Persian Gulf; the tradition, therefore, seems to show that the Phoenicians believed that their ancestors came originally from Babylonia. By settling along the Syrian coast they developed a strangely un-Semitic love for the sea, and advanced on different lines from the other Canaanites who occupied the interior. They called themselves Canaanites and their land Canaan; such is their name in the Amarna tablets, Kinaḫḫi and Kinaḫni; and with this agrees the statement assigned to Hecataeus (Fr. hist. gr. i. 17) that Phoenicia was formerly called Χνᾶ, a name which Philo of Byblus adopts into his mythology by making “Chna who was afterwards called Phoinix” the eponym of the Phoenicians (Fr. hist. gr. iii. 569). In the reign of Antiochus IV. and his successors the coins of Laodicea of Libanus bear the legend “Of Laodicea which is in Canaan”;[1] the Old Testament also sometimes denotes Phoenicia and Phoenicians by “Canaan” and “Canaanites” (Isa. xxiii. 11; Obad. 20; Zeph. i. 11), though the latter names generally have a more extended sense. But “Sidonians” is the usual designation both in the Old Testament and in the Assyrian monuments (Sidunnu); and even at the time of Tyre's greatest ascendancy we read of Sidonians and not Tyrians in the Old Testament and in Homer; thus Ethbaal king of Tyre (Jos. Ant. viii. 13, 2) is called king of the Sidonians in 1 Kings xvi. 31. In the Homeric poems we meet with Σιδόνιοι, Σιδονίη; (Od. iv. 618; Il. vi. 290; Od. xiii. 285; Il. vi. 291) and Φοίνικες, Φοινίκη (Od. xiii. 272, xiv. 288 seq., &c.), and both terms together (Od. iv. 83 seq., Il. xxiii. 743 seq.)[2] And the Phoenicians themselves used Sidonians as a general name; thus in the oldest Phoenician inscription known (CIS. i. 5 = NSI., No. 11), Hiram II. king of Tyre in the 8th century is styled “king of the Sidonians.” But among the Greeks “Phoenicians” was the name most in use, Φοίνικες (plur. of Φοῖνιξ) for the people and Φοινίκη for the land (cf. Phoenix). The former was probably the older word, and may be traced to Φοινός = “blood-red”; the Canaanite sailors were spoken of as the “red men” on account of their sunburnt skin; then the land from which they came was called after them; and then probably the original connexion between Φοῖνιξ and Φοινός was forgotten, and new forms and meanings were invented. Thus Φοῖνιξ came to mean a “date-palm”; but the date-palm is not in the least characteristic of Phoenicia, and can hardly grow there; Φοῖνιξ in this sense has no connexion with the original meaning of Phoenician. A derivation has been sought elsewhere, and the Egyptian Fenḫ proposed as the origin of the name; but the word Fenḫ was apparently used of Asiatic barbarians in general, without any special reference to the Phoenicians (W. M. Müller, Asien u. Europa, p. 208 seq.). The Lat. Poenus is of course merely an adaptation of the Greek form.[3]
Language.—Inscriptions, coins, topographical names preserved by Greek and Latin writers, names of persons and the Punic passages in the Poenulus of Plautus, all show conclusively that the Phoenician language belonged to the North-Semitic group, and to that subdivision of it which is called the Canaanite and includes Hebrew and the dialect of Moab. A comparison between Phoenician and Hebrew reveals close resemblances both in grammatical forms and in vocabulary; in some respects older features have been preserved in Phoenician, others are later, others again are peculiar to the dialect; many words poetic or rare or late in Hebrew are common in Phoenician. Hence we may conclude that the two languages developed independently from a common ancestor, which can be no other than the ancient Canaanite, of which a few words have survived in the Canaanite glosses to the Amarna tablets (written in Babylonian).[4] But in forming an estimate of the Phoenician language it must be remembered that our material is scanty and limited in range; the Phoenicians were in no sense a literary people; moreover, with one exception (CIS. i. 5), almost all the inscriptions are subsequent to the 6th century B.C.; the majority belong to the 4th century and later, by which time the language must have undergone a certain amount of decay.[5] Indirectly, however, the Phoenicians rendered one great service to literature; they took a large share in the development and diffusion of the alphabet which forms the foundation of Greek (Herod. v. 58) and of all European writing. The Phoenician letters in their earlier types are practically identical with those used by the Hebrews (e.g. the Siloam inscr. NSI. No. 2), the Moabites (e.g. the Mesha stone, ibid. No. 1), and the Aramaeans of north Syria (e.g. the Zenjirli inscrr. ibid. Nos. 61-63). They passed through various modifications in the course of time; after leaving the mother country the script acquires a more cursive flowing style on the stones from Cyprus and Attica; the tendency becomes more strongly marked at the Punic stage; until in the neo-Punic, from the destruction of Carthage (146 B.C.) to the 1st century A.D. both the writing and the language reached their most degenerate form. As a rustic dialect the language lasted on in North Africa till the 5th century A.D. In his sermons St Augustine frequently quotes Punic words.
History.—The Phoenicians, in imitation of the Egyptians, claimed that their oldest cities had been founded by Early Period. themselves, and that their race could boast an antiquity of 30,000 years (Africanus in Syncellus, p. 31). Herodotus quotes (ii. 44) a more moderate tradition which placed the foundation of Tyre 2300 years before his time, i.e., c. 2756 B.C. According to Justin (xviii. 3) the Phoenicians, who had long been settled on the coast and occupied Sidon, founded Tyre in the year before the fall of Troy; possibly the date 1198 B.C., given by Menander of Ephesus (in Jos. Ant. viii. 3, 1 and c. Ap. i. 18) as that from which the era of Tyre begins, may refer to the epoch which Justin mentions. Little certainty, however, can be allowed to these traditional chronologies. It is probable that in remote ages Babylonia exercised a considerable influence upon Syria and its coast towns; but Mr L. W. King has shown that the tradition, which was supposed to connect Sargon I. (c. 3800 B.C.) with the western land and sea, has been misunderstood; it was the sea in the east, i.e. the Persian Gulf, which Sargon crossed (Chronicles concerning Early Bab. Kings, vol. i. ch. 2, 1907).
The extension of the Egyptian empire in the direction of Asia began about 1600 B.C. under Ahmosi (Aahmes, Amasis) I., Egyptian Rule c. 1600-1100 B.C. the founder of the XVIIIth Dynasty, who carried his arms into Syria, and conquered at least Palestine and Phoenicia, the latter being the country called Da-hi on the Egyptian monuments (Müller, As. u. Eur. p. 181). Whether the campaign of Thothmes (Tethmosis) I. to the Euphrates produced any lasting results is doubtful; it was Thothmes III. (1503-1449) who repeated and consolidated the earlier conquest, and established Egyptian suzerainty over all the petty states of Syria and Phoenicia (see Egypt: History, I.). For the geography and civilization of Canaan about 1400 B.C. we have valuable evidence in the Egyptian papyrus Anastasi I., which mentions Kepuna (Gubna, Gebal-Byblus) the holy city, and continues: “Come then to Berytus, to Sidon, to Sarepta. Where is the ford of Nat-’ana (? Nahr el-Kāsimīyeh, or a town)? Where is ’Eutu (? Usu, Palaetyrus)? Another city on the sea is called a haven, D’ar (Tyre) is its name, water is carried to it in boats; it is richer in fish than in sands.”[6] But the fullest information about the state of Phoenicia in the 15th and 14th centuries B.C. comes from the Amarna tablets, among which are many letters from the subject princes and the Egyptian governors of Phoenicia to the Pharaoh.[7] It was a time of much political disturbance. The Hittites (q.v.) were invading Syria; nomads from the desert supported the invasion; and many of the local chiefs were ready to seize the opportunity to throw off the yoke of Egypt. The towns of Phoenicia were
- ↑ Cooke, North-Semitic Inscriptions (elsewhere abbreviated NSI.), No. 149 B. 8.
- ↑ In this passage “Phoenicians” is a general name for carriers of commerce, not the inhabitants of a particular country. Similarly “Sidonian” in Il. vi. 209, is taken to mean Semites in general. Elsewhere “Phoenicians” are merchants, kidnappers, &c., “Sidonians” are artists; to indicate nationality both names seem to be used indifferently, e.g. Od. xiii. 272, xiv. 288, xv. 414.
- ↑ See especially Pietschmann, Gesch. d. Phönizier, 13 sqq., and Winckler, Keilinschr. u. d. A. T., 3rd ed., 127.
- ↑ A vocabulary is given in KAT.3, 652 seq.; see further Böhl, Die Sprache d. Amarnabriefe (1909).
- ↑ For the Phoen. inscrr. see Corpus inscriptionum semiticarum, pt. i., brought up to date provisionally by Répertoire d'épigr. sém. A selection is published by Lidzbarski, Handbuch d. nordsem. Epigraphik (1898); Cooke, Textbook of North-Semitic Inscriptions (1903), with translations and notes; Landau, Beiträge z. Altertumsk. d. Orients (1899-1906); Lidzbarski, Altsem. Texte (1907), pt. i.
- ↑ See W. M. Muller, loc. cit. pp. 57, 172 sqq., 184 sqq.; Jeremias, Das A. T. im Lichte d. alt. Orients, p. 302 seq; Records of the Past, ii. 109 seq.
- ↑ Winckler, Tell-el-Am. Letters Nos. 37 sqq.; Petrie, Syria and Egypt in the Tell el Am. Letters.
