SECTION 7. SYRIA
It is time for our traveller to move on southward into "Hatti-land," as the Assyrians would long continue to call the southern area of the old Hatti civilization. He would have found Syria in a state of greater or less disintegration from end to end. Since the withdrawal of the strong hands of the Hatti from the north and the Egyptians from the south, the disorganized half-vacant land had been attracting to itself successive hordes of half-nomadic Semites from the eastern and southern steppes. By 1000 B.C. these had settled down as a number of Aramaean societies each under its princeling. All were great traders. One such society established itself in the north-west, in Shamal, where, influenced by the old Hatti culture, an art came into being which was only saved ultimately by Semitic Assyria from being purely Hittite. Its capital, which lay at modern Sinjerli, one of the few Syrian sites scientifically explored, we shall notice later on. South lay Patin and Bit Agusi; south of these again, Hamath and below it Damascus - all new Aramaean states, which were waiting for quiet times to develop according to the measure of their respective territories and their command of trade routes. Most blessed in both natural fertility and convenience of position was Damascus (Ubi or Hobah), which had been receiving an Aramaean influx for at least three hundred years. It was destined to outstrip the rest of those new Semitic states; but for the moment it was little stronger than they. As for the Phoenician cities on the Lebanon coast, which we know from the Amarna archives and other Egyptian records to have long been settled with Canaanitic Semites, they were to appear henceforward in a light quite other than that in which the reports of their Egyptian governors and visitors had hitherto shown them. Not only did they very rapidly become maritime traders instead of mere local territorial centres, but (if we may infer it from the lack of known monuments of their higher art or of their writing before 1000 B.C.) they were making or just about to make a sudden advance in social development. It should be remarked that our evidence, that other Syrian Semites had taken to writing in scripts of their own, begins not much later at various points - in Shamal, in Moab and in Samaria.
This rather sudden expansion of the Phoenicians into a maritime power about 1000 B.C. calls for explanation. Herodotus thought that the Phoenicians were driven to take to the sea simply by the growing inadequacy of their narrow territory to support the natural increase of its inhabitants, and probably he was partly right, the crisis of their fate being hastened by Armaean pressure from inland. But the advance in their culture, which is marked by the development of their art and their writing, was too rapid and too great to have resulted only from new commerce with the sea; nor can it have been due to any influence of the Aramaean elements which were comparatively fresh from the Steppes. To account for the facts in Syria we seem to require, not long previous to this time, a fresh accession of population from some area of higher culture. When we observe, therefore, among the earlier Phoenician and south Syrian antiquities much that was imported, and more that derived its character, from Cyprus and even remoter centres of the Aegean culture of the latest Minoan Age, we cannot regard as fantastic the belief of the Cretan discoverer, Arthur Evans, that the historic Phoenician civilization, and especially the Phoenician script, owed their being in great measure to an immigration from those nearest oversea lands which had long possessed a fully developed art and a system of writing. After the fall of the Cnossian Dynasty we know that a great dispersal of Cretans began, which was continued and increased later by the descent of the Achaeans into Greece. It has been said already that the Pulesti or Philistines, who had followed the first northern horde to the frontiers of Egypt early in the twelfth century, are credibly supposed to have come from some area affected by Minoan civilization, while the Tjakaray and Washasha, who accompanied them, were probably actual Cretans. The Pulesti stayed, as we know, in Philistia: the Tjakaray settled at Dor on the South Phoenician coast, where Unamon, an envoy of Rameses XI, found them. These settlers are quite sufficient to account for the subsequent development of a higher culture in mid and south Syria, and there may well have been some further immigration from Cyprus and other Aegean lands which, as time went on, impelled the cities of Phoenicia, so well endowed by nature, to develop a new culture apace about 1000 B.C.