2 94 The National Geographic Magazine 



bays of Salamis and Himera the real 

 scenes, of Greek triumph. Earl}' a few 

 Sidonian colonies had been scattered 

 along the northern shore of the Mediter- 

 ranean. Wherever these seamen landed 

 they left some mark of the worship of 

 Astarte and of the strange vice of a sea- 

 faring coast to corrupt for all the future 

 the space wide-scattered from Corinth 

 to Massalia, a moral stain which not 

 the flow of thirty centuries has wholly 

 effaced. But after the battles in which 

 the Phoenician, rather than the Persian, 

 fleet and their Carthaginian ally had 

 been defeated, Phoenician colonies were 

 confined to the southern edge of the 

 Mediterranean. Neither were exclu- 

 sive. The earliest of Greek colonies 

 was to the south, at Cyrene.'' In like 

 manner the earliest of Phoenician colo- 

 nies were to the north. But the drift 

 of both was along opposite banks of the 

 Mediterranean. It is only at some point 

 like Sicily, where at Girgenti the Tem- 

 ple of Theron, and at Monreale the 

 Saracenic cloisters of Frederick, remind 

 Us that these eddying tides of Semitic 

 and Aryan strife have left their early 

 and late beach-marks side by side. 



The fashion in which not only com- 

 merce but the arts spread along these 

 routes of trade is best illustrated by the 

 diffusion of some simple article like the 

 majolica of Chaldea ; its early examples 

 have just been recovered by the German 

 excavator at Hillah ; its later glories 

 are seen in the Persian archer which 

 M. Dieulafoy brought to the Ivouvre 

 from Susa. When Chosroes in the last 

 expansion of the Sassanidae held Rhodes, 

 he planted there a colony of Persian 

 potters. From them came Rhodian 

 ware ; their glaze spread through the 

 Mediterranean ; their patterns still live 

 in the potters of Brusa. Of their cer- 



'- Establissements et Commerce des Pheni- 

 ciens. Lenormant Francois Atlas D'Histoire 

 Ancienne De L'Orient. Planche XX. 



Greek Colonies. Gibbin's History of Com- 

 merce in Europe. 



amic lineage has sprung the majolica 

 of Faenza and the Mauresque pottery of 

 Spain. Over the Mediterranean basin 

 they displaced the wares and the glaze 

 of the Greek and Roman potter. By 

 the hands of the Huguenot Palissy they 

 passed from southern France to northern 

 Europe. Of their family is the entire 

 field of modern glazed wares, distrib- 

 uted along lines of trade from Susa to 

 Staffordshire. 



When the Persian archer was pictured 

 in them he held Asia Minor and conquered 

 Egypt ; he closed to Greece and opened 

 to Phoenicia the route of the Red Sea. 

 The legendary peace of Cimon repre- 

 sents the commercial fact that no Phoe- 

 nician vessel passed in to the ^gean, 

 and no Greek vessel could safely go 

 south of Crete. Towns like Ephesus 

 grew and flourished and carved the great 

 sculptured drums which stand in the 

 Eouvre and in the British Museum, under 

 the stimulus of a trade which could only 

 reach Greece by the Persian land routes 

 and dubious relations. The Greek 

 trader left these routes, and again, as 

 ten centuries later under Justinian, 

 Greek trade sought a route above the 

 Black Sea, and the Greek colonies of 

 Euxine had their brief period of bloom 

 prior to Alexander. 



When the expansion of Greece came 

 under Alexander, the linked area which 

 we are considering had been for nearly 

 two centuries under the control of the 

 Persian Empire. The organized rule, 

 which had established itself early in the 

 Nile and still more in the Euphrates 

 Valley, as important for trade routes as 

 they were for the fertility and security 

 which they offered for agriculture 'and 

 the basis they furnished for the develop- 

 ment of trade, had in both cases been 

 expanded beyond its original area. In 

 the case of the eastern valley it had been 

 replaced first by successive waves of 

 invasion from the plains to the south, 

 from the days of Hammurabi certainly 

 and probabl}^ earlier, and next by the 



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