38 FOLLOW THE WHALE 



selves several fortified harbor towns, the names of which were to 

 become famous — Tyre, Sidon, and Arvad. It was once thought that 

 the Phoenicians originally came from the Aegean region, but it is 

 now known that they themselves recorded their homeland as being 

 on the Persian Gulf and they appear always to have spoken of the 

 Palestinian settlements as "colonies." They brought with them their 

 skill as shipwrights and immediately set to work to create a mer- 

 chant fleet on the new sea, and from 1 500 B.C. until the coming of 

 the Romans, a period of more than a thousand years, these amazing 

 people maintained their maritime commercial supremacy despite the 

 rise and fall of empires and rivalries and vicissitudes of many other 

 kinds. 



While the Phoenician colonists were thus engaged, there arose in 

 Mesopotamia a great empire. The Assyrians were also a Semitic 

 people who had come into the fertile valleys from the western des- 

 erts and had wrested them from their previous inhabitants, con- 

 quering far and wide and consolidating their power around their 

 great capital of Nineveh. By the year iioo b.c. their conquering 

 armies reached the Mediterranean under the banner of their King 

 Tiglath-Pileser I. They arrived by way of modern Syria, conquered 

 its Hittite inhabitants, and then pressed on southward to the borders 

 of the Phoenician colonies. Here they found something very new 

 and strange to them, which appears to have made such an impres- 

 sion on King Tiglath-Pileser that he ever afterwards ranked it above 

 all other things encountered during his campaigning. Indeed, its 

 strangeness made such an impression on the Assyrians that more 

 than two hundred years later it was still being discussed in their 

 home country. What King Tiglath-Pileser, the landsman, found in 

 the land of the seafaring Phoenicians was a fully fledged whaling 

 industry. 



We learn from cuneiform inscriptions on a broken obelisk which 

 is now in the British Museum that Tiglath-Pileser boarded a Phoeni- 

 cian whaling ship at the port of Arvad and with his retinue went to 

 sea in pursuit of whales. What is more, he witnessed the capture of 

 a large nakhiru — an Assyrian word meaning "the blower" — 



t^^jii 



