directly from the Phœnician through the medium of the Greek.
One point more now alone needs to be noticed. The long-continued influence upon early Greek culture which we ascribe to the Phœnicians cannot but have left its mark upon the Greek vocabulary also. Some at least of the names given by the Phœnicians to the objects of luxury they brought with them must have been adopted by the natives of Hellas. We know that this is the case with the letters of the alphabet; is it also the case with other words? If not, analogy would almost compel us to treat the evidences that have been enumerated of Phœnician influence as illusory, and to fall back upon the position of K. O. Müller and his school. By way of answer I would refer to the list of Greek words, the Semitic origin of which admits of no doubt, lately given by Dr. August Müller in Bezzenberger's "Beiträge zur Kunde der indogermanischen Sprachen."[1] Amongst these we find articles of luxury like "linen" (byssus), "shirt" (χιτών), "sackcloth" (σύκκος) "myrrh" and "frankincense," "galbanum" and "cassia," "cinnamon" and "soap" (νιτρον), "lyres"(νάβλας) and "wine-jars" (κύδος), "balsam" and "cosmetics" (φύκος) as well, possibly, as "fine linen" (όθόνη) and "gold," along with such evidences of trade and literature as the "pledge" or άρραβών, the mina, "the writing-tablet" (δέλτος), and the "shekel." If these were the only instances of Semitic tincture, they would be enough to prove the early presence of the Semitic Phœnicians in Greece. But we must remember that they are but samples of a class, and that many words borrowed during the heroic age may have dropped out of use or been conformed to the native part of the vocabulary long before the beginning of written literature, while it would be in the lesser known dialects of the islands that the Semitic element was strongest. We know that the dialect of Cyprus was full of importations from the East.
In what precedes I have made no reference to the Homeric poems, and the omission may be thought strange. But Homeric illustrations of the presence of the Phœnicians in Greece will occur to every one, while both the Iliad and the Odyssey in their existing form are too modern to be quoted without extreme caution. A close investigation of their language shows that it is the slow growth of generations; Æolic formulæ from the lays first recited in the towns of the Troad are embodied in Ionic poems where old Ionic, new Ionic, and even Attic jostle against one another, and traditional words and phrases are furnished with mistaken meanings or new forms coined by false analogy. It is difficult to separate the old from the new, to say with certainty that this allusion belongs to the heroic past, this to the Homer of Theopompus and Euphorion, the contemporary of the Lydian Gyges. The art of Homer is not the art of Mykenæ and of the early age of Phœnician influence; iron is already taking the place of bronze, and the shield of Akhilles or the palace of Alkinous bear witness to a developed art which has freed itself from its foreign bonds. Six times are Phœnicia and the Phœnicians mentioned in the Odyssey, once in the Iliad[2] elsewhere it is Sidon and the Sidonians that represent them, never Tyre.[3] Such passages, therefore, cannot belong to the epoch of Tyrian supremacy, which goes back, at all events, to the age of David, but rather to the brief period when the Assyrian king Shalmaneser laid siege to Tyre, and his successor Sargon made Sidon powerful at its expense. This, too, was the period when Sargon set up his record in Cyprus, "the isle of Yavnan" or the Ionians, when Assyria first came into immediate contact with the Greeks, and when Phœnician artists worked at the court of Nineveh and carried their wares to Italy and Sardinia. But it was not the age to which the relics of Mykenæ, in spite of paradoxical doubts, reach back, nor that in which the sacred bull of Astarte carried the Phœnician maiden Europa to her new home in the west. A. H. Sayce.
A WORLDLET WITHIN THE WORLD.
We wonder that Admiral de Horsey’s report on the condition of Pitcairn Island has not attracted more public attention. The story of the island is curious enough, and its present condition more curious even than its story. As our readers probably know, it is an island of about seven miles in circumference, and about a square mile and a quarter in extent, not much more than half the size of Sark. It is only two
