United States or Jordan ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !


The Phoenicians came along the northern coasts a thousand years before Christ and began settlements which culminated in Carthage and extended down the Atlantic shores of North Africa nearly to the Gulf of Guinea. From the earliest times the Greeks have been in contact with Africa as visitors, traders, and colonists, and the Persian influence came with Cambyses and others.

Suddenly the forbidding ocean was turned into a peaceful highway of commerce and the dangerous menace of the horizon became a myth. These Phoenician navigators were Semites. Their ancestors had lived in the desert of Arabia together with the Babylonians, the Jews and all the others. But when the Jews occupied Palestine, the cities of the Phoenicians were already old with the age of many centuries.

What hardships, what insults, what outrages the Phoenicians had to endure during this interval we do not know, and can only conjecture; but the conduct of the Parthians at Jerusalem makes it probable that the inhabitants of the conquered districts generally had much cause for complaint.

The literature on the subject of these remains is very extensive and rapidly increasing. The Language. The Remains. The Phoenician language bore a strong affinity to the Hebrew, through which alone the inscriptions on coins and monuments can be interpreted, and these constitute the entire literary remains, though the Phoenicians had doubtless their archives and written laws.

XIV. Literature and Art From the Union of Italy to the Subjugation of Carthage and the Greek States Arduum res gestas scribere. Sallust. Carthage The Phoenicians The Semitic stock occupied a place amidst, and yet aloof from, the nations of the ancient classical world.

"Say, rather, my son, that it comes of the godlessness and extortion of Phoenicians," interrupted Queen Niort's. "For three days the chief of police from Pi-Bast is in Memphis with two assistants, and they are on the trail of the murderer and deceiver Lykon." "Who was hidden in Phoenician temples!" cried Niort's.

The Phoenicians, who formed the main strength of his navy, declined to take any part in an attack on Carthage, since the Carthaginians were their colonists, and the relations between the two people had always been friendly.

"Yes, centuries before." "Who were they?" demanded both Jean and Giusippe in the same breath. "The Egyptians first; and after them the Phoenicians and Syrians. All these peoples lived where they could easily get plenty of the fine white sand necessary for glass-making.

Mithradates reckoned himself lost, just as the Carthaginians had done; but, while the Phoenicians yielded from despair, the king of Sinope did the very opposite and assembled his troops and ships. "Does not even he who must succumb," he is reported to have said, "defend himself against the robber?"

They lie in the woods, but mindful of their origin they neither avoid the presence of man nor do they ever injure any one. There is a tradition that Cadmus introduced into Greece the letters of the alphabet which were invented by the Phoenicians. This is alluded to by Byron, where, addressing the modern Greeks, he says: "You have the letters Cadmus gave, Think you he meant them for a slave?"