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

      Preface

       Table of Contents

Histories of Phoenicia or of the Phoenicians were written towards the middle of the present century by Movers and Kenrick. The elaborate work of the former writer01 collected into five moderate-sized volumes all the notices that classical antiquity had preserved of the Religion, History, Commerce, Art, &c., of this celebrated and interesting nation. Kenrick, making a free use of the stores of knowledge thus accumulated, added to them much information derived from modern research, and was content to give to the world in a single volume of small size,02 very scantily illustrated, the ascertained results of criticism and inquiry on the subject of the Phoenicians up to his own day. Forty-four years have since elapsed; and in the course of them large additions have been made to certain branches of the inquiry, while others have remained very much as they were before. Travellers, like Robinson, Walpole, Tristram, Renan, and Lortet, have thrown great additional light on the geography, geology, fauna, and flora of the country. Excavators, like Renan and the two Di Cesnolas, have caused the soil to yield up most valuable remains bearing upon the architecture, the art, the industrial pursuits, and the manners and customs of the people. Antiquaries, like M. Clermont-Ganneau and MM. Perrot and Chipiez, have subjected the remains to careful examination and criticism, and have definitively fixed the character of Phoenician Art, and its position in the history of artistic effort. Researches are still being carried on, both in Phoenicia Proper and in the Phoenician dependency of Cyprus, which are likely still further to enlarge our knowledge with respect to Phoenician Art and Archæology; but it is not probable that they will affect seriously the verdict already delivered by competent judges on those subjects. The time therefore appeared to the author to have come when, after nearly half a century of silence, the history of the people might appropriately be rewritten. The subject had long engaged his thoughts, closely connected as it is with the histories of Egypt, and of the “Great Oriental Monarchies,” which for thirty years have been to him special objects of study; and a work embodying the chief results of the recent investigations seemed to him a not unsuitable termination to the historical efforts which his resignation of the Professorship of Ancient History at Oxford, and his entrance upon a new sphere of labour, bring naturally to an end.

The author wishes to express his vast obligations to MM. Perrot and Chipiez for the invaluable assistance which he has derived from their great work,03 and to their publishers, the MM. Hachette, for their liberality in allowing him the use of so large a number of MM. Perrot and Chipiez’ Illustrations. He is also much beholden to the same gentlemen for the use of charts and drawings originally published in the “Géographie Universelle.” Other works from which he has drawn either materials or illustrations, or both, are (besides Movers’ and Kenrick’s) M. Ernest Renan’s “Mission de Phénicie,” General Di Cesnola’s “Cyprus,” A. Di Cesnola’s “Salaminia,” M. Ceccaldi’s “Monuments Antiques de Cypre,” M. Daux’s “Recherches sur les Emporia Phéniciens,” the “Corpus Inscriptionum Semiticarum,” M. Clermont-Ganneau’s “Imagerie Phénicienne,” Mr. Davis’s “Carthage and her Remains,” Gesenius’s “Scripturæ Linguæque Phoeniciæ Monumenta,” Lortet’s “La Syrie d’aujourd’hui,” Serra di Falco’s “Antichità della Sicilia,” Walpole’s “Ansayrii,” and Canon Tristram’s “Land of Israel.” The difficulty has been to select from these copious stores the most salient and noteworthy facts, and to marshal them in such a form as would make them readily intelligible to the ordinary English reader. How far he has succeeded in doing this he must leave the public to judge. In making his bow to them as a “Reader” and Writer “of Histories,"04 he has to thank them for a degree of favour which has given a ready sale to all his previous works, and has carried some of them through several editions.

      CANTERBURY: August 1889.

Chapter I—The Land

       Table of Contents

      Phoenicia—Origin of the name—Spread of the name southwards—Real length of Phoenicia along the coast— Breadth and area—General character of the region—The Plains—Plain of Sharon—Plain of Acre—Plain of Tyre—Plain of Sidon—Plain of Berytus—Plain of Marathus—Hilly regions—Mountain ranges—Carmel—Casius—Bargylus—Lebanon— Beauty of Lebanon—Rivers—The Litany—The Nahr-el-Berid— The Kadisha—The Adonis—The Lycus—The Tamyras—The Bostrenus—The Zaherany—The Headlands—Main characteristics, inaccessibility, picturesqueness, productiveness.

      Phoenicé, or Phoenicia, was the name originally given by the Greeks—and afterwards adopted from them by the Romans—to the coast region of the Mediterranean, where it faces the west between the thirty-second and the thirty-sixth parallels. Here, it would seem, in their early voyagings, the Pre-Homeric Greeks first came upon a land where the palm-tree was not only indigenous, but formed a leading and striking characteristic, everywhere along the low sandy shore lifting its tuft of feathery leaves into the bright blue sky, high above the undergrowth of fig, and pomegranate, and alive. Hence they called the tract Phoenicia, or “the Land of Palms;” and the people who inhabited it the Phoenicians, or “the Palm-tree people.”

The term was from the first applied with a good deal of vagueness. It was probably originally given to the region opposite Cyprus, from Gabala in the north—now Jebili—to Antaradus (Tortosa) and Marathus (Amrith) towards the south, where the palm-tree was first seen growing in rich abundance. The palm is the numismatic emblem of Aradus,11 and though not now very frequent in the region which Strabo calls “the Aradian coast-tract,"12 must anciently have been among its chief ornaments. As the Grecian knowledge of the coast extended southward, and a richer and still richer growth of the palm was continually noticed, almost every town and every village being embosomed in a circle of palm groves, the name extended itself until it reached as far south at any rate as Gaza, or (according to some) as Rhinocolura and the Torrens Ægypti. Northward the name seems never to have passed beyond Cape Posideium (Possidi) at the foot of Mount Casius, the tract between this and the range