Page:History of Greece Vol III.djvu/358

342 HISTORY OF GREECE. was six hours too short, According to the statement of Herodotus (ii, 4), the priests of Heliopolis represented the year of 365 days (which they saiil that the Egyptians had first discovered) as if it were an exact recurrence of the seasons, without any reference to the remaining six hours. This passage of Herodotus, our oldest informant, is perplexing. Geminus (Isagoge in Arati Phenomena, c. 6) says that the Egyptians intentionally refrained from putting in the six hours by any intercalation, because they preferred that their months, and the religious ceremonies connected with them, should from Lime to time come round at different seasons, which has much more the air of an ingenious after-thought, than of a determining reason. Respecting the principle on which the Egyptian chronology of Herodotus is put together, see the remarks of M. Bunsen, ^Egyptens Stellung in dor Wclt-gcschichtc, vol. i, p. 145. CHAPTER XXI. DECLINE OF THE PHENICIANS.- GROWTH OF CARTHAGE. THE preceding sketch of that important system of foreign nations, Phenicians, Assyrians, and Egyptians, who occu- pied the south-eastern portion of the (oiKOVfitvtf) inhabited world of an early Greek, brings them down nearly to the time at which they were all absorbed into the mighty Persian empire. In tracing the series of events which intervened between 700 B. c., and 530 B. c., we observe a material increase of power both in the Chaldoeans and Egyptians, and an immense extension of Grecian maritime activity and commerce, but we at the same time notice the decline of Tyre and Sidon, both in power and traffic. The arms of Nebuchadnezzar reduced the Phenician cities to the same state of dependence as that which the Ionian cities underwent half a century later from Croesus and Cyrus, while the ships of Miletus, Phokoea, and Samos gradually spread over all those waters of the Levant which had once been exclu- sively Phenician. In the year 704 B. c., the Samians did not yet |r-sess a single trireme, 1 down to the year G30 B. c. not a single 1 Thucyd. i, 13.