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The Historians' History of the World 02 [Israel, India, Persia, Phoenicia, Minor Nations of Western Asia]
- Автор: Gutenberg
- Год: 1905
- Язык: английский
- Жанр: История
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The return of domestic peace allowed the caliph Abdul-malik to resume the conquest of Africa; the standard was delivered to Hassan, governor of Egypt, and the revenue of that kingdom, with an army of forty thousand men, was consecrated to the important service. In the vicissitudes of war the interior provinces had been alternately won and lost by the Saracens. But the seacoast still remained in the hands of the Greeks; the predecessors of Hassan had respected the name and fortifications of Carthage; and the number of its defenders was recruited by the fugitives of Cabes and Tripoli. The arms of Hassan were bolder and more fortunate; he reduced and pillaged the metropolis of Africa; and the mention of scaling ladders may justify the suspicion that he anticipated, by a sudden assault, the more tedious operations of a regular siege. But the joy of the conquerors was soon disturbed by the appearance of the Christian succours. The prefect and patrician John, a general of experience and renown, embarked at Constantinople the forces of the Eastern Empire; they were joined by the ships and soldiers of Sicily, and a powerful reinforcement of the Goths was obtained from the fears and religion of the Spanish monarch. The weight of the confederate navy broke the chain that guarded the entrance of the harbour; the Arabs retired to Kairawan, or Tripoli; the Christians landed; the citizens hailed the ensign of the cross, and the winter was idly wasted in the dream of victory or deliverance. But Africa was irrecoverably lost; the zeal and resentment of the commander of the faithful prepared in the ensuing spring a more numerous armament by sea and land; and the patrician in his turn was compelled to evacuate the post and fortifications of Carthage. A second battle was fought in the neighbourhood of Utica: the Greeks and Goths were again defeated; and their timely embarkation saved them from the sword of Hassan, who had invested the slight and insufficient rampart of their camp. Whatever yet remained of Carthage was delivered to the flames, and the colony of Dido and Cæsar lay desolate above two hundred years, till a part, perhaps a twentieth, of the old circumference was repeopled by the first of the Fatimite caliphs. In the beginning of the sixteenth century the second capital of the West was represented by a mosque, a college without students, twenty-five or thirty shops, and the huts of five hundred peasants, who, in their abject poverty, displayed the arrogance of the Punic senators. Even that paltry village was swept away by the Spaniards whom Charles V had stationed in the fortress of the Goletta. The ruins of Carthage have perished; and the place might be unknown if some broken arches of an aqueduct did not guide the footsteps of the inquisitive traveller.f
FOOTNOTES
[9] For a detailed account of the Punic wars, see Vol. V.
Phœnician Terracotta Chariot
Phœnician Bottle in Form of a Gourd
CHAPTER VII. PHŒNICIAN COMMERCE
At all stages of its history Phœnicia was essentially a manufacturing and commercial rather than a warlike nation. Nevertheless, it took a more or less prominent part in the combats of the great nations for many centuries. There was only one period, namely, during the reign of Hiram, the contemporary of David and Solomon, about 950 B.C., when Phœnicia could aspire to anything like first rank among the nations. It was at most a community of scattered cities, each generally independent of the others, rather than a nation in the narrower sense. Nevertheless, such is the vitality of a nation whose prosperity is based on the pursuits of peace, that Phœnicia continued to hold a respectable place among the powers of the earth, for a longer period than almost any other of the minor nations of antiquity. Thus we find it reviving again and again, after being subjected by the foreign conquerors, until finally, even so late as 332 B.C., it was able to afford most powerful opposition to Alexander, and throughout this period, for at least a thousand years, the navy of the Phœnicians was celebrated as being, for the most of the time, a type of excellence, and the Phœnicians for this reason were coveted as allies, or hired as mercenaries by such great contending powers as the Greeks and the Persians. All in all, notwithstanding the comparatively minor place which is always assigned to the Phœnicians, in comparison with such great conquering powers as Egypt and Babylonia, there are many reasons for feeling that the great manufacturers and traders of antiquity were among the most admirable of the peoples whose history has been preserved.
The accounts of wars and conquests must necessarily always hold a foremost place in the records of the historian, at least in our day, but one should not hesitate to give a due measure of praise to a nation whose ideal was not self-aggrandisement through the destruction of other nations, but the building up of power through the far more useful channels of manufacture and commerce. Where other nations destroyed, the Phœnicians constructed. They took no high rank as inventors pure and simple, but they were acceptors of the inventions of other peoples, and as an educating influence they have no peers among the oriental nations. And this is true simply because the Phœnicians were the great progressive and commercial people of antiquity.a
SEA TRADE
It requires no great sagacity to develop the causes by which the Phœnicians became a commercial and seafaring people. They were in a manner constrained to it by their situation; for the commodities of interior Asia becoming accumulated in vast quantities upon their coasts, seemed to demand a further transport. It would, nevertheless, be an error to assume this as the first and only impulse to their navigation, which most likely had the same origin here that it generally had among commercial nations; it sprung from piracy. The seeming advantages which this affords are too near and too striking to be overlooked by uncivilised nations; while the benefits to be derived from a peaceable and regular commerce are too distant to come at first within the scope of their ideas. It was thus that the piratical excursions of the Normans gave the first impulse to the navigation of the western countries of Europe. But among nations who are not, like the African nest of pirates, held back by despotism and other unfavourable circumstances, good gradually grows out from this original evil. A trifling advance, too, in civilisation soon teaches mankind how greatly the benefits of trade surpass those of plunder; and as the latter diminishes, the former increases.
This is exactly the state in which the navigation of the Phœnicians is first presented to our notice, in the time of Homer—the earliest period at which we catch an authentic glance at it from any definite accounts.
The Phœnicians at this period visited the Greek islands and the coasts of the continents as robbers, or merchants, according as circumstances offered. They came with trinkets, beads, and baubles, which they sold at a high price to the inexperienced and unwary Greeks; and they thus gained opportunities of kidnapping their boys and girls, whom they turned to good account in the Asiatic slave markets, or who were redeemed at heavy ransoms by their parents and countrymen. A most faithful and lively picture of the state of society in these respects is drawn by the Greek bard himself, in the narrative which he makes Eumæus relate of his birth and early adventures.
This kind of intercourse, however, could not last beyond the infancy of Grecian civilisation. As this advanced, and that people grew formidable upon the seas, and Athenian and Ionian squadrons covered the Mediterranean, it must of itself have assumed another shape, as piracy would no longer be tolerated. But notwithstanding this, the connection between Phœnicia and Greece, in the flourishing period of the latter, seems not to have continued so strong as might naturally have been expected. There is no trace of an active intercourse between Tyre and Athens, or Corinth; there is no vestige of commercial treaties, such as frequently were closed between Carthage and Rome. Commercial jealousy, common to both nations, in some measure accounts for this phenomenon. (How much less has the intercourse between England and France always been than it might have been, considering the situation and magnitude of the two kingdoms!) I trust, however, that the following observations will be deemed satisfactory upon this subject.