Our Oriental Heritage

by Will Durant

  Their low and narrow galleys, some seventy feet long, set a new style of design by abandoning the inward-curving bow of the Egyptian vessel, and turning it outward into a sharp point for cleaving wind or water, or the ships of the enemy. One large rectangular sail, hoisted on a mast fixed in the keel, helped the galley-slaves who provided most of the motive-power with their double bank of oars. On a deck above the rowers, soldiers stood on guard, ready for trade or war. These frail ships, having no compasses and drawing hardly five feet of water, kept cautiously near the shore, and for a long time dared not move during the night. Gradually the art of navigation developed to the point where the Phoenician pilots, guiding themselves by the North Star (or the Phoenician Star, as the Greeks called it), adventured into the oceans, and at last circumnavigated Africa, sailing down the east coast first, and “discovering” the Cape of Good Hope some two thousand years before Vasco da Gama. “When autumn came,” says Herodotus, “they went ashore, sowed the land, and waited for harvest; then, having reaped the corn, they put to sea again. When two years had thus passed, in the third, having doubled the Pillars of Hercules (Gibraltar), they arrived in Egypt.”23 What an adventure!

  At strategic points along the Mediterranean they established garrisons that grew in time into populous colonies or cities: at Cadiz, Carthage and Marseilles, in Malta, Sicily, Sardinia and Corsica, even in distant England. They occupied Cyprus, Melos and Rhodes.24 They took the arts and sciences of Egypt, Crete and the Near East and spread them in Greece, Africa, Italy and Spain. They bound together the East and the West in a commercial and cultural web, and began to redeem Europe from barbarism.

  Nourished by this trade, and skilfully governed by mercantile aristocracies too clever in diplomacy and finance to waste their fortunes in war, the cities of Phoenicia rose to a place among the richest and most powerful in the world. Byblos thought itself the oldest of all cities; the god El had founded it at the beginning of time, and to the end of its history it remained the religious capital of Phoenicia. Because papyrus was one of the principal articles in its trade, the Greeks took the name of the city as their word for book—biblos—and from their word for books named our Bible—ta biblia.

  Some fifty miles to the south, also on the coast, lay Sidon; originally a fortress, it grew rapidly into a village, a town, a prosperous city; it contributed the best ships to Xerxes’ fleet; and when later the Persians besieged and captured it, its proud leaders deliberately burned it to the ground, forty thousand inhabitants perishing in the conflagration.25 It was already rebuilt and flourishing when Alexander came, and some of its enterprising merchants followed his army to India “for trafficking.”26

  Greatest of the Phoenician cities was Tyre—i.e., the rock—built upon an island several miles off the coast. It, too, began as a fortress; but its splendid harbor and its security from attack soon made it the metropolis of Phoenicia, a cosmopolitan bedlam of merchants and slaves from the whole Mediterranean world. Already in the ninth century B.C., Tyre had achieved affluence under King Hiram, friend of King Solomon; and by the time of Zechariah (ca. 520 B.C.), she had “heaped up silver as the dust, and fine gold as the mire of the streets.”27 “The houses here,” said Strabo, “have many stories, even more than the houses at Rome.”28 Its wealth and courage kept it independent until Alexander came. The young god saw in it a challenge to his omnipotence, and reduced it by building a causeway that turned the island into a peninsula. The success of Alexandria completed the ruin of Tyre.

  Like every nation that feels the complexity of cosmic currents and the variety of human needs, Phoenicia had many gods. Each city had its Baal (i.e., Lord) or city-god, who was conceived as ancestor of the kings, and source of the soil’s fertility; the corn, the wine, the figs and the flax were all the work of the holy Baal. The Baal of Tyre was called Melkarth; like Hercules, with whom the Greeks identified him, he was a god of strength, and accomplished feats worthy of a Munchausen. Astarte was the Greek name of the Phoenician Ishtar; she had the distinction of being worshiped in some places as the goddess of a cold Artemisian chastity, and in others as the amorous and wanton deity of physical love, in which form she was identified by the Greeks with Aphrodite. As Ishtar-Mylitta received in sacrifice the virginity of her girl-devotees at Babylon, so the women who honored Astarte at Byblos had to give up their long tresses to her, or surrender themselves to the first stranger who solicited their love in the precincts of the temple. And as Ishtar had loved Tammuz, so Astarte had loved Adoni (i.e., Lord), whose death on the tusks of a boar was annually mourned at Byblos and Paphos (in Cyprus) with wailing and beating of the breast. Luckily Adoni rose from the dead as often as he died, and ascended to heaven in the presence of his worshipers.29 Finally there was Moloch (i.e., King), the terrible god to whom the Phoenicians offered living children as burnt sacrifices; at Carthage, during a siege of the city (307 B.C.), two hundred boys of the best families were burned to death on the altar of this fiery divinity.30

  Nevertheless the Phoenicians deserve some niche in the hall of civilized nations, for it was probably their merchants who taught the Egyptian alphabet to the nations of antiquity. Not the ecstasies of literature but the needs of commerce brought unity to the peoples of the Mediterranean; nothing could better illustrate a certain generative relation between commerce and culture. We do not know that the Phoenicians introduced this alphabet into Greece, though Greek tradition unanimously affirms it;31 it is possible that Crete gave the alphabet to both the Phoenicians and the Greeks.32 But it is more probable that the Phoenicians took letters where they took papyrus. About 1100 B.C. we find them importing papyrus from Egypt;33 for a nation that kept and carried many accounts it was an inestimable convenience compared with the heavy clay tablets of Mesopotamia; and the Egyptian alphabet was likewise an immense improvement upon the clumsy syllabaries of the Near East. About 960 B.C. King Hiram of Tyre dedicated to one of his gods a bronze cup engraved with an alphabetic inscription;34 and about 840 B.C. King Mesha of Moab announced his glory (on a stone now in the Louvre) in a Semitic dialect written from right to left in letters corresponding to those of the Phoenician alphabet. The Greeks reversed the facing of some of the letters, because they wrote from left to right; but essentially their alphabet was that which the Phoenicians had taught them, and which they were in turn to teach to Europe. These strange symbols are the most precious portion of our cultural heritage.

  The oldest examples of alphabetic writing known to us, however, appear not in Phoenicia but in Sinai. At Serabit-el-khadim, a little hamlet covering a site where anciently the Egyptians mined turquoise, Sir William Flinders Petrie found inscriptions in a strange language, dating back to an uncertain age, perhaps as early as 2500 B.C. Though these inscriptions have never been deciphered, it is apparent that they were written not in hieroglyphics, nor in syllabic cuneiform, but with an alphabet.35 At Zapouna, in southern Syria, French archeologists discovered an entire library of clay tabletssome in hieroglyphic, some in a Semitic alphabetic script. As Zapouna seems to have been permanently destroyed about 1200 B.C., these tablets go back presumably to the thirteenth century B.C.,36 and suggest to us again how old civilization was in those centuries to which our ignorance ascribes its origins.

  Syria lay behind Phoenicia, in the very lap of the Lebanon hills, gathering its tribes together loosely under the rule of that capital which still boasts that it is the oldest city of all, and still harbors Syrians hungry for liberty. For a time the kings of Damascus dominated a dozen petty nations about them, and successfully resisted the efforts of Assyria to make Syria one of her vassal states. The inhabitants of the city were Semitic merchants, who managed to garner wealth out of the caravan trade that passed through Syria’s mountains and plains. Artisans and slaves worked for them, none too happily. We hear of masons organizing great unions, and inscriptions tell of a strike of bakers in Magnesia; across the centuries we sense the strife and busyness of an ancient Syrian town.37 These artisans were skilful in shaping graceful pottery, in
carving ivory and wood, in polishing gems, and in weaving stuffs of gay colors for the adornment of their women.38

  Fashions, manners and morals in Damascus were very much as at Babylon, which was the Paris and arbiter elegantiarum of the ancient East. Religious prostitution flourished, for in Syria, as throughout western Asia, the fertility of the soil was symbolized in a Great Mother, or Goddess, whose sexual commerce with her lover gave the hint to all the reproductive processes and energies of nature; and the sacrifice of virginity at the temples was not only an offering to Astarte, but a participation with her in that annual self-abandonment which, it was hoped, would offer an irresistible suggestion to the earth, and insure the increase of plants, animals and men.39 About the time of the vernal equinox the festival of the Syrian Astarte, like that of Cybele in Phrygia, was celebrated at Hierapolis with a fervor bordering upon madness. The noise of flutes and drums mingled with the wailing of the women for Astarte’s dead lord, Adoni; eunuch priests danced wildly, and slashed themselves with knives; at last many men, who had come merely as spectators, were overcome with the excitement, threw off their clothing, and emasculated themselves in pledge of lifelong service to the goddess. Then, in the dark of the night, the priests brought a mystic illumination to the scene, opened the tomb of the young god, and announced triumphantly that Adoni, the Lord, had risen from the dead. Touching the lips of the worshipers with balm, the priests whispered to them the promise that they, too, would some day rise from the grave.40

  The other gods of Syria were not less bloodthirsty than Astarte. It is true that the priests recognized a general divinity, embracing all the gods, and called El or Ilu, like the Elohim of the Jews; but this calm abstraction was hardly noticed by the people who gave their worship to the Baal. Usually they identified this city-god with the sun, as they identified Astarte with the moon; and on occasions of great moment they offered him their own children in sacrifice, after the manner of the Phoenicians; the parents came to the ceremony dressed as for a festival, and the cries of their children burning in the lap of the god were drowned by the blaring of trumpets and the piping of flutes. Normally, however, a milder sacrifice sufficed; the priests slashed themselves until the altar was covered with their blood; or the child’s foreskin was offered as a commutation for his life; or the priests condescended to accept a sum of money to be presented to the god in place of the prepuce. In some way the god had to be appeased and satisfied; for his worshipers had made him in the image and dream of themselves, and he had no great regard for human life, or womanly tears.41

  Similar customs, varying only in name and detail, were practised by the Semitic tribes south of Syria, who filled the land with their confusion of tongues. It was forbidden the Jews to “make their children pass through the fire,” but occasionally they did it none the less.42 Abraham about to sacrifice Isaac, and Agamemnon sacrificing Iphigenia, were but resorting to an ancient rite in attempting to propitiate the gods with human blood. Mesha, King of Moab, sacrificed his eldest son by fire as a means of raising a siege; his prayer having been answered, and the sacrifice of his son having been accepted, he slaughtered seven thousand Israelites in gratitude.43 Throughout this region, from the Sumerian days when the Amorites roamed the plains of Amurru (ca. 2800 B.C.) to the time when the Jews fell with divine wrath upon the Canaanites, and Sargon of Assyria captured Samaria, and Nebuchadrezzar captured Jerusalem (597 B.C.), the valley of the Jordan was drenched periodically with fratricidal blood, and many Lords of Hosts rejoiced. These Moabites, Canaanites, Amorites, Edomites, Philistines and Aramæans hardly enter into the cultural record of mankind. It is true that the fertile Aramæans, spreading everywhere, made their language the lingua franca of the Near East, and that the alphabetic script which they had learned either from the Egyptians or the Phoenicians replaced the cuneiform and syllabaries of Mesopotamia, first as a mercantile, then as a literary, medium, and became at last the tongue of Christ and the alphabet of the Arabs today.44 But time preserves their names not so much because of their own accomplishments as because they played some part on the tragic stage of Palestine. We must study, in greater detail than their neighbors, these numerically and geographically insignificant Jews, who gave to the world one of its greatest literatures, two of its most influential religions, and so many of its profoundest men.

  CHAPTER XII

  Judea

  I. THE PROMISED LAND

  Palestine—Climate—Prehistory—Abraham’s people—The Jews in Egypt—The Exodus—The conquest of Canaan

  A BUCKLE or a Montesquieu, eager to interpret history through geography, might have taken a handsome leaf out of Palestine. One hundred and fifty miles from Dan on the north to Beersheba on the south, twenty-five to eighty miles from the Philistines on the west to the Syrians, Aramæans, Ammonites, Moabites and Edomites on the east—one would not expect so tiny a territory to play a major rôle in history, or to leave behind it an influence greater than that of Babylonia, Assyria or Persia, perhaps greater even than that of Egypt or Greece. But it was the fortune and misfortune of Palestine that it lay midway between the capitals of the Nile and those of the Tigris and Euphrates. This circumstance brought trade to Judea, and it brought war; time and again the harassed Hebrews were compelled to take sides in the struggle of the empires, to pay tribute or be overrun. Behind the Bible, behind the plaintive cries of the psalmists and the prophets for help from the sky, lay this imperiled place of the Jews between the upper and nether millstones of Mesopotamia and Egypt.

  The climatic history of the land tells us again how precarious a thing civilization is, and how its great enemies—barbarism and desiccationare always waiting to destroy it. Once Palestine was “a land flowing with milk and honey,” as many a passage in the Pentateuch describes it.1 Josephus, in the first century after Christ, still speaks of it as “moist enough for agriculture, and very beautiful. They have abundance of trees, and are full of autumn fruits both wild and cultivated. . . . They are not naturally watered by many rivers, but derive their chief moisture from rain, of which they have no want.”2 In ancient days the spring rains that fed the land were stored in cisterns or brought back to the surface by a multitude of wells, and distributed over the country by a network of canals; this was the physical basis of Jewish civilization. The soil, so nourished, produced barley, wheat and corn, the vine throve on it, and trees bore olives, figs, dates or other fruits on every slope. When war came and devastated these artifically fertile fields, or when some conqueror exiled to distant regions the families that had cared for them, the desert crept in eagerly, and in a few years undid the work of generations. We cannot judge the fruitfulness of ancient Palestine from the barren wastes and timid oases that confronted the brave Jews who in our own time returned to their old home after eighteen centuries of exile, dispersion and suffering.

  History is older in Palestine than Bishop Ussher supposed. Neanderthal remains have been unearthed near the Sea of Galilee, and five Neanderthal skeletons were recently discovered in a cave near Haifa; it appears likely that the Mousterian culture which flourished in Europe about 40,000 B.C. extended to Palestine. At Jericho neolithic floors and hearths have been exhumed that carry back the history of the region down to a Middle Bronze Age (2000-1600 B.C.), in which the towns of Palestine and Syria had accumulated such wealth as to invite conquest by Egypt. In the fifteenth century before Christ Jericho was a well-walled city, ruled by kings acknowledging the suzerainty of Egypt; the tombs of these kings, excavated by the Garstang Expedition, contained hundreds of vases, funerary offerings, and other objects indicating a settled life at Jericho in the time of the Hyksos domination, and a fairly developed civilization in the days of Hatshepsut and Thutmose III.3 It becomes apparent that the different dates at which we begin the history of divers peoples are merely the marks of our ignorance. The Tell-el-Amarna letters carry on the general picture of Palestinian and Syrian life almost to the entrance of the Jews into the valley of the Nile. It is probable, though not certain, that the “Habir
u” spoken of in this correspondence were Hebrews.*4

  The Jews believed that the people of Abraham had come from Ur in Sumeria,5 and had settled in Palestine (ca. 2200 B.C.) a thousand years or more before Moses; and that the conquest of the Canaanites was merely a capture by the Hebrews of the land promised them by their God. The Amraphael mentioned in Genesis (xiv, 1) as “King of Shinar in those days” was probably Amarpal, father of Hammurabi, and his predecessor on the throne of Babylon.6 There are no direct references in contemporary sources to either the Exodus or the conquest of Canaan;7 and the only indirect reference is the stele erected by Pharaoh Merneptah (ca. 1225 B.C.), part of which reads as follows:

  The kings are overthrown, saying “Salam!” . . .

  Wasted is Tehenu,

  The Hittite land is pacified,

  Plundered is Canaan, with every evil, . . .

  Israel is desolated, her seed is not;

  Palestine has become a widow for Egypt,

  All lands are united, they are pacified;