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rate opinion of Herodotus, founded on inquiry, is surely entitled to outweigh all those historical speculations which deny to Phoenicia any influence on the civilisation of Greece. Whatever may have been the case in regard to the islands of the Ægean, here are distinct traces of a permanent settlement. No visit for mere commercial purposes could have brought the Phoenicians to the inland site of Thebes, nor have led to such an intimate intermingling of Phoenician mythology with its history as we find in the legends of this city. In the occupation of the Cadmea by Cadmus, in the fable of the dragon's teeth and the armed men, in his reputation as the inventor of brazen armour, in the significance of his name which means a suit of armour,* we have evident traces of a conquest, which by the use of brazen weapons the Phoenicians were enabled to make over the native inhabitants of Boeotia, the Aones, Temmices, Leleges, and Hyantes, and which they preserved for several generations, till they were expelled by Argives from the Peloponnesus. By the same event, the worship and mysteries of the Cabiri, which were closely connected with Phoenicia, were expelled the Theban territory. The connection of the history of Bacchus and the introduction of his worship, with the history of Cadmus, point to a migration of the Phoenicians from Thrace and Boeotia rather than immediately from Phoenicia. For the oldest mention of the Dionysiac worship in Grecian literature represents Bacchus as in conflict with Lycurgus, king of the Edones, inhabiting the country near Amphipolis, and he had no original or special connection with the Phoenician mythology, though he may have been identified with some of its divinities by that system of interpretation and syncretism which prevailed in later times. Thrace was the immediate, Lydia and Phrygia the remoter source from which it came into Greece, and Thebes the first place in Southern Greece in which it gained a footing. The worship of Minerva at Thebes appears to have been more purely Phoenician." (pp. 94-100.)

In a former work+ Mr. Kenrick had employed the same principle of investigation to connect together the scattered notices of the worship of the Cabiri, and detect their presence under the endless shapes of mythic transformation, tracking them first of all along the acknowledged seats of the Pelasgi, and through these indicating the probability of still earlier Phoenician influence, as though the Pelasgi had been the original link between Phoenician and Hellenic civilisation. In the present volume, as the result of further reflection and inquiry, Mr. Kenrick expresses a more decided opinion as to the undoubted influence of the Phoenicians on the Greeks. We are surprised that the dissertation just referred to (for a dissertation it is, though it appears in the unpretending form of a note), should not have excited more attention than, as far as we are aware, it has ever received. It can only have been neglected from the general indifference of our country to all

* Κάδμος. δόρυ, λόφος, ασπίς. Hesych. The root is κάζω, instruo,
The Egypt of Herodotus.

questions that lie remote from the immediate interests of the day; for it has ever seemed to us one of the best specimens of modern scholarship, exhibiting a remarkable union of the opposite gifts of analysis and combination, exercised in a field which demands the greatest ingenuity and most varied learning, yet withal so abounding in deceitful appearances, that except under the guidance of a consummate judgment, the acutest minds will wander the furthest from truth, and the deepest erudition be the most prolific of absurdity.

On the subject of the alphabet Mr. Kenrick adheres to the generally received opinion, that it consisted, in the earliest form in which we can trace it, both among the Phoenicians, and among the Greeks who derived it from them, of only sixteen letters, including the vau and the digamma; and he quotes a very curious passage from Irenæus in confirmation of it (p. 151). We observe that he differs on this point from Professor Key (On the Alphabet, p. 27), who argues that in both languages it must originally have contained twenty letters, from the fact that the zain and the zeta, the cheth and the eta, the teth and the theta, the samech and the xi, fill corresponding places in the two alphabets, and must therefore have been there from the first,-obviously distinguishable in this respect from the four last letters of the Greek alphabet, which have all the appearance of a simultaneous posterior addition.

Mr. Kenrick thinks the Phoenicians penetrated to the far west at a very early date, and had probably made a settlement at Tartessus in Spain before the time of Moses (p. 118). In this part of his work, however, we miss a preliminary criticism of the sources from which many of his statements are drawn. In regard to his Greek and Latin authorities this was unnecessary; for here the labours of Heyne, Heeren, and Dahlmann had already accomplished all that was possible. But for the books of the Old Testament something more was required in the present state of opinion respecting them: yet they are constantly cited indiscriminately and without remark, as if no question had ever been raised by learned and serious men about their age and character and principle of composition. This is very unsatisfactory; as, from being left in ignorance on these points, we do not know when a passage is quoted, what is the limit of time within which we may accept its testimony as pertinent and reliable. The author furnishes us with no criteria for testing the grounds of his own judgment. We have already glanced at this deficiency in speaking of Mr. Kenrick's use of the genealogical table (Gen. x.), and we are made to feel it again in his determination from the same authority, of the probable date of the Phoenician occupation of Tartessus. Tarshish is mentioned in this table along with

Kittim (the isles of the Mediterranean), with Elisha (probably Elis, or Peloponnesus), and with Dodanim (possibly Dodona),* among the descendants of Japheth. Upon which the remark is made: "If this chapter be of the same date with the rest of the book of Genesis, it must have been written in the fifteenth century B.C., and it is credible that even then Phoenician mariners had passed the Pillars of Hercules." We do not affirm the incredibility of the event; but if evidence of its actual occurrence be intended to be derived from this passage in Genesis, we cannot avoid remarking, that it involves a condition, and rests on an assumption; the condition being, that the chapter be of the same date with the rest of the book, and the assumption, that the book itself, in the form and fulness in which we now possess it, was actually written by Moses 1500 B.C. Subsequent statements do not seem to confirm this very early date for the Phonician colonisation of Tartessus. "Tarshish is not mentioned in the historical books of Scripture from Genesis to the time of Solomon" (p. 131). And the two psalms (the 48th and 72d) where the name occurs, could not have been written earlier than his reign. Traditions concur in representing the earliest settlements in Tartessus to have been made by Tyrians (p. 124); and Gadeira their principal factory or emporium in that region, was founded 1100 B.C., about the commencement of the kingly period among the Israelites. In the course of the eleventh century B.C., Tyre must have grown rapidly in power and wealth, and the name of its distant colony had begun to be more widely known. In the time of David, Tyre had already eclipsed the more ancient city of Sidon: yet we are told that "the Tyrian annals contained no historical facts earlier than the reign of Hiram," who was his contemporary (p. 169). These surmises as to the probability of a later discovery and knowledge of Tarshish would weigh nothing, it is true, against positive evidence to the contrary; and it is because we desire such evidence, if it can be had, and would gladly see the chronological value of the earlier scriptural statements clearly established (though hesitation about it in certain points is quite consistent with deep reverence for the religious authority of the Bible), that we cannot but regret a scholar so profound and acute as Mr. Kenrick should not have felt it necessary to express his opinion on a point of criticism directly affecting the basis of many of his inferences and reasonings.

On the whole, the Hellenic side of his subject has been more fully developed and more satisfactorily handled by Mr. Kenrick than the Hebraic. He has so entirely confined himself in the latter direction to an indication of the simple statements of the sacred writers, and abstained so religiously from even the sober

* Gesenius, Hebräisch. Wörterb., sub voc. Tarshish and Kittim.

speculation which facts themselves would naturally have suggested, and of which he has shown himself such a master in his treatment of early Greek history, that he has omitted to fill up the meagre outline of the annalist with the living colours which legitimate inference and cautious comparison might have supplied, and failed in consequence to impart to some portions of his work the deepest interest of which they were susceptible. He has observed, indeed, at the conclusion of the volume, that the "history of the Phoenician states has been treated too much from the polemical point of view" (p. 454), and that injustice has been done them from the supposed opposition of their interests to those of the Jews. But this idea has not been worked out; we do not recollect any instances of its application to particular cases in the body of the work. Yet the affinities and the distinctions between the Phoenician and the Hebrew peoples are so marked and so curious, that a free comparison of them from a dispassionate and elevated point of view, would have helped to bring out more clearly the true significance of this period of history, and must have redounded in a more perfect understanding and more reverential appreciation of the history and literature of the Hebrews. We have long felt, that to penetrate to the divine element which we firmly believe to exist in that history and literature, we must approach them with a more human feeling; that we must divest ourselves of the distrustful cautiousness in every thing respecting them, which only implies the weakness or the absence of a genuine faith; and that instead of insulating them from the great community of human interests, it should rather be our object, by surrendering foregone conclusions, and freely recognising their manifold natural relations to other forms of mental activity and social existence, to discern with a clearer vision and grasp with a firmer belief their appointed place and function in the grand economy of Providence. That two nations, issuing from the same stock and speaking essentially the same language, distinguished from their neighbours by some peculiar usages,* dwelling within the limits of the same territory, pressed upon and influenced by the same contiguous civilisations-should nevertheless have struck out so different a type of national character; should have been so strikingly distinguished from each other in arts, manners, beliefs, and aims, and left so different an impression on the subsequent course of human history-is one of those phenomena which, as we interpret them, yield the most conclusive evidence that the genius and destined career of nations as of individuals are regulated by influences which cannot originate within the system of material causation, but must issue from an all-directing Intelligence which transcends and embraces it. The agree* The Hebrews and the Phoenicians both practised circumcision (p. 329).

ment and the diversity of the Hebrew and the Phoenician character are curiously brought out in small incidental particulars. In a Carthaginian tablet discovered at Marseilles in 1845, and containing a tariff of the price of different victims, or perhaps of their commutation-which has been interpreted by Movers, and fully described by Mr. Kenrick in his note on the Phoenician alphabet and language (p. 175-8)—we are struck with a general similarity in the tone of the regulations to that of the Levitical portions of the Pentateuch; and yet, in the midst of this external conformity, the essential distinction in the moral character of the temple-service of the two peoples is strikingly evinced by Movers's very probable rendering of a word in the Phoenician inscription, which admits of direct comparison with a passage in Deuteronomy (xxiii. 18). If Movers be correct in his translation, we have, in the Carthaginian table, a precept relative to the offerings of one of the iepódovλai, or consecrated female slaves, attached for impure purposes to many of the temples of antiquity, especially in places of great commercial resort, like Corinth or Marseilles. In Deuteronomy the same class of persons are alluded to (indeed the same Semitic word occurs, both in the Hebrew law and in the Phoenician inscription); but in accordance with that severe purity which pervades the whole Mosaic code, their offerings are forbidden as an abomination to Jehovah. Still, both nations, true to the general impulse which a higher Power had impressed on them, were working out unconsciously, in spite of cleaving prejudices, dark passions, and degrading sensuality, the great purposes of an all-embracing Providence, and preparing the elements of a civilisation nobler and purer than their own; one, nursing close within its bosom a seed of spiritual life, till it should have grown up into beauty and the world be prepared to accept the expanded flower; the other, scattering far and wide over the western world the materials of a vast industrial development, essential to the growth of the outward life of man; each destined in its time and place to check the other's exorbitance and supplement its deficiency; and both cherishing a power whose internal resources and manifold applications they little suspected, and the wide range of whose flight into the limitless future of the human race they could not foresee.

"Omnibus mundi Dominator horis
Aptat urgendas per inane pennas:
Pars adhuc nido latet, et futuros
Crescit in annos."

Mr. Kenrick passes a favourable judgment on the Phonicians as a people; and we see no reason for dissenting from it.

*Casimir. Carm. i. 4.

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