The pillars of Hercules

Every time I left the “Rock,” or returned to it, I had to pass round or through the ruins of Carteia, always deferring an examination of them to a special day. At last that day was fixed, and I went with three friends, who more or less indulged in Phœnician predilections—the French consul, M. Bero, Mr. Cornwell, and Dr. Dunbreck. We talked over its old fortunes and great names, until it seemed that we were paying a visit to Balbus, and had made an excursion of some thousand years. We wandered over the red earth, which is a mass of pounded brick, interspersed with broken marble of all colours, and fragments of mortar which here and there showed surfaces smooth and painted like those of the walls of Pompeii. We gathered tiles of sundry dimensions, some grooved so as to fit together like those which have been recently discovered in Arabia; some two feet square, with borders raised like trays. They are quarrying still here, to build little boxes like those on Hampstead Heath. In one place they had opened rows of amphoræ standing on end. The only building which can be made out is Roman,—the amphitheatre,—it is on the side of the hill, overlooking the bay: the part resting against the hill still stands, even to the upper stories, to commemorate the importance of this first colony, and of the Romans, the settlement of the Hybrides, the Creoles of antiquity; a race produced from Roman fathers and Iberian mothers,—as before them the Bastuli were from Carthaginian fathers and Iberian mothers. It is curious to see the instinct with which a Spaniard,—I mean, of course, the educated class,—will catch at any allusion to those races: they do not relish it, and do, therefore, understand the intellectual bastardy of their own nature. It is, however, strange, that they should be ashamed of association with a cross which produced Hannibal and Asdrubal. I should like to see how they would have taken the assimilation with the dry and rootless stumps of men[107] to whom Spain is now given over.

After we had completed our researches and concluded our homilies, we repaired to a ruined convent to get figs. The inmates deal in relics, and the stock was principally composed of flattened drops of blue glass, in shape and size resembling peppermint lozenges. They must have been in enormous quantities, for they are even yet picked up along the beach at Cadiz and other places. Some suppose that the Phœnicians circulated them as money—they made money out of them by disposing of them. The ancients did not cut stones in facets; their cups, arms,[108] horse-trappings, even their ships,[109] were studded with gems: these drops were adapted to this purpose. These were gems (glass in the East still goes by that name):[110] so that in these drops we had the staple of Tyre, hinted at by Ezekiel, when he spoke of “her riches in the sand.”

In like manner, on the Guinea coast, they still find drops of Phœnician glass, which they sell for their weight in gold. We have in vain attempted to imitate them. They retain this value although Africa is deluged with glass from every work-shop in Europe. The fact is of importance, as bearing on traffic, which Herodotus makes the Carthaginians carry on, and which moderns dispute. What must glass have been when the knowledge of its manufacture was a secret; when the people who possessed it worked with system, and neither glutted the market nor undersold one another.

Observing at the bottom of a large chest in which their curiosities were kept, a quantity of rubbish, I had it turned out. There were all sorts of strange things, from glass lustre drops to blacking labels. I selected some fragments of what seemed then earthen jars: when wetted they proved to be glass of brilliant and variegated colours; some opaque, some translucent. On one there was a flower with yellow leaves and a red centre; the ground was green and translucent; the leaves were opaque, the leaves twisted in passing through, so that the yellow appeared through the green as if shaded with a brush. On the other side it came out a comet with a red head and a yellow tail. From the tombs of Egypt and Etruria have been obtained specimens of the same manufacture; but I have seen none equal to this.

These broken fragments seemed to change in my hands into a magic mirror, in which were reflected the workshops of Sidon and Aradus, smelting to order the gems of Golconda. What is the Philosopher’s Stone to their daily craft!

But it will be objected that the Egyptians were acquainted with it—that it is found as far back as the tombs of the fourth dynasty, and in the old Pyramids of Memphis; and that glass-blowing is recorded on the walls of Beni Hassan, in a tomb of the eleventh or twelfth dynasty.[111] Nevertheless, I think I shall very easily show that this art, so far as the Egyptians are concerned, was the peculiar property of the Phœnicians.

The invention is by all antiquity attributed to the Tyrians. When Pliny wrote there were still histories of Tyre extant; still traditions as well as interpretations of the hieroglyphics. It is difficult to imagine that if it had been Egyptian, it should have been given to any other people; and, if not Tyrian, claimed by and surrendered to them. Even if communicated to the Egyptians at the period when it figures on their walls, it may have been for many previous centuries the exclusive possession of Tyre, for the Phœnicians were of equal date with the Egyptians.[112] The monuments of Egypt were not pictures of common things, but records of extraordinary ones. They were designed to illustrate the lives of kings and heroes; representing their triumphal entries; their trophies; the tribute offered; the captives brought home; the arts they introduced; the inventions and incidents of their time. We have in them a few repetitions: elephants are there: they are seen but once; a cart but once; brick-making once; glass-blowing once, and that is in the reign of Sesu Sesen, consequently I will not say that this record proves, but that it at least suggests, that up to that time the manufacture was unknown in Egypt. The representation is not, however, of glass-making; it is of blowing only: no where is glass-making seen. If the Egyptians had the art of blowing glass only, they must have imported the raw material.

The monument of Carnac enumerates among the tribute paid to Tathmes III., “ingots of enamel;” and this tribute was paid four hundred years after the glass-blowing figures on the walls. The material for glass abounded in Egypt. They were dexterous in preparing mineral compounds for colouring: had they understood the manufacture they would not have imported it; and had the manufacture been known, we should have seen it figured with the blowing. But the Egyptians, having learnt the art of blowing, would desire to have the unmanufactured material in order to adapt it to their own fashions. This is entirely confirmed by the description given by the Egyptian priests to Herodotus; for it must be after them that he designates the ornaments of the sacred crocodiles (which we know to be glass), λίθανα χύτα, fused stones.

This tribute came from “Maharama,” or Mesopotamia, in the first cities of which the Phœnicians had establishments.

Having set aside the claims put in for Egypt, no other people making any, I have, I think, restored the invention to the Phœnicians.

A new claim has now been set up for the Assyrians, according to Mr. Layard. “They had acquired the art of making glass. Several small bottles or vases of elegant shape in this material were found at Nimroud and Konyunjik.”[113] But, strange to say, in the very spot where he came upon the first glass vase he found pottery, with letters which he supposes to be Phœnician.

The Greeks knew nothing of the art, though they possessed the substance. Prometheus, in Eschylus, claims the honour of almost every invention—glass is not enumerated among his titles to the hatred of Jupiter. Socrates, in “The Clouds,” tricks a bum-bailiff out of his wit by means of a burning-glass.[114] From the Scholiast we learn, that these were sold at the apothecaries.

This burner may now seem of another substance, of which the Phœnicians had possession—amber. I have seen it so used on the coast of the Baltic, being formed in the most primitive manner by rubbing between the palms of the hands. Amber was supposed to attract the sun’s rays, as it did various substances, whence its name, ἔλεκτρον. The word was also applied to glass,[115] from its possessing a similar quality. There may be more in the association than we have yet discovered. Pliny mentions the magnet as used in the preparation of glass. The Tyrians employed glass as artillery; they discharged what was called “melted sand” at Alexander’s troops in storms which inflicted torture, and carried dismay and agonies against which no defensive armour could avail. The Venetians, following in their steps, likewise made glass their artillery. The first shells, and perhaps the most effectual, were of glass; they are still to be seen used as ink-bottles.

But the art seems to have extended from burning glasses to microscopes and telescopes, or they must have had eyes differently constituted from ours; for without such aid we could not make out valleys and mountains in the Moon; the milky-way[116] to be composed of stars; or count, as there is reason to believe they had done, the satellites of Jupiter and Saturn: and, supposing reflectors, and not lenses, were employed to survey the heavens, we can hardly escape from acknowledging their claim to microscopes and magic lanterns.[117] Their gems could not have been engraved without such aid; indeed, we require glass to make out the figures of some of them.[118] Eye-glasses we know they had, from Nero, who, being short-sighted, used one in the amphitheatre: it is called an emerald. One of the personages on the Greek stage had eyes of different colours, which was represented in his mask, and of course by coloured glasses. All these were the “wares of Tyre.”

In after times the manufacture of glass was transferred to Rome; but in the early period the Phœnicians must have supplied glass to Greece and Italy, as they did to Egypt, Assyria, Spain, and Africa.

In the chapter of Ezekiel, in which Tyre is described, a very different country is represented as sending to Tyre their produce for “her wares;” but what the “ten thousand”[119] wares of Tyre were nowhere appears, unless in the “treasures hid in the sand.” We know of no wares that she had except dyes and glass;—dyes implies the dyeing of stuffs; but in Phœnicia there were no manufactories; and she is herself represented as importing manufactured stuffs. A few glass-houses, according to our notion, would not suffice to compel an exchange of the metal of Ogg, and the beasts of Deden, and the pearls of Chittim, and the gold of Tarshish. The wares consisted in the dye itself which she extracted from the shells of her own coast, and from that portion of the coast of Africa, where they were in like manner found, and the drops of glass equivalent to gems, to prepare which a few hands sufficed, and on which the profits must have exceeded all calculation.[120]

The great nations of antiquity eschewed commerce and navigation: they lived at home. It is the property of a primitive people so to live; and that concentration of life upon the spot must be the character of all institutions which are calculated to last long. To the Egyptian the sea was unclean: the Hindoo, the Persian, the Chinese, all avoided the sea-trade. Of the tribes nearly allied to the Phœnicians, one only, the Arabs, were a transporting people;[121] the two monopolised the trade of early times, the Arab carrying on the traffic of the desert by his camels, the Phœnician that of the sea by his ships.

The great nations I have referred to were not anti-commercial: they received the stranger who came amongst them as a friend; he was more—he was a guest—the rites of hospitality extended to whole tribes who came to settle wherever there was room for them. How much then must have been the favour which attended the arrival and settlement of trading strangers? There could have been in Tyre no competitions, no under-sellings, no combinations. From the beginning to the end of their exchanges there must have been an adaptation of the profits of the community and of the individual—a union of traffic and government.[122] This endured for not less than one thousand, and may have extended to nearly two thousand, years.

The Phœnicians, in the structure of the old world, may be compared to the lime cementing the blocks, or to the veins and arteries spreading life through the body. Phœnicia was the smallest of states: arms had no part in her growth, conquest no share in her greatness. She gathered and spread around the produce of the earth and of the toil of man; its business was on homely and vulgar things. More than the mystery which shrouds the antiquity of the most visionary, is spread over the origin of this most practical of people; our profoundest writers are at variance as to whether she gave to, or borrowed from, Greece her gods; as to the form of government which prevailed in her cities; as to the taxes imposed on her merchandise. The avowed introducers of letters into the Western world alone remain without the record of a written page, or of a chiselled stone.

We see in this society dominion without conquest; greatness without ambition; permanency without numbers; freedom without turbulence; commerce without legislation;[123] and riches without pauperism. Neither arrogant in their strength, nor servile in their weakness, they could abstain from encroachments on the Lybian or Iberian populations, who afforded them a settlement, and maintain their peculiar character in Memphis, Babylon, and Persepolis. Their commerce paid to, while it received tribute from, every shore it visited; and was enriched in the aggregate wealth of all the wealth it bestowed. Thus did it take tithe of the spices of Malabar and the Philippines; of the frankincense of Abyssinia and Arabia; of the fine linen of Egypt; of the herds and camels of Deden; of the corn and oil of Judæa; of the ivory and ebony of Lybia and Hindoostan; of the gold of Spain; of the tin of the Cassiterides; of the amber of the Baltic. It had its colonies and its stores at Taprobane, as it had them at Cadiz and in Britain.

A few days after my visit to Carteia, I was looking over some coins which a gentleman at Gibraltar had collected, and was astounded to come upon one which is not copied, but which is represented in the accompanying wood-cut.[124] This told the whole story of the glass-houses and the tin. I wonder if the coin was censured as indiscreet at Tyre. How is it that by putting the hand in this fashion to the nose the fancy should be tickled? Whence did the custom come? how did it travel to Britain? One is not prepared to have to search for such a gesture in the Hebrew Talmudists, or the Greek scholiasts; but here it is raised to numismatic dignity, and is worthy of the philosopher.

There is a ludicrously supercilious animal, very strong and very stupid, with a horn on his nose, belonging to Africa, the Holy Land, Mesopotamia—in fact, all the Phœnician countries. He was the Behemoth, for of no other animal could Job be thinking when he said, “With his nose he pierceth through snares”—the horn, emblem of victorious strength, denoting by its exaltation its own achievements, and the proud bearing of the brow on which it is planted. Each year gives to it increase, and each increase is marked by a wrinkle which comes to signify acquirement. There are false acquirements as there are true; and the horn of the nose is the burlesque of the horn of the forehead. The motion that is given to the hand shows that it is the spiral wreathings of a horn that are imitated: the rhinoceros represents the one, the unicorn the other.

Of the two images, the African has preserved the grave one, we the grotesque. The Abyssinian warrior, when he has gained a victory, adorns his forehead with a horn. The London coalheaver, when he has made a hit, puts his thumb to his nose.

This gesture in its grotesque form was known not long ago in Spain, although at present it appears to have died out. Cervantes unmistakably describes it, and in the person of Sancho Panza; the English have therefore the sole honour and distinction of preserving this peculiarity of the Phœnicians and Etruscans.[125]

I might be inclined to place beside this, the groups of lions and unicorns at Persepolis, which so closely resemble the supporters of the English arms, as scarcely to be referable to coincidence. They are, indeed, of recent adoption as the arms of England, but of ancient date in those of Scotland. The emblematic plants of England were, however, those of Phœnicia—the oak and the ivy; and the rose of England is still the flower of Spain. The blood-red hand of Ulster is in Morocco stuck above every door. It wants not so much to raise the thought, or justify the association. Instinctively one seeks for some sympathetic deed, which shall link us to the Phœnicians; and Spain lies between, and is bound therewith: she too at length prides herself on her Moorish blood, and exalts herself (or at least did so till we robbed her fortress) on her British friendship recorded in the proverb:—

Guerra con toda la tierra,
Pero par con Ynglaterra.

The extinction of written records has given importance in these countries to every trifling usage or tradition, as will be best felt by reviewing the catalogue of mischances which have befallen the literature of Africa, and of the great people, who in the West have given to it its celebrity.

Alexander destroyed the libraries of Tyre: those of Sidon perished in the flames with their wealth and themselves. The whole mass of the literature of Carthage was destroyed by the Romans, except a small portion given to Massinissa.

The Alexandrian library was burnt by the troops of Julius Cæsar. The various collections made at Rome by Asinius Pollio, Augustus, and Tiberius, were lost in the fires under Nero and Titus. Domitian endeavoured to repair the disaster by getting the manuscripts of private collections copied, and ransacking Africa for the lost works: these were deposited in the Temple of Peace, and destroyed by fire under Commodus.

Finally, the gleanings of Rome were carried off by Genseric and lost at sea. The persecution of the Donatists led to the burning, all over Africa, of books and manuscripts. The Mussulman conquests led to fresh burnings, and the great African collections of Alexandria again perished under Omar.

The 600,000 volumes of Cordova, and the enormous collections of the learned cities of the Moors, perished by Christian and Gothic hands. The library of Tunis was destroyed by Charles V.; Muley Hassan lamented it more than his city. After the ravages of war had ceased, Cardinal Ximenes, the munificent patron of literature, consigned to the flames 88,000 African manuscripts. Lastly came the capture of the library of the King of Morocco, a portion of which constitutes the collection of the Escurial, and this again has suffered by fire.

Thus have been swept away the literary records of this quarter of the globe, as completely as devouring sands and the human ravages of more recent times have effaced all local signs. The curiosity of the traveller is arrested on its inhospitable shores; the research of the antiquarian baffled by the scantiness or uncertainty of data. Her history remains what her interior still is: we can wander, guided only by the stars—little points of light that shine only because of the surrounding darkness.