The Greatest Empires & Civilizations of the Ancient East: Egypt, Babylon, The Kings of Israel and Judah, Assyria, Media, Chaldea, Persia, Parthia & Sasanian Empire. George Rawlinson

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Audacity in enterprise can certainly not be denied to the adventurous race which, from the islands and coasts of the Eastern Mediterranean, launched forth upon the unknown sea in fragile ships, affronted the perils of waves and storms, and still more dreaded “monsters of the deep,"316 explored the recesses of the stormy Adriatic and inhospitable Pontus, steered their perilous course amid all the islets and rocks of the Ægean, along the iron-bound shores of Thrace, Euboea, and Laconia, first into the Western Mediterranean basin, and then through the Straits of Gibraltar into the wild and boundless Atlantic, with its mighty tides, its huge rollers, its blinding rains, and its frequent fogs. Without a chart, without a compass, guided only in their daring voyages by their knowledge of the stars, these bold mariners penetrated to the shores of Scythia in one direction; to Britain, if not even to the Baltic, in another; in a third to the Fortunate Islands; while, in a fourth, they traversed the entire length of the Red Sea, and entering upon the Southern Ocean, succeeded in doubling the Cape of Storms two thousand years before Vasco di Gama, and in effecting the circumnavigation of Africa.317 And, wild as the seas were with which they had to deal, they had to deal with yet wilder men. Except in Egypt, Asia Minor, Greece, and perhaps Italy, they came in contact everywhere with savage races; they had to enter into close relations with men treacherous, bloodthirsty, covetous—men who were almost always thieves, who were frequently cannibals, sometimes wreckers—who regarded foreigners as a cheap and very delicious kind of food. The pioneers of civilisation, always and everywhere, incur dangers from which ordinary mortals would shrink with dismay; but the earliest pioneers, the first introducers of the elements of culture among barbarians who had never heard of it, must have encountered far greater peril than others from their ignorance of the ways of savage man, and a want of those tremendous weapons of attack and defence with which modern explorers take care to provide themselves. Until the invention of gunpowder, the arms of civilised men—swords, and spears, and javelins, and the like—were scarcely a match for the cunningly devised weapons—boomerangs, and blow-pipes, and poisoned arrows, and lassoes318—of the savage.

The adaptability and pliability of the Phoenicians was especially shown in their power of obtaining the favourable regard of almost all the peoples and nations with which they came into contact, whether civilised or uncivilised. It is most remarkable that the Egyptians, intolerant as they usually were of strangers, should have allowed the Phoenicians to settle in their southern capital, Memphis, and to build a temple and inhabit a quarter there.319 It is also curious and interesting that the Phoenicians should have been able to ingratiate themselves with another most exclusive and self-sufficing people, viz. the Jews. Hiram’s friendly dealings with David and Solomon are well known; but the continued alliance between the Phoenicians and the Israelites has attracted less attention. Solomon took wives from Phoenicia;320 Ahab married the daughter of Ithobalus, king of Sidon;321 Phoenicia furnished timber for the second Temple;322 Isaiah wound up his prophecy against Tyre with a consolation;323 our Lord found faith in the Syro-Phoenician woman;324 in the days of Herod Agrippa, Tyre and Sidon still desired peace with Judæa, “because their country was nourished by the king’s country."325 And similarly Tyre had friendly relations with Syria and Greece, with Mesopotamia and Assyria, with Babylonia and Chaldæa. At the same time she could bend herself to meet the wants and gain the confidence of all the varieties of barbarians, the rude Armenians, the wild Arabs, the barbarous tribes of northern and western Africa, the rough Iberi, the passionate Gauls, the painted Britons, the coarse Sards, the fierce Thracians, the filthy Scyths, the savage races of the Caucasus. Tribes so timid and distrustful as those of Tropical Africa were lured into peaceful and friendly relations by the artifice of a “dumb commerce,"326 and on every side untamed man was softened and drawn towards civilisation by a spirit of accommodation, conciliation, and concession to prejudices.

If the Phoenicians are to be credited with acuteness of intellect, it must be limited to the field of practical enquiry and discovery. Whatever may be said with regard to the extent and variety of their literature—a subject which will be treated in another chapter—it cannot be pretended that humanity owes to them any important conquests of a scientific or philosophic character. Herodotus, who admires the learning of the Persians,327 the science of the Babylonians,328 and the combined learning and science of the Egyptians,329 limits his commendation of the Phoenicians to their skill in navigation, in mechanics, and in works of art.330 Had they made advances in the abstract, or even in the mixed, sciences, in mathematics, or astronomy, or geometry, in logic or metaphysics, either their writings would have been preserved, or at least the Greeks would have made acknowledgments of being indebted to them.331 But it is only in the field of practical matters that any such acknowledgments are made. The Greeks allow themselves to have been indebted to the Phoenicians for alphabetic writing, for advances in metallurgy, for improvements in shipbuilding, and navigation, for much geographic knowledge, for exquisite dyes, and for the manufacture of glass. There can be no doubt that the Phoenicians were a people of great practical ability, with an intellect quick to devise means to ends, to scheme, contrive, and execute, and with a happy knack of perceiving what was practically valuable in the inventions of other nations, and of appropriating them to their own use, often with improvements upon the original idea. But they were not possessed of any great genius or originality. They were, on the whole, adapters rather than inventors. They owed their idea of alphabetic writing to the Accadians,332 their weights and measures to Babylon,333 their shipbuilding probably to Egypt,334 their early architecture to the same country,335 their mimetic art to Assyria, to Egypt, and to Greece. They were not poets, or painters, or sculptors, or great architects, much less philosophers or scientists; but in the practical arts, and even in the practical sciences, they held a high place, in almost all of them equalling, and in some exceeding, all their neighbours.

      We should be inclined also to assign to the Phoenicians, as a special characteristic, a peculiar capacity for business. This may be said, indeed, to be nothing more than acuteness of intellect applied in a particular way. To ourselves, however, it appears to be, in some sort, a special gift. As, beyond all question, there are many persons of extremely acute intellect who have not the slightest turn for business, or ability for dealing with it, so we think there are nations, to whom no one would deny high intellectual power, without the capacity in question. In its most perfect form it has belonged but to a small number of nations—to the Phoenicians, the Venetians, the Genoese, the English, and the Dutch. It implies, not so much high intellectual power, as a combination of valuable, yet not very admirable, qualities of a lower order. Industry, perseverance, shrewdness, quickness of perception, power of forecasting the future, power of organisation, boldness, promptness, are among the qualities needed, and there may be others discoverable by the skilful analyst. All these met in the Phoenicians, and met in the proportions that were needed for the combination to take full effect.

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