Such, then, are the materials which exist at present for recovering the history and elucidating the civilisation of one of the most remarkable peoples of antiquity. In the volume before us they have been worked up by Mr. Kenrick with the mature scholarship and ripened judgment of a long life devoted uninterruptedly to historical and philological pursuits. He has given us, in fact, a most thorough and complete critical résumé of all that can as yet be known about the Phoenicians; and he has placed within reach of the English reader, from the advanced point of view of modern learning, another very valuable contribution to the exact knowledge of ancient history, which he had already enriched by his two volumes on Egypt under the Pharaohs, and by his admirable and philosophical essay on Primeval History. In the distribution of his matter Mr. Kenrick has followed very much the same order in the present work as in the earlier one on Egypt. He has treated, first, of the geography, climate, and productions of Phoenicia; then discussed the origin of the nation, and the dispersion of its colonies; next considered its language, commerce, navigation, arts, manufactures, form of government, and religion; and in the concluding chapters recited its history from the earliest records till the final subjection of the country at the beginning of the sixteenth century to Ottoman rule. In this wide range of inquiry Mr. Kenrick has had the field more entirely to himself than in his earlier work on Egypt. Since Swinton furnished his chapters on the Semitic nations to the Ancient Universal History-now a century ago—we are not aware that any English scholar, if we except some occasional disquisition in the third volume of Sir W. Drummond's Origines, has directed any original study to the subject of Phoenician history and antiquities. It has been otherwise abroad. In the early part of the seventeenth century, Samuel Bochart, one of those giants of learning who formed then the strength and glory of the French Protestant Church, brought to bear on it an enormous amount of classical and oriental erudition, derived from every source of information which the existing state of literature supplied. "The most diligent reader of ancient authors, with a view to the illustration of Phoenician history, will find himself,” says Mr. Kenrick, "anticipated or surpassed by Bochart." (preface, vi.) Etienne Morin's account of the origin of his great paru le plus complet, le plus vrai des livres. Je l'ai appelé ailleurs un volume de six mille ans,' dont chaque siècle a écrit une page avec de la cendre et de la poussière. Il n'y a qu'à souffler sur cette poussière, et elle se ranimera au contact de la vie, comme les morts à la voix d'Elisée. . . . Et puis quel a donc été le rédacteur de ce livre antique, écrit avec des ossemens et avec des ruines? L'écrivain, c'est la mort qui ne mort jamais, et qui de sa main de fer a dépouillé impitoyablement tout ce qu'il y avait de faux chez l'homme, pour ne laisser plus subsister que le vrai.”—La Normandie Souterraine, par l'Abbé Cochet. M work, the Geographia Sacra, well illustrates the man and his age. Bochart was the pastor of a Huguenot church at Caen in Normandy, at that time, when the French provinces were still halfindependent principalities, a distinguished seat of letters, where many learned men resided, and where the Protestants were numerous and powerful. Among his audience were doubtless some of the most highly educated men of the time. With the scrupulous reverence for Scripture which distinguished the early Protestants, Bochart, in the exercise of his ministerial duties—" ut nihil e cathedrâ proferret quod verissimum et compertissimum non esset"-commenced a minute and elaborate exposition of the book of Genesis, which proceeded slowly but continuously till he arrived at the genealogical perplexities of the tenth chapter. Here the descending stream of his erudition was arrested by an obstacle of doubt and difficulty, which formed a nucleus of accumulation, and gathered round it that huge mass of multifarious knowledge which subsists to this day in the Phaleg and Canaan. How the scriptural instruction of the congregation fared while this collateral inquiry was being prosecuted, we are not informed; but the fact shows with what conscientious diligence all Scripture difficulties were then encountered, and what immense erudition was applied to their solution. A younger contemporary of Bochart's, who had acquired from him a taste for oriental learning, the celebrated Huet, afterwards bishop of Avranches, was probably induced by the example of his profounder master, to direct his attention to kindred studies; and these produced as their result his two treatises, De Navigationibus Salomonis, and the Histoire du Commerce des Anciens.† Since that time, be "De clarissimo Bocharto et omnibus ejus scriptis," prefixed to the folio edition of the "Geographia Sacra," Leyden, 1707, p. 4. It is in the second part of this work, entitled "Canaan," that the account of the Phoenician language and colonies is chiefly contained. †The mutual relations of these remarkable men, perhaps the most eminent representatives of the two great religious parties between which France was at that time more equally divided than at present, are singular and affecting. Huet was the son of an ex-Calvinist. Notwithstanding their difference of faith, he had attached himself early in life to Bochart, who was the most learned man in that part of France. Huet accompanied Bochart on his visit to Christina, queen of Sweden, and has left a very amusing poetical account of their journey in his Iter Suecicum. A coldness afterwards ensued between them, in consequence of Bochart's charging Huet with a wilful mutilation of the text in his edition of the Commentaries of Origen. They were never friends again; and this alienation was increased by the growing bitterness of religious differences. Bochart's death appears to have been caused immediately by the intensity of an argument between them. In a session of the Academy of Caen, during a vehement dispute respecting the authenticity of some Spanish medals, Bochart was overtaken by a sudden seizure which soon terminated his life. Huet was admitted by his own friends to be exceedingly passionate in disputation. The event seems to have dwelt on his mind; for in a letter written to his nephew, Piedouë de Chersigné in 1712, more than forty years afterwards, he alludes to it: "La mort de M. Bochart ne luy fut causée par notre dispute, sinon en partie. Il estoit déjà attaqué d'un mal sides monographs communicated to the learned societies of France and Germany, Heeren has devoted a part of his book on the Trade and Commerce of the Ancient Nations to Phoenicia; and Movers, a professor at Breslau, is now completing a work in three parts on the same subject-Das Phönizische Alterthum. To all these writers Mr. Kenrick acknowledges his obligations; but he comes into the field as an independent inquirer, criticising their statements from the resources of a learning at once extensive and accurate, and with the clear verdict of a firm and self-relying judgment. Owing to the obscurity which hangs over the origin of nations, and the uncertainty attaching to mythic interpretationperhaps also from natural reaction against the too great readiness of older scholars to accept as fact only partially enveloped and disguised, the fabulous narrations of ancient poets and historians, there has been a disposition of late years in some quarters to dispute, or at least to ignore, the alleged filiation of different civilisations, and to treat them in their respective localities as autochthonous. On this subject Mr. Kenrick adopts a middle theory. He does not, as was formerly the fashion, pragmatise mythology, i. e. simply drop the supernatural elements, and take the residuum as history; nor, on the other hand, reject it altogether, as utterly useless for historical purposes; but having endeavoured to catch the traditional belief, the impregnating idea which is at work under the ever-changing forms of fable, he uses it with cautious sagacity as a clue for tracing the course of primeval settlements, and recovering the lost thread of ethnological affinities. Against Movers, for instance, and other writers, he defends and accepts Herodotus's statement of the original migration of the Phoenicians from the head of the Persian Gulf to the shores of the Mediterranean; and in opposition to the view of the late Ottfried Müller, he thinks we may still discern through the many-tinted cloud of fable no obscure indication of the influence of Phoenician colonies on the earliest civilisation of Greece. In reference to Herodotus's account of the origin of the Phoenicians, dangereux, dont les accès le mettoient en péril, et un de ces accès luy fut causé "Scilicet hic cuique est data sors æquissima, talis Musarum in gremio teneris qui vixit ab annis, Huet, Evêque d'Avranches, &c., avec des extraits de documents inédits, par It is singular that Morin, in describing the circumstances of Bochart's death (p. 35), never once alludes to the dispute between him and Huet in the Academy. which that writer says he received from themselves, Mr. Kenrick remarks: "The 6 sea called Erythra,' in Herodotus, has a wide extension, including the Indian Ocean and its two gulfs, the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf, which latter, however, he does not appear to have considered as a gulf, but as a part of a continuous sea-line; but when he means specifically the Red Sea, he calls it by the name of the Arabian Gulf. The south of Palestine would be the route naturally taken by emigrants from the Persian Gulf to the shores of the Mediterranean, and the valley of the Jordan would conduct them thence across the plain of Esdraelon to Phoenicia. From Petra to Jericho was only three or four days' journey; and from Petra to Gerrha on the Persian Gulf was a well-known route of traffic, which in earlier ages would be a natural course of emigration. It is remarkable, that not fewer than three places were found on the Persian Gulf bearing similar, if not identical, names with those of Phoenicia-Tyrus or Tylus, Aradus, and Dora, in which were temples resembling in architecture those of Phoenicia, and the inhabitants of which claimed the Phoenicians of Palestine for their colonists. If the resemblance of name do not prove this, it shows at least a similarity of language presumptive of an affinity between the inhabitants of these two regions. The threefold character under which the Phoenicians appear to us in their earliest history-navigators, merchants, and pirates- has always belonged to the natives of the Arabian peninsula; and these attributes were united in no other nation of equal antiquity. The Babylonians were not familiar with the sea, and the Egyptians abhorred it. The Phoenicians were never more than settlers on the coast of Syria, without roots in the interior; as they began, so they ended." By this last observation Mr. Kenrick does not of course intend to deny the affinity of the Phoenicians with the Canaanitish race that dwelt southward between the valley of the Jordan and the seacoast; but simply affirms, that the particular tribe which settled down on the narrow strip of territory at the foot of Libanus, was immigrant directly from the Persian Gulf, and brought with it the seafaring aptitudes and tendencies which it had acquired in its original home. Within the area occupied by what has been called the Semitic family of nations, shut in by the Persian and Arabian gulfs, and bounded northwards by the Taurus and the basin of the Euphrates and Tigris, three remarkable movements took place at a remote period, which do not appear to have had any connection with one another, but have each left a distinct impression on the earliest notices of history: the passage of the Phoenicians, or, as they called themselves, Canaanites, in a northwesterly direction across the country from sea to sea; the peaceful immigration of Abraham from the upper region of the Euphrates into the low country, sloping towards the Mediterranean, which was already tenanted by Canaanitish tribes; and the Mr. hostile irruption of the Hyksos, Arabian nomades, into Lower Egypt. The people engaged in these movements must have been all of one race, though their interior distinctions and relations to one another it is not very easy to assign. Kenrick supposes the Philistines, on whose origin so much theory and conjecture has been expended, to have been of the same stock, and closely allied to the Phoenicians. He places their original home, like that of the Phoenicians, on the Persian Gulf (p. 55). The Canaanites who dwelt south of Carmel and Tabor, were warlike in their habits, and stoutly resisted the entrance of the Abrahamidæ into their territory under Joshua; while the Phoenicians, from the time of their earliest settlement, seem to have been averse to war by land, and to have turned all their thoughts to the extension of their piratical excursions in the waters of the Mediterranean.* This diversity of genius and occupation among the different Semitic peoples affected their feelings towards each other, and brought them into various relations of friendship and hostility. Thus, while a common language, and not a few indications of dispersion from a common centre, show them to have been all of one primitive stock,-in the genealogical table preserved in Genesis x., while the Hebrew race is traced up through Eber to Shem, the Canaanites are derived under a curse from Ham. Mr. Kenrick is of opinion that the principle of classification in this table is that of colour; and that we are thus to account for the ascription to a different origin, of nations clearly proving their affinity by the use of a language fundamentally the same (p. 49). It is certainly true, that the peoples who are here placed with the Canaanites among the descendants of Ham,-the Ethiopians, Egyptians, and Mauritanians (Cush, Mizraim, and Phut),-must have been distinguished formerly, as they are now, by their dark complexion; nor is it impossible that this difference of colour may have been among the causes of international aversion, as we observe it is at this day between the negroes and the whites of the United States Still we find it difficult to read the ninth and tenth chapters of Genesis and avoid the conclusion, that something deeper and more personal than mere reference to an outward sign of classification,-some consciousness of irreconcilable hostility in territorial relations and political pretensions, in manners, and in religion,—must have been at work at the time of the construction of this table, to occasion so marked and invidious a distinction between nations whose language and traditions preserved so many evidences of a common descent. We read the language of Genesis, "These are the sons of Ham after their families, after their tongues, in their countries, and in * The inhabitants of Laish are described in the book of Judges as "dwelling careless, after the manner of the Sidonians, quiet and secure" (xviii. 7). |