distant Indian Ocean, and was, moreover, as it still
^o THE STORY OF ASSYRIA.
is, a point of attraction and departure for caravans.
Besides which, both Yemen and Somali are them-
selves exceedingly rich in numbers of costly Oriental
products, such as rare woods, frankincense, spices,
etc. Here the Puna lived and traded, principally
with Egypt, long before we hear of the Phoenicians.
Some think that the latter were a later branch of
these Puna, which separated from them at some
time and wandered northwards. Others, again, are
of opinion that the people who settled on the Syr-
ian sea-shore were Puna, who migrated, by a more
northern road, directly across the desert into the
Syrian land from their old home by the Persian
Gulf, whence their Canaanite brethren had departed
before them, so that they found them already as
builders of cities and founders of communities.
Among these and the Semitic tribes who continued
nomadic longer, some forever, they must have
tarried by the way, until, by long intercourse and
unhindered intermarriages, the differences wore
away and they were numbered among the " sons of
Canaan," and their first capital, SlDON, came to
pride herself on being "the first-born of Canaan."
3. There are no events of greater moment in the
history of remote antiquity than the early migra-
tions of races, and none to which, from their very
nature, it is more difficult to assign even an approx-
imative date. Races generally migrate when they
are at a stage of culture that does not as yet create
many monuments, and the creation of monu-
ments takes time. At a given moment a people
is mentioned in the inscriptions of some more
THE SONS OF CANAAN. y Y
advanced nation as living in certain places, and
that is the first we hear of it. All we can say
is, " At such a time they were there, for here is the
proof ; " How long? is often a question impossible
to answer. Yet in some favorable cases indirect
indications may be gathered which will help to
place the event correctly within a couple of hun-
dred years or so, a trifle which at our distance from
it scarcely comes into account at all. Now in
Genesis (chap. xii. 5-6), where we are told how
Abram, with Sarai, his wife, and Lot, his brother's
son, and all their substance and families, departed
from Harran towards the south and came into the
land of Canaan, we read this little annotation :
" And the Canaanite was then in the land." The
qualifying word " then " seems to imply that they
had not been there long. Whether they had so-
journed, as had the Hebrews, in the land of Shumir
itself, or confined themselves to the adjoining fer-
tile tracts by the Gulf, they seem to have preceded
the Hebrews in their westward migration. Accord-
ing to one tradition they had been driven from
their seats in consequence of a quarrel with the
King of Babylon. The time thus indicated corre-
sponds more than approximatively with the famous
Elamite conquest of Khudur-Nankhundi, to which
we are continually led back, and there is nothing
improbable in the supposition that the dispersion
of the Canaanites, like the migration of the Hebrew
and Assyrian Semites, was caused by the shock of
that invasion, the reaction of which was felt in
wider and wider circles, even before it reached the
72
THE STORY OF ASSYRIA.
Dead Sea itself under the enterprising Khudur Lag.
amar* until, as we saw in a former chapter (see
p. 24), it threw the Hyksos hordes into Egypt.
In the Hyksos invasion the Canaanite, especially
the Hittite, element was strongly represented, as
strongly as the Semitic, and both acted so much in
concert as to be almost undistinguishable from each
other, owing to the many and close affinities which
have always subsisted between the two races of
Shem and Ham, and the ease with which they al-
ways amalgamated, as though by mutual attraction.
Thus everything concurs to show the Elamite inva-
sion to have been one of the most momentous as
well as authentic events of remote antiquity, and a
point of departure for revolutions which affected
the Oriental world far beyond the countries imme-
diately concerned,, and helped shaping it into those
conditions which have until lately been considered
as the very earliest that history could deal with.
Nothing could be established with much certainty
previous to 1000 B.C., and, fantastical as the saying
may seem, all the ground we have gained in our
backward progress has been conquered by the
labors of the pickaxe and shovel, within the last
thirty or forty years.
4. We have seen \ that it is a law of history that
no country is found desert by an invading or mi-
grating race when it takes possession of it ; also
that no race, however long established and however
* See " Story of Chaldea," p. 221.
t See Ibid. p. 126.
THE SONS OF CANAAN. y?
indigenous it may deem itself, but will be shown to
have come from somewhere else, if we can get
back far enough to find out. Of course, behind
everything we have found out stands the next thing
which we have not, and which we may, or may not,
find out in the future, since no one can tell before-
hand where the limit of knowledge and discovery
lies, though it is certain that there is such a limit
somewhere, in every branch and direction of knowl-
edge. As we pursue the destinies of migrating
races, we often come upon populations which we
have no means to track further up into the past,
and the very names of which, given them by the
new comers, show them to have been as great a
puzzle to these new comers as they are to us. Thus
we are told that " Palestine, when entered by the
Canaanites, was not a wilderness. The greater part
of its towns were already built and the. country
round about them inhabited by a numerous popula-
tion, who were either extermined or forced to emi-
grate by the Canaanites. Some remnants, however,
of the primitive races still existed when the Isra-
elites conquered the land. Some of the names
given by the Bible to these primitive races of
Palestine indicate men of large stature and great
strength, and thus popular tradition in after ages
has termed them giants." * Such were the ANAKIM,
the EMIM (the latter name meaning " the terrible,"
" the formidable ") ; such also the people whom the
*Fr. Lenormant. "Ancient History of the East," translation of
E. Chevallier, Vol. II., p. 146.
74
THE STORY OF ASSYRIA.
Canaanites called Zurim and Zamzummim, names
simply indicative of a language which sounded to
the foreigners like a monotonous gibberish, an unin-
telligible buzzing. The last remnants of these
primitive races were destroyed by the Hebrews ;
but even then they were numerous enough, and
report represented them as sufficiently terrible to
inspire the new conquerors with even greater mis-
givings than the Canaanitic nations they came to
dislodge. When Moses sent twelve men of trust
and high standing, one from each tribe of Israel and
" every one a ruler among them," to " spy out the
land of Canaan " and " see the land, what it is, and
the people that dwelleth therein,'' ''whether they be
strong or weak, whether they be few or many,"
they came back disheartened, and declared to Moses
and the assembled tribes : " We be not able to go
up against the people, for they are stronger than
we. . . '. There we saw the giants, the sons of
Anak, which come of the giants : and we were in
our own sight as grasshoppers, and so we were in
their sight " (Numbers, xiii.). And of the land of
the Moabites by the Dead Sea (at its southern end)
it is further said : " The Emim dwelt therein afore-
time, a people great, and many, and tall, as the
Anakim, which also were accounted giants, as the
Anakim ; but the Moabites call them Emim." And
again of the people that preceded the Ammonites, a
little to the north of the Moabites: ". . . . the
Ammonites called them Zamzummim ; a people
great, and many, and tall, as the Anakim ; but the
Lord destroyed them before them, and they (the
THE SONS OF CANAAN. y$
Ammonites) succeeded them and dwelt in their
stead" (Deuteronomy, ii. io-ii, 20-21). In fact,
the physical power of these last descendants from
the old owners of the soil had become proverbial :
" Who can stand before the children of Anak ! "
was a common saying, and it took two conquests,
that of the Canaanites and that of the Hebrews,
finally to exterminate them. The account of the
latter concludes with the express statement, " There
was none of the Anakim left in the land of the
children of Israel," certain districts of the Philistines
alone excepted.
5. Now, when we ask the question that naturally
suggests itself : " Who were these very remarkable
primitive races? Under what division of the human
family should they be classed ? " we have no means
of answering it by anything but conjectures. If they
have attained any notable degree of culture, they
have left no monuments of it, and the great table of
the tenth chapter of Genesis itself furnishes no clew,
leaving us completely at fault ; for while it minutely
enumerates the members of the Canaanitic family, it
passes over in silence their predecessors, who have
been aptly called " the pre-Canaanite races of Syria."
This silence itself is, perhaps, a sort of indirect clew,
for it is manifestly intentional. It cannot proceed
from ignorance or inadvertence, since they are so
frequently and pointedly mentioned afterwards.
They are voluntarily and consistently ignored, as are
the entire yellow and black divisions of mankind.
It does not, therefore, appear improbable that they
should have belonged to the former, especially when
;6
THE STORY OF ASSYRIA.
we remember the traditions as to the long occupation
of all Western Asia by Turanians, and the fact that
wherever any one of the great white races, which
alone the biblical historian ranks among Noah's
posterity, arrives in the course of its migrations,
it seems to find a Turanian population in long estab-
lished possession.*
6. Of all the " sons of Canaan " the Phoenicians
achieved the widest renown and performed the most
universally important historical mission. They con-
quered the world as much of it as was known not
by force of arms, but by enterprise and cleverness.
And they knew more of the world than any other
people, for they alone possessed a navy and ventured
out to sea, into the open sea, out of sight of the land.
They were the connecting link between the most
distant shores, the most uncongenial peoples, the
founders of that amicable intercourse which com-
merce creates and fosters, because it satisfies mutual
heeds. They were the first wholesale manufacturers,
and greatest boon of all ! they gave the alpha-
bet to the world. And all this greatness, power,
wealth, these achievements they owed, next to their
distinctive national bent of mind, to the peculiar
disadvantages under which they labored with regard
to their location. Not that their country was un-
productive or in any way undesirable. There is,
perhaps, no fairer strip of land than that between
the Mediterranean and the Lebanon chain. But it
is just only " a strip," so narrow that the gigantic
* See * Story of Chaldea," Chapter II., " The Great Races."
12. A PASS IN LEBANON.
77
78
THE STORY OF ASSYRIA.
mountains that overtop it with the eternal crown of
snows which gave them their name ("Lebanon"
means "White Mountains"), have no room to de-
scend to the shore in easy steps and gracious slopes,
as they do on their eastern side into the Syrian plain,
but tower rugged and precipitous, with rocky ledges
sometimes jutting and beetling on the very edge of
the water. At its widest, the coast-land has only a
few miles to expand in, so" that even the streams are
not really rivers, but rather rushing, leaping torrents.
Never had nation so scant space to grow and multi-
ply in, with such utter impossibility of spreading on
any side. It was a cup which, when too full, could
overflow, literally, only into the sea. The harbors
along the shore were many and good, and around
them the Phoenician fishing settlements grew into
populous, active cities, forming a sort of ladder,
with the promontory of Mount CARMEL at the
bottom, and the island city of Arvad at the top.
To this day the lines of steamers, as they ply their
service along the Syrian coast, stop for passengers
and freight at all the great maritime stations of the
Phoenicians : Acre, Sur, Saida, Beyrout, Djebel
are the ancient Akko, Tyre, Sidon, Berytus,
Gebal, each of them once an independent township
or principality, with its own territory and subject
villages, its own king and council of noble and
wealthy elders; all rivals, jealous and envious of
each other, sometimes hostile, yet bound fast to-
gether by the ties of race, language, religion, common
customs, institutions, and pursuits, till to outsiders
and later generations all distinctions were blurred,
'J-
-SOURCE OF THE RIVER ADONIS IN THE LEBANON-
80 THE STORY OF ASSYRIA.
all differences merged in the one collective name of
" Phoenicians." Stinted for space on dry land, these
communities early betook themselves to the water,
became the best mariners and shipwrights in the
world, built almost as many ships as houses, and
must have come to look on the sea as their real home,
since even their very dwellings were in great part
constructed more on water than on land. Arvad
rose on a rocky islet quite some distance from the
coast ; Tyre was built on a group of small islands
artificially connected by filling the shallow straits
between them, and though the oldest quarter of the
city continued to exist on dry land, it was degraded
into a suburb of warehouses and landing-places for
freight, while the palaces and temples, the arsenals
and docks graced the later island quarter. The real
uncorrupted name of Tyre is Ts6r, i. e., " the Rock."
Sidon occupied a small peninsula, connected with
the coast by a narrow neck or causeway, and en-
dowed with the unusual luxury of three harbors,
facing the north and south.
7. It was during the four or five centuries of the
Hyksos rule in Egypt that the Phoenician cities rose
to their full development ; indeed, most probably in
consequence of that rule, which, being in the hands
of kindred races, must have created very favorable
conditions for their commerce. It was then, too,
that Sidon achieved a pre-eminence among them,
which, while not amounting to actual sovereignty,
yet must have become a real leadership or supre-
macy, and gained for her the proud surname of
" first-born of Canaan," even though, in point of
THE SONS OF CANAAN. 3 Y
date, some other cities may have been of older
foundation still, so that during a long period
foreign nations often used the name " Sidonians"
indiscriminately, applying it to the whole Phoe-
nician people. For this distinction Sidon may
very likely have been indebted originally, as her
name suggests, to her purple fisheries, the most
profitable along the shore. For of all the staple
articles of the Phoenicians' export trade, the one
which created the widest demand and fetched
the highest prices was their purple dye, an arti*
cle, too, which could be had only from them.
They supplied the markets also with many other
most valuable products of their industry, but there
was none so distinctively their own. They were
skilful workers in metals, and produced exquisite
cups, dishes, ewers, and ornaments of all sorts in gold,
silver, and bronze ; their glasswares were as famous
as Bohemian and Venetian glass is nowadays; their
looms were not idle. But in all these branches they
could be imitated and rivalled, in some outdone.
Thus the works of the Egyptian jewellers are mar-
vels of art, and the "Egyptians also manufactured
glass, while many countries and cities might have
disputed the prize in weaving fine stuffs and beauti-
ful carpets. But the purple dye the Phoenicians
had discovered, invented, they possessed, and jeal-
ously guarded the secret of it, and no one else could
make it. Through all the gradations of color, from
delicate crimson to the richest blood-red, the softest
amethyst-purple, the deepest black, they could
manage the wonderful substance, till the costliest,
6
82 THE STORY OF ASSYRIA.
most perfect piece of woollen goods increased in
value tenfold on emerging from their vats. And
robes of Sidonian or Tyrian purple became an al-
most necessary attribute of royalty and of worship,
the adornment of temples, the distinctive badge of
the high-born of all nations, so that the less wealthy
or more thrifty, as in later times the Romans, if
they could not afford or condemned the expense
of the lordly luxury, still adorned at least the hem
of their garments with a more or less wide band of
purple, according to the wearer's rank.
8. Never before or after did tiny shell-fish for
that was the humble scale in creation occupied by
the giver of the precious dyeing substance come
to such high honor or play so princely a part in
the affairs of the mighty of this world, unless we
except the pearl oyster ; yet even pearl fisheries,
though they have enriched companies and fed
whole populations, have not been the making of
great states, while it may be said, with very little
exaggeration, that the purple mussel was the mak-
ing of Phoenicia, first by the discovery of it, then
and still more by its disappearance. The dyeing
substance is a fluid, secreted by the mussel in
almost microscopic quantity, each animal yielding
just one small drop. Of this fluid, the raw ma-
terial, it is recorded that three hundred pounds
were needed to dye fifty pounds of wool. Clearly,
at this rate the home fisheries, however abundant,
had to be exhausted some day, and when the mus-
sel began to grow scarce, the fishers followed it up
the coast in their boats. It was soon discovered
THE SONS OF CANAAN.
83
that the entire coast of Asia Minor swarmed with
the precious shell-fish ; then ships were equipped
and sent on fishing tours, much as whalers are now.
Thus, from station to station, fishing, trading, ex-
ploring, they were drawn far to the north, as far as
the Hellespont. But this was not all. It appears
that in those days that particular kind of mussel
absolutely filled the waters not only of the Asiatic
coast, but of all the islands between that and
Greece, the straits, and bays, and gulfs of Greece
itself, nay, of Sicily, and, further still, the coast
of Northern Africa and Southern Spain in the en-
tire Mediterranean. From island, then, to island
the Phoenicians advanced, always in pursuit of their
invaluable " raw material " ; on, onwards to the west,
till the shores of Africa and Spain became to them
as familiar as their own. Thus this same insig-
nificant little animal, after founding the wealth and
prosperity of the nation, lured it into enterprise
and became the direct cause of the first voyages of
discovery that were ever made and which enlarged
the world, as then known, by all the expanse of the
Mediterranean, with all the countries that enclose
it, and all the islands scattered over it ; for of these,
surely, there is not one that was not first stepped
upon by the Phoenicians.
9. But even this is not all that marvellous mussel
did for them. It founded their first colonies For it
would have been highly unpractical and wasteful
to bring home shiploads of the mussels for the
sake of the one drop of fluid to be obtained from
each. It was much simpler to extract it on the
8 4
THE STORY OF ASSYRIA.
spot and leave the shells to rot or dry upon the
shore, as the pearl-fishers do with the oysters. That
such really became the general practice we have
evidence in the mounds of shells still occasionally
found on the beach of this or that island. This
obvious calculation gave rise to the establishment
of counting-houses and factories at the principal
landing points ; these in their turn, and at the
more important stations, gradually expanded into
permanent settlements. Contact with the native
populations, as yet very rude and uncultured, was
inevitable ; native labor had to be employed, as
being both cheap and handy. The islanders were
quickly trained to fish for the purple-mussel them-
selves and to trade it to the strangers for manufact-
ured wares pottery, glass, woollens and there is
no doubt that the foreign merchants drove many
hard bargains and cheated their semi-barbarous cus-
tomers quite as systematically and successfully as
the modern traders who grow rich on the gold and
ivory of African tribes, obtained for handfuls of
beads, bottles of whiskey, and poor cutlery. Single
Phoenician ships would enter some harbor or
anchor in some well-sheltered cove, and, displaying
an attractive array of goods on the shore, draw out
the natives and organize an extempore fair, which
seldom lasted more than five or six days, the
seventh day being generally devoted to rest by the
Phoenicians as well as by the Babylonians and
Assyrians.* Not unfrequently the ship-owner and
* See " Story of Chaldea," p. 256.
THE SONS OF CANAAN.
85
crew would invite the islanders to a grand festive
winding up of business, perhaps promising the
women presents or bargains, and, when the sails
were set and all was ready for their departure,
seize upon as many girls, boys, and children as they
could without too great risk, and carry them away,
to be sold for slaves in their own country, or in
Egypt, or Asia Minor, or even on other distant
islands again very much after the manner of Eu-
ropean dealers on the coast of Africa- before the
abomination of slave-trade was abolished.* How-
ever, the islanders of the Greek seas were not
stolid African tribes, but the ancestors of the
Greeks, the most gifted race in all the ancient
world. So they learned from their foreign visitors ;
learned not only what these taught them, but far
more, so that in time they could treat with them
on equal terms, barter their fishing, their timber,
their ore to them in fair exchange, and in the
course of a few hundred years supplant the Phoeni-
cians' navy by their own and become their rivals
in many arts, yet never in the production of the
purple dye, although the Greeks did attempt to
imitate even that, and not unsuccessfully. But
all this belongs to a far later period of history than
that we have as yet arrived at, and which is that of
active Phoenician colonization.
10. The prosperity of most of the Greek islands
* That the Phoenicians never quite abandoned the practice we can
gather from the reproof addressed to them by the prophet Joel :
" The children of Judah and Jerusalem have ye sold unto the sons of
the Grecians " (Joel, iii. 6).
86 THE STORY OF ASSYRIA.
dates from the establishment on them of Phoenician
colonies. Of these the oldest, falling into the age
of Sidon's supremacy and sent out principally by
that city, are naturally the nearest to the mother-
country. By far the most important ones were
those oh the neighboring island of CYPRUS, then
on that of Crete, the two largest and most
southern of the Greek islands. Cyprus's chief
attraction lay in her copper mines, which were
so abundant that the island itself was named
after the metal,* a most valuable discovery to
skilful workers in bronze, since about nine parts
in ten of bronze are copper. Now bronze, in those
early times, was the staple metal out of which
every kind of implements, tools, and household arti-
cles was manufactured, and even weapons swords,
daggers, the heads of arrows and lances the
use of iron having been introduced only later, at
least on a large and general scale. But if copper
is the main ingredient of bronze, the other ingredi-
ent, tin, is no less necessary, though only in the
proportion of one tenth or little more. Yet it is
much less plentifully supplied by nature; there
are, in the world, several copper mines to one of
tin ; these are few and far between, and where they
do occur they are comparatively scant and quickly
exhausted. It is this difficulty which probably first
led to adopt iron, though it is more difficult to work,
for its great superiority could be revealed only
by the use and labor of centuries. But in the time
* Hebrew, Kopher ; Greek, Kupros ; German, Kupfer; our Copper'
THE SONS OF CANAAN.
87
of the earlier Phoenicians bronze still reigned su-
preme, and they had to provide the tin both for
their own foundries and those of other nations, for
instance, the Egyptians. For awhile they used
to get it in the mountain regions of the Taurus,
north of their own country, but the supply was in-