In the time of Ezekiel Tyre was still at the height of her commercial prosperity. Although not the oldest of the Phœnician cities, she held a supremacy among them which dated from the thirteenth century B.C.,(76) and she had long been regarded as the typical embodiment of the genius of the remarkable race to which she belonged. The Phœnicians were renowned in antiquity for a combination of all the qualities on which commercial greatness depends. Their absorbing devotion to the material interests of civilisation, their amazing industry and perseverance, their resourcefulness in assimilating and improving the inventions of other peoples, the technical skill of their artists and craftsmen, but above all their adventurous and daring seamanship, conspired to give them a position in the old world such as has never been quite rivalled by any other nation of ancient or modern times. In the grey dawn of European history we find them acting as pioneers of art and culture along the shores of the Mediterranean, although even then they had been displaced from their earliest settlements in the Ægean and the coast of Asia Minor by the rising commerce of Greece. Matthew Arnold has drawn a brilliant imaginative picture of this collision between the two races, and the effect it had on the dauntless and enterprising spirit of Phœnicia:—
As some grave Tyrian trader, from the sea, Descried at sunrise an emerging prow Lifting the cool‐hair’d creepers stealthily, The fringes of a southward‐facing brow Among the Ægæan isles; And saw the merry Grecian coaster come, Freighted with amber grapes, and Chian wine, Green, bursting figs, and tunnies steep’d in brine— And knew the intruders on his ancient home, The young light‐hearted masters of the waves— And snatch’d his rudder and shook out more sail; And day and night held on indignantly O’er the blue Midland waters with the gale, Betwixt the Syrtes and soft Sicily, To where the Atlantic raves Outside the western straits; and unbent sails There, where down cloudy cliffs, through sheets of foam, Shy traffickers, the dark Iberians, come; And on the beach undid his corded bales.(77)
It is that spirit of masterful and untiring ambition kept up for so many centuries that throws a halo of romance round the story of Tyre.
In the oldest Greek literature, however, Tyre is not mentioned, the place which she afterwards held being then occupied by Sidon. But after the decay of Sidon the rich harvest of her labours fell into the lap of Tyre, which thenceforth stands out as the foremost city of Phœnicia. She owed her pre‐eminence partly to the wisdom and energy with which her affairs were administered, but partly also to the strength of her natural situation. The city was built both on the mainland and on a row of islets about half a mile from the shore. This latter portion contained the principal buildings (temples and palaces), the open place where business was transacted, and the two harbours. It was no doubt from it that the city derived its name (צוֹר = Rock); and it always was looked on as the central part of Tyre. There was something in the appearance of the island city—the Venice of antiquity, rising from mid‐ocean with her “tiara of proud towers”—which seemed to mark her out as destined to be mistress of the sea. It also made a siege of Tyre an arduous and a tedious undertaking, as many a conqueror found to his cost. Favoured then by these advantages, Tyre speedily gathered the traffic of Phœnicia into her own hands, and her wealth and luxury were the wonder of the nations. She was known as “the crowning city, whose merchants were princes, and her traffickers the honourable of the earth” (Isa. xxiii. 8). She became the great commercial emporium of the world. Her colonies were planted all over the islands and coasts of the Mediterranean, and the one most frequently mentioned in the Bible, Tarshish, was in Spain, beyond Gibraltar. Her seamen had ventured beyond the Pillars of Hercules, and undertook distant Atlantic voyages to the Canary Islands on the south and the coasts of Britain on the north. The most barbarous and inhospitable regions were ransacked for the metals and other products needed to supply the requirements of civilisation, and everywhere she found a market for her own wares and manufactures. The carrying trade of the Mediterranean was almost entirely conducted in her ships, while her richly laden caravans traversed all the great routes that led into the heart of Asia and Africa.