Encylodaedia Biblica; a critical dictionary of the literary, political and ...

PHCENICIA PHCENICIA
of the desert, and by many of the local dynasts who
longed for independence (see HITTITES, 5s 88). Among
these, AbdaSirta and his son Aziru, the dynasts of the
Amorites, in the northern part of the Lebanon, took a
leading position. The Phanician towns were divided ;
all their kings tried to gain as much as they could for
themselves, but they all pretended to be faithful vassals
of Egypt, even if they did as much harm to its interests
as was possible to them. The Amarna tablets give a
very vivid picture of these troubles. We see that Arados
made itself independent ; Simyra was conquered and
destroyed by Aziru ; the king of Arka was slain ; the
king of Sidon supported the rebels, in spite of his loyal
letters, while Rib-hadad of Byblos held out to the last on
the Egyptian side. In Tyre the king and his wife and
children were slain ; but here the Egyptians gained the
supremacy again, and the new king Abimelech proved
a faithful vassal like Rib-hadad. Both were pressed hard
by the rebels. Usu was occupied by the Sidoniam, who
were supported by a fleet from Arados, and the Tyrians
on their island suffered severely for the want of wood and
water. Rib-hadad lost one part of the Byblian territory
after another, and the inhabitants of Byblos had to
sell their sons and daughters in payment of the pro-
visions they imported from the sea. At last, when
Rib-hadad had gone for help to Berytus, where an
Egyptian officer was posted, his subjects revolted, shut
the gates against his return, and joined the enemy.’
In the religious troubles under Amenophis IV. and
his successors, the Egyptian power in Asia was reduced
to nothing. Sethos I. (Setoy, about 1350 R.c.) had
to begin the conquest anew. He slew the Bedouins,
occupied Palestine and southern Phcenicia, made the
Syrian magnates cut trees on the Lebanon for his
buildings in Egypt, and fought, as it seems, with
varying success against the Hittites. Neither Sethos,
however, nor his son Ramses II., in spite of his
victories, was able to subjugate the Hittites and the
N. of Syria again. At last Ramses 11. concluded a
treaty with the Hittites, by which both empires re-
cognised each other as equals and became friends.
From that time (about 1320) onwards, Palestine and
southern Phcenicia were for more than a century in the
possession of the Egyptians. The boundary seems to
have been formed by the Nahr el-Kelb, N. of Beiriit,
where three tablets of Ramses 11. allude to his victories
and fix the frontier ; unfortunately, they are in very bad
preservation. A visit which the king of Tyre paid to
Egypt is mentioned in pap. Anastasi IV. verso 6, Z. 3.
The peaceful state of Syria was again disturbed, first
by the decay of the Egyptian power under the weak suc-
cessors of Ramses 11. and by the internal troubles which
led to the rise of the twentieth dynasty with Setnekht
and Ramses III., and perhaps also by a similar decay
of the very loosely organised Hittite empire. Then
followed the great invasion of Syria by a migration of
peoples from Asia Minor and Europe, who came both
by land and by sea; a migration about which some
information has come down to us in the inscriptions
of Ramses 111. (about 1200 B.c.), who defeated the
invaders on the frontier of Egypt. The final result of
this migration was the occupation of the coast of
Palestine by the Zakari (in Dor) and the Philistines (in
Ashkelon and the neighbouring towns).
The empire of the Hittites henceforth disappears ; it
is dissolved into a great number of smaller states.
Ranises 111. still maintained a part of Canaan and
fought against the Amorites; but under his feeble
successors the power of the Pharaohs in Asia was
again reduced to nought, although they never gave up
the claim of supremacy over Palestine and Phenicia.
We possess part of an account of an official of the
temple of Anion in Thebes,* who was sent by the high
1 For the chronology of Rib-hadad’s letters see Knudtzon in
Beitnip ZUY Assyriologie, 4 2m5 (IT.).
a Published by Golenischeff, RecarzZdc Trauuux, 21, 1899 ;
3735
priest Hrihor and the prince of Tank Smendes (afterwards
thefirst king of the twenty-first dynasty, about 1075
B.C.), to Byblos in order to get timber from Lebanon
for the sacred bark of the god, and brought a statue of
the god with him for his protection. The Phcenicians
still regarded the great god of Thebes with some awe ;
nevertheless the Egyptian messenger was received with
bad grace by Beder, prince of the Zakari of DOR (g.~.),
and worse still by Zekar-ba‘al prince of Byblos (see
GEBAL i. ). The latter proved that neither he nor his
ancestors had been subjects of the Pharaohs, and when
at last he gave the timber on religious grounds, he exacted
the promise that he should be paid for it on the
envoy’s return.
The father-in-law of Solomon, and afterwards, in
Rehoboam’s time, Shishak, the first Pharoah of the
twenty-second dynasty, once more renewed the Egyptian
campaign to Palestine, but only with momentary
success. Farther northward no Egyptian army again
penetrated until the time of Pharaoh Necho in 608.
There was no dominant power in Syria either, and the
invasion of Syria by Tiglath-pileser I. who came to
Arados and hunted in the Lebanon, was only a passing
episode. So the Phenician towns were left to themselves;
the period of their rise and greatness begins,
and with it the dominating position of Tyre in Phenicia
The prosperity of Phcenicia was the result of seatrade
and colonisation. For a long time, scholars
g. Phmniciarr were inclined to put the beginning
of Phcenician colonisation into much
colonies. earlier times, and to suppose that in
the second millennium B.C. they were doknant on all
the islands and shores on the Zgean sea. We hsve
since learnt, however, that this was a mistake. Certainly
the Phoenicians went to sea as early as in the
time of Thutmosis 111. and his successors, and on the
other hand, numerous remains in Greece and Egypt
prove that there was a lively intercourse between the
E. and the Greeks of the Mycenaean period during
the whole time of the Egyptian empire; but the
Oriental people, which at this time was most nearly
connected with Greece, were the inhabitants of Kaft ;
and we know now that this was not Phcenicia, but
another country farther to the W. (cp 5 I).
On the other hand, the Greeks of the Mycenaean
time (with Crete and Argos as the great centres of their
civilisation) were far more enterprising than scholars
had supposed; they came to the E. as mercenaries,
pirates, and tradesmen, and brought their wares
(Mycenzan pottery, arms, etc.) to Cyprus and Egypt.
There can be no doubt that at a very early period
(perhaps in connection with the great migration under
Ramses 111.) they settled on the southern coast of Asia
Minor (Pamphy1ia)and in Cyprus, before the Phcenicians
had any colonies there. In the time of the Amarna
tablets there were no Phoenician colonies ; probably
their colonisation did not begin before the twelfth
century, and it never reached the extent which used
often to be dreamt of. In Cyprus they founded Citium
and some other places; but to the Bgean sea they
always came only as traders (as we see in Homer), and
never possessed more than a few factories (probably on
some islands, on the Isthmus of Corinth. etc.), from
which they carried on their trade with the Greeks.
This is the character of Phcenician colonisation generally;
by far the larger number of the Phoenician
colonies were mercantile settlements, factories, planted
at sheltered points of the coast, or, still better, on a
rocky island off it, like the towns of Phcenicia itself.
For the task of occupying extensive territories, for
subjugation of foreign peoples or even assertion of
political supremacy over them, the Phcenician cities
were not powerful enough; they did not even possess
cp Erman, ‘Eine Reise nach Phoenicien im elften Jahrhundert
vor Chr.’ in Z& vol. 38 (IF).
3736