The Essential Works of George Rawlinson: Egypt, The Kings of Israel and Judah, Phoenicia, Parthia, Chaldea, Assyria, Media, Babylon, Persia, Sasanian Empire & Herodotus' Histories. George Rawlinson
all of them, the actual produce of the country in ancient times, and Herodotus has been in some degree discredited, but perhaps without sufficient reason. He is supported to a considerable extent by Theophrastus, the disciple of Aristotle, who says:967 “Frankincense, myrrh, and cassia grow in the Arabian districts of Saba and Hadramaut; frankincense and myrrh on the sides or at the foot of mountains, and in the neighbouring islands. The trees which produce them grow sometimes wild, though occasionally they are cultivated; and the frankincense-tree grows sometimes taller than the tree producing the myrrh.” Modern authorities declare the frankincense-tree (Boswellia thurifera) to be still a native of Hadramaut;968 and there is no doubt that the myrrh-tree (Balsamodendron myrrha) also grows there. If cinnamon and cassia, as the terms are now understood, do not at present grow in Arabia, or nearer to Phoenicia than Hindustan, it may be that they have died out in the former country, or our modern use of the terms may differ from the ancient one. On the other hand, it is no doubt possible that the Phoenicians imagined all the spices which they obtained from Arabia to be the indigenous growth of the country, when in fact some of them were importations.
Next to her spices, Arabia was famous for the production of a superior quality of wool. The Phoenicians imported this wool largely. The flocks of Kedar are especially noted,969 and are said to have included both sheep and goats.970 It was perhaps a native woollen manufacture, in which Dedan traded with Tyre, and which Ezekiel notices as a trade in “cloths for chariots."971 Goat’s hair was largely employed in the production of coverings for tents.972 Arabia also furnished Phoenicia with gold, with precious stones, with ivory, ebony, and wrought iron.973 The wrought iron was probably from Yemen, which was celebrated for its manufacture of sword blades. The gold may have been native, for there is much reason to believe that anciently the Arabian mountain ranges yielded gold as freely as the Ethiopian,974 with which they form one system; or it may have been imported from Hindustan, with which Arabia had certainly, in ancient times, constant communication. Ivory and ebony must, beyond a doubt, have been Arabian importations. There are two countries from which they may have been derived, India and Abyssinia. It is likely that the commercial Arabs of the south-east coast had dealings with both.975
Of Phoenician imports into Arabia we have no account; but we may conjecture that they consisted principally of manufactured goods, cotton and linen fabrics, pottery, implements and utensils in metal, beads, and other ornaments for the person, and the like. The nomadic Arabs, leading a simple life, required but little beyond what their own country produced; there was, however, a town population976 in the more southern parts of the peninsula, to which the elegancies and luxuries of life, commonly exported by Phoenicia, would have been welcome.
The Phoenician trade with Babylonia and Assyria was carried on probably by caravans, which traversed the Syrian desert by way of Tadmor or Palmyra, and struck the Euphrates about Circesium. Here the route divided, passing to Babylon southwards along the course of the great river, and to Nineveh eastwards by way of the Khabour and the Sinjar mountain-range. Both countries seem to have supplied the Phoenicians with fabrics of extraordinary value, rich in a peculiar embroidery, and deemed so precious that they were packed in chests of cedar-wood, which the Phoenician merchants must have brought with them from Lebanon.977 The wares furnished by Assyria were in some cases exported to Greece,978 while no doubt in others they were intended for home consumption. They included cylinders in rock crystal, jasper, hematite, steatite, and other materials, which may sometimes have found purchasers in Phoenicia Proper, but appear to have been specially affected by the Phoenician colonists in Cyprus.979 On her part Phoenicia must have imported into Assyria and Babylonia the tin which was a necessary element in their bronze; and they seem also to have found a market in Assyria for their own most valuable and artistic bronzes, the exquisite embossed pateræ which are among the most precious of the treasures brought by Sir Austen Layard from Nineveh.980
The nature of the Phoenician trade with Upper Mesopotamia is unknown to us; and it is not impossible that their merchants visited Haran,981 rather because it lay on the route which they had to follow in order to reach Armenia than because it possessed in itself any special attraction for them. Gall-nuts and manna are almost the only products for which the region is celebrated; and of these Phoenicia herself produced the one, while she probably did not need the other. But the natural route to Armenia was by way of the Coelesyrian valley, Aleppo and Carchemish, to Haran, and thence by Amida or Diarbekr to Van, which was the capital of Armenia in the early times.
Armenia supplied the Phoenicians with “horses of common and of noble breeds,"982 and also with mules.983 Strabo says that it was a country exceedingly well adapted for the breeding of the horse,984 and even notes the two qualities of the animal that it produced, one of which he calls “Nisæan,” though the true “Nisæan plain” was in Media. So large was the number of colts bred each year, and so highly were they valued, that, under the Persian monarchy the Great King exacted from the province, as a regular item of its tribute, no fewer than twenty thousand of them annually.985 Armenian mules seem not to be mentioned by any writer besides Ezekiel; but mules were esteemed throughout the East in antiquity,986 and no country would have been more likely to breed them than the mountain tract of Armenia, the Switzerland of Western Asia, where such surefooted animals would be especially needed.
Armenia adjoined the country of the Moschi and Tibareni—the Meshech and Tubal of the Bible. These tribes, between the ninth and the seventh centuries B.C., inhabited the central regions of Asia Minor and the country known later as Cappadocia. They traded with Tyre in the “persons of men” and in “vessels of brass” or copper.987 Copper is found abundantly in the mountain ranges of these parts, and Xenophon remarks on the prevalence of metal vessels in the portion of the region which he passed through—the country of the Carduchians.988 The traffic in slaves was one in which the Phoenicians engaged from very early times. They were not above kidnapping men, women, and children in one country and selling them into another;989 besides which they seem to have frequented regularly the principal slave marts of the time. They bought such Jews as were taken captive and sold into slavery by the neighbouring nations,990 and they looked to the Moschi and Tibareni for a constant supply of the commodity from the Black Sea region.991 The Caucasian tribes have always been in the habit of furnishing slave-girls to the harems of the East, and the Thracians, who were not confined to Europe, but occupied a great part of Asia Minor, regularly trafficked in their children.992
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