Page:History of Art in Phœnicia and Its Dependencies Vol 1.djvu/33

ORIGIN OF TIIK PHOENICIANS. beliefs, no doubt varied greatly between Jerusalem and Tyre and Sidon ; but arguments drawn from such evidence can hardly stand against the identity of language. If we accept the Cushite descent, we can only explain this identity in one way, namely, by supposing that the Hebrews exercised sufficient influence over the Phoenicians to induce them to abandon their own idiom for that of the descendants of Abraham. But there are many serious difficulties in the way of such an explanation, which is, moreover, in conflict with all that we know of Phoenician history. It was only under David and Solomon that the Hebrews won great political and military prestige in Syria, and at that time Phoenicia had been a solidly-established state for many centuries. We have no reason to doubt that she had also been long in full possession of her language and written character. Moreover it is not difficult to gather from the historical and prophetic books of our Bible that, during the whole of the period of the kings of Israel and Judah, both before and after the schism of the ten tribes, the Phoenicians acted upon the Jews rather than the Jews upon the Phoenicians. We do not find that from the coming of David to the Captivity, the Jews made any attempt to conquer Phoenicia or to bring her under their sovereignty in any way ; they do not seem to have impressed upon her either their manners or their ideas ; on the contrary, it was from Tyre that they drew the architects and master workmen who built the temple of Jehovah. In defiance of their own prophets they never ceased to borrow from the same people both the images and names of their gods and the rites in which they were worshipped. A Syrian princess, Athaliah, reigned at Jerusalem, but there is nothing to suggest that a Jew ever rose so high in the towns on the coast. If not under their kings, when could the Jews have wielded any such influence or authority over their rich and industrious neigh- bours as to cause them to throw aside the non-Semitic idiom they had brought from their distant fatherland and adopt Hebrew instead ? Search the history of Palestine from beginning to end and you will find no stage at which such a substitution was possible ; and on the other hand if you refuse to admit that the Phoenicians were of the same blood as the Jews, how do you account for their speaking and writing, not one of the idioms which we encounter at their