sufficient, and soon ceased entirely. They then
went for it to the Caucasus, sending their ships all
the way round Asia Minor, through the Hellespont
and the Bosphorus into the Black Sea, along the
southern coast of which they scattered several set-
tlements. And in their westward navigations, ex-
tended as much in pursuit of the precious ore as
of the no less precious shell-fish, they carefully ex-
plored every point at which they touched land.
II. It was thus they came on a land which was to
be for many centuries one of their richest posses-
sions the south of Spain, which they called Tar-
SHISH, and which is often given in the later and
corrupted form of TARTESSUS. Here the rivers car-
ried gold sand ; the mountains generously opened
their silver-laden sides and yielded such treasures
of pure ore as many centuries of assiduous working
scarcely succeeded in exhausting; and not silver
alone, but also copper, lead, and, in small quan-
tities, tin, while the fertile plains known to this
day, under the name of Andalusia, as one of the
gardens of the earth, literally flowed with honey,
oil, and wine, and were a very granary of wheat
and other grains, besides sheep of finest fleece and
several lesser products. The most extravagant
tales, as of fairyland, were circulated of this blessed
8 8 THE S TOR Y OF ASS YRIA .
region, and many have been wonderingly and half
believingly transmitted to us by various writers
of note. Thus one tells how the first Phoenicians
who came to Tarshish received so much silver in ex-
change for worthless articles that the ships could
not carry the weight ; so all the implements and
utensils, even to the anchors, were left on the
shore and new ones made of silver. Another
gravely reports that once on a time the forests got
on fire, when the gold and silver bubbled up from
below the earth, melted by the tremendous confla-
gration, for that every hill and mountain was a
solid mass of gold and silver. The same story is
told of the Pyrenees, where numerous rivulets of
pure molten silver were said to have formed and
run down the mountain sides on a similar occasion.
In the north-western corner of the Spanish penim
sula the Phoenicians found tin in rather larger
quantities than in the South.
12. But the great and only reliable tin mart of
the world in the bronze ages was England, espe-
cially its south-western extremity, now known as
Devon and Cornwall, and the islands of the Chan-
nel, the first recorded name of which is a Greek
one, signifying " TlN-ISLANDS " (CASSITERIDES).
When or in what way the Phoenicians ever heard of
so remote a nook, so totally out of the beat and be-
yond the horizon of all the nations then of any
note, must ever remain a mystery. But certain it
is that already long before the foundation of Gades
(about I ioo) they in some manner regularly drew
thence their supply of tin by a continental route
THE SONS OF CANAAN.
8 9
which traversed the whole of France. Probably
they did not at first go over to the islands, but
the natives brought the tin to them where their
caravans waited to receive it, somewhere about
the mouth of the Seine, and even further inland,
if not as far as the Pyrenees themselves. A glance
at the map will show how easy it was, by sail-
ing up the Seine as far as it is navigable, then
transferring the freight by a short land journey to
the Saone, then drifting down to that river's junc-
tion with the Rhone, and again down the latter's
deep and swift current, to take any amount of
wares to any of the numerous harbors on the Medi-
terranean by the mouths of the Rhone, where
would be stationed some of the so-called " Tarshish
ships," vessels of unusual size and peculiar build,
adapted for long navigations and heavy freights.
13. Still, this route must have been hampered by
many expenses and delays. For the country it
traversed was occupied by a great many tribes,
each of whom, of course, learned to make an easy
profit out of the foreign traders by levying a toll on
their ships or wagons as the condition of allowing
them free and safe passage through their own re-
spective territories. The Phoenicians were not a
fighting people and always submitted to exactions,
even extortions, having early learned the power of
wealth and its extraordinary capacities for smooth-
ing every path ; besides, their profits were so enor-
mous that they could well afford to sacrifice some
portion of it for the sake of being allowed to pur-
sue their business unmolested. At the same time,
QO THE S TOR Y OF ASS YRIA .
they were never slow to find and take ways and
means to elude irksome obligations. So it was in
this case ; they discovered that there was a way to
the " Tin Islands" round by sea, the route we now
know as that from Gibraltar by the Bay of Biscay
and the Atlantic. But to take this route required
more than ordinary pluck, not to say recklessness :
not so much on account of any deficiency in the
ships or in the skill of the mariners, as because the
Phoenicians had an idea that the straits which sep-
arated Spain from Africa marked the end of the
world. The great waste of waters beyond was to
them the mysterious Western Ocean, into which
their national deity, the great Baal-Melkarth, the
glorious Sun-God, plunged every night at the end
of his career, and whither no mortal was to follow
him. He had protected his people in their distant
wanderings ; he had led them, in the wake of his
own westward course, to these gates of the outer
world, but here was the end, the limit, where he
said "No further!" The two gigantic, towering
rocks which mark the entrance into the straits from
the Mediterranean, he had himself set up as signs
and boundaries ; they were, and for all ages were
to be, " The Pillars of Melkarth," beyond
which to pass to further explorations would be lit-
tle less than sacrilegious. Gades, indeed, the head-
quarters of their western commerce, wealthy and
splendid, a miniature Tyre, built, like the metropo-
lis, on a rocky islet at some distance from the land,
Gades rose on the outer side of the sacred land-
marks, but then that was only a continuation of a
.v
THE SONS OF CANAAN. g r
coast belonging to them along its whole extent ; and
besides, the city was said to have been founded by
the god's own order, imparted in a dream. Had
they not been held back by this feeling of super-
stitious awe, who knows what further discoveries
they might have made. One they did make, but it
was only accidental, and nothing came of it except
a few fables, which the Greeks later took hold of,
and, touching them up with their marvellous fancy,
worked out into beautiful stories. It appears that
some Phoenician ships were carried out into the
Atlantic by violent winds, and, losing control of
their movements, " were driven by the tempest,
after many days, to a large island opposite the
shores of Lybia (Africa), blest with such fertility
and such delicious air as to appear destined for the
abode of gods rather than the dwelling of men."
Evidently the island of Madeira! But the Phoeni-
cians did not return thither, and left the group to
be re-discovered a couple of thousand years later.
The love of gain, however, seems to have overruled
even religious scruples, for the next thing we hear
of are the regular trips of Phoenician ships to the
" Tin Islands," and if they did not found any per-
manent settlements in that remote and uncongenial
clime, there is no want of traces to attest their
presence. Thus, they had a station on the Isle of
Wight, in the centre of the island, where it rises
to a considerable eminence, commanding the rest.
The site was so cleverly chosen, that when the
Romans came, a thousand years later, they built a
fort on the same spot, and that again was succeeded
9 2
THE STORY OF ASSYRIA.
in due time by a strong castle of Norman construc-
tion, the noble ruins of which are much visited and
admired under the name of Carisbrooke Castle.
The knowledge of the sea-route to the " Tin
Islands " the Phoenicians kept strictly to them-
selves, and were jealously watchful that no one
should follow and supplant them there, as the
Greeks had supplanted them nearer home. A
characteristic story has been preserved of a Phoeni-
cian captain, who, finding himself pursued by some
Roman ships which had accidentally strayed into
those unfamiliar waters, and being unable to escape
by stress of oars and sails, deliberately ran himself
aground and drowned his whole crew and cargo, so
as not to be questioned and found out a deed
which was considered at Tyre an act of patriotic
heroism. All this, however, relates to a much later
period than that we have to deal with now.
14. Tin was not the only commodity the advent-
urous traders brought from their northern voyages.
They were the only importers of another northern
produce, the yellow amber of the Baltic merely a
fancy article, it is true, an ornamental luxury, but
not the less in great and general demand, and fetch-
ing extravagant prices, for it had become universally
fashionable in the then civilized world on account
of its scarcity and the mysterious charm which dis-
tance lent it. It is well known that the resinous
substance we call amber, the produce of inaccessible
forests of submarine plants, washed ashore by high
tides and tempest-beaten waves, is gathered all along
the coast of Prussia. It has therefore been con-
THE SONS OF CANAAN.
93
jectured and given out almost as a certainty, that
the Phoenician ships must have visited those se-
cluded and most inhospitable seas. Later and more
accurate study, however, has shown the improba-
bility of their having confronted the dangers of a
navigation round Denmark, and ventured into
strange and nearly always stormy waters, so bristling,
moreover, with obstacles in the shape of reefs and
cliffs, shoals and shallows and straits, as to make
them nearly impracticable to any but native sailors.
It has further been shown that, in very ancient
times, amber was found off the coasts of Holland?
very easily accessible from England, and, lastly,
that the Phoenicians had established a caravan route
across the whole of Germany, from the Adriatic to
the Baltic. It is along this route, which offered
them many convenient points for bartering their
Asiatic wares against local* products, that the
greater part of the amber was brought to the mouth
of the river Po in Northern Italy and then shipped
down the Adriatic.
15. For the Phoenicians, although their chief re-
nown is based on their maritime expeditions, were
quite as intrepid travellers by land as by sea. On
the Asiatic continent they practised caravan trading
on an immense scale; the great caravan routes
of the East were almost entirely in their hands :
from the Black Sea to the Nile, over Karkhemish
and Damascus ; from their own cities, through
the land of Judah to the southern marts of Ara-
bia ; across Syria, through Damascus, to the Eu-
phrates, and down the river to Babylon, or by a
94
THE STORY OF ASSYRIA.
short cut through the desert to Assyria proper
Nineveh, Kalah, and the rest ; lastly, from
Babylon, across the continent, even to India it-
self, at least to the mouth of the Indus. The
latter point, however, they probably reached more
frequently in large armed vessels of the same build
as the Tarshish ships. They were the privileged
traders of the world ; the wealth of nations passed
and repassed through their hands in its transfer
from country to country, and in its passage enough
stuck to these hands to have made the cities by
the sea rich and prosperous beyond all others, even
without the ever flowing source of income which
their own factories supplied, and which, again, would
have sufficed for a nation's prosperity without the
addition of foreign commerce on such a scale.
16. As it was, the wealth and boundless luxury
which the Phoenicians enjoyed at home passes all
description and almost imagination. " Tyrus did
build herself a stronghold," says one of the Hebrew
prophets,* " and heaped up silver as the dust and
fine gold as the mire of the streets." But the
most complete and striking picture of Tyre in her
greatest glory we find in some of the prophet Eze-
kiel's wonderful pages. This picture breathes and
lives before our enraptured eyes, and we scarcely
know what most to marvel at, the poetic beauty
of the description, or its almost dazzling vividness
and gorgeousness. The prophet apostrophizes the
queen of the Phoenician cities :
* Zechariah, ix. 3.
THE SONS OF CANAAN.
95
" O thou that dwellest at the entry of the sea, which art the mer-
chant of the people unto many isles .... thou, O Tyre, hast said, I
am perfect in beauty.' ... By thy wisdom and by thine understand-
ing thou hast gotten thee riches and hast gotten gold and silver into
' thy treasures. By thy great wisdom and by thy traffic hast thou in-
creased thy riches, and thine heart is lifted up because of thy
riches, .... and thou hast said, 'lama god, I sit in the seat of God,
in the midst of the seas/ . . . Thy borders are in the heart of the
seas, thy builders have perfected thy beauty. They have made all thy
ship boards of fir trees from Senir ; they have taken cedars from
Lebanon to make a mast for thee. Of the oaks of Bashan they
have made thine oars ; they have made thy benches of ivory inlaid
in boxwood from the isles of Kittim (Cyprus). Fine linen with
broidered work from Egypt was thy sail, that it might be to thee for
an ensign ; blue and purple from the isles of Elishah (the Greek
islands) was thine awning. The inhabitants of Sidon and Arvad
were thy rowers ; thy wise men, O Tyre, were in thee, they were thy
pilots ... all the ships of the sea with their mariners were in thee to
occupy thy merchandise. . . . Tarshish was thy merchant by reason
of the multitude of all kind of riches ; with silver, iron, tin, and lead
they traded for thy wares. Javan, Tubal, and Meschech (the Ionian
Greeks and the mountain peoples of the Taurus), they were thy
traffickers ; they traded the persons of men and vessels of brass for
thy merchandise. They of the house of Togarmah (Armenia) traded
for thy wares with horses and war-horses and mules. . . . Many isles
were the mart of thine hand : they brought thee in exchange horns of
ivory and ebony. Syria was thy merchant, by reason of the multitude
of thy handiworks : they traded for thy wares with emeralds, purple
and broidered work, and fine linen, and coral and rubies. Judah and
the land of Israel, they were thy traffickers : they traded for thy
merchandise wheat .... and honey and oil and balm. Damascus was
thy merchant for the multitude of thy handiworks, by reason of the
multitude of all kinds of riches ; with the wine of Helbon and white
wool. . . . Arabia " (the prophet enumerates a number of Arabian
tribes from the Persian Gulf to the Red Sea) "... they traded for
thy wares in lambs, and rams, and goats .... with chief of all
spices and with all precious stones, and gold .... in choice wares in
wrappings of blue and broidered work, and in chests of rich apparel,
bound with cords, and made of cedar. . . . When thy wares went
forth out of the seas, thou filledst many people ; thou didst enrich
9 6
THE STORY OF ASSYRIA.
the kings of the earth with the multitude of thy riches and of thy
merchandise. . . . The ships of Tarshish were thy caravans for thy
merchandise : and thou wast replenished and made very glorious in
the midst of the seas."*
17. " Thy wisdom and thine understanding."
"Thy great wisdom and thy traffic." The wisdom
of the money-maker, the understanding of the cun-
ning trader such indeed is the summing up and
the culmination of the Phoenicians' moral worth.
Money-making, the love of gain and accumulation,
is not only the key to their national character, it is
their character itself, and their whole character.
Motive, incentive, sustaining power all is there ;
they develop great qualities : enterprise, endurance,
industry, ingenuity but these are all begotten of
and animated by the love of lucre, and success to
them is wealth, and therein is their pride, their joy :
" Thine heart is lifted up because of thy riches."
Truly, if ever nation has been a worshipper 01 Mam-
mon, has made its choice and clung to it, the Phoe-
nicians have been that nation. They were lacking
in all the qualities which have won for other races
the name of heroic and intellectual ; their ambition
ran in but one channel. They were not a warlike
or conquering people, not even a patriotic or free
dom-loving people. Ever ready to meet an invader
with tribute and submission, they invariably pre-
ferred to pay rather than fight. They were not
alive to the shame of foreign rule, and bore it with
equanimity so long as its demands on their treasu-
* Ezekiel, chs. xxvii. and xxviii.
THE SONS OF CANAAN. gj
ries were moderate and it did not interfere with their
commercial operations. They had no army, but
foreign hired soldiers for emergencies; in the words
of Ezekiel (xxvii. 10), " They of Persia and Lud
(Lydia) and of Put (Libya) were in thine army,
thy men of war: they hanged the shield and helmet
in thee." When actually attacked within their
cities, their homes, or subjected to excessive extor-
tion, they could fight, like wild beasts at bay in their
dens, and this they did more than once. But they
were seldom put to such a test, being far too valu-
able subjects, too convenient agents and middle-
men not to be treated, as a rule, with consideration.
Thus they came through the five hundred years of
Egyptian dominion and invasions unscathed and
unimpoverished, rarely refractory, never openly re-
bellious. Even when they founded colonies, they
were quite willing to pay ground rent for their set-
tlements, if the native population met them in a
determined spirit and asserted their rights, and they
frequently continued to pay such rent long after
the colonies had grown into powerful communities,
simply to avoid unpleasantness.
1 8. They were not a literary or intellectual people.
Although they invented the alphabet, they used it
chiefly for purposes of book-keeping and short
inscriptions. They have left no poetry, no histor-
ical annals, no works of science or speculation.
They do not seem to have cared even to publish
their own very remarkable experiences and exploits ;
these brought them wealth, what cared they for
the fame? Had Assyrian conquerors visited such
9 8
THE STORY OP ASSYRIA.
remote and unfamiliar regions as the coast of Spain,
that of the Baltic, the ''Tin Islands," what interest-
ing records would have been left for our perusal !
How the monotony of the military narrative would
have been relieved with
touches of description,
giving briefly but graph-
ically the most marked
peculiarities of the land
and the people, accounts
even of their plants and
animals! Nothing of the
kind seems to have oc-
curred to the Phoenicians,
whose silence is especial-
ly tantalizing in the case
of the "Tin Islands":
We should like to know
what England was like
two thousand years B. C.
They were not an imag-
inative or creative people,
but merely clever learn-
14. small Phoenician idol in e rs and imitators. Of the
TERRA-COTTA (CLAY). many ^ they cultivated)
not one was their own. Their only original inven-
tion was the purple dye and that is a craft, not
an art. Their sculpture, of which many specimens
have been preserved, was only a transformation of
Babylonian and Assyrian art. Nothing can be
more hideous and shapeless than the images of
their principal deities, mostly in clay, which they
THE SONS OF CANAAN.
99
carried with them on all their expeditions. Of
their architecture we cannot judge, for when the
day of destruction came, it was utter and complete,
and not stone on stone was left of their buildings,
It came to pass, as we read
in the prophet Ezekiel:
" They shall destroy the
walls of Tyre and break
down her towers . . . and
they shall break down thy
walls and destroy thy pleas-
ant houses; and they shall
lay thy stones and thy tim-
ber and thy dust in the
midst of the waters. . . . I
will make her a bare rock :
she shall be a place for the
spreading of nets in the
midst of the sea." *
19. Thus through the
cycle of what the Phoeni-
cians were not, we are for-
cibly brought back to what 15. ashtoreth, small phce-
they eminently were, to the NICIAN IDOL IN TERRA-
IN !*.. j- COTTA (CLAY).
vocation wherein they dis-
played unrivalled genius and boundless capabilities
that of business men and money-makers. And
as it seems to be a wise and invariable dispensation
that people, in laboring, however selfishly, to benefit
themselves, should in some way, and independently
* Ezekiel, xxvi.
t oo THE S TOR Y OF ASS YRIA.
of their own will, necessarily benefit others also, so
the Phoenicians have been the bearers, if not of spir-
itual culture, at least of material progress to count-
less tribes and places, which, but for them, but for
their awakening and stirring contact, might have
slumbered for ages longer in unconsciousness of
their own powers and resources.
" In this respect," says Francois Lenormant, the scholar so often
quoted already, " it is impossible ever to overrate the part which the
Phoenicians played in the ancient world and the greatness of their
influence. . . . There was a time, of which the culminating point
may be placed about twelve centuries before the beginning of our era,
when the counting-houses of the sons of Canaan formed an uninter-
rupted chain along all the shores of the Mediterranean to the Strait
of Gibraltar, while another series of similar establishments were
stationed along the sea route that stretched from the southern
extremity of the Red Sea to the shores of India. These counting-
houses exercised an immense influence on the countries wherein they
were established. Every one of them became the nucleus of great
cities, for the natives quickly rallied around the Phoenician commer-
cial settlement, drawn to it by the advantages it offered them and the
attractions of civilized life. Every one, too, became a centre for the
propagation of material civilization. A barbarous people does not
enter into active and prolonged commercial relations with a civilized
one without gradually appropriating the latter's culture, especially
in the case of races so intelligent and capable of progress as were
those of Europe. . , . New needs make themselves felt : the native
covets the manufactured products which are brought to him, and
which reveal to him all sorts of refinements of which he had no idea.
Soon the wish arises in him to find out the secret of their fabrication,
to master the arts which create them, to profit himself by the re-
sources his own country yields, instead of giving them up in the
shape of raw material to the strangers who know so well how to
make use of them. ..." *
20. If we will try to imagine how reviving, bene-
* Fr. Lenormant, " Premieres Civilisations," Vol. I., p. 158.
THE SONS OF* CANAAN:
"tot
ficial, truly civilizing, even in our own days, would
be the regularly recurring trips of a pedler with a
judicious selection of wares to a remote and secluded
neighborhood somewhere on the outskirts of civ-
ilization, especially if that pedler be willing to
barter his goods not always for money, but more
often for such simple local products and materials
as his customers can supply, we shall, by magnify-
l6. PHOENICIAN SARCOPHAGUS (COFFIN). (OF LATE PERIOD.)
ing the whole thing a hundredfold, form a tolerably
fair idea of the blessings that everywhere followed
in the wake of the Phoenicians. The resemblance
would be the closer from the fact that our pedler
would certainly cheat his customers as hard and as
long as they would let him, that is, as long as they
had not gained some knowledge of the market
value of their own wares, and, probably, some skill
in manufacturing them, so as to become compara-
tively independent of their itinerant trader. If
they were wise and just, however, they would not
502 T&B SPOKY OF ASSYRIA.
grudge him his past exorbitant profits, even while
reducing them for the future within reasonable
bounds, but would consider that all schooling must
be paid for. Thus as each one of the great nations
that have in succession played prominent parts on
the historical stage of the world seems to have
had allotted to it a special mission, in accordance
with its own particular powers and gifts, we really