The Martyrdom of Man by Winwood Reade (mini ebook reader .TXT) π
The Egyptians were islanders, cut off from the rest of the world by sand and sea. They were rooted in their valley; they lived entirely upon its fruits, and happily these fruits sometimes failed. Had they always been able to obtain enough to eat, they would have remained always in the semi-savage state.
It may appear strange that Egypt should have suffered from famine, for there was no country in the ancient world where food was so abundant and so cheap. Not only did the land produce enormous crops of corn; the ditches and hollows which were filled by the overflowing Nile supplied a harvest of wholesome and nourishing aquatic plants, and on the borders of the des
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Egypt, and were permitted to settle in Memphis itself. Their quarter was
called the Syrian camp; it was built round a grove and chapel sacred to
Astarte. Their caravan routes extended in every direction towards the
treasure countries of the East. Wandering Arabs were their sailors, and
camels were their ships. They made voyages by sand, more dangerous
than those by sea, to Babylon through Palmyra or Tadmor on the skirts of
the desert; to Arabia Felix and the market city of Petra; and to Gerrha, a
city built entirely of salt on the rainless shores of the Persian Gulf.
Phoenicia itself was a narrow, undulating plain about a hundred miles in
length, and at the most not more than a morningβs ride in breadth. It was
walled in by the mountains on the north and east. To those who sailed
along its coast it appeared to be one great city interspersed with gardens
and fields. On the lower slopes of the hills beyond gleamed the green
vineyard patches and the villas of the merchants. The offing was
whitened with sails, and in every harbour was a grove of masts. But it
was Tyre which of all the cities was the queen. It covered an island
which lay at anchor off the shore. The Greek poet Nonnus has prettily
described the mingling around it of the sylvan and marine. βThe sailor
furrows the sea with his oar,β he says, βand the ploughman the soil; the
lowing of oxen and the singing of birds answer the deep roar of the main;
the wood nymph under the tall trees hears the voice of the sea-nymph
calling to her from the waves; the breeze from the Lebanon, while it cools
the rustic at his midday labour, speeds the mariner who is outward
bound.β
These Canaanitish men are fairly entitled to our gratitude and esteem, for
they taught our intellectual ancestors to read and write. Wherever a
factory trade is carried on it is found convenient to employ natives as
subordinate agents and clerks. And thus it was that the Greeks received
the rudiments of education. That the alphabet was invented by the
Phoenicians is improbable in the extreme, but it is certain that they
introduced it into Europe. They were intent only on making money, it is
true; they were not a literary or artistic people; they spread knowledge by
accident like birds dropping seeds. But they were gallant, hardy,
enterprising men. Those were true heroes who first sailed through the
sea-valley of Gibraltar into the vast ocean and breasted its enormous
waves. Their unceasing activity kept the world alive. They offered to
every country something which it did not possess. They roused the
savage Briton from his torpor with a rag of scarlet cloth, and stirred him
to sweat in the dark bowels of the earth. They brought to the satiated
Indian prince the luscious wines of Syria and the Grecian amber-gatherers
of the Baltic mud to the nutmeg-growers of the equatorial groves, from
the mulberry plantations of the Celestial Empire to the tin-mines of
Cornwall and the silver mines of Spain, emulation was excited, new
wants were created, and whole nations were stimulated to industry by the
agency of the Phoenicians.
Shipbuilding and navigation were their inventions, and for a long time
were entirely in their hands. Phoenician shipwrights were employed to
build the fleet of Sennacherib: Phoenician mariners were employed by
Necho to sail round Africa. But they could not forever monopolise the
sea. The Greeks built ships on the Phoenician model, and soon showed
their masters that kidnapping and piracy was a game at which two could
play. The merchant kings who possessed the whole commercial world
were too wise to stake their prosperity on a single province. They had no
wish to tempt a siege of Tyre which might resemble the siege of Troy.
They quickly retired from Greece and its islands, and the western coast of
Asia Minor and the margin of the Black Sea. They allowed the Greeks to
take the foot of Italy and the eastern half of Sicily, and did not molest
their isolated colonies of Cyrene in Africa and Marseilles in Southern
Gaul.
But in spite of all their prudence and precautions, the Greeks supplanted
them entirely. The Phoenicians, like the Jews, were vassals of necessity
and by position: they lived half-way between two empires. They found it
cheaper to pay tribute than to go to war, and submitted to the emperor of
Syria for the time being, sending their money with equal indifference to
Nineveh or Memphis.
But when the empire was disputed, as in the days of Nebuchadnezzar and
of Necho, they were compelled to choose a side. Like the Jews, they
chose the wrong one, and the old Tyre and Jerusalem were demolished at
the same time.
From that day the Phoenicians began to go down the hill, and under the
Persians their ships and sailors were forced to do service in the royal
navy. This was the hardest kind of tribute that they could be made to pay,
for it deprived them not only of their profits but of the means by which
those profits were obtained. In the Macedonian war they went wrong
again; they chose the side of the Persians although they had so often
rebelled against them and Tyre was severely handled by its conqueror.
But it was the foundation of Alexandria which ruined the Phoenician
cities, as it ruined Athens. Form that time Athens ceased to be
commercial and became a university. Tyre also ceased to be commercial,
but remained a celebrated manufactory. Under the Roman empire it
enjoyed the monopoly of the sacred purple, which was afterwards
adopted by the popes. It prospered under the caliphs; its manufactories in
the Middle Ages were conducted by the Jews; but it fell before the
artillery of the Turks to rise no more. The secret of the famous dye was
lost, and the Vatican changed the colour of its robes.
But while Phoenicia was declining in the East its great colony, Carthage,
was rising in the West. This city had been founded by malcontents from
Tyre. But they kindly cherished the memories of their motherland, and,
like the Pilgrim Fathers, always spoke of the country which had cast them
forth as βHome.β And after a time all the old wrongs were forgotten, all
angry feelings died away. Every year the Carthaginians sent to the
national temple a tenth part of their revenues as a free-will offering.
During the great Persian wars, when on all sides empires and kingdoms
were falling to the ground, the Phoenicians refused to lend their fleet to
the Great King to make war upon Carthage. When Tyre was besieged by
Alexander the nobles sent their wives and children to Carthage, where
they were tenderly received.
The Africa of the ancientsβthe modern Barbaryβlies between
the Sahara and the Mediterranean Sea. It is protected from the
ever-encroaching waves of the sandy ocean by the Atlas range. In its
western parts this mountain wall is high and broad and covered with
eternal snow. It becomes lower as it runs towards the east, also drawing
nearer to the sea, and dwindles and dwindles till finally it disappears,
leaving a wide, unprotected region between Barbary and Egypt. Over
this the Sahara flows, forming a desert barrier tract to all intents and
purposes itself a sea, dividing the two lands from each other as
completely as the Mediterranean divides Italy and Greece. This land of
North Africa is in reality a part of Spain; the Atlas is the southern
boundary of Europe. Grey cork-trees clothe the lower sides of those
magnificent mountains; their summits are covered with pines, among
which the cross-bill flutters, and in which the European bear may still be
found. The flora of the range, as Dr. Hooker has lately shown, is of a
Spanish type; the Straits of Gibraltar is merely an accident; there is
nothing in Morocco to distinguish it from Andalusia. The African
animals which are there found are desert-haunting species-βthe antelope
and gazelle, the lion, the jackal, the hyena,* and certain species of the
monkey tribe; and these might easily have found their way across the
Sahara from oasis to oasis. It is true that in the Carthaginian days the
elephant abounded in the forests of the Atlas, and it could not have come
across from central Africa, for the Sahara, before it was a desert, was a
sea. It is probable that the elephant of Barbary belonged to the same
species as the small elephant of Europe, the bones of which have been
discovered in Malta and in certain caves of Spain, and that it outlived the
European kind on account of its isolated position in the Atlas, which was
thinly inhabited by savage tribes. But it did not long withstand the power
of the Romans. Pliny mentions that in his time the forests of Morocco
were being ransacked for ivory, and Isidore of Seville, in the seventh
century observes that βthere are no longer any elephants in Mauritania.β
*[spelt hyaena in original text]
In Morocco the Phoenicians were settled only on the coast. The Regency
of Tunis and part of Algeria is the scene on which the tragedy of Carthage
was performed.
In that part of Africa the habitable country must be divided into three
regions; first a corn region, lying between the Atlas and the sea,
exceedingly fertile but narrow in extent; secondly the Atlas itself, with its
timber stores and elephant preserves; and thirdly a plateau region of poor
sandy soil, affording a meagre pasture, interspersed with orchards of
date-trees, abounding in ostriches, lions, and gazelles, and gradually
fading away into the desert.
Africa belonged to a race of man whom we shall call Berbers or Moors,
but who were known as the ancients under many names, and who still
exist as the Kabyles or Algeria, the Shilluhs of the Atlas, and the Tuaricks
or tawny Moors of the Sahara. Their habits depended on the locality in
which they dwelt. Those who lived in the Tell or region of the coast
cultivated the soil and lived in towns, some of which appear to have been
of considerable size. Those who inhabited the plateau region led a free
Bedouin life, wandering from place to place with flocks and herds, and
camping under oblong huts which the Romans compared to boats turned
upside down. In holes and caverns of the mountains dwelt a miserable
black race, apparently the aborigines of the country, and represented to
this day by the Rock Tibboos. They were also found on the outskirts of
the desert, and were hunted by the Berbers in four-horse chariots, caught
alive, and taken to the Carthage market to be sold.
The Phoenician settlements were at first independent of one another, but
Carthage gradually obtained the supremacy as Tyre had obtained it in
Phoenicia. The position of Utica towards Carthage was precisely that of
Sidon towards Tyre. It was the more ancient city of the two, and it
preserved a certain kind of position without actual power. Carthage and
Utica, like Tyre and Sidon, were at one time always spoken of together.
The Carthaginians began by paying a quit-rent or custom to the natives,
but that did not last very long; they made war, and exacted tribute from
the original possessors of the soil. When Carthage suffered from
overpopulation colonies were dispatched out west along the coast, and
down south into the interior. These colonies were more on the Roman
than the Greek pattern; the emigrants built cities and intermarried freely
with the Berbers, for there was no difference of colour between them, and
little difference of race. In course of time the whole of the habitable
region was subdued; the Tyrian factory became a
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