble the Egyptian images of that god; and the coins attributed to Cossura exhibit a similar dwarfish form, generally carrying a hammer in the right hand.[82] An astral character has been attached by some writers to the Cabeiri,[83] but chiefly on account of their number, which is scarcely a sufficient proof.

Several Greek writers speak of a Phœnician goddess corresponding to the Grecian Athene,[84] and some of them say that she was named Onga or Onca.[85] The Phœnician remains give us no such name; but as Philo Byblius has an “Athene” among his Phœnician deities, whom he makes the daughter of Il, or Kronos, and the queen of Attica,[86] it is perhaps best to allow Onca to retain her place in the Phœnician Pantheon. Philo says that Kronos /by her advice/ shaped for himself out of iron a sword and a spear; we may therefore presume that she was a war- goddess (as was Pallas-Athene among the Greeks), whence she naturally presided over the gates of towns,[87] which were built and fortified for warlike purposes.

The worship of a goddess, called Tanath or Tanith, by the later Phœnicians, is certain, since, besides the evidence furnished by the name Abd-Tanith, i.e. “Servant of Tanith,”[88] the name Tanith itself is distinctly read on a number of votive tablets brought from Carthage, in a connection which clearly implies her recognition, not only as a goddess, but as a great goddess, the principal object of Carthaginian worship. The form of inscription on the tablets is, ordinarily, as follows:–[89]

“To the great [goddess], Tanith, and To our lord and master Baal-Hammon.
The offerer is * * * * *,
Son of * * * * *, son of * * * *.”

Tanith is invariable placed before Baal, as though superior to him, and can be no other than the celestial goddess (Dea cœlestis), whose temple in the Roman Carthage was so celebrated.[90] The Greeks regarded her as equivalent to their Artemis;[91] the Romans made her Diana, or Juno, or Venus.[92] Practically she must at Carthage have taken the place of Ashtoreth. Apuleius describes her as having a lunar character, like Ashtoreth, and calls her “the parent of all things, the mistress of the elements, the initial offspring of the ages, the highest of the deities, the queen of the Manes, the first of the celestials, the single representative of all the gods and goddesses, the one divinity whom all the world worships in many shapes, with varied rites, and under a multitude of names.”[93] He says that she was represented as riding upon a lion, and it is probably her form which appears upon some of the later coins of Carthage, as well as upon a certain number of gems.[94] The origin of the name is uncertain. Gesenius would connect it at once with the Egyptian Neith (Nit), and with the Syrian Anaïtis or Tanaïtis;[95] but the double identification is scarcely tenable, since Anaïtis was, in Egypt, not Neith, but Anta.[96] The subject is very obscure, and requires further investigation.

Baaltis, or Beltis, was, according to Philo Byblius, the daughter of Uranus and the sister of Asthoreth or Astarte.[97] Il made her one of his many wives, and put the city of Byblus, which he had founded, under her special protection.[98] It is doubtful, however, whether she was really viewed by the Phœnicians as a separate goddess, and not rather as Ashtoreth under another name. The word is the equivalent of {…}, “my lady,” a very suitable title for the supreme goddess. Beltis, indeed, in Babylonia, was distinct from Ishtar;[99] but this fact must not be regarded as any sufficient proof that the case was the same in Phœnicia. The Phœnician polytheism was decidedly more restricted than the Babylonian, and did not greatly affect the needless multiplication of divinities. Baaltis in Phœnicia may be the Beltis of Babylon imported at a comparatively late date into the country, but is more probably an alternative name, or rather, perhaps, a mere honorary title of Ashtoreth.[100]

The chief characteristic of the third period of the Phœnician religion was the syncretistic tendency,[101] whereby foreign gods were called in, and either identified with the old national divinities, or joined with them, and set by their side. Ammon, Osiris, Phthah, Pasht, and Athor, were introduced from Egypt, Tanith from either Egypt or Syria, Nergal from Assyria, Beltis (Baaltis) perhaps from Babylon. The worship of Osiris in the later times appears from such names as Abd- Osir, Osir-shamar, Melek-Osir, and the like,[102] and is represented on coins with Phœnician legends, which are attributed either to Malta or Gaulos.[103] Osiris was, it would seem, identified with Adonis,[104] and was said to have been buried at Byblus;[105] which was near the mouth of the Adonis river. His worship was not perhaps very widely spread; but there are traces of it at Byblus, in Cyprus, and in Malta.[106] Ammon was identified with Baal in his solar character,[107] and was generally worshipped in conjunction with Tanith, more especially at Carthage.[108] He was represented with his head encircled by rays, and with a perfectly round face.[109] His common title was “Lord” {…}, but in Numidia he was worshipped as “the Eternal King” {…}.[110] As the giver of all good things, he held trees or fruits in his hands.[111]

The Phœnicians worshipped their gods, like most other ancient nations, with prayer, with hymns of praise, with sacrifices, with processions, and with votive offerings. We do not know whether they had any regularly recurrent day, like the Jewish Sabbath, or Christian Sunday, on which worship took place in the temples generally; but at any rate each temple had its festival times, when multitudes flocked to it, and its gods were honoured with prolonged services and sacrifices on a larger scale than ordinary. Most festivals were annual, but some recurred at shorter intervals; and, besides the festivals, there was an every day cult, which was a duty incumbent upon the priests, but at which the private worshipper also might assist to offer prayer or sacrifice. The ordinary sacrificial animals were oxen, cows, goats, sheep, and lambs; swine were not offered, being regarded as unclean;[112] but the stag was an acceptable victim, at any rate on certain occasions.[113] At all functions the priests attended in large numbers, habited in white garments of linen or cotton, and wearing a stiff cap or mitre upon their heads:[114] on one occasion of a sacrifice Lucian counted above three hundred engaged in the ceremony.[115] It was the duty of some to slay the victims; of others to pour libations; of a third class to bear about pans of coal on which incense could be offered; of a fourth to attend upon the altars.[116] The priests of each temple had at their head a Chief or High Priest, who was robed in purple and wore a golden tiara. His office, however, continued only for a year, when another was chosen to succeed him.[117]

Ordinarily, sacrifices were offered, in Phœnicia as elsewhere, singly, and upon altars; but sometimes it was customary to have a great holocaust. Large trees were dug up by the roots, and planted in the court of the temple; the victims, whether goats, or sheep, or cattle of any other kind, were suspended by ropes from the branches; birds were similarly attached, and garments, and vessels in gold and silver. Then the images of the gods belonging to the temple were brought out, and carried in a solemn procession round the trees; after which the trees were set on fire, and the whole was consumed in a mighty conflagration.[118] The season for this great holocaust was the commencement of the spring-time, when the goodness of Heaven in once more causing life to spring up on every side seemed to require man’s special acknowledgment.

Hymns of praise are spoken of especially in connection with this same Spring-Festival.[119] Votive offerings were continually being offered in every temple by such as believed that they had received any benefit from any god, either in consequence of their vows, or prayers, or even by the god’s spontaneous action. The sites of temples yield numerous traces of such offerings. Sometimes they are in the shape of stone /stelæ/ or pillars, inscribed and more or less ornamented,[120] sometimes of tablets placed within an ornamental border, and generally accompanied by some rude sculptures;[121] more often of figures, either in bronze or clay, which are mostly of a somewhat rude character. M. Renan observes with respect to these figures, which are extremely numerous:–“Ought we to see in these images, as has been supposed, long series of portraits of priests and priestesses continued through several centuries? We do not think so. The person represented in these statues appears to us to be the author of a vow or of a sacrifice made to the divinity of the temple . . . Vows and sacrifices were very fleeting things; it might be feared that the divinity would soon forget them. An inscription was already recognised as a means of rendering the memory of a vow more lasting; but a statue was a momento still more–nay, much more efficacious. By having himself represented under the eyes of the divinity in the very act of accomplishing his vow, a man called to mind, as one may say, incessantly the offering which he had made to the god, and the homage which he had rendered him. An idea of this sort is altogether in conformity with the materialistic and self-interested character of the Phœnician worship, where the vow is a kind of business affair, a matter of debtor and creditor account, in which a man stipulates very clearly what he is to give, and holds firmly that he is to be paid in return . . . We have then, in these statues, representations of pious men, who came one after another to acquit themselves of their debt in the presence of the divinity; in order that the latter should not forget that the debt was discharged, they set up their images in front of the god. The image was larger or smaller, more or less carefully elaborated, in a more or less valuable material, according to the means of the individual who consecrated it.”[122]

Thus far there was no very remarkable difference between the Phœnician religious system and other ancient Oriental worships, which have a general family likeness, and differ chiefly in the names and number of the deities, the simplicity or complication of the rites, and the greater or less power and dignity attached to the priestly office. In these several respects the Phœnician religion seems to have leant towards the side of simplicity, the divinities recognised being, comparatively speaking, few, priestly influence not great, and the ceremonial not very elaborate. But there were two respects in which the religion was, if not singular, at any rate markedly different from ordinary polytheisms, though less in the principles involved than in the extent to which they were carried out in practice. These were the prevalence of licentious orgies and of human sacrifice. The worship of Astarte was characterised by the one, the worship of Baal by the other. Phœnician mythology taught that the great god, Il or El, when reigning upon earth as king of Byblus, had, under circumstances of extreme danger to his native land, sacrificed his dearly loved son, Ieoud, as an expiatory offering. Divine sanction had thus been given to the horrid rite; and thenceforth, whenever in Phœnicia either public or private calamity threatened, it became customary that human victims should be selected, the nobler and more honourable the better, and that the wrath of the gods should be appeased by taking their lives. The mode of death was horrible. The sacrifices were to be consumed by fire; the life given by the Fire God he should also take back again by the flames which destroy being. The rabbis describe the image of Moloch as a human figure with a bull’s head and outstretched arms;[123] and the account which they give is confirmed by what Diodorus relates of the Carthaginian Kronos. His image, Diodorus says,[124] was of metal, and was made hot by a fire kindled within it; the victims were placed in its arms and thence rolled into the fiery lap below. The most usual form of the rite was the sacrifice of their children–especially of their eldest sons[125]–by parents. “This custom was grounded in part on the notion that children were the dearest possession of their parents, and, in part, that as pure and innocent beings they were the offerings of atonement most certain to pacify the anger of the deity; and further, that the god of whose essence the generative power of nature was had a just title of that which was begotten of man, and to the surrender of their children’s lives . . . Voluntary offering on the part of the parents was essential to the success of the sacrifice; even the first-born, nay, the only child of the family, was given up. The parents stopped the cries of their children by fondling and kissing them, for the victim ought not to weep; and the sound of complaint was drowned in the din of flutes and kettledrums. Mothers, according to Plutarch,[126] stood by without tears or sobs; if they wept or sobbed they lost the honour of the act, and their children were sacrificed notwithstanding. Such sacrifices took place either annually or on an appointed day, or before great enterprises, or on the occasion of public calamities, to appease the wrath of the god.”[127]

In the worship of Astarte the prostitution of women, and of effeminate men, played the same part that child murder did in the worship of Baal. “This practice,” says Dr. Döllinger,[128] “so widely spread in the world of old, the delusion that no service more acceptable could be rendered a deity than that of unchastity, was deeply rooted in the Asiatic mind. Where the deity was in idea sexual, or where two deities in chief, one a male and the other a female, stood in juxtaposition, there the sexual relation appeared as founded upon the essence of the deity itself, and the instinct and its satisfaction as that in men which most corresponded with the deity. Thus lust itself became a service of the gods; and, as the fundamental idea of sacrifice is that of the immediate or substitutive surrender of a man’s self to the deity, so the woman could do the goddess no better service than by prostitution. Hence it was the custom [in some places] that a maiden before her marriage should prostitute herself once in the temple of the goddess;[129] and this was regarded as the same in kind with the offering of the first-fruits of the field.” Lucian, a heathen and an eye-witness, tells us[130]–“I saw at Byblus the grand temple of the Byblian Venus, in which are accomplished the orgies relating to Adonis; and I learnt the nature of the orgies. For the Byblians say that the wounding of Adonis by the boar took place in their country; and, in memory of the accident, they year by year beat their breasts, and utter lamentations, and go through the orgies, and hold a great mourning throughout the land. When the weeping is ended, first of all, they make to Adonis the offerings usually made to a corpse; after which, on the next day, they feign that he has come to life again, and hold a procession [of his image] in the open air. But previously they shave their heads, like the Egyptians when an Apis dies; and if any woman refuse to do so, she must sell her beauty during one day to all who like. Only strangers, however, are permitted to make the purchase, and the money paid is expended on a sacrifice which is offered to the goddess.” “In this way,” as Dr. Döllinger goes on to say, “they went so far at last as to contemplate the abominations of unnatural lust as a homage rendered to the deity, and to exalt it into a regular cultus. The worship of the goddess [Ashtoreth] at Aphaca in the Lebanon was specially notorious in this respect.”[131] Here, according to Eusebius, was, so late as the time of Constantine the Great, a temple in which the old Phœnician rites were still retained. “This,” he says, “was a grove and a sacred enclosure, not situated, as most temples are, in the midst of a city, and of market-places, and of broad streets, but far away from either road or path, on the rocky slopes of Libanus. It was dedicated to a shameful goddess, the goddess Aphrodite. A school of wickedness was this place for all such profligate persons as had ruined their bodies by excessive luxury. The men there were soft and womanish–men no longer; the dignity of their sex they rejected; with impure lust they thought to honour the deity. Criminal intercourse with women, secret pollutions, disgraceful and nameless deeds, were practised in the temple, where there was no restraining law, and no guardian to preserve decency.”[132]

One fruit of this system was the extraordinary institution of the Galli. The Galli were men, who made themselves as much like women as they could, and offered themselves for purposes of unnatural lust to either sex. Their existence may be traced in Israel and Judah,[133] as well as in Syria and Phœnicia.[134] At great festivals, under the influence of a strong excitement, amid the din of flutes and drums and wild songs, a number of the male devotees would snatch up swords or knives, which lay ready for the purpose, throw off their garments, and coming forward with a loud shout, proceed to castrate themselves openly. They would then run through the streets of the city, with the mutilated parts in their hands, and throw them into the houses of the inhabitants, who were bound in such case to provide the thrower with all the apparel and other gear needful for a woman.[135] This apparel they thenceforth wore, and were recognised as attached to the worship of Astarte, entitled to reside in her temples, and authorised to take part in her ceremonies. They joined with the priests and the sacred women at festival times in frenzied dances and other wild orgies, shouting, and cutting themselves on the arms, and submitting to be flogged one by another.[136] At other seasons they “wandered from place to place, taking with them a veiled image or symbol of their goddess, and clad in women’s apparel of many colours, and with their faces and eyes painted in female fashion, armed with swords and scourges, they threw themselves by a wild dance into bacchanalian ecstasy, in which their long hair was draggled through the mud. They bit their own arms, and then hacked themselves with their swords, or scourged themselves in penance for a sin supposed to have been committed against the goddess. In these scenes, got up to aid the collection of money, by long practice they contrived to cut themselves so adroitly as not to inflict on themselves any very serious wounds.”[137]

It is difficult to estimate the corrupting effect upon practice and morals of a religious system which embraced within it so many sensual and degrading elements. Where impurity is made an essential part of religion, there the very fountain of life is poisoned, and that which should have been “a savour of life unto life”–a cleansing and regenerating influence–becomes “a savour of death unto death”–an influence leading on to the worst forms of moral degradation. Phœnician religion worked itself out, and showed its true character, in the first three centuries after our era, at Aphaca, at Hierapolis, and at Antioch, where, in the time of Julian, even a Libanius confessed that the great festival of the year consisted only in the perpetration of all that was impure and shameless, and the renunciation of every lingering spark of decency.[138]

A vivid conception of another world, and of the reality of a life after death, especially if connected with a belief in future rewards and punishments, might have done much, or at any rate something, to counteract the effect upon morals and conduct of the degrading tenets and practices connected with the Astarte worship; but, so far as appears, the Phœnicians had a very faint and dim conception of the life to come, and neither hoped for happiness, nor feared misery in it. Their care for the preservation of their bodies after death, and the provision which in some cases they are seen to have made for them,[139] imply a belief that death was not the end of everything, and a few vague expressions in inscriptions upon tombs point to a similar conviction;[140] but the life of the other world seems to have been regarded as something imperfect and precarious[141]–a sort of shadowy existence in a gloomy /Sheôl/, where was neither pleasure nor pain, neither suffering nor enjoyment, but only quietness and rest. The thought of it did not occupy men’s minds, or exercise any perceptible influence over their conduct. It was a last home, whereto all must go, acquiesced in, but neither hoped for nor dreaded. A Phœnician’s feelings on the subject were probably very much those expressed by Job in his lament:–[142]

“Why died I not from the womb? Why gave I not up the ghost at my birth?
Why did the knees prevent me? or why the breasts that I should suck? For now should I have lain still and been quiet; I should have slept, and then should I have been at rest; I should have been with the kings and councillors of the earth, Who rebuilt for themselves the cities that were desolate. I should have been with the princes that had much gold, And that filled their houses with silver . . . There they that are wicked cease from troubling, There they that are weary sink to rest; There the prisoners are in quiet together, And hear no longer the voice of the oppressor: There are both the great and small, and the servant is freed from his master.

Still their religion, such as it was, had a great hold upon the Phœnicians. Parents gave to their children, almost always, religious names, recognising each son and daughter as a gift from heaven, or placing them under the special protection of the gods generally, or of some single divinity. It was piety, an earnest but mistaken piety, which so often caused the parent to sacrifice his child–the very apple of his eye and delight of his heart–that so he might make satisfaction for the sins which he felt in his inmost soul that he had committed. It was piety that filled the temples with such throngs, that brought for sacrifice so many victims, that made the worshipper in every difficulty put up a vow to heaven, and caused the payment of the vows in such extraordinary profusion. At Carthage alone there have been found many hundreds of stones, each one of which records the payment of a vow;[143] while other sites have furnished hundreds or even thousands of /ex votos/–statues, busts, statuettes, figures of animals, cylinders, seals, rings, bracelets, anklets, ear-rings, necklaces, ornaments for the hair, vases, amphoræ, œnochoæ, pateræ, jugs, cups, goblets, bowls, dishes, models of boats and chariots– indicative of an almost unexampled devotion. A single chamber in the treasury of Curium produced more than three hundred articles in silver and silver-gilt;[144] the temple of Golgi yielded 228 votive statues;[145] sites in Sardinia scarcely mentioned in antiquity have sufficed to fill whole museums with statuettes, rings, and scarabs. If the Phœnicians did not give evidence of the depth of their religious feeling by erecting, like most nations, temples of vast size and magnificence, still they left in numerous places unmistakable proof of the reality of their devotion to the unseen powers by the multiplicity, and in many cases the splendour,[146] of their votive offerings.

CHAPTER XII

DRESS, ORNAMENTS, AND SOCIAL HABITS

Dress of common men–Dress of men of the upper classes–Treatment of the hair and beard–Male ornaments–Supposed priestly costume– Ordinary dress of women–Arrangement of their hair–Female ornaments–Necklaces–Bracelets–Ear-rings–Ornaments for the hair –Toilet pins–Buckles–A Phœnician lady’s toilet table–Freedom enjoyed by Phœnician women–Active habits of the men–Curious agate ornament–Use in furniture of bronze and ivory.

The dress of the Phœnician men, especially of those belonging to the lower orders, consisted, for the most part, of a single close-fitting tunic, which reached from the waist to a little above the knee.[1] The material was probably either linen or cotton, and the simple garment was perfectly plain and unornamented, like the common /shenti/ of the Egyptians. On the head was generally worn a cap of one kind or another, sometimes round, more often conical, occasionally shaped like a helmet. The conical head-dresses seem to have often ended in a sort of top-knot or button, which recalls the head-dress of a Chinese Mandarin.

Where the men were of higher rank, the /shenti/ was ornamented. It was patterned, and parted towards the two sides, while a richly adorned lappet, terminating in uræi, fell down in front.[2] The girdle, from which it depended, was also patterned, and the /shenti/ thus arranged was sometimes a not inelegant garment. In addition to the /shenti/, it was common among the upper classes to wear over the bust and shoulders a close-fitting tunic with short sleeves,[3] like a modern “jersey;” and sometimes two garments were worn, an inner robe descending to the feet, and an outer blouse or shirt, with sleeves reaching to the elbow.[4] Occasionally, instead of this outer blouse, the man of rank has a mantle thrown over the left shoulder, which falls about him in folds that are sufficiently graceful.[5] The conical cap with a top- knot is, with persons of this class, the almost universal head-dress.

Great attention seems to have been paid to the hair and beard. Where no cap is worn, the hair clings closely to the head in a wavy compact mass, escaping however from below the wreath or diadem, which supplies the place of a cap, in one or two rows of crisp, rounded curls.[6] The beard has mostly a strong resemblance to that affected by the Assyrians, and familiar to us from their sculptures. It is arranged in three, four, or five rows of small tight curls,[7] and extends from ear to ear around the cheeks and chin. Sometimes, however, in lieu of the many rows, we find one row only, the beard falling in tresses, which are curled at the extremity.[8] There is no indication of the Phœnicians having cultivated mustachios.

For ornaments the male Phœnicians wore collars, which were sometimes very elaborate, armlets, bracelets, and probably finger-rings. The collars resembled those of the Egyptians, being arranged in three rows, and falling far over the breast.[9] The armlets seem to have been plain, consisting of a mere twist of metal, once, twice, or thrice around the limb.[10] The royal armlets of Etyander, king of Paphos, are single twists of gold, the ends of which only just overlap: they are plain, except for the inscription, which reads /Eteadoro to Papo basileos/, or “The property of Etyander, king of Paphos.”[11] Men’s bracelets were similar in character. The finger- rings were either of gold or silver, and generally set with a stone, which bore a device, and which the wearer used as a seal.[12]

The most elaborate male costume which has come down to us is that of a figure found at Golgi, and believed to represent a high priest of Ashtoreth. The conical head-dress is divided into partitions by narrow stripes, which, beginning at its lower edge, converge to a point at top. This point is crowned by the representation of a calf’s or bull’s head. The main garment is a long robe reaching from the neck to the feet, “worn in much the same manner as the peplos on early Greek female figures.” Round the neck of the robe are two rows of stars painted in red, probably meant to represent embroidery. A little below the knee is another band of embroidery, from which the robe falls in folds or pleats, which gather closely around the legs. Above the long robe is worn a mantle, which covers the right arm and shoulder, and thence hangs down below the right knee, passing also in many folds from the shoulder across the breast, and thence, after a twist around the left arm, falling down below the left knee. The treatment of the hair is remarkable. Below the rim of the cap is the usual row of crisp curls; but besides these, there depend from behind the ears on either side of the neck three long tresses. The feet of the figure are naked. The right hand holds a cup by its foot between the middle and fore- fingers, while the left holds a dove with wings outspread.[13]

Women were, for the most part, draped very carefully from head to foot. The nude figures which are found abundantly in the Phœnician remains[14] are figures of goddesses, especially of Astarte, who were considered not to need the ornament, or the concealment of dress. Human female figures are in almost every case covered from the neck to the feet, generally in garments with many folds, which, however, are arranged very variously. Sometimes a single robe of the amplest dimensions seems to envelop the whole form, which it completely conceals with heavy folds of drapery.[15] The long petticoat is sleeved, and gathered into a sinus below the breasts, about which it hangs loosely. Sometimes, on the contrary, the petticoat is perfectly plain, and has no folds.[16] Occasionally a second garment is worn over the gown or robe, which covers the left shoulder and the lap, descending to the knees, or somewhat lower.[17] The waist is generally confined by a girdle, which is knotted in front.[18] There are a few instances in which the feet are enclosed in sandals.[19]

The hair of women is sometimes concealed under a cap, but generally it escapes from such confinement, and shows itself below the cap in great rolls, or in wavy masses, which flow off right and left from a parting over the middle of the forehead.[20] Tresses are worn occasionally: these depend behind either ear in long loose curls, which fall upon the shoulders.[21] Female heads are mostly covered with a loose hood, or cap; but sometimes the hair is merely encircled by a band or bands, above and below which it ripples freely.[22]

Phœnician women were greatly devoted to the use of personal ornaments. It was probably from them that the Hebrew women of Isaiah’s time derived the “tinkling ornaments of the feet, the cauls, the round tires like the moon, the chains, the bracelets, and the mufflers, the bonnets and the ornaments of the legs, and the head-bands, and the tablets, and the ear-rings, the rings and nose-jewels, the changeable suits of apparel, and the mantles, and the wimples, and the crisping pins, the glasses, and the fine linen, and the hoods, and the vails,”[23] which the prophet denounces so fiercely. The excavations made on Phœnician sites have yielded in abundance necklaces, armlets, bracelets, pendants to be worn as lockets, ear-rings, finger-rings, ornaments for the hair, buckles or brooches, seals, buttons, and various articles of the toilet such as women delight in.

Women wore, it appears, three or four necklaces at the same time, one above the other.[24] A string of small beads or pearls would closely encircle the neck just under the chin. Below, where the chest begins, would lie a second string of larger beads, perhaps of gold, perhaps only of glass, while further down, as the chest expands, would be rows of still larger ornaments, pendants in glass, or crystal, or gold, or agate modelled into the shape of acorns, or pomegranates, or lotus flowers, or cones, or vases, and lying side by side to the number of fifty or sixty. Several of the necklaces worn by the Cypriote ladies have come down to us. One is composed of a row of one hundred and three gold beads, alternately round and oval, to the oval ones of which are attached pendants, also in gold, representing alternately the blossom and bud of the lotus plant, except in one instance. The central bead of all has as its pendant a human head and bust, modelled in the Egyptian style, with the hair falling in lappets on either side of the face, and with a broad collar upon the shoulders and the breast.[25] Another consists of sixty-four gold beads, twenty-two of which are of superior size to the rest, and of eighteen pendants, shaped like the bud of a flower, and delicately chased.[26] There are others where gold beads are intermixed with small carnelian and onyx bugles, while the pendants are of gold, like the beads; or where gold and rock-crystal beads alternate, and a single crystal vase hangs as pendant in the middle; or where alternate carnelian and gold beads have as pendant a carnelian cone, a symbol of Astarte.[27] Occasionally the sole material used is glass. Necklaces have been found composed entirely of long oval beads of blue or greenish-blue glass; others where the colour of the beads is a dark olive;[28] others again, where all the component parts are of glass, but the colours and forms are greatly varied. In a glass necklace found at Tharros in Sardinia, besides beads of various sizes and hues, there are two long rough cylinders, four heads of animals, and a human head as central ornament. “Taken separately, the various elements of which this necklace is composed have little value; neither the heads of the animals, nor the bearded human face, perhaps representing Bacchus, are in good style; the cylinders and rounded beads which fill up the intermediate spaces between the principal objects are of very poor execution; but the mixture of whites, and greys, and yellows, and greens, and blues produces a whole which is harmonious and gay.”[29]

Perhaps the most elegant and tasteful necklace of all that have been discovered is the one made of a thick solid gold cord, very soft and elastic, which is figured on the page opposite.[30] At either extremity is a cylinder of very fine granulated work, terminating in one case in a lion’s head of good execution, in the other surmounted by a simple cap. The lion’s mouth holds a ring, while the cap supports a long hook, which seems to issue from a somewhat complicated knot, entangled wherein is a single light rosette. “In this arrangement, in the curves of the thin wire, which folds back upon itself again and again, there is an air of ease, an apparent negligence, which is the very perfection of technical skill.”[31]

The bracelets worn by the Phœnician ladies were of many kinds, and frequently of great beauty. Some were bands of plain solid gold, without ornament of any kind, very heavy, weighing from 200 to 300 grammes each.[32] Others were open, and terminated at either extremity in the head of an animal. One, found by General Di Cesnola at Curium in Cyprus,[33] exhibited at the two ends heads of lions, which seemed to threaten each other. The execution of the heads left nothing to be desired. Some others, found in Phœnicia Proper, in a state of extraordinary preservation, were of similar design, but, in the place of lions’ heads, exhibited the heads of bull, with very short horns.[34] A third type aimed at greater variety, and showed the head of a wild goat at one end, and that of a ram at the other.[35] In a few instances, the animal representation appears at one extremity of the bracelet only, as in a specimen from Camirus, whereof the workmanship is unmistakably Phœnician, which has a lion’s head at one end, and at the other tapers off, like the tail of a serpent.[36]

A pair of bracelets in the British Museum, said to have come from Tharros, consist of plain thin circlets of gold, with a ball of gold in the middle. The ball is ornamented with spirals and projecting knobs, which must have been uncomfortable to the wearer, but are said not to be wanting in elegance.[37]

There are other Phœnician bracelets of an entirely different character. These consist of broad flat bands, which fitted closely to the wrist, and were fastened round it by means of a clasp. Two, now in the Museum of New York, are bands of gold about an inch in width, ornamented externally with rosettes, flowers, and other designs in high relief, on which are visible in places the remains of a blue enamel.[38] Another is composed of fifty-four large-ribbed gold beads, soldered together by threes, and having for centre a gold medallion, with a large onyx set in it, and with four gold pendants.[39] A third bracelet of the kind, said to have been found at Tharros, consists of six plates, united by hinges, and very delicately engraved with patterns of a thoroughly Phœnician character, representing palms, volutes, and flowers.[40]

But it is in their earrings that the Phœnician ladies were most curious and most fanciful. They present to us, as MM. Perrot and Chipiez note, “an astonishing variety.”[41] Some, which must have been very expensive, are composed of many distinct parts, connected with each other by chains of an elegant pattern. One of the most beautiful specimens was found by General Di Cesnola in Cyprus.[42] There is a hook at top, by which it was suspended. Then follows a medallion, where the workmanship is of singular delicacy. A rosette occupies the centre; around it are a set of spirals, negligently arranged, and enclosed within a chain-like band, outside of which is a double beading. From the medallion depend by finely wrought chains five objects. The central chain supports a human head, to which is attached a conical vase, covered at top: on either side are two short chains, terminating in rings, from which hang small nondescript pendants: beyond are two longer chains, with small vases or bottles attached. Another, found in Sardinia, is scarcely less complicated. The ring which pierced the ear forms the handle of a kind of basket, which is covered with lines of bead-work: below, attached by means of two rings, is the model of a hawk with wings folded; below the hawk, again attached by a couple of rings, is a vase of elegant shape, decorated with small bosses, lozenges, and chevrons.[43] Other ear-rings have been found similar in type to this, but simplified by the omission of the bird, or of the basket.[44]

An entirely different type is that furnished by an ear-ring in the Museum of New York brought from Cyprus, where the loop of the ornament rises from a sort of horse-shoe, patterned with bosses and spirals, and surrounded by a rough edging of knobs, standing at a little distance one from another.[45] Other forms found also in Cyprus are the ear-ring with the long pendant, which has been called “an elongated pear,”[46] ornamented towards the lower end with small blossoms of flowers, and terminating in a minute ball, which recalls the “drops” that are still used by the jewellers of our day; the loop which supports a /crux ansata/;[47] that which has attached to it a small square box, or measure containing a heap of grain, thought to represent wheat;[48] and those which support fruit of various kinds.[49] An ear-ring of much delicacy consists of a twisted ring, curved into a hook at one extremity, and at the other ending in the head of a goat, with a ring attached to it, through which the hook passes.[50] Another, rather curious than elegant, consists of a double twist, ornamented with lozenges, and terminating in triangular points finely granulated.[51]

Ornaments more or less resembling this last type of ear-ring, but larger and coarser, have given rise to some controversy, having been regarded by some as ear-rings, by others as fastenings for the dress, and by a third set of critics as ornaments for the hair. They consist of a double twist, sometimes ornamented at one end only, sometimes at both. A lion’s or a griffin’s head crowns usually the principal end; round the neck is a double or triple collar, and below this a rosette, very carefully elaborated. In one instance two griffins show themselves side by side, exhibiting their heads, their chests, their wings, and their fore-paws or hands; between them is an ornament like that which commonly surmounts Phœnician /stelæ/; and below this a most beautiful rosette.[52] The fashioning shows that the back of the ornament was not intended to be seen, and favours the view that it was to be placed where a mass of hair would afford the necessary concealment.

The Phœnician ladies seem also to have understood the use of hair- pins, which were from two to three inches long, and had large heads, ribbed longitudinally, and crowned with two smaller balls, one above the other.[53] The material used was either gold or silver.

To fasten their dresses, the Phœnician ladies used /fibulæ/ or buckles of a simple character. Brooches set with stones have not at present been found on Phœnician sites; but in certain cases the fibulæ show a moderate amount of ornament. Some have glass beads strung on the pin that is inserted into the catch; others have the rounded portion surmounted by the figure of a horse or of a bird.[54] Most fibulæ are in bronze; but one, found in the treasury of Curium, and now in the Museum of New York, was of gold.[55] This, however, was most probably a votive offering.

It is impossible at present to reproduce the toilet table of a Phœnician lady. We may be tolerably sure, however, that certain indispensable articles would not be lacking. Circular mirrors, either of polished metal, or of glass backed by a plate of tin or silver, would undoubtedly have found their place on them, together with various vessels for holding perfumes and ointments. A vase in rock crystal, discovered at Curium, with a funnel and cover in gold, the latter attached by a fine gold chain to one of its handles,[56] was doubtless a fine lady’s favourite smelling bottle. Various other vessels in silver, of a small size,[57] as basins and bowls beautifully chased, tiny jugs, alabasti, ladles, &c., had also the appearance of belonging rather to the toilet table than to the plate- basket. Some of the alabasti would contain /kohl/ or /stibium/, some salves and ointments, others perhaps perfumed washes for the complexion. Among the bronze objects found,[58] some may have been merely ornaments, others stands for rings, bracelets, and the like. One terra-cotta vase from Dali seems made for holding pigments,[59] and raises the suspicion that Phœnician, or at any rate Cyprian, beauties were not above heightening their charms by the application of paint.

Women in Phœnicia seem to have enjoyed considerable freedom. They are represented as banqueting in the company of men, sometimes sitting with them on the same couch, sometimes reclining with them at the same table.[60] Occasionally they delight their male companion by playing upon the lyre or the double pipe,[61] while in certain instances they are associated in bands of three, who perform on the lyre, the double pipe, and the tambourine.[62] They take part in religious processions, and present offerings to the deities.[63] The positions occupied in history by Jezebel and Dido fall in with these indications, and imply a greater approach to equality between the sexes in Phœnicia than in Oriental communities generally.

The men were, for Orientals, unusually hardy and active. In only one instance is there any appearance of the use of the parasol by a Phœnician.[64] Sandals are infrequently worn; neck, chest, arms, and legs are commonly naked. The rough life of seamen hardened the greater number; others hunted the wild ox and the wild boar[65] in the marshy plains of the coast tract, and in the umbrageous dells of Lebanon. Even the lion may have been affronted in the great mountain, and if we are unable to describe the method of its chase in Phœnicia, the reason is that the Phœnician artists have, in their representations of lion hunts, adopted almost exclusively Assyrian models.[66] The Phœnician gift of facile imitation was a questionable advantage, since it led the native artists continually to substitute for sketches at first hand of scenes with which they were familiar, conventional renderings of similar scenes as depicted by foreigners.

An ornament found in Cyprus, the intention of which is uncertain, finds its proper place in the present chapter, though we cannot attach it to any particular class of objects. It consists of a massive knob of solid agate, with a cylinder of the same both above and below, through which a rod, or bar, must have been intended to pass. Some archæologists see in it the top of a sceptre;[67] others, the head of a mace;[68] but there is nothing really to prove its use. We might imagine it the adornment of a throne or chair of state, or the end of a chariot pole, or a portion of the stem of a candelabrum. Antiquity has furnished nothing similar with which to compare it; and we only say of it, that, whatever was its purpose, so large and so beautiful a mass of agate has scarcely been met with elsewhere.[69] The cutting is such as to show very exquisitely the veining of the material.

Bronze objects in almost infinite variety have been found on Phœnician sites,[70] but only a few of them can have been personal ornaments. They comprise lamps, bowls, vases, jugs, cups, armlets, anklets, daggers, dishes, a horse’s bit, heads and feet of animals, statuettes, mirrors, fibulæ, buttons, &c. Furniture would seem to have been largely composed of bronze, which sometimes formed its entire fabric, though generally confined to the ornamentation. Ivory was likewise employed in considerable quantities in the manufacture of furniture,[71] to which it was applied as an outer covering, or veneer, either plain, or more generally carved with a pattern or with figures. The “ivory house” of Ahab[72] was perhaps so called, not so much from the application of the precious material to the doors and walls, as from its employment in the furniture. There is every probability that it was the construction of Phœnician artists.

CHAPTER XIII

PHŒNICIAN WRITING, LANGUAGE, AND LITERATURE

The Phœnician alphabet–Its wide use–Its merits–Question of its origin–Its defects–Phœnician writing and language–Resemblance of the language to Hebrew–In the vocabulary–In the grammar– Points of difference between Phœnician and Hebrew–Scantiness of the literature–Phœnician history of Philo Byblius–Extracts– Periplus of Hanno–Phœnician epigraphic literature–Inscription of Esmunazar–Inscription of Tabnit–Inscription of Jehav-melek– Marseilles inscription–Short inscriptions on votive offerings and tombs–Range of Phœnician book-literature.

The Phœnician alphabet, like the Hebrew, consisted of twenty-two characters, which had, it is probable, the same names with the Hebrew letters,[1] and were nearly identical in form with the letters used anciently by the entire Hebrew race. The most ancient inscription in the character which has come down to us is probably that of Mesha,[2] the Moabite king, which belongs to the ninth century before our era. The next in antiquity, which is of any considerable length, is that discovered recently in the aqueduct which brings the water into the pool of Siloam,[3] which dates probably from the time of Hezekiah, ab. B.C. 727-699. Some short epigraphs on Assyrian gems, tablets, and cylinders belong apparently to about the same period. The series of Phœnician and Cilician coins begins soon after this, and continues to the time of the Roman supremacy in Western Asia. The soil of Phœnicia Proper, and of the various countries where the Phœnicians established settlements or factories, as Cyprus, Malta, Sicily, Sardinia, Southern Gaul, Spain, and North Africa, has also yielded a large crop of somewhat brief legends, the “inscription of Marseilles”[4] being the most important of them. Finally there have been found within the last few years, in Phœnicia itself, near Byblus and Sidon, the three most valuable inscriptions of the entire series–those of Jehavmelek, Esmunazar and Tabnit–which have enabled scholars to place the whole subject on a scientific basis.

It is now clear that the same, or nearly the same, alphabet was in use from a very early date over the greater part of Western Asia–in Phœnicia, Moab, Judæa, Samaria, Lycia, Caria, Phrygia, &c.–that it was adopted, with slight alterations only, by the Etruscans and the Greeks, and that from them it was passed on to the nations of modern Europe, and acquired a quasi-universality. The invention of this alphabet was, by the general consent of antiquity, ascribed to the Phœnicians;[5] and though, if their claim to priority of discovery be disputed, it is impossible to prove it, their practical genius and their position among the nations of the earth are strong subsidiary arguments in support of the traditions.

The Phœnician alphabet, or the Syrian script, as some call it,[6] did not obtain its general prevalence without possessing some peculiar merits. Its primary merit was that of simplicity. The pictorial systems of the Egyptians and the Hittites required a hand skilled in drawing to express them; the cuneiform syllabaries of Babylonia, Assyria, and Elam needed an extraordinary memory to grasp the almost infinite variety in the arrangement of the wedges, and to distinguish each group from all the rest; even the Cypriote syllabary was of awkward and unnecessary extent, and was expressed by characters needlessly complicated. The Phœnician inventor, whoever he was, reduced letters to the smallest possible number, and expressed them by the simplest possible forms. Casting aside the idea of a syllabary, he reduced speech to its ultimate elements, and set apart a single sign to represent each possible variety of articulation, or rather each variety of which he was individually cognisant. How he fixed upon his signs, it is difficult to say. According to some, he had recourse to one or other of previously existing modes of expressing speech, and merely simplified the characters which he found in use. But there are two objections to this view. First, there is no known set of characters from which the early Phœnician can be derived with any plausability. Resemblances no doubt may be pointed out here and there, but taking the alphabet as a whole, and comparing it with any other, the differences will always be quite as numerous and quite as striking as the similarities. For instance, the writer of the article on the “Alphabet” in the “Encyclopædia Britannica” (1876) derives the Phœnician letters from letters used in the Egyptian hieratic writing,[7] but his own table shows a marked diversity in at least eleven instances, a slight resemblance in seven or eight, a strong resemblance in no more than two or three. Derivation from the Cypriote forms has been suggested by some; but here again eight letters are very different, if six or seven are similar. Recently, derivation from the Hittite hieroglyphs has been advocated,[8] but the alleged instances of resemblance touch nine characters only out of the twenty- two. And real resemblance is confined to three or four. Secondly, no theory of derivation accounts for the Phœnician names of their letters, which designate objects quite different from those represented by the Egyptian hieroglyphs, and equally different from those represented by the Hittite letters. For instance, the Egyptian /a/ is the ill-drawn figure of an eagle, the Phœnician /alef/ has the signification of “ox;” the /b/ of the Egyptians is a hastily drawn figure of a crane, the Phœnician /beth/ means “a house.”

On the whole, it seems most probable that the Phœnicians began with their own hieroglyphical system, selecting an object to represent the initial sound of its name, and at first drawing that object, but that they very soon followed the Egyptian idea of representing the original drawing in a conventional way, by a few lines, straight or curved. Their hieroglyphic alphabet which is extant is an alphabet in the second stage, corresponding to the Egyptian hieratic, but not derived from it. Having originally represented their /alef/ by an ox’s head, they found a way of sufficiently indicating the head by three lines {…}, which marked the horns, the ears, and the face. Their /beth/ was a house in the tent form; their /gimel/ a camel, represented by its head and neck; their /daleth/ a door, and so on. The object intended is not always positively known; but, where it is known, there is no difficulty in tracing the original picture in the later conventional sign.

The Phœnician alphabet was not without its defects. The most remarkable of these was the absence of any characters expressive of vowel sounds. The Phœnician letters are, all of them, consonants; and the reader is expected to supply the vowel sounds for himself. There was not even any system of pointing, so far as we know, whereby, as in Hebrew and Arabic, the proper sounds were supplied. Again, several letters were made to serve for two sounds, as /beth/ for both /b/ and /v/, /pe/ for both /p/ and /f/, /shin/ for both /s/ and /sh/, and /tau/ for both /t/ and /th/. There were no forms corresponding to the sounds /j/ or /w/. On the other hand, there was in the alphabet a certain amount of redundancy. /Tsade/ is superfluous, since it represents, not a simple elemental sound, but a combination of two sounds, /t/ and /s/. Hence the Greeks omitted it, as did also the Oscans and the Romans. There is redundancy in the two forms for /k/, namely /kaph/ and /koph/; in the two for /t/, namely /teth/ and /tau/; and in the two for /s/, namely /samech/ and /shin/. But no alphabet is without some imperfections, either in the way of excess or defect; and perhaps we ought to be more surprised that the Phœnician alphabet has not more faults than that it falls so far short of perfection as it does.

The writing of the Phœnicians was, like that of the majority of the Semitic nations, from right to left. The reverse order was entirely unknown to them, whether employed freely as an alternative, as in Egypt, or confined, as in Greece, to the alternate lines. The words were, as a general rule, undivided, and even in some instances were carried over the end of one line into the beginning of another. Still, there are examples where a sign of separation occurs between each word and the next;[9] and the general rule is, that the words do not run over the line. In the later inscriptions they are divided, according to the modern fashion, by a blank space;[10] but there seems to have been an earlier practice of dividing them by small triangles or by dots.

The language of the Phœnicians was very close indeed to the Hebrew, both as regards roots and as regards grammatical forms. The number of known words is small, since not only are the inscriptions few and scanty, but they treat so much of the same matters, and run so nearly in the same form, that, for the most part, the later ones contain nothing new but the proper names. Still they make known to us a certain number of words in common use, and these are almost always either identical with the Hebrew forms, or very slightly different from them, as the following table will demonstrate:–

Phœnician Hebrew English Ab {…} {…} father
Aben {…} {…} stone Adon {…} {…} lord
Adam {…} {…} man Aleph {…} {…} an ox Akh {…} {…} brother Akhar {…} {…} after Am {…} {…} mother
Anak {…} {…} I Arets {…} {…} earth, land Ash {…} {…} who, which Barak {…} {…} to bless Bath {…} {…} daughter Ben {…} {…} son
Benben {…} {…} grandson Beth {…} {…} house, temple Ba’al {…} {…} lord, citizen Ba’alat {…} {…} lady, mistress Barzil {…} {…} iron
Dagan {…} {…} corn Deber {…} {…} to speak, say Daleth {…} {…} door
Zan {…} {…} this Za {…} {…} this
Zereng {…} {…} seed, race Har {…} {…} mountain Han {…} {…} grace, favour Haresh {…} {…} carpenter Yom {…} {…} day, also sea Yitten {…} {…} to give Ish {…} {…} man
Ishath {…} {…} woman, wife Kadesh {…} {…} holy
Kol {…} {…} every, all Kol {…} {…} voice
Kohen {…} {…} priest Kohenath {…} {…} priestess Kara {…} {…} to call Lechem {…} {…} bread Makom {…} {…} a place Makar {…} {…} a seller Malakath {…} {…} work Melek {…} {…} king
Mizbach {…} {…} altar Na’ar {…} {…} boy, servant Nehusht {…} {…} brass Nephesh {…} {…} soul Nadar {…} {…} to vow ‘Abd {…} {…} slave, servant ‘Am {…} {…} people ‘Ain {…} {…} eye, fountain ‘Ath {…} {…} time
‘Olam {…} {…} eternity Pen {…} {…} face
Per {…} {…} fruit Pathach {…} {…} door Rab {…} {…} lord, chief Rabbath {…} {…} lady Rav {…} {…} rain, irrigation Rach {…} {…} spirit Rapha {…} {…} physician Shamam {…} {…} the heavens Shemesh {…} {…} the sun Shamang {…} {…} to hear Shenath {…} {…} a year Shad {…} {…} a field Sha’ar {…} {…} a gate Shalom {…} {…} peace Shem {…} {…} a name Shaphat {…} {…} a judge Sopher {…} {…} a scribe Sakar {…} {…} memory Sar {…} {…} a prince Tsedek {…} {…} just

The Phœnician numerals, so far as they are known to us, are identical, or nearly identical, with the Hebrew. /’Ahad/ {…} is “one;” /shen/ {…}, “two;” /shalish/ {…}, “three;” /arba/ {…}, “four;” /hamesh/ {…}, “five;” /eshman/ {…}, “eight;” /’eser/ {…}, “ten;” and so on. Numbers were, however, by the Phœnicians ordinarily expressed by signs, not words–the units by perpendicular lines: | for “one,” ||