The Historians' History of the World 02 [Israel, India, Persia, Phoenicia, Minor Nations of Western Asia]

In the year 203 B.C. Antiochus led an army into Syria and Palestine, and recovered possession of them. The Egyptians sent a force under Scopas, which gained some temporary advantages, but they were defeated at Panium and shut up in Sidon, where they were compelled to surrender. Thus Phœnicia once more (198 B.C.) fell under the power of Syria.

Tyre suffered a severe blow, when Ptolemy Philadelphus constructed the harbour of Berenice on the Red Sea, and established a road with stations and watering places between that place and Coptos, reopening at the same time the canal which joined the Pelusiac branch of the Nile to the Gulf of Suez. The traffic of the Red Sea and Indian Ocean, which had hitherto passed from Eloth and Ezion-geber across the Desert to Rhinocolura, and thence been conveyed by Tyrian vessels to all parts of the Mediterranean, was now brought by the Nile or the canal to Alexandria. The opening of the safe and easy route by Kosseir and Coptos, which saved the dangerous navigation of the northern end of the Red Sea, gradually drew to Egypt the wealth that had previously flowed into Phœnicia.

The sufferings which the Syrians endured from the civil wars of the Seleucidæ induced them in the year 83 B.C. to place themselves under the dominion of Tigranes, king of Armenia, who took possession of Syria. This state of things lasted for fourteen years, when, in consequence of the victories of Lucullus, Syria and Phœnicia returned for a short time (67 B.C.) to the dominion of the Seleucidæ. Four years later Pompey reduced Syria into a Roman province, making Gaza, Joppa, Dora, and Turris Stratonis free.

[63 B.C.-636 A.D.]

The dominion of Rome, however, was exercised mildly; and though Tyre and Sidon ceased to have any political importance, they retained their ancient fame for nautical science, for the manufacture of glass, and the preparation of the purple dye. A school of philosophy arose here, whose doctrines, like those of Alexandria, combined Greek and oriental elements, and endeavoured to reconcile philosophy with theology. Strabo mentions several contemporaries, eminent in their day, whom Tyre and Sidon had produced. Philo, to whom we owe the translation of Sanchoniathon, was a native of Byblus; his pupil, Hermippus, of Berytus. Porphyry, whose original name was Malchus, was of Tyrian parentage, though born at Batanæa, on the eastern side of the Jordan. Berytus became the seat of a school of law, which for three centuries furnished the eastern portion of the empire with pleaders and magistrates. Marinus of Tyre, who lived in the early part of the second century after Christ, was the first author who substituted maps, mathematically constructed according to latitude and longitude, for the itinerary charts which had been in use before. The maps of Marinus, like those of Ptolemy, which were only an improvement upon them, must have been founded on records of voyages and travels, of which the measured or computed distances were translated into latitudes and longitudes. Nowhere could such records have abounded more than in Phœnicia, which for so many centuries had taken the lead of all other nations in navigation and commerce. Had the invention of maps, in the modern sense, been due to the geographers and mathematicians of Alexandria, it is not probable that Ptolemy, himself a native of Alexandria, would have based his own work entirely on that of Marinus of Tyre.