Page:History of Art in Phœnicia and Its Dependencies Vol 1.djvu/31

ORIGIN OF TIII-: PHOENICIANS, i i storms. To turn their ships' prows out into the open and to become a people of merchants and adventurous mariners were then only matters of time. 2. The Phoenicians ; their Origin and their First Establishment. According to all probability, it was touards the twentieth century before our era rather before that than after that the Phoenicians appeared in Syria ; and by the Phoenicians we mean, with the Greeks, the peoples who settled on the coast at the foot of Lebanon ; other tribes, their mare or less distant relations, dwelt north, east, and south of them. 1 How did they come there, and whence ? According to a tradition gathered by Herodotus from one of their descendants, their ancestors lived on the shores of the Persian Gulf,' 2 where they peopled the Bahrein Islands, two of which were still called Tyros and Arados in the time of Strabo. They passed for the mother countries of the two great towns on the Syrian coast, and we are told that they contained temples similar in appearance to those of Phoenicia. 3 Perhaps some of the resemblances between the Phoenicia of the Mediterranean and that of the Indian Ocean were after-thoughts on the part of the latter, which may have thus thought to attract curious visitors to its coasts ; but the story must have been founded on fact. The Hebrew Scriptures agree with the Greek historians in speaking of the great migrations that carried into Syria, towards the period of the first Theban empire, those 1 There are no grounds for insisting upon the Greek etymologies of the word ; which they sometimes derived from the name of the palm-tree, sometimes from that of the colour red, which was dear to a people who long had a monopoly in the manufacture of purple dye. It is now generally agreed that the word is a corruption of the name given by the Egyptians to the whole bulk of the populations of Arabia and the Persian Gulf; the country of Punt. The primitive form would seem to be better preserved in the names Pceni, Punici, given by the Romans to those Phoenicians of Africa with whom they were so long embroiled (see MASPERO, Histoire ancienne, p. 169, and PH. BERGER, La Phenicie [article reprinted from Z' 'Encyclopedic des Sciences religieuses, p. 3). 2 HERODOTUS, ii. 89. 3 STRABO, xvi. iii. 4. PLINY, Nat. Hist. vi. 32. According to Pliny the real name of Strabo's Tvros was Tvlos.