II. THE SEMITIC PEOPLES

The antiquity of the Arabs—Phoenicians—Their world trade—Their circumnavigation of Africa—Colonies—Tyre and Sidon—Deities—The dissemination of the alphabet—Syria—Astarte—The death and resurrection of Adoni—The sacrifice of children

If we attempt to mitigate the confusion of tongues in the Near East by distinguishing the northern peoples of the region as mostly Indo-European, and the central and southern peoples, from Assyria to Arabia, as Semitic,* we shall have to remember that reality is never so clear-cut in its differences as the rubrics under which we dismember it for neat handling. The Near East was divided by mountains and deserts into localities naturally isolated and therefore naturally diverse in language and traditions; but not only did trade tend to assimilate language, customs and arts along its main routes (as, for example, along the great rivers from Nineveh and Carchemish to the Persian Gulf), but the migrations and imperial deportations of vast communities so mingled stocks and speech that a certain homogeneity of culture accompanied the heterogeneity of blood. By “Indo-European,” then, we shall mean predominantly Indo-European; by “Semitic” we shall mean predominantly Semitic: no strain was unmixed, no culture was left uninfluenced by its neighbors or its enemies. We are to vision the vast area as a scene of ethnic diversity and flux, in which now the Indo-European, now the Semitic, stock for a time prevailed, but only to take on the general cultural character of the whole. Hammurabi and Darius I were separated by differences of blood and religion, and by almost as many centuries as those that divide us from Christ; nevertheless, when we examine the two great kings we perceive that they are essentially and profoundly akin.

The fount and breeding-place of the Semites was Arabia. Out of that arid region, where the “man-plant” grows so vigorously and hardly any other plant will grow at all, came, in a succession of migrations, wave after wave of sturdy, reckless stoics no longer supportable by desert and oases, and bound to conquer for themselves a place in the shade. Those who remained behind created the civilization of Arabia and the Bedouin: the patriarchal family, the stern morality of obedience, the fatalism of a hard environment, and the ignorant courage to kill their own daughters as offerings to the gods. Nevertheless they did not take religion very much to heart till Mohammed came, and they neglected the arts and refinements of life as effeminate devices for degenerate men. For a time they controlled the trade with the further East: their ports at Canneh and Aden were heaped with the riches of the Indies, and their patient caravans carried these goods precariously overland to Phoenicia and Babylon. In the interior of their broad peninsula they built cities, palaces and temples, but they did not encourage foreigners to come and see them. For thousands of years they have lived their own life, kept their own customs, kept their own counsel; they are the same today as in the time of Cheops and Gudea; they have seen a hundred kingdoms rise and fall about them; and their soil is still jealously theirs, guarded from profane feet and alien eyes.

Who, now, were those Phoenicians who have so often been spoken of in these pages, whose ships sailed every sea, whose merchants bargained in every port? The historian is abashed before any question of origins: he must confess that he knows next to nothing about either the early or the late history of this ubiquitous, yet elusive, people.¹⁵ We do not know whence they came, nor when; we are not certain that they were Semites;* and as to the date of their arrival on the Mediterranean coast, we cannot contradict the statement of the scholars of Tyre, who told Herodotus that their ancestors had come from the Persian Gulf, and had founded the city in what we should call the twenty-eighth century before Christ.¹⁷ Even their name is problematical: the phoinix from which the Greeks coined it may mean the red dye that Tyrian merchants sold, or a palm-tree that flourishes along the Phoenician coast. That coast, a narrow strip a hundred miles long and only ten miles wide, between Syria and the sea, was almost all of Phoenicia; the people never thought it worth while to settle in the Lebanon hills behind them, or to bring these ranges under their rule; they were content that this beneficent barrier should protect them from the more warlike nations whose goods they carried out into all the lanes of the sea.

Those mountains compelled them to live on the water. From the Sixth Egyptian Dynasty onward they were the busiest merchants of the ancient world; and when they liberated themselves from Egypt (ca. 1200 B.C.) they became masters of the Mediterranean. They themselves manufactured various forms and objects of glass and metal; they made enameled vases, weapons, ornaments and jewelry; they had a monopoly of the purple dye which they extracted from the molluscs abounding along their shores;¹⁸ and the women of Tyre were famous for the gorgeous colors with which they stained the products of their deft needlework. These, and the exportable surplus of India and the Near East—cereals, wines, textiles and precious stones—they shipped to every city of the Mediterranean far and near, bringing back, in return, lead, gold and iron from the south shores of the Black Sea, copper, cypress and corn from Cyprus,† ivory from Africa, silver from Spain, tin from Britain, and slaves from everywhere. They were shrewd traders; they persuaded the natives of Spain to give them, in exchange for a cargo of oil, so great a quantity of silver that the holds of their ships could not contain it—whereupon the subtle Semites replaced the iron or stones in their anchors with silver, and sailed prosperously away.¹⁹ Not satisfied with this, they enslaved the natives, and made them work for long hours in the mines for a subsistence wage.‡ Like all early voyagers, and some old languages, they made scant distinction between trade and treachery, commerce and robbery; they stole from the weak, cheated the stupid, and were honest with the rest. Sometimes they captured ships on the high seas, and confiscated their cargoes and their crews; sometimes they lured curious natives into visiting the Phoenician vessels, and then sailed off with them to sell them as slaves.²¹ They had much to do with giving the trading Semites of antiquity an evil reputation, especially with the early Greeks, who did the same things.*

Their low and narrow galleys, some seventy feet long, set a new style of design by abandoning the inward-curving bow of the Egyptian vessel, and turning it outward into a sharp point for cleaving wind or water, or the ships of the enemy. One large rectangular sail, hoisted on a mast fixed in the keel, helped the galley-slaves who provided most of the motive-power with their double bank of oars. On a deck above the rowers, soldiers stood on guard, ready for trade or war. These frail ships, having no compasses and drawing hardly five feet of water, kept cautiously near the shore, and for a long time dared not move during the night. Gradually the art of navigation developed to the point where the Phoenician pilots, guiding themselves by the North Star (or the Phoenician Star, as the Greeks called it), adventured into the oceans, and at last circumnavigated Africa, sailing down the east coast first, and “discovering” the Cape of Good Hope some two thousand years before Vasco da Gama. “When autumn came,” says Herodotus, “they went ashore, sowed the land, and waited for harvest; then, having reaped the corn, they put to sea again. When two years had thus passed, in the third, having doubled the Pillars of Hercules (Gibraltar), they arrived in Egypt.”²³ What an adventure!

At strategic points along the Mediterranean they established garrisons that grew in time into populous colonies or cities: at Cadiz, Carthage and Marseilles, in Malta, Sicily, Sardinia and Corsica, even in distant England. They occupied Cyprus, Melos and Rhodes.²⁴ They took the arts and sciences of Egypt, Crete and the Near East and spread them in Greece, Africa, Italy and Spain. They bound together the East and the West in a commercial and cultural web, and began to redeem Europe from barbarism.

Nourished by this trade, and skilfully governed by mercantile aristocracies too clever in diplomacy and finance to waste their fortunes in war, the cities of Phoenicia rose to a place among the richest and most powerful in the world. Byblos thought itself the oldest of all cities; the god El had founded it at the beginning of time, and to the end of its history it remained the religious capital of Phoenicia. Because papyrus was one of the principal articles in its trade, the Greeks took the name of the city as their word for book—biblos—and from their word for books named our Bible—ta biblia.

Some fifty miles to the south, also on the coast, lay Sidon; originally a fortress, it grew rapidly into a village, a town, a prosperous city; it contributed the best ships to Xerxes’ fleet; and when later the Persians besieged and captured it, its proud leaders deliberately burned it to the ground, forty thousand inhabitants perishing in the conflagration.²⁵ It was already rebuilt and flourishing when Alexander came, and some of its enterprising merchants followed his army to India “for trafficking.”²⁶

Greatest of the Phoenician cities was Tyre—i.e., the rock—built upon an island several miles off the coast. It, too, began as a fortress; but its splendid harbor and its security from attack soon made it the metropolis of Phoenicia, a cosmopolitan bedlam of merchants and slaves from the whole Mediterranean world. Already in the ninth century B.C., Tyre had achieved affluence under King Hiram, friend of King Solomon; and by the time of Zechariah (ca. 520 B.C.), she had “heaped up silver as the dust, and fine gold as the mire of the streets.”²⁷ “The houses here,” said Strabo, “have many stories, even more than the houses at Rome.”²⁸ Its wealth and courage kept it independent until Alexander came. The young god saw in it a challenge to his omnipotence, and reduced it by building a causeway that turned the island into a peninsula. The success of Alexandria completed the ruin of Tyre.

Like every nation that feels the complexity of cosmic currents and the variety of human needs, Phoenicia had many gods. Each city had its Baal (i.e., Lord) or city-god, who was conceived as ancestor of the kings, and source of the soil’s fertility; the corn, the wine, the figs and the flax were all the work of the holy Baal. The Baal of Tyre was called Melkarth; like Hercules, with whom the Greeks identified him, he was a god of strength, and accomplished feats worthy of a Munchausen. Astarte was the Greek name of the Phoenician Ishtar; she had the distinction of being worshiped in some places as the goddess of a cold Artemisian chastity, and in others as the amorous and wanton deity of physical love, in which form she was identified by the Greeks with Aphrodite. As Ishtar-Mylitta received in sacrifice the virginity of her girl-devotees at Babylon, so the women who honored Astarte at Byblos had to give up their long tresses to her, or surrender themselves to the first stranger who solicited their love in the precincts of the temple. And as Ishtar had loved Tammuz, so Astarte had loved Adoni (i.e., Lord), whose death on the tusks of a boar was annually mourned at Byblos and Paphos (in Cyprus) with wailing and beating of the breast. Luckily Adoni rose from the dead as often as he died, and ascended to heaven in the presence of his worshipers.²⁹ Finally there was Moloch (i.e., King), the terrible god to whom the Phoenicians offered living children as burnt sacrifices; at Carthage, during a siege of the city (307 B.C.), two hundred boys of the best families were burned to death on the altar of this fiery divinity.³⁰

Nevertheless the Phoenicians deserve some niche in the hall of civilized nations, for it was probably their merchants who taught the Egyptian alphabet to the nations of antiquity. Not the ecstasies of literature but the needs of commerce brought unity to the peoples of the Mediterranean; nothing could better illustrate a certain generative relation between commerce and culture. We do not know that the Phoenicians introduced this alphabet into Greece, though Greek tradition unanimously affirms it;³¹ it is possible that Crete gave the alphabet to both the Phoenicians and the Greeks.³² But it is more probable that the Phoenicians took letters where they took papyrus. About 1100 B.C. we find them importing papyrus from Egypt;³³ for a nation that kept and carried many accounts it was an inestimable convenience compared with the heavy clay tablets of Mesopotamia; and the Egyptian alphabet was likewise an immense improvement upon the clumsy syllabaries of the Near East. About 960 B.C. King Hiram of Tyre dedicated to one of his gods a bronze cup engraved with an alphabetic inscription;³⁴ and about 840 B.C. King Mesha of Moab announced his glory (on a stone now in the Louvre) in a Semitic dialect written from right to left in letters corresponding to those of the Phoenician alphabet. The Greeks reversed the facing of some of the letters, because they wrote from left to right; but essentially their alphabet was that which the Phoenicians had taught them, and which they were in turn to teach to Europe. These strange symbols are the most precious portion of our cultural heritage.

The oldest examples of alphabetic writing known to us, however, appear not in Phoenicia but in Sinai. At Serabit-el-khadim, a little hamlet covering a site where anciently the Egyptians mined turquoise, Sir William Flinders Petrie found inscriptions in a strange language, dating back to an uncertain age, perhaps as early as 2500 B.C. Though these inscriptions have never been deciphered, it is apparent that they were written not in hieroglyphics, nor in syllabic cuneiform, but with an alphabet.³⁵ At Zapouna, in southern Syria, French archeologists discovered an entire library of clay tabletssome in hieroglyphic, some in a Semitic alphabetic script. As Zapouna seems to have been permanently destroyed about 1200 B.C., these tablets go back presumably to the thirteenth centuryB.C.,³⁶ and suggest to us again how old civilization was in those centuries to which our ignorance ascribes its origins.

Syria lay behind Phoenicia, in the very lap of the Lebanon hills, gathering its tribes together loosely under the rule of that capital which still boasts that it is the oldest city of all, and still harbors Syrians hungry for liberty. For a time the kings of Damascus dominated a dozen petty nations about them, and successfully resisted the efforts of Assyria to make Syria one of her vassal states. The inhabitants of the city were Semitic merchants, who managed to garner wealth out of the caravan trade that passed through Syria’s mountains and plains. Artisans and slaves worked for them, none too happily. We hear of masons organizing great unions, and inscriptions tell of a strike of bakers in Magnesia; across the centuries we sense the strife and busyness of an ancient Syrian town.³⁷ These artisans were skilful in shaping graceful pottery, in carving ivory and wood, in polishing gems, and in weaving stuffs of gay colors for the adornment of their women.³⁸

Fashions, manners and morals in Damascus were very much as at Babylon, which was the Paris and arbiter elegantiarum of the ancient East. Religious prostitution flourished, for in Syria, as throughout western Asia, the fertility of the soil was symbolized in a Great Mother, or Goddess, whose sexual commerce with her lover gave the hint to all the reproductive processes and energies of nature; and the sacrifice of virginity at the temples was not only an offering to Astarte, but a participation with her in that annual self-abandonment which, it was hoped, would offer an irresistible suggestion to the earth, and insure the increase of plants, animals and men.³⁹ About the time of the vernal equinox the festival of the Syrian Astarte, like that of Cybele in Phrygia, was celebrated at Hierapolis with a fervor bordering upon madness. The noise of flutes and drums mingled with the wailing of the women for Astarte’s dead lord, Adoni; eunuch priests danced wildly, and slashed themselves with knives; at last many men, who had come merely as spectators, were overcome with the excitement, threw off their clothing, and emasculated themselves in pledge of lifelong service to the goddess. Then, in the dark of the night, the priests brought a mystic illumination to the scene, opened the tomb of the young god, and announced triumphantly that Adoni, the Lord, had risen from the dead. Touching the lips of the worshipers with balm, the priests whispered to them the promise that they, too, would some day rise from the grave.⁴⁰

The other gods of Syria were not less bloodthirsty than Astarte. It is true that the priests recognized a general divinity, embracing all the gods, and called El or Ilu, like the Elohim of the Jews; but this calm abstraction was hardly noticed by the people who gave their worship to the Baal. Usually they identified this city-god with the sun, as they identified Astarte with the moon; and on occasions of great moment they offered him their own children in sacrifice, after the manner of the Phoenicians; the parents came to the ceremony dressed as for a festival, and the cries of their children burning in the lap of the god were drowned by the blaring of trumpets and the piping of flutes. Normally, however, a milder sacrifice sufficed; the priests slashed themselves until the altar was covered with their blood; or the child’s foreskin was offered as a commutation for his life; or the priests condescended to accept a sum of money to be presented to the god in place of the prepuce. In some way the god had to be appeased and satisfied; for his worshipers had made him in the image and dream of themselves, and he had no great regard for human life, or womanly tears.⁴¹

Similar customs, varying only in name and detail, were practised by the Semitic tribes south of Syria, who filled the land with their confusion of tongues. It was forbidden the Jews to “make their children pass through the fire,” but occasionally they did it none the less.⁴² Abraham about to sacrifice Isaac, and Agamemnon sacrificing Iphigenia, were but resorting to an ancient rite in attempting to propitiate the gods with human blood. Mesha, King of Moab, sacrificed his eldest son by fire as a means of raising a siege; his prayer having been answered, and the sacrifice of his son having been accepted, he slaughtered seven thousand Israelites in gratitude.⁴³ Throughout this region, from the Sumerian days when the Amorites roamed the plains of Amurru (ca. 2800 B.C.) to the time when the Jews fell with divine wrath upon the Canaanites, and Sargon of Assyria captured Samaria, and Nebuchadrezzar captured Jerusalem (597 B.C.), the valley of the Jordan was drenched periodically with fratricidal blood, and many Lords of Hosts rejoiced. These Moabites, Canaanites, Amorites, Edomites, Philistines and Aramæans hardly enter into the cultural record of mankind. It is true that the fertile Aramæans, spreading everywhere, made their language the lingua franca of the Near East, and that the alphabetic script which they had learned either from the Egyptians or the Phoenicians replaced the cuneiform and syllabaries of Mesopotamia, first as a mercantile, then as a literary, medium, and became at last the tongue of Christ and the alphabet of the Arabs today.⁴⁴ But time preserves their names not so much because of their own accomplishments as because they played some part on the tragic stage of Palestine. We must study, in greater detail than their neighbors, these numerically and geographically insignificant Jews, who gave to the world one of its greatest literatures, two of its most influential religions, and so many of its profoundest men.