Many particulars which warrant this conclusion may still be found in Phoenician history, notwithstanding the general scantiness of its information.

Next to the kings stood the Phoenician magistrates. These conjointly sent ambassadors. Indeed, at certain periods, a general congress of the great Phoenician cities was wont to be held, when the kings in council with the sanhedrim deliberated upon the common affairs of the confederacy. Tripolis was the place destined for the common assembly of the three principal cities.

Besides this, there is no question but the authority of the monarchs was very essentially limited by religion. The priests in these states formed a numerous and powerful class, and seem to have stood next in rank to the kings. Sicharbas, or Sichæus, the chief priest of the principal temple, was the husband of Dido [Elissa], and brother-in-law to King Pygmalion. His persecution and death by the latter, gave rise to those serious commotions which ended in the emigration of that numerous colony which founded the city of Carthage. The political influence of the Phoenician priests of Baal among the Jews, which caused a revolution in the state, is sufficiently well known. Among a people like the Phoenicians, where everything so much depended on sanctuaries and religion, the priesthood could scarcely fail to have a large share in the government, though we are not in a situation to determine precisely its extent.

The prophet Ezekiel in his prophecy against the king of Tyre, gives us a somewhat deep insight into the power of the prince of that city. He is pictured as a powerful prince, living in great splendour; but still as the ruler of a commercial city, which by its trade filled his treasury; as one who encourages and protects commerce by his wisdom and policy; but who, in the end, degenerating to craft and injustice, is threatened with the punishment of his misdeeds. "With thy wisdom and with thy understanding," Ezekiel cries, "hast thou gotten thee riches; with gold and silver hast thou filled thy treasury by means of the greatness of thy commerce. Full of wisdom sealedst thou great sums; thou dwellst in a garden of God, ornamented from thine infancy with precious stones, clothed with fine garments. But traffic has enriched thee with ill-gotten wealth and thou hast sinned." From this remarkable passage it may at least be gathered, that the revenue of the Tyrian kings, and without doubt that of the princes of the other cities also, was derived from commerce; but whether from the customs, or, which seems more probable, from a monopoly of some of the branches of trade, or from both, cannot be decided.b

ORIGIN OF THE PHOENICIANS

As is seen on examination of the different names which were in course of time applied to the Phoenicians, they are not as a race to be separated from the rest of the Canaanites, especially from the various elements of the pre-Israelitish population of Palestine. Their history is only that of a section of the Canaanite race, the history of that portion which, as far back as the times to which the earliest historical information concerning this territory refers, had fixed its abode, not in the interior of Palestine but on the edge of the sea, along the coasts of the strip of country which bordered it on the north as far as those level stretches of the coast lands of Syria which extended to the northwestern slopes of Lebanon. Although in the matter of descent no difference can be discerned between

them and the other Canaanites, historical science must, nevertheless, regard them as a different people. It is in this sense that they are spoken of as the Phoenician race, the Phoenician people. They, and the inhabitants of the colonies which they founded, alone have a claim to the name of Phoenicians.

We can only guess at the manner in which the settlement of the Phoenician country by the Canaanites was effected, but the occurrences which afterwards took place in the interior of Palestine point to the assumption that the Canaanites did not spread inwards from the coast. It is not easily conceivable that at first they possessed merely those long narrow stretches of land and only subsequently extended their settlements from thence over those portions of the country west of Jordan of which they were masters before the Israelites. From ancient times there prevailed, as far as can be discovered, an endeavour on the part of the population of the interior, to approach the flat country on the coast, where the fruitful fields were in any case much more attractive than the mountains and hilly districts which, even in the time of the Israelites, were still partly covered with forest.

It may be concluded, therefore, that the Canaanite population of Phoenicia had at some time immigrated thither, either from the southern strips of the Syrian coast or from the northern portions of the interior of Palestine. But if this be so, the immigration must still be looked upon as an event which was completed at a distance of time historically so remote, that a distinct and faithful recollection of it can hardly have been preserved by the Phoenicians themselves. Even a possibility that a dim notion of these occurrences may have lingered, at least in isolated legends, is scarcely to be calculated on. Rather should we expect all real knowledge of the kind to be early extinguished, and that the Phoenicians in their new home, as a result of the historical development through which they passed, should have early come to regard themselves as the primitive inhabitants of the country. As a fact there do exist notices respecting what purport to be Phœnician traditions, the age and to some extent the authenticity of which cannot indeed be determined, but which seem to indicate that at least in Hellenic and still later times, the Phoenicians cherished this opinion. Every people considers itself autochthonous, directly it has ceased to remember its origin.

On the other hand, there are accounts which tell of an immigration of the Phoenicians, and even of an immigration from regions lying farther south. The first who speaks of this is Herodotus. In the description of the collection of Xerxes' army which he sketches in the seventh book of his work, he says: "As regards the Phoenicians, they formerly dwelt, as they themselves say, on the Erythræan Sea. From thence they passed transversely across Syria and now dwell there on the seashore."

Most of the remaining notices of the coming of the Phoenicians from the Erythræan Sea, which are found in the writings of the ancients, are to be referred to this assertion of Herodotus. The few other isolated references may be passed over in silence, with the exception of the one concerning the origin of the Phoenicians furnished by Justin in his extracts from the historical works of Pompeius Trogus. What he tells us is as follows: "The people of the Tyrians are descended from Phoenicians who, disquieted by an earthquake, left their first home on the inland sea of Syria (ad Syrium stagnum), and soon after settling on the nearest seacoast, there built a town, which they called Sidon on account of the abundance of fish, for the fish is called 'sidon' by the Phoenicians." The statement that "sidon" means "fish" is incorrect, but it has at least the sense of "fishing."

The inland sea, the Syrium stagnum which is here mentioned, is said to be not far from the Syrian coast. This has been thought to refer to the Lake of Gennesareth, the Sea of Galilee, with its abundance of fish. But as stagnum means a body of water with no outlet, this interpretation is improbable. Christian Carl Josias Bunsen seems rather to have found the real one, when he expressed the opinion that the Dead Sea is meant, and that the earthquake which is said to have induced the Phoenicians to quit the shores of that sea was the same to which the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah is ascribed in the Bible. The tale of the destruction of these towns apparently lies at the root of the idea that in this region, immeasurable ages ago, there existed a higher civilisation than was known in historical times, and which belonged to races other than those which dwelt there in the historical period. The higher the idea which men formed of this ruined civilisation, the less could they impute its disappearance exclusively to chance, and the blind forces of the rude powers of nature. When legend glances back to the prehistoric past, she always regards the overthrow of the noble and beautiful as the direct result of a crime.

Compared with one another, the two accounts allow us to conclude the existence of a common tradition, in which the division of the peoples into different tribes is explained generally, and its cause is conceived to have been a great natural disturbance, a transformation of the earth's surface which is said to have occurred in the region round about the Dead Sea. In the reports which underlie the statements of Justin, or rather the sources of Pompeius Trogus, the history of the rise of the Phoenicians began with this catastrophe and therefore probably the general history of the various offshoots of the Canaanite section of humanity. On the other hand, in the Bible narrative, the same tradition is applied to connect it with the rise of two races which afterwards dwelt in the vicinity of that catastrophe. The peculiar nature of the catastrophe and the circumstance that just such great convulsions of the earth give occasion to new adjustments of the relations of peoples, lead to the conclusion that the joint tradition, which may be inferred from the two presentations, again refers back to a conception which cannot have arisen in the north of Palestine or in its coast districts, but only in the immediate neighbourhood of the Dead Sea, and in face of tokens which witness in eloquent language to the effects of the mighty forces of nature. In other words, a legend of local origin which ascribed the creation of the Dead Sea to a powerful convulsion of the earth, formed the germ of a legendary cycle with much common groundwork, in which the chief importance was assigned to the region of the Dead Sea and an earthquake which is said to have done its work there. This cycle consisted of a series of legends whose subject was the destruction of a lost civilisation which had attained a high pitch of excellence, and expression was thereby given to the conviction that the history of nations is not indeed to be traced back to its first startingpoint, the origin of man, but that nevertheless the human race must have had a common origin.

If we ask with which race this legendary cycle developed, it is evident that we have here to do with a tradition of Canaanite origin which can have arisen only amongst those Canaanites who had their seat in the inland district, which lies in the neighbourhood of the Dead Sea. When it arose,

cannot of course be determined. The Biblical account comes from the so-called Yahvistic narrator, who wrote as is assumed about the middle of the ninth century B.C. No doubt, however, the tradition on which this narrator draws is of much more ancient origin.

At best then we conclude that the information of Herodotus and Justin was derived from a Canaanite legend, in which a region by the Dead Sea was regarded as the starting-point of a division of the nations. And the starting-point was placed there, not because it was historically certain that such a movement of nations had begun in that place, but, on the contrary, because the starting-point was really unknown. But that region was said to have been the scene of a violent transformation of the earth's surface, which had swallowed up the flourishing settlements of antiquity, and in their place created a dreary waste. It was only for this reason that the legend for the division of the nations was there localised.

The early study of navigation in Phoenicia, the development of the Phoenician race into a seafaring commercial people, the international character of their proceedings-in short all those peculiarities attending the appearance of this people in history, which have always required explanation

have been readily ascribed to their former sojourn on the shore of the Erythræan Sea. For the idea is, that it was not by any means in a state of savagery, but as skilled seamen, as experienced traders, conversant with all the achievements of the civilisation of southern latitudes and prepared for every contingency, that the Phoenicians for some cause not further explained, changed their home and sought out the Mediterranean coast of Syria. Although it has never been asserted that this event could belong to historical times, with it the explanation of historical problems, which so far as it is admissible, at all times is to be drawn entirely and without arbitrary suppositions from the condition and situation of the Phoenician settlements on the Syrian shore, is relegated into the region of the entirely unknown. As a matter of fact, those particular regions which have been specially represented as the primitive home of the Phoenicians, namely, the Babylonian coasts of the Persian Gulf and those which lie to the west of them, are so little qualified to favour the rise of navigation, owing to the want of suitable woods, that, as Aristobulus informs us, when Alexander the Great conceived the design of bringing the coast district of eastern Arabia under his dominion, both seamen and portable ready-made ships had to be brought from Phoenicia to Babylon, and this was actually done with the express intention of making of Babylonia, what it had never hitherto been, namely, "a second Phoenicia."

Thus neither those statements which make the Phoenicians the primitive inhabitants of their country, nor those which represent them as immigrants, have any convincing force. It is in itself probable that they were originally native not to Phoenicia but to some place farther south, and in the interior of Palestine; but not because we have information to that effect, but solely on account of the outlying position of their settlements, representing the most northerly extent of territory of the Canaanites. Amongst the peoples of antiquity the Phoenician is not indeed the only one which must not be regarded as autochthonous, although all the accounts of their immigration which we possess are unworthy of credit. As a rule no conjectures can be brought forward, as to the road by which this or that people reached its place of abode. That this is possible in the case of the Phoenicians is one of the exceptions. They can only have reached their homes from the south, and that which urged them forward was, as has already been emphasised above, that same movement of peoples, which, starting from the northern territories of Arabia, has always produced an effect in the south of Palestine.c

ACCORDING to the opinion of eminent geologists Phoenicia was an inhabited country at some wholly prehistoric period, long before the first appearance of the Phoenicians. Nevertheless neither skulls nor other portions of the skeletons of the primitive, prehistoric inhabitants have been found there up to the present time. But on the floor of particular caves, of which there are many on the western slopes of Lebanon, are certain strata composed of the remains of burnt coal and ashes, potsherds, splinters of the bones of animals, and flint stones of various shapes. The whole, as it were, cemented together by calcareous sinter, into a kind of brecciated mass as hard as stone. The bones of animals have been declared to be those of a species no longer extant, but they exhibit no trace of having been modelled. On the other hand the flints, which exist in great quantities, are regarded as products which are certainly the work of human hands. At least, experts who have gone deep into this department of inquiry, have expressed the conviction that shapes such as these exhibit could not have come into existence in any other way, by means of any fall of rock or chance splitting of masses of flint. Unfortunately, however, a class of shapes is in question concerning whose origin doubt and hesitation are permissible. There is no object amongst them which bears on the face of it either the unmistakable impress of a tool or a sure sign of polishing or careful fashioning. It also seems as though the deposits on the floors of those grottos which have been the principal subjects of investigation had in no instance remained undisturbed. Further confirmation must consequently be looked for before the existence of a population of Phoenicia which was prehistoric in the geological sense, can be regarded as an established fact, and even then the generation which exclusively employed tools of such a rough form as these flint fragments must in any case have been, would be divided by an immeasurable gulf from the generations which were subsequently established in the same country.

It is in no way probable that when the Phoenicians chose the lowlands on the west side of the Lebanon chain as their place of abode they took possession of a tract of country which had as yet practically no population. But we have not the slightest grounds for guessing the stage of civilisation of the predecessors whom they encountered there, nor to what race these belonged. Certain scholars have indeed sought to answer the question, why it was in Phoenicia that in early times a much higher development of