Phoenicians Sentence Examples

The Phoenicians have left no marked trace of their presence; but inasmuch as they were probably of nearly the same race as the Arabs, it would not be easy to distinguish the two types.

At a very early period - as early probably as the 16th century B.C.- Syria became the meeting-place of Egyptian and Babylonian elements, resulting in a type of western Asiatic culture peculiar to itself, which through the commerce of the Phoenicians was carried to the western lands of the Mediterranean basin.

She is everywhere the great female principle, answering to the Baal of the Canaanites and Phoenicians 2 and to the Dagon of the Philistines.

The Phoenicians are the earliest Mediterranean people in the consecutive chain of geographical discovery which joins prehistoric time with the present.

Such were the Persian wars of Greece, and perhaps one may add Hannibal's invasion of Italy, if the Carthaginians were Phoenicians transplanted to Africa.

The question as to whether copper really was first used in Egypt is not yet resolved, and many arguments can be brought against the theory of Egyptian origin and in favour of one in Syria or further north.26 Egypt has also recently been credited with being the inceptor of the whole " megalithic (or heliolithic, as the fashionable word now is) culture " of mankind, from Britain to China and (literally) Peru or at any rate Mexico via the Pacific Isles.27 The theory is that the achievements of the Egyptians in great stone architecture at the time of the pyramid-builders so impressed their contemporaries that they were imitated in the surrounding lands, by the Libyans and Syrians, that the fame of them was carried by the Phoenicians further afield, and that early Arab and Indian traders passed on the megalithic idea to Farther India, and thence to Polynesia and so on so that both the teocalli of Teotihuacan and Stonehenge are ultimately derived through cromlechs and dolmens innumerable from the stone pyramid of Saqqara, built by Imhotep, the architect of King Zoser, about 3100 B.C. (afterwards deified as the patron of science and architecture).

Even in the Homeric poems, which belong to an age when the great Minoan civilization was already decadent, the Cretans appear as the only Greek people who attempted to compete with the Phoenicians as bold and adventurous navigators.

This interpretation of the popular tales, according to which the career of the hero can be followed in its entirety and in detail in the movements in the heavens, in time, with the growing predominance of the astral-mythological system, overshadowed the other factors involved, and it is in this form, as an astral myth, that it passes through the ancient world and leaves its traces in the folk-tales and myths of Hebrews, Phoenicians, Syrians, Greeks and Romans throughout Asia Minor and even in India.

Viewing the subject as a whole, and apart from remote developments which have not in fact seriously influenced the great structure of the mathematics of the European races, it may be said to have had its origin with the Greeks, working on pre-existing fragmentary lines of thought derived from the Egyptians and Phoenicians.

Tipasa was founded by the Phoenicians, was made a Roman military colony by the emperor Claudius, and afterwards became a municipium.

As regards the Philistines, it is impossible to lay much weight on the statement of Chronicles, unsupported as it is by the older history, and in Joel the Philistines plainly stand in one category with the Phoenicians, as slave dealers, not as armed foes.

On the whole, the historical evidence indicates that in Spain, when it first became known to the Greeks and Romans there existed many separate and variously civilized tribes connected by at least apparent identity of race, and by similarity (but not identity) of language, and sufficiently distinguished by their general characteristics from Phoenicians, Romans and Celts.

How far the Phoenicians had any effective control over it is unknown; the absence of their monuments does not argue much real jurisdiction.

There is continuous historical evidence that Malta remains to-day what Diodorus Siculus described it in and the 1st century, " a colony of the Phoenicians "; this branch of the Caucasian race came down the great rivers to the Persian Gulf and thence to Palestine.

The earliest inhabitants of Malta (Melita) and Gozo (Gaulos) belonged to a culture-circle which included the whole of the western Mediterranean, and to a race which perhaps originated from North Africa; and it is they, and not the Phoenicians, who were the builders of the remarkable megalithic monuments which these islands contain, the Gigantia in Gozo, Hagiar Kim and Mnaidra near Crendi, the rock-cut hypogeum of Halsaflieni,' and the megalithic buildings on the hill of Corradino in Malta, being the most noteworthy.

The description of the islanders in Acts as " barbaroi " confirms the testimony of Diodorus Siculus that they were Phoenicians, neither hellenized nor romanized.

It is true that childsacrifice in connexion with fire prevailed among the Phoenicians, and, according to the Greeks, the deity honoured with these grisly rites was Kronos (identified with the Phoenician El, "God").

This fact was also known to the Egyptians, the Phoenicians and other nations of Asia and Africa.

The island was colonized at an early date by Phoenicians, attracted probably by its gold mines; they founded a temple of Heracles, which still existed in the time of Herodotus.

Thasus, son of Phoenix, is said to have been the leader of the Phoenicians, and to have given his name to the island.

Herodotus, who visited Thasos, says that the best mines on the island were those which had been opened by the Phoenicians on the east side of the island facing Samothrace.

From the name Assaracus, from the intercourse between the Phoenicians and the early inhabitants of the Troad, and from the connexion of Aphrodite, the protecting goddess of the Phoenicians, with Anchises, it has been inferred that his family was originally of Assyrian origin.

The Phoenicians, the Romans, the Vandals, the Byzantines, the Arabs, the Turks and the French, all came from the east or from the north.

Sidon, Tyre and Aradus, though now connected with the mainland, were built originally upon islands; the Phoenicians preferred such sites, because they were convenient for shipping and easily defended against attack.

The Phoenicians were an early offshoot from the Semitic stock, and belonged to the Canaanite branch of it.

Elsewhere " Phoenicians " are merchants, kidnappers, &c., " Sidonians " are artists; to indicate nationality both names seem to be used indifferently, e.g.

During the period which elapsed before the rise of the Assyrian power in Syria the Phoenicians were left to themselves.

Even when cut off from its possessions on the mainland the city itself was not captured; its seafaring trade went on; and though by degrees the colonies were lost, yet the ties of race and sentiment remained strong enough to bind the Phoenicians of the mother-country to their kindred beyond the seas.

On occasion the towns could defend their independence with strenuous courage; the higher qualities which make for a progressive national life the Phoenicians did not possess.

C. Greece,' the Phoenicians were among the most loyal subjects of the empire.

The Phoenicians were essentially a seafaring nation.

Another valuable article of commerce which the Phoenicians brought into the market was amber.

A deposit of amber has also been found in the Lebanon, and perhaps the Phoenicians worked this and concealed its origin.

These were discovered to be, not a part of Britain as was imagined at first, but a separate group by themselves, now known as the Scillies; hence it is improbable that the Phoenicians ever worked the tin-mines in Cornwall.

Then at the beginning of the 8th century B.C. the colonial power of Tyre began to decline; on the mainland and in Cyprus the Assyrians gained the Upper hand; in the Greek islands the Phoenicians had already been displaced to a great extent by the advancing tide of Dorian colonization.

The invention of these various arts and industries was popularly ascribed to the Phoenicians, no doubt merely because Phoenician traders brought the products into the market.

The Phoenicians spent much care on their burial-places, which have furnished the most important 1 Traces of ancient mining for iron have been found in the Lebanon; cf.

Like the Canaanites of whom they formed a branch, the Phoenicians connected their religion with the great powers and The processes of nature.'

A tendency to form a distinct deity by combining the attributes of two produced such curious fusions as Milk-`ashtart, Milk-ba'al, Milk-'osir, Eshmunmelqarth, Melqarth-resef, &c. As in the case of art and industries, so in religion the Phoenicians readily assimilated foreign ideas.

On the other hand, the Phoenicians produced a considerable effect upon Greek and Roman religion, especially from the religious centres in Cyprus and Sicily.

It was the custom among the Phoenicians, as among other Semitic nations, to use the names of the gods in forming proper names and thus to express devotion or invoke favour; thus Hanni-ba`al, 'Abd-melqarth, IIanni- `ashtart, Eshmun-`azar.

No doubt the Phoenicians had their legends and myths to account for the origin of man and the universe; to some extent these would Myth R e!,, o logy have resembled the ideas embodied in the book of and Genesis.

The ivory was probably brought by the Phoenicians from Cyprus or from one of the works on the coast of Asia Minor.

But Roman ascendancy did not affect Greeks and Phoenicians in the same way.

As in Cyprus and in the islands of the Aegean, the Phoenicians were before them.

The Phoenicians, now shut up in one corner of the island, with Selinus on one side and Himera on the other founded right in their teeth, are bitter enemies; but the time of their renewed greatness under the headship of Carthage has not yet come.

Here cedars were felled for him by the Syrian princes, and the Phoenicians paid homage before he returned home in triumph.

Rawlinson also suggests that the Phoenicians may have originally come from the Bahrein Is.

After the Phoenicians, Babylonians, and Arabs came the Persians; though they never aspired to command of the seas and are indeed not a maritime race, the Persian Gulf was no obstacle to them, and at one time or another they occupied Muscat and parts of Oman and Bahrein, and penetrated into the greater part of Arabia.

The countries visited, and to a certain extent explored, by Pytheas, were previously unknown to the Greeks - except, perhaps, by vague accounts received through the Phoenicians - and were not visited by any subsequent authority during more than two centuries.

There is ground for supposing that the Phoenicians were not ignorant of the Canaries.

Lying as it did in the closest proximity to Phoenicians and Aramaeans, its population must have been exceptionally mixed, and the description of the occupation of Palestine in Judg.

It was mainly the spirit of commercial enterprise that led the Phoenicians to plant their colonies upon the islands and along the southern coast of the Mediterranean; and even beyond the Pillars of Hercules this earliest great colonizing race left enduring traces of its maritime supremacy.

In this latter respect the Greek colonies resembled those of the Phoenicians.

Wherever the alphabet may have originated, there seems no doubt that its first importation in a form closely resembling that with which we are familiar in modern times was from the Phoenicians to the Greeks.

The Phoenicians were certainly using it with freedom in the 9th century s.c.; with so much freedom, indeed, that they must have been in possession of it for a considerable time before we can trace it.

According to this view the alphabet was borrowed by the Phoenicians from the cursive (hieratic) form of Egyptian hieroglyphics.

That the alphabet was borrowed and adapted independently by different places not widely separated, and that the earliest Greek alphabets did not spread from one or a few centres in Greek lands, seem clear (a) from the different Greek sounds for which the Phoenician symbols were utilized; (b) from the different symbols which were employed to represent sounds which the Phoenicians did not possess, and for which, therefore, they had no symbols.

It can be traced in the graffiti of the mercenaries of Psammetichus at Abu Simbel in Upper Egypt, where Greeks, Carians and Phoenicians all cut their names upon the legs of the colossal statues.

The carrying of the alphabet to the Greeks by the Phoenicians at an early period affords no clue to the period when Semitic ingenuity constructed an alphabet out of a heterogeneous multitude of signs.

The priestesses were called doves (7r XEtac) and Herodotus tells a story which he learned at Egyptian Thebes, that the oracle of Dodona was founded by an Egyptian priestess who was carried away by the Phoenicians, but says that the local legend substitutes for this priestess a black dove, a substitution in which he tries to find a rational meaning.

With regard to the introduction of the vine into other parts of Europe, it appears that it was brought to Spain by the Phoenicians, and to Italy and southern Gaul from Greece.

This annual flax appears to have been introduced into the north of Europe by the Finns, afterwards into the west of Europe by the western Aryans, and perhaps here and there by the Phoenicians; lastly, into Hindustan by the eastern Aryans after their separation from the European Aryans.

Phoenicians held Citium and Amathus on the south coast between Salamis and Curium, also Tamassus and Idalium in the interior; but the last named was little more than a sanctuary town, like Paphos.

The early Christian Fathers recorded many a valuable observation of the Gentile faiths around them from varying points of view, sympathetic or hostile; and Eusebius and Epiphanius, in the 4th century A.D., attributed to the librarian of Ptolemy Philad.elphus the design of collecting the sacred books of the Ethiopians, Indians, Persians, Elamites, Babylonians, Assyrians, Romans, Phoenicians, Syrians and Greeks.

This was only to be seen in the extreme western provinces of the empire among the Phoenicians, Greeks and Lycians, whose cities were essentially distinct from those of the east; which, indeed, to Greek eyes, were only great villages (acwuoirhXeis).

Bola was an Assyrian term for Bael or Bel, the god of the Phoenicians and Druids.

Either by the Phoenicians or by the Greeks metallurgy was taught to men who no sooner recognized the nature and malleable properties of copper than they learnt that by application of heat a substance could be manufactured with tin far better suited to their purposes.

The Phoenicians, as was only to be expected of those traders and artisans of the ancient world, appear to have adopted both the cylinder of Assyria and the scarab of Egypt as have survived the numerous engraved stones or g pebbles, technically called gems, which served as matrices and in most instances were undoubtedly mounted as finger-rings or were furnished with swivels.

Phoenician names are found cut both on cylinder matrices and on scarabs by the Phoenician engravers employed in Assyria and Egypt; and, when the cone-shaped matrix superseded the cylinder in Western Asia, the Phoenicians conformed to the change.

There is very little doubt that it was from these islands that the Puni, or Phoenicians, emigrated northwards to the Mediterranean.

Shem is probably Israel; Canaan, of course, the Canaanites; by analogy, Japheth should be some third element of the population of Palestine - the Philistines or 'the Phoenicians have been suggested.

Another expedition against the great oasis failed likewise, and the plan of attacking Carthage was frustrated by the refusal of the Phoenicians to operate against their kindred.

A temple of Heracles seems to have been built on the Monaco headland by the Phoenicians at a very early date, and the same god was afterwards worshipped there by the Greeks under the surname of Movocicos, whence the name Monaco.

The Phoenicians were here traders and not settlers; the Greeks, though they planted early colonies on the Gulf of Lyons, occupied hardly any site south of the Pyrenees, and the seeming likeness in name of Saguntum and the Greek island Zacynthus is mere coincidence.

It was also, as Augustine tells us,' a usage of the Phoenicians to call their land " Canaan."

We now understand how the Phoenicians, whose ancestors arrived in the second Semitic migration, came to call their land " Canaan."

It is believed that the ultimate origin of the constellation figures and names is to be found in the corresponding systems in vogue among the primitive civilizations of the Euphrates valley - the Sumerians, Accadians and Babylonians; that these were carried westward into ancient Greece by the Phoenicians, and to the lands of Asia Minor by the Hittites, and that Hellenic culture in its turn introduced them into Arabia, Persia and India.

The inter-relations of the Phoenicians with the early Hellenes were frequent and farreaching, and in the Greek presentation of the legends concerning constellations a distinct Phoenician, and in turn Euphratean, element appears.

Further support is given to the view that, in the main, the constellations were transmitted to the Greeks by the Phoenicians from Euphratean sources in the fact that Thales, the earliest Greek astronomer of any note, was of Phoenician descent.

Some modern mythologists regard the Minotaur as a solar personification and a Greek adaptation of the Baal-Moloch of the Phoenicians.

In the book of Joel there are only scanty allusions to Phoenicians, Philistines, Egypt and Edom, couched in terms applicable to very different ages, while the prophet's own people are exhorted to repentance without specific reference to any of those national sins of which other prophets speak.

Philology proves that, though called " Canaanites " from having sojourned in that land, the Phoenicians have no racial connexion with the African descendants of Ham.

Probably like other Canaanites the Phoenicians offered worship " on every high hill and under every green tree "; but to judge from the allusions to sanctuaries in the inscriptions and else- sacred where, the Ba'al or `Ashtart of a place was usually worshipped at a temple, which consisted of a court or W o rshi p. enclosure and a roofed shrine with a portico or pillared hall at the entrance.

These were unable to withstand the Greek settlers, and the Phoenicians of Sicily withdrew step by step to form three considerable towns in the north-west corner bf the island near to the Elymi, on whose alliance they relied, and at the shortest distance by sea from Carthage - Motya, Solous or Soluntum, and Panormus (see Palermo).

The Greek names of the letters, their forms, and the order of the symbols show that the Greek alphabet as we know it must have been imported by or from a Semitic people, and there is no evidence to contradict ancient tradition that this people was the Phoenicians.

This craft dates back to about the 11th century when historians say Hebrews, Phoenicians, and Babylonians embroidered their robes.