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While this race hardy, temperate, brave, and superstitious was leading its primitive life upon the Iberian peninsula, while they were shooting arrows at the sky to threaten the thunder, drawing their swords against the rising tide, and prizing iron more dearly than their abundant gold and silver, because they could hammer it into hooks, and swords, and spears there had long existed in the East a group of wonderful civilizations: the Egyptian, hoary with age and steeped in wisdom and in wickedness; the Chaldeans, who, with "looks commercing with the skies," were the fathers of astronomy; the Assyrians and Babylonians, with their wonderful cities of Nineveh and Babylon, and the Phenicians, with their no less famous cities of Sidon and Tyre.
O'Brien, in his dictionary, at the word Fearmiugh, signifies Phenicians; as they were probably called so from the tradition that Phenicians came to Ireland in the early ages.
Sidon, which was the more ancient of these two, is said to have been founded by Sidon, the son of Canaan, who was the great-grandson of Noah. Of all these nations it was the Phenicians who were the most adventurous.
Three such invasions took place: those of the Phenicians, of the Philistines, and of the Hebrews the first and third being Semitic peoples, and perhaps the second also. The Philistines, settling on the south-eastern corner of the Mediterranean, had a Semitic religion, of which the fish-god Dagon, the Fly-Baal of Ekron, and the Ashtoreth, probably of Ascalon, are known figures.
Semitic religion tends to grow more sombre and intense as it develops; and the Phenicians, while still holding the principle of a god and goddess, concentrate their worship more and more on a single divine figure, and come to regard that figure from a greater distance and with greater awe.
The Phenicians also sailed by way of Gibraltar to England to bring tin from Cornwall, and by 500 B.C. the Carthaginians were well acquainted with the Atlantic coast of northern Africa. At some time or other, long before the Christian era, a ship belonging to one of the peoples of the eastern Mediterranean was probably blown to the shores of America by the steady trade-winds.
Israel essayed to do many things that other peoples achieved, and promised success in more than one direction. At a certain period she bade fair to develop into a martial empire, and to become a lesser Assyria or Rome. A little later she seemed about to rival the Phenicians in commerce. About the same time she
Among the Phenicians however, though we have good reasons to think that they learned their arts and crafts from the Egyptians, there is convincing evidence of a high development of dentistry. M. Ernest Renan, during an exploring expedition in Phenicia, found in the old necropolis at Sidon a set of teeth wired together, two of which were artificial.
It was a striking example of bridgework, very well done, and may now be seen in the Louvre. It would be more than a little surprising, from what we know of the lack of inventiveness on the part of the Phenicians and their tendency to acquire their arts by imitation, if they had reached such a climax of invention by themselves.
But they bestowed something far beyond this something more enriching than silver and gold, an alphabet, and it is to the Phenicians that we are indebted for the alphabet now in use throughout the civilized world. Such an extension of power, and the acquisition of sources of wealth so boundless, excited the envy of other nations.
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