Other works from which he has drawn either materials or illustrations, or both, are (besides Movers’ and Kenrick’s) M. Ernest Renan’s “Mission de Phenicie,” General Di Cesnola’s “Cyprus,” A. Di Cesnola’s “Salaminia,” M. Ceccaldi’s “Monuments Antiques de Cypre,” M. Daux’s “Recherches sur les Emporia Pheniciens,” the “Corpus Inscriptionum Semiticarum,” M. Clermont-Ganneau’s “Imagerie Phenicienne,” Mr. Davis’s “Carthage and her Remains,” Gesenius’s “Scripturae Linguaeque Phoeniciae Monumenta,” Lortet’s “La Syrie d’aujourd’hui,” Serra di Falco’s “Antichita della Sicilia,” Walpole’s “Ansayrii,” and Canon Tristram’s “Land of Israel.”  The difficulty has been to select from these copious stores the most salient and noteworthy facts, and to marshal them in such a form as would make them readily intelligible to the ordinary English reader.  How far he has succeeded in doing this he must leave the public to judge.  In making his bow to them as a “Reader” and Writer “of Histories,"[04] he has to thank them for a degree of favour which has given a ready sale to all his previous works, and has carried some of them through several editions.

Canterbury:  August 1889.

HISTORY OF PHOENICIA

CHAPTER I—­THE LAND

Phoenicia—­Origin of the name—­Spread of the name southwards—­Real length of Phoenicia along the coast—­ Breadth and area—­General character of the region—­The Plains—­Plain of Sharon—­Plain of Acre—­Plain of Tyre—­Plain of Sidon—­Plain of Berytus—­Plain of Marathus—­Hilly regions—­Mountain ranges—­Carmel—­Casius—­Bargylus—­Lebanon—­ Beauty of Lebanon—­Rivers—­The Litany—­The Nahr-el-Berid—­ The Kadisha—­The Adonis—­The Lycus—­The Tamyras—­The Bostrenus—­The Zaherany—­The Headlands—­Main characteristics, inaccessibility, picturesqueness, productiveness.

Phoenice, or Phoenicia, was the name originally given by the Greeks—­and afterwards adopted from them by the Romans—­to the coast region of the Mediterranean, where it faces the west between the thirty-second and the thirty-sixth parallels.  Here, it would seem, in their early voyagings, the Pre-Homeric Greeks first came upon a land where the palm-tree was not only indigenous, but formed a leading and striking characteristic, everywhere along the low sandy shore lifting its tuft of feathery leaves into the bright blue sky, high above the undergrowth of fig, and pomegranate, and alive.  Hence they called the tract Phoenicia, or “the Land of Palms;” and the people who inhabited it the Phoenicians, or “the Palm-tree people.”