Origin of Our Written LanguageSemitic Influence in Greek Art
In short, we now know that the Phœnicians did not begin to spread over the western sea and influence Europe till the break up of the Ægean civilisation. The Homeric lays and Hellenic myths reflect the inception of a Semitic expansion, which must be placed after 1100B.C.Even in Homer there is more mention of Greek ships than of Sidonian, and the Tyrian power is yet to come. The latter pushed westward later, and the founding of Carthage, usually dated in the eighth century, marks its first great achievement along those distant sea-routes, which certainly the Semites had been coming to know during a couple of centuries of huckstering trade, even if the dependence of the early Hellenes on Phœnician knowledge of these waters has been overrated. But, in any case, during the interval between the fall of Ægean power and the rise of the Hellenic maritime cities these Semites counted for much. Even in the light of Cretan discovery, we need not question their responsibility for the Greek alphabet, and thus, indirectly, for the ultimate medium of written communication used throughout European civilisation; nor need it be doubted that Hellenic writers, who trace early instruction in trade and barter to visits of Semitic ships to their coasts, show real, though limited, knowledge of fact. Phœnician factories were certainly established on Greek shores, and left Semitic forms among later Greek place-names; and it is quite possible that political power was exercised at one time by Semitic colonists in parts of Hellas. Sufficient Phœnician art products have been found on archaic Hellenic sites, to prove that, in the period between 1000 and 500B.C., the Ægean coasts were often visited by these Semites. Such objects are especially numerous in Rhodes, a convenient stage on the westward sea route, and they radiate over not only Ionia and the Hellenic lands, but also into the further Mediterranean, to Sicily and its neighbouring islands, to Italy and South Gaul, and to Sardinia and Spain. Carthage probably had much to say in their western distribution.
ÆNEAS AND DIDO: THE QUEEN OF CARTHAGE LISTENING TO THE STORY OF THE SIEGE OF TROYFrom the Painting by P. Guerin, in the Louvre.LARGER IMAGE
ÆNEAS AND DIDO: THE QUEEN OF CARTHAGE LISTENING TO THE STORY OF THE SIEGE OF TROY
From the Painting by P. Guerin, in the Louvre.
LARGER IMAGE
No Phœnician Influence in Britain
Of Semitic influence on archaic Greek art there is considerable evidence. After the Geometric Age, we find in the Greek lands pottery and metal-work showing certain motives and arrangement of decoration foreign to Ægean art, and referable ultimately to the Mesopotamian and Egyptian. Such are the animals and monsters disposed in concentric friezes and zones on Cypriote bowls, Corinthian vases, and the Cretan shields of the Idaean Cave. But this influence, strong and undoubted as it was, must not be over estimated. As the Hellenes rose to power, their instinct of sincerity and naturalism, inherited from Ægean civilisation, revolted against, and triumphed over, this parasitic Semitic art, and already in the ninth or eighth century we find a Græco-Lydian influence,which owes nothing to Phœnician, breaking back to the east and creating the ivories of the Sargonid Age at Nineveh. Phœnician objects thenceforward become fewer and fewer in Hellenic strata, and in the sixth centuryB.C.they virtually vanish. By this time Phœnicia had become a subject country, about to give up the last ghost of its independence to the Greeks themselves, as its western offshoot, Carthage, was also to surrender a little later to another civilisation near akin to the Greek. But, needless to say, the Semite has had his full revenge for the short tenure of his earliest predominance in European waters. The fall of Phœnicia cleared the way for another Semitic family to capture international trade, and, first with one creed and then another, to conquer the Greeks, the Romans, and the World.
There are, of course, possibilities of direct Phœnician intercourse with non-Mediterranean Europe—for example, with England’s south-western coasts; but they need not detain us. For whether certain Semites came to Cornwall in quest of tin or no, it is certain that by these no lasting influence of civilisation passed in to England. Neither the religion, the speech, nor the script of Britain owed them anything. Recent scholarship tends to discredit any Semitic element even in English south-western place-names.
The Origins of our Civilisations
Such, in brief outline, are the channels through which the civilisations of the South-eastern river-valleys could communicate with primitive Europe. It is easier to point them out than to say exactly what flowed along them. Seldom can so definite a debt be recorded as that under which we lie to the Semites of Phœnicia, for the names and the forms of the written characters which, presumably, they themselves had borrowed from Egypt, and modified ere they passed them westwards. Usually the obligation must be stated much more vaguely, being confined, as in the case of Ægean influences, to little more than a general responsibility for the spirit, and for many forms of the expression, of the first great artistic growth on the mainland soil of Europe, as well as for certain persistent and dynamic features in South European cults.
Thus, it becomes even more apparent at the end of our discussion than it was at the beginning that when all has been said about influences of Egypt and Mesopotamia, and influences of the intermediate civilisations of the Ægean, Syria, and Asia Minor, only a very small part of the whole story of incipient European civilisation has been told. Nor is it to be expected that the origin of our culture should be capable of being adequately expressed in terms of other cultures, developed at a great distance and under different geographical conditions. Civilisations, destined to be living growths, spring, it seems, of themselves, and the debts which they can incur at the first are very small and mostly in small things. It is only when they are come to adult estate, have bred men of wealth and leisure with open and receptive minds, and have broken through the geographical barriers about them, that they begin to borrow at large.
In the Childhood of Europe
One of the intermediate civilisations of which we have treated, the Ægean, the only one whose own origins are fairly well known, offers proof in point. Its remains indicate but trifling obligations to neighbouring Egypt till a very late period, that which, in Crete, we call the Third Minoan. Thereafter, in the space of two or three generations, the evidence of its debt increases at a wholly disproportionate rate. So too, no doubt, in the misty period of the childhood of Central and Western Europe, little was borrowed from abroad that was essential to civilisation; and the heavy obligations which we owe to the Eastern lands fall in ages much more recent. They fall, in fact, in those times which saw the Anatolian cult of Kybéle and Attis, the Egyptian cult of Isis and Horus-Harpocrates, the Mesopotamian cult of Mithra, and, far more momentous, of course, than these, Christianity—Hebrew in origin if modified by Greek conceptions—brought by a greater intermediary civilisation than any with which we have had to deal, to the knowledge of inner European races already long emerged from savagery, and able and eager to borrow.
DAVIDGEORGEHOGARTH