Page:History of Art in Phœnicia and Its Dependencies Vol 1.djvu/76

56 HISTORY OF ART IN PIKKNICIA AND ITS DEPENDENCIES. Thenceforward Tyre also had to abandon the great ambitions renounced long before by the other cities of the coast, and the Phoenicians, as a whole, had to be content with the status of merchants ; merchants better informed, readier at a bargain, at once more enterprising, more wary, more economical, and richer than their rivals, but still only merchants ; subjects now of the Ptolemies, now of the Seleucidae, and, finally, of the Roman emperors, they had stations everywhere, at Alexandria and Athens, at Corinth and Antioch, and later at Puteoli in Italy. In all these towns they dwelt in their own quarter, they used among them- selves their native Semitic language, they had their own temples and forms of worship ; like the Jews and Armenians in modern Turkey, they formed a nation apart, devoted to gain. From the time that Greek art imposed itself upon all civilized nations they ceased to play a useful part as the disseminators of plastic types and industrial methods ; but in other respects their mission was not yet fulfilled. During the two first centuries of our era their dis- persed but strongly cohesive communities were among the most active agents in the diffusion of Christianity. 1 3. Religion. Our knowledge of the Phoenician religion is still very imperfect. The numerous inscriptions that have been found in recent years they are for the most part dedications and fragments of ritual have revealed the names of several deities previously unknown. A certain amount of information has also been gleaned by the study of onomatology, as nearly all the Phoenician proper names are what is called theophori, that is to say, composite words in which the name of a deity is included. Finally, we have a few fragments of Phoenician writings, and a considerable mass of information sprinkled over the works of Greek and Roman authors. 2 But, 1 RENAN, Les Apotres, pp. 295-303. 2 MENANDER, who wrote a history of Phoenicia, was a native of Ephesus; but according to Josephus, to whom we owe the few fragments of his work which survive, he consulted Phoenician documents in the original (Fragmenta Historicum Gracorum, C. Muller, vol. iv. pp. 445-448). The remains of Sanchoniathon are to be found in the same collection, vol. iii. pp. 560-576. For the corrections that require to be made in the Greek text of these fragments, see several ingenious