The History of Antiquity, Vol. 2 (of 6). Duncker Max

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СКАЧАТЬ II. and III. give to the princes of Arathu, that beside the power to which the kingdom of the Hittites had risen about the middle of the fifteenth century B.C., and which it maintained to the end of the fourteenth,69 the Phenician cities had assumed an independent position. The successes of the Pharaohs in Syria come to an end in the first decades of the fourteenth century. Egypt makes peace and enters into a contract of marriage with the royal house of the Cheta; the Syrians obtain even the preponderance against Egypt (I. 152), to which Ramses III. towards the end of the fourteenth century was first able to oppose a successful defence.

      The overthrow of the kingdom of the Hittites, which succumbed to the attack of the Amorites (I. 348) soon after the year 1300 B.C., must have had a reaction on the cities of the Phenicians. Expelled Hittites must have been driven to the coast-land, or have fled thither, and in the middle of the thirteenth century the successes gained by the Hebrews who broke in from the East, over the Amorites, the settlement of the Hebrews on the mountains of the Amorites, must again have thrown the vanquished, i. e. the fugitives of this nation, towards the coast.

      With this retirement of the older strata of the population of Canaan to the coast is connected the movement which from this period emanates from the coasts of the Phenicians, and is directed towards the islands of the Mediterranean and the Ægean. It is true that on this subject only the most scanty statements and traces, only the most legendary traditions have come down to us, so that we can ascertain these advances only in the most wavering outlines. One hundred miles to the west off the coast of Phœnicia lies the island of Cyprus. On the southern coast of this island, which looked towards Phœnicia, stood the city of Citium, Kith and Chith in the inscriptions of the Phenicians, and apparently Kittii in those of the Assyrians. Sidonian coins describe Citium as a daughter of Sidon.70 After this city the whole island is known among the Semites as Kittim and Chittim; this name is even used in a wider sense for all the islands of the Mediterranean.71 The western writers state that before the time of the Trojan war Belus had conquered and subjugated the island of Cyprus, and that Citium belonged to Belus.72 The victorious Belus is the Baal of the Phenicians. The date of the Trojan war is of no importance for the settlement of the Phenicians in Cyprus, for this statement is found in Virgil only. More important is the fact that the settlers brought the Babylonian cuneiform writing to Cyprus. This became so firmly rooted in use that even the Greeks, who set foot on the island at a far later time, scarcely before the end of the ninth century, adopted this writing, which here meanwhile had gone through a peculiar development, and had become a kind of syllabic-writing, and used it on coins and in inscriptions even in the fifth century B.C.73 The settlement of the Sidonians in Cyprus must therefore have taken place before the time in which the alphabetic writing, i. e. the writing specially known as Phenician, was in use in Syria, and hence at the latest before 1100 B.C. How long before this time the settlement of the Phenicians in Cyprus took place can, perhaps, be measured by the fact that the Cyprian alphabet is a simplification of the old Babylonian cuneiform writing. The simplified form would undoubtedly have been driven out by the far more convenient alphabetic writing of the Phenicians if the Cyprian writing had not become fixed in use in this island before the rise of the alphabetic writing. Further, since the Phenicians, as we shall see, set foot on the coast of Hellas from about the year 1200 B.C. onwards, we must place the foundation of the colonies on the coasts nearest them, the settlement in Cyprus, before this date, about the middle of the thirteenth century B.C.

      What population the Phenicians found on Cyprus it is not possible to discover. Herodotus tells us that the first inhabitants of the island were Ethiopians, according to the statements of the Cyprians. It is beyond a doubt that not Citium only, but the greater part of the cities of the island were founded by the Phenicians, and that the Phenician element became the ruling element of the whole island.74 It is Belus who is said to have conquered Cyprus, and to whom the city of Citium is said to belong; i. e. Citium worshipped the god Baal. At Amathus, to the west of Citium, on the south coast of the island, which was called the oldest city on Cyprus, and which nevertheless bears a distinctly Semitic name (Hamath), Adonis and Ashera-Astarte were worshipped,75 and these deities had also one of their oldest and most honoured seats of worship at Paphos (Pappa in the inscriptions), on the west coast. The Homeric poems represent Aphrodite as hastening to her altar at Paphos in Cyprus. Pausanias observes that the Aphrodite of Cyprus was a warlike Aphrodite,76 and as the daughters of the Cyprians surrendered themselves to the foreign seamen in honour of this goddess,77 it was the Astarte-Ashera of the Phenicians who was worshipped at Amathus and Paphos. The Zeus of the Cyprian city Salamis (Sillumi in the inscriptions of the Assyrians), to whom, according to the evidence of western writers, human sacrifices were offered, can only be Baal Moloch, the evil sun-god of the Phenicians. In the beginning of the tenth century B.C. the cities of Cyprus stood under the supremacy of the king of Tyre.78 The island was of extraordinary fertility. The forests furnished wood for ship-building; the mountains concealed rich veins of the metal which has obtained the name of copper from this island.79 Hence it was a very valuable acquisition, an essential strengthening of the power of Sidon in the older, and Tyre in the later, period.

      Following Zeno of Rhodes, who wrote the history of his home in the first half of the second century B.C.,80 Diodorus tells us: The king of the Phenicians, Agenor, bade his son Cadmus seek his sister Europa,81 who had disappeared, and bring back the maiden, or not return himself to Phœnicia. Overtaken by a violent storm, Cadmus vowed a shrine to Poseidon. He was saved, and landed on the island of Rhodes, where the inhabitants worshipped before all other gods the sun, who had here begotten seven sons and among them Makar. Cadmus set up a temple in Rhodes to Poseidon, as he had vowed to do, and left behind Phenicians to keep up the service; but in the temple which belonged to Athena at Cnidus in Rhodes he dedicated a work of art, an iron bowl, which bore an inscription in Phenician letters, the oldest inscription which came from Phœnicia to the Hellenes. From Rhodes Cadmus came to Samothrace, and there married Harmonia. The gods celebrated this first marriage by bringing gifts, and blessing the married pair to the tones of heavenly music.82

      Ephorus says that Cadmus carried off Harmonia while sailing past Samothrace, and hence in that island search was still made for Harmonia at the festivals.83 Herodotus informs us that Cadmus of Tyre, the son of Agenor, in his search for Europa, landed on the island of Thera, which was then called Callisto, and there left behind some Phenicians, either because the land pleased him or for some other reason. These Phenicians inhabited the island for eight generations before Theras landed there from Lacedæmon. The rest went to the island of Thasos and there built a temple to Heracles, which he had himself seen, and the city of Thasos. This took place five generations before Heracles the son of Amphitryon was born. After that Cadmus came to the land now called Bœotia, and the Phenicians who were with him inhabited the land and taught the Hellenes many things, among others the use of writing, "which as it seems to me the Hellenes did not possess before. They learnt this writing, as it was used by the Phenicians; in the course of time the form of the letters changed with the language. From these Phenicians the Ionians, among whom they dwelt, learnt the letters, altered their form a little, and extended their use. As was right, they called them Phenician letters, since the Phenicians had brought them into Greece. I have myself seen inscriptions in Cadmeian letters (i. e. from the time of Cadmus) in the temple of Ismenian Apollo at Thebes."84 According to the narrative of Hellanicus, Cadmus received an oracle, bidding him follow the cow which bore on her back the sign of the full moon, and found a city where she lay down. Cadmus carried out the command, and when the cow lay down wearied, where СКАЧАТЬ