strata, after the fashion of the rock-cut tombs of Upper Egypt.  They present a bare and dismal appearance both within and without.  The entrances are narrow and arched, the ceilings low, the walls bare and colourless, unrelieved by moulding, picture, or inscription.  At one place only, near the modern village of Hanaweh, a few groups of figures and coarsely cut stelae are to be found, indicating, it would seem, the burying-place of some chief of very early times.

[Illustration:  273.jpg THE SCULPTURED ROCKS OF HANAWEH]

     Drawn by Boudier, from a photograph by Lortet.

These figures run in parallel lines along the rocky sides of a wild ravine.  They vary from 2 feet 6 inches to 3 feet in height, the bodies being represented by rectangular pilasters, sometimes merely rough-hewn, at others grooved with curved lines to suggest the folds of the Asiatic garments; the head is carved full face, though the eyes are given in profile, and the summary treatment of the modelling gives evidence of a certain skill.  Whether they are to be regarded as the product of a primitive Amorite art or of a school of Phoenician craftsmen, we are unable to determine.  In the time of their prosperity the Tyrians certainly pushed their frontier as far as this region.  The wind-swept but fertile country lying among the ramifications of the lowest spurs of the Lebanon bears to this day innumerable traces of their indefatigable industry—­remains of dwellings, conduits and watercourses, cisterns, pits, millstones and vintage-troughs, are scattered over the fields, interspersed with oil and wine presses.  The Phoenicians took naturally to agriculture, and carried it to such a high state of perfection as to make it an actual science, to which the neighbouring peoples of the Mediterranean were glad to accommodate their modes of culture in later times.*

* Their taste for agriculture, and the comparative perfection of their modes of culture, are proved by the greatness of the remains still to be observed:  “The Phoenicians constructed a winepress, a trough, to last for ever.”  Their colonists at Carthage carried with them the same clever methods, and the Romans borrowed many excellent things in the way of agriculture from Carthaginian books, especially from those of Mago.

Among no other people was the art of irrigation so successfully practised, and from such a narrow strip of territory as belonged to them no other cultivators could have gathered such abundant harvests of wheat and barley, and such supplies of grapes, olives, and other fruits.  From Arvad to Tyre, and even beyond it, the littoral region and the central parts of the valleys presented a long ribbon of verdure of varying breadth, where fields of corn were blended with gardens and orchards and shady woods.  The whole region was independent and self-supporting, the inhabitants having no need to address themselves to their neighbours in the interior, or to send their children to seek their fortune in distant lands.  To insure prosperity, nothing was needed but a slight exercise of labour and freedom from the devastating influence of war.