119. Egypt did not enter largely upon maritime expeditions with her own ships until the Pharaohs had passed away, and a new conqueror founded in her western limits a city of his own name, to supplant the honour of immolated Tyre.

120. With Alexandria, a new era began in the commerce of Egypt. She had fallen under the rule of the Greek, and her subsequent history will be considered in another page.

121. PHŒNICIA.-On the rocky shores of Phoenicia, in her barbours, on her islets from north to south, there are cities and manufacturing towns, and the sounds of commerce and the gathering of ships. In ancient Tyre stands the temple of Melkarth, 2700 before the era of Christ. The merchants are busy at Sidon. In the wide extent behind them, from the sea to Euphrates, nomade tribes wander over the deserts and the plains. Here and there are scattered the strongholds or little cities of hordes beginning to settle, and to combine agriculture with the commerce of the caraIn the mountains are the remnants of an earlier population, levying black-mail and retribution on those who had expelled them from their plains. Far southward, amid the rocks of Idumea, are the beginnings of a commercial state. They are all kindred races in different stages of civilization; all are occupied in carrying forward or in levying contributions on the natural and artificial productions of the East. The meleks, and the emirs, and the sheikhs rule their petty communities, except when some turbulent leader arises to subdue a neighbouring clan, or to summon the warriors to some common exploit.

vans.

122. The people of Lebanon and of Idumæa, the inhabitants of the mountains and the plains, of all the regions of Syria, are moving, and the people of the desert are with them. A mighty chieftain has called them to conquest; the Phoenicians, the shepherds, the Hyksos have swarmed across the river of Egypt (B. c. 2000), and spread over and desolated that ancient realm. The rulers of Tanis, Bubastis, and Sais, the princes of Memphis and the Fayoum, the Xoite

kings, and the Diospolitan kings are fleeing or retiring before them. For nearly five hundred years they occupy the sea-coasts and large portions of the land, and contend for dominion with the Pharaohs of Egypt. The leadership is with the ruler of Avaris (Pelusium), the rallying point of the tribes; but the petty princes, especially of the maritime cities, were almost independent of the chief. Their power began (B.C. 1700) to decline, and during about 150 years they were gradually driven from the Nile northward and eastward, until (B.c. 1550) Avaris was taken and they were expelled, and the conquerors doubtless pursued them into their ancient homes.

123. During this period, then, from about B.c. 2000 to B.C. 1550-for computations can only be speculatively approximate the rule of Phoenicians or peoples of a kindred race extended almost along the whole northern coast of Egypt, the whole coast of Syria, and the coast of Asia Minor, perhaps as far as Rhodes; and that island with Crete and Cyprus were under the influence of Phoenician habits and sentiments, the love of commerce by land and by sea.

124. The routes of commerce have little change. Subject to the growth and decay of cities and temples, its usual emporia, and to the interruptions and devastations of plunder and war, they may be faintly traced from Cathay, by the desert of Cobi, through the passes of the Himalaya and its subordinate ranges, by the rivers of Tartary, and over the plains of Turkistan, by the marts of Samarcand, of Bokhara and Balk, to the Euphrates and Chaldæa, where the mighty Babylon received the caravans, and where it received too a portion of the imports of the Persian Gulf. A portion passed thence across the desert to Petra; but the great convoys to the maritime cities traversed the desert, where Palmyra the stately, and Damascus the beautiful, afterwards arose, and proceeded to the harbours of the Sidonian coasts. Such was their progress centuries before Joseph was bought and sold.

125. Soon after the Hyksos had been driven back in defeat upon the regions of Canaan, another expulsion occurred. The children of Israel, and probably some kindred families, had, during the Hyksian domination, been permitted to settle in a pastoral district of one or two thousand square miles to the north or north-west of the head of the Heroopolitan Gulf, the western horn of the Red Sea. After the martial race which had held Avaris was driven out, the people of Goshen were allowed to retain a precarious possession of their pastures; but the superfluous population were employed and exposed to the hardships of slavery in building a fortress at each extremity of their district to keep them in subjection, and to restore or replace the ancient monuments, which their compatriots had defaced or destroyed. They were oppressed, and became, as their descendants ever were, an impatient and rebellious people.

126. With what atrocities on their part, which are faintly indicated by the marks on the door and the slaughter of the first-born, and with what violence on the part of the oppressors, cannot now be discovered; they were driven by the ancient well-known route of the caravan into Arabia (B.c. 1490), and after being repulsed in an attempt to penetrate into Canaan on the south-west, skirted the commercial district of Idumæa, and assailed the towns on the eastern part of that province of Phoenicia, which afterwards acquired the name of Palestine.

127. They brought with them the laws of Egypt, with an edict of extermination and the other bloody additions deemed requisite by a half-savage horde to make good its conquest against a people better disciplined and more numerous and civilized than themselves.

128. They brought moreover with them, and, from their exclusiveness, better preserved, a notion, somewhat more distinct than among other peoples, of a single God, yet only the notion of a tutelary national divinity resting in their shrine, personally pronouncing oracles through the priest;

a notion disturbed also by vague associations of angels, of spirits, and ghosts.

129. Their poets, like the philosophers of Egypt and Greece, had higher conceptions of the Deity, and described His attributes in a loftier strain.

130. After between 300 and 400 years of alternate victory and defeat, of tyranny and subjugation and doubtful conflict, they captured Jerusalem, a city already sacred in that land, and made it their capital; and, under the banner of the ill-requited Joab, extended their dominion or their influence to Tadmor in the north-eastern desert, where the superb ruins of Palmyra now stand, to the neighbourhood of the Sidonian cities on the coast, and to the eastern horn of the Red Sea on the south.

131. In the reigns of the priest-ridden David and his pedantic and luxurious son, they imported some peacocks, some apes, and some gold. But so destitute were they of the arts of civilization and commerce, that their temple, and its holy of holies, its cherubim and its seraphim, and its fantastical ornaments, were built and modeled by workmen from ancient Tyre; and the very gold entombed within it, for the gratification of the priests, was imported by ships and seamen hired from Tarsus, or Tarshish, whence the fabulous voyage from Ezion-geber to Tartessus in Spain.

132. From that time wholly or partially dependent on Egypt, on Nineveh or Babylon, as the tide of battle rolled forward and backward between Euphrates and the Nile, occasionally rebelling against either master through the ambition of its priests; its commerce was represented by fishingboats on Gennesareth, and by the fable of Jonah on the sea.

133. From about B.C. 1100 to about B.C. 1020, the contest was carried on between the invading Israelites and the maritime cities of the south coasts, the Philistines, and their civilization and commerce were at length almost exterminated and destroyed.

134. During this period the kingdom of Damascus or

Syria was growing up, which spread its dominion over a considerable portion of the country north of Palestine, and probably pressed upon the people of the sea-coasts. It lasted from B.C. 1030 about 300 years, until B.C. 738, when it was overturned by the Assyrian power, sixteen years before the Israelite kingdom of Samaria (B.c. 721) was destroyed.

135. We have referred to these events as indicative of the circumstances under which the early voyages and emigrations from the Syrian coasts occurred.

136. The earliest colonizations from Phoenicia are recorded in no tablets of brass, in no pillars of marble, in no written book; but they were indelibly engraved on the manners and habits, and abundantly illustrated by the wealth and happiness of the peoples among whom they were introduced. The opulence of Sidon and Tyre, and the other cities on the seaboard of Syria and Philistia to the river of Egypt on the south, and towards and along the south shores of Asia Minor, beyond Tarsus or Tarshish on the north, and inland beyond where Damascus now stands, and in the regions now desolate beyond Jordan, where numberless cities once stood, and their indestructible houses still remain, attest the power and splendour which Phoenicia once enjoyed.

137. The appetite for war exhibited in the conquest of Egypt may have led to disasters after the Hyksian armies were driven back; but the first record of her decline is in the invasion by the Israelitish tribes.

138. The sea was her realm. Of all nations she alone sent forth peace and goodwill, and distributed wealth and prosperity over the waters, to thrive and flourish in the islands and on the adjacent shores. She conquered with arts, and conferred on the vanquished, with whom her children became blended, civilization, protection, and peace. She did not impose on the countries into which her children went to reside the obligation of allegiance, but the bonds of friendship and gratitude; and attached them by mutual benefits and reciprocating wealth. They turned the wastes

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