Ideas for the Philosophy of the History of Mankind by Johann Gottfried Herder;

Author:Johann Gottfried Herder;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2023-11-28T00:00:00+00:00

IV. Phoenicia and Carthage

The Phoenicians, too, have rendered service to the rest of the world; but their contribution was of a rather different kind. They invented glass, one of man’s noblest manufactures, and history has recorded the accidental occasion of its discovery on the river Belus.* As they dwelt on the seacoast, they had been mariners since time immemorial: for already Semiramis had commissioned Phoenician shipwrights to build her fleet.* From small rafts they gradually progressed to galleys; they learned to navigate by observing the stars, particularly the Pole Star of the Lesser Bear, and, having been attacked, they were at last compelled to learn naval warfare. They sailed all over the Mediterranean, to the Straits of Gibraltar and beyond, reaching even as far as Britain, and it is possible that, setting out from the Red Sea, they circumnavigated Africa more than once.* And they did this not as conquerors, but as merchants and colonists. Lands that the sea had separated they connected by traffic, language, and manufactured goods, employing their ingenuity to invent whatever might promote this traffic. They learned to reckon numbers, to stamp metals, and to shape these metals into various vessels and baubles. They discovered purple dye, wrought fine Sidonian linen, exported tin and lead from Britain, silver from Spain, amber from Prussia, gold from Africa, and traded these for Asiatic commodities. Thus, the whole of the Mediterranean Sea was their domain, its coasts dotted here and there with their colonies, and Tartessos* in Spain the famed emporium of commerce between three quarters of the globe. However much knowledge they may have communicated to the Europeans, the gift of the alphabet, which the Greeks got from them, was worth more than everything else put together.

How did this people come to achieve such merit in manufactures? Was it perhaps a particularly fortunate tribe of the primordial land [Urland], advantageously endowed by Nature with mental and physical powers? Not at all. According to all the accounts we have of the Phoenicians, they were originally a despised and displaced cave people, the troglodytes or Gypsies of this region. We first encounter them on the littoral of the Red Sea,* in the wastes of which they probably sustained themselves with the vilest foods: for, long after they had moved to the Mediterranean, they retained their barbarous manners, their cruel and inhuman religion, and even their dwellings among the rocks of Canaan. Everyone knows the description of the ancient inhabitants of Canaan; and that this be no exaggeration is shown not only by the similar depiction of the Arabian troglodytes in Job,11 but also by the vestiges of barbarous idolatry that long persisted even in Carthage. Nor were the manners of Phoenician navigators much esteemed by foreign nations; they were predatory, piratical, lecherous, and treacherous—so much so that Punic faith became a proverbial stigma.*

Generally it has been necessity and circumstance that drove human beings to become all that they are. In the deserts surrounding the Red Sea, where the Phoenicians probably

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