492 MAN : PAST AND PRESENT. [CHAP. 



It is the same with the Phoenicians, who, according to 

 Phoenician Theodore Bent and others, had their first seats in 



Cradle and th e Persian Gulf, whence they passed in quite late 



Migrations. 



times to the Mediterranean, at first as traders and 

 seafarers (Byblos, Tyre, Sidon), then as colonists and founders of 

 empires (Leptis Magna, Carthage, Gades). In the earliest 

 references to the Syrian coast, a cylinder of Sargon I. (3800 B.C.), 

 and another of his son Dungi from Cyprus, no allusion is made to 

 the Phoenicians, who had probably at that time not yet reached 

 the Mediterranean. Herodotus learnt from the priests of Baal 

 Melkart, the great god of Tyre, that this place was founded about 

 2700 B.C., while Old Tyre on the mainland was much more 

 ancient. Yet Tyre was still but an obscure fishing town, while 

 Byblos, their oldest settlement, Sidon, and Beryta (Beyrout) were 

 flourishing seaports, referred to in a papyrus of about 1320 B.C. 

 Amongst the places captured by Thutmes III. (1600 B.C.) are 

 mentioned both Beryta and Akko (Acre). 



Altogether Phoenician origins in their new seats on the Syrian 

 seaboard cannot be carried back beyond about 3000 B.C. How 

 long they may have dwelt in their first homes on the Arabian side 

 of the Persian Gulf can only be conjectured from the immense 

 extent of the burial grounds explored by Bent in the Bahrein 

 Islands. Obviously these remains date back into Neolithic times, 

 and make it probable that the eastern Phoenicians had taken a 

 chief part in the active trade carried on by the Sumerian city of 

 Eridhu with Sinai, possibly even with the far East, 4000 or 5000 

 years before the new era. 



Was the "Phoenician Alphabet" amongst the treasures intro- 



duced into Greece by these early distributors of 

 Alphabet? eastern wares? Before Mr Evans's discovery of a 



pre-Phcenician syllabary in Crete, the story of 

 Cadmus was accepted in its integrity, and must still be regarded 

 as substantially true. It is possible that this syllabary of linear 

 symbols, as has been suggested, may have been picked up by the 

 Phoenician traders in the Archipelago, simplified by them in Tyre 

 or Sidon, and then reintroduced into Hellas in the perfect form 

 which it has since retained. But the suggestion, made apparently 

 in order to transfer the credit of this stupendous invention from 





