The Martyrdom of Man, Winwood Reade [best book club books TXT] 📗

inland trade. They were the first to overcome the exclusiveness of

Egypt, and were permitted to settle in Memphis itself. Their quarter was

called the Syrian camp; it was built round a grove and chapel sacred to

Astarte. Their caravan routes extended in every direction towards the

treasure countries of the East. Wandering Arabs were their sailors, and

camels were their ships. They made voyages by sand, more dangerous

than those by sea, to Babylon through Palmyra or Tadmor on the skirts of

the desert; to Arabia Felix and the market city of Petra; and to Gerrha, a

city built entirely of salt on the rainless shores of the Persian Gulf.

 

Phoenicia itself was a narrow, undulating plain about a hundred miles in

length, and at the most not more than a morning’s ride in breadth. It was

walled in by the mountains on the north and east. To those who sailed

along its coast it appeared to be one great city interspersed with gardens

and fields. On the lower slopes of the hills beyond gleamed the green

vineyard patches and the villas of the merchants. The offing was

whitened with sails, and in every harbour was a grove of masts. But it

was Tyre which of all the cities was the queen. It covered an island

which lay at anchor off the shore. The Greek poet Nonnus has prettily

described the mingling around it of the sylvan and marine. “The sailor

furrows the sea with his oar,” he says, “and the ploughman the soil; the

lowing of oxen and the singing of birds answer the deep roar of the main;

the wood nymph under the tall trees hears the voice of the sea-nymph

calling to her from the waves; the breeze from the Lebanon, while it cools

the rustic at his midday labour, speeds the mariner who is outward

bound.”

 

These Canaanitish men are fairly entitled to our gratitude and esteem, for

they taught our intellectual ancestors to read and write. Wherever a

factory trade is carried on it is found convenient to employ natives as

subordinate agents and clerks. And thus it was that the Greeks received

the rudiments of education. That the alphabet was invented by the

Phoenicians is improbable in the extreme, but it is certain that they

introduced it into Europe. They were intent only on making money, it is

true; they were not a literary or artistic people; they spread knowledge by

accident like birds dropping seeds. But they were gallant, hardy,

enterprising men. Those were true heroes who first sailed through the

sea-valley of Gibraltar into the vast ocean and breasted its enormous

waves. Their unceasing activity kept the world alive. They offered to

every country something which it did not possess. They roused the

savage Briton from his torpor with a rag of scarlet cloth, and stirred him

to sweat in the dark bowels of the earth. They brought to the satiated

Indian prince the luscious wines of Syria and the Grecian amber-gatherers

of the Baltic mud to the nutmeg-growers of the equatorial groves, from

the mulberry plantations of the Celestial Empire to the tin-mines of

Cornwall and the silver mines of Spain, emulation was excited, new

wants were created, and whole nations were stimulated to industry by the

agency of the Phoenicians.

 

Shipbuilding and navigation were their inventions, and for a long time

were entirely in their hands. Phoenician shipwrights were employed to

build the fleet of Sennacherib: Phoenician mariners were employed by

Necho to sail round Africa. But they could not forever monopolise the

sea. The Greeks built ships on the Phoenician model, and soon showed

their masters that kidnapping and piracy was a game at which two could

play. The merchant kings who possessed the whole commercial world

were too wise to stake their prosperity on a single province. They had no

wish to tempt a siege of Tyre which might resemble the siege of Troy.

They quickly retired from Greece and its islands, and the western coast of

Asia Minor and the margin of the Black Sea. They allowed the Greeks to

take the foot of Italy and the eastern half of Sicily, and did not molest

their isolated colonies of Cyrene in Africa and Marseilles in Southern

Gaul.

 

But in spite of all their prudence and precautions, the Greeks supplanted

them entirely. The Phoenicians, like the Jews, were vassals of necessity

and by position: they lived half-way between two empires. They found it

cheaper to pay tribute than to go to war, and submitted to the emperor of

Syria for the time being, sending their money with equal indifference to

Nineveh or Memphis.

 

But when the empire was disputed, as in the days of Nebuchadnezzar and

of Necho, they were compelled to choose a side. Like the Jews, they

chose the wrong one, and the old Tyre and Jerusalem were demolished at

the same time.

 

From that day the Phoenicians began to go down the hill, and under the

Persians their ships and sailors were forced to do service in the royal

navy. This was the hardest kind of tribute that they could be made to pay,

for it deprived them not only of their profits but of the means by which

those profits were obtained. In the Macedonian war they went wrong

again; they chose the side of the Persians although they had so often

rebelled against them and Tyre was severely handled by its conqueror.

But it was the foundation of Alexandria which ruined the Phoenician

cities, as it ruined Athens. Form that time Athens ceased to be

commercial and became a university. Tyre also ceased to be commercial,

but remained a celebrated manufactory. Under the Roman empire it

enjoyed the monopoly of the sacred purple, which was afterwards

adopted by the popes. It prospered under the caliphs; its manufactories in

the Middle Ages were conducted by the Jews; but it fell before the

artillery of the Turks to rise no more. The secret of the famous dye was

lost, and the Vatican changed the colour of its robes.

 

But while Phoenicia was declining in the East its great colony, Carthage,

was rising in the West. This city had been founded by malcontents from

Tyre. But they kindly cherished the memories of their motherland, and,

like the Pilgrim Fathers, always spoke of the country which had cast them

forth as “Home.” And after a time all the old wrongs were forgotten, all

angry feelings died away. Every year the Carthaginians sent to the

national temple a tenth part of their revenues as a free-will offering.

During the great Persian wars, when on all sides empires and kingdoms

were falling to the ground, the Phoenicians refused to lend their fleet to

the Great King to make war upon Carthage. When Tyre was besieged by

Alexander the nobles sent their wives and children to Carthage, where

they were tenderly received.

 

The Africa of the ancients—the modern Barbary—lies between

the Sahara and the Mediterranean Sea. It is protected from the

ever-encroaching waves of the sandy ocean by the Atlas range. In its

western parts this mountain wall is high and broad and covered with

eternal snow. It becomes lower as it runs towards the east, also drawing

nearer to the sea, and dwindles and dwindles till finally it disappears,

leaving a wide, unprotected region between Barbary and Egypt. Over

this the Sahara flows, forming a desert barrier tract to all intents and

purposes itself a sea, dividing the two lands from each other as

completely as the Mediterranean divides Italy and Greece. This land of

North Africa is in reality a part of Spain; the Atlas is the southern

boundary of Europe. Grey cork-trees clothe the lower sides of those

magnificent mountains; their summits are covered with pines, among

which the cross-bill flutters, and in which the European bear may still be

found. The flora of the range, as Dr. Hooker has lately shown, is of a

Spanish type; the Straits of Gibraltar is merely an accident; there is

nothing in Morocco to distinguish it from Andalusia. The African

animals which are there found are desert-haunting species-—the antelope

and gazelle, the lion, the jackal, the hyena,* and certain species of the

monkey tribe; and these might easily have found their way across the

Sahara from oasis to oasis. It is true that in the Carthaginian days the

elephant abounded in the forests of the Atlas, and it could not have come

across from central Africa, for the Sahara, before it was a desert, was a

sea. It is probable that the elephant of Barbary belonged to the same

species as the small elephant of Europe, the bones of which have been

discovered in Malta and in certain caves of Spain, and that it outlived the

European kind on account of its isolated position in the Atlas, which was

thinly inhabited by savage tribes. But it did not long withstand the power

of the Romans. Pliny mentions that in his time the forests of Morocco

were being ransacked for ivory, and Isidore of Seville, in the seventh

century observes that “there are no longer any elephants in Mauritania.”

 

*[spelt hyaena in original text]

 

In Morocco the Phoenicians were settled only on the coast. The Regency

of Tunis and part of Algeria is the scene on which the tragedy of Carthage

was performed.

 

In that part of Africa the habitable country must be divided into three

regions; first a corn region, lying between the Atlas and the sea,

exceedingly fertile but narrow in extent; secondly the Atlas itself, with its

timber stores and elephant preserves; and thirdly a plateau region of poor

sandy soil, affording a meagre pasture, interspersed with orchards of

date-trees, abounding in ostriches, lions, and gazelles, and gradually

fading away into the desert.

 

Africa belonged to a race of man whom we shall call Berbers or Moors,

but who were known as the ancients under many names, and who still

exist as the Kabyles or Algeria, the Shilluhs of the Atlas, and the Tuaricks

or tawny Moors of the Sahara. Their habits depended on the locality in

which they dwelt. Those who lived in the Tell or region of the coast

cultivated the soil and lived in towns, some of which appear to have been

of considerable size. Those who inhabited the plateau region led a free

Bedouin life, wandering from place to place with flocks and herds, and

camping under oblong huts which the Romans compared to boats turned

upside down. In holes and caverns of the mountains dwelt a miserable

black race, apparently the aborigines of the country, and represented to

this day by the Rock Tibboos. They were also found on the outskirts of

the desert, and were hunted by the Berbers in four-horse chariots, caught

alive, and taken to the Carthage market to be sold.

 

The Phoenician settlements were at first independent of one another, but

Carthage gradually obtained the supremacy as Tyre had obtained it in

Phoenicia. The position of Utica towards Carthage was precisely that of

Sidon towards Tyre. It was the more ancient city of the two, and it

preserved a certain kind of position without actual power. Carthage and

Utica, like Tyre and Sidon, were at one time always spoken of together.

 

The Carthaginians began by paying a quit-rent or custom to the natives,

but that did not last very long; they made war, and exacted tribute from

the original possessors of the soil. When Carthage suffered from

overpopulation colonies were dispatched out west along the coast, and

down south into the interior. These colonies were more on the Roman

than the Greek pattern; the emigrants built cities and intermarried freely

with the Berbers, for there was no difference of colour between them, and

little difference of race. In course of time the whole of the habitable

region was subdued; the Tyrian factory became a