The Phœnician Vademecum

Abstract

IT is gratifying to see (vol. vii. p. 351) that you express a doubt whether the Cowrie shells in the Pomeranian barrows must necessarily, as Wagner supposes, have been brought by the Phœnicians. Because the earliest Greek historians introduced the Phœnicians to us they have been employed as a universal machinery for carrying out all kinds of operations. This theory is in fact incompatible with our present knowledge of the duration of the human race, and, we may say, with the relative antiquity of the Phœnician epoch, which can date but little beyond the historic period. Thus we are led to neglect the evidences of skulls, weapons, tools, monuments, and languages, which show that there must have been communications between distant regions long before the rise of the Phœnicians. There are many prehistoric races which had a sufficiently wide distribution to provide for the dissemination of such a small object as the Cowrie. Among these may be named the dwarf or short races, of which the Mincopies of the Audamans are a type; the race now represented by the Agavs of the Nile, Avkhass of Caucasus (Achivi), and Omagua and Guarani of Brazil; and the Dravidian race. Populations which could distribute men over the continents and islands of Europe, Africa, Australia, and the Americas must have been capable of distributing cowries and beads without Phœnician intervention. At present the Phœnicians are blocking the road to prehistoric research, as the Hebrews formerly did.