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Trade in the Red Sea and Indian Ocean |
There was one further direction in which the Phoenicians pushed their maritime trade, not perhaps continuously, but at intervals, when their political relations were such as to give them access to the sea which washed Asia on the south and on the southeast. The nearest points at which they could embark for the purpose of exploring or utilising the great tract of ocean in this quarter were the inner recesses of the two deep gulfs known as the Persian and the Arabian. It has been thought by some that there were times in their history when the Phoenicians had the free use of both these gulfs, and could make the starting-point of their eastern explorations and trading voyages either a port on one of the two arms into which the Red Sea divides towards the north, or a harbour on the Persian Gulf near its north- western extremity. But the latter supposition rests upon grounds which are exceedingly unsafe and uncertain. That the Phoenicians migrated at some remote period from the shores of the Persian Gulf to the Mediterranean may be allowed to be highly probable; but that, after quitting their primitive abodes and moving off nearly a thousand miles to the westward, they still maintained a connection with their early settlements and made them centres for a trade with the Far East, is as improbable a hypothesis as any that has ever received the sanction of men of learning and repute. The Babylonians, through whose country the connection must have been kept up, were themselves traders, and would naturally keep the Arabian and Indian traffic in their own hands; nor can we imagine them as brooking the establishment of a rival upon their shores. The Arabians were more friendly; but they, too, would have disliked to share their carrying trade with a foreign nation. And the evidence entirely fails to show that the Phoenicians, from the time of their removal to the Mediterranean, ever launched a vessel in the Persian Gulf, or had any connection with the nations inhabiting its shores, beyond that maintained by the caravans which trafficked by land between the Phoenician cities and the men of Dedan and Babylon. It was otherwise with the more western gulf.
There, certainly, from time to time, the Phoenicians launched their fleets,
and carried on a commerce which was scarcely less lucrative because they
had to allow the nations whose ports they used a participation in its
profits. It is not impossible that, occasionally, the Egyptians allowed
them to build ships in some one or more of their Red Sea ports, and to
make such port or ports the head-quarters of a trade which may have proceeded
beyond the Straits of Babelmandeb and possibly have reached Zanzibar and
Ceylon. At any rate, we know that, in the time of Solomon, two harbours
upon the Red Sea were open to them--viz. Eloth and Ezion-Geber--both places
situated in the inner recess of the Elanitic Gulf, or Gulf of Akaba, the
more eastern of the two arms into which the Red Sea divides. David's conquest
of Edom had put these ports into the possession of the Israelites, and
the friendship between Hiram and Solomon had given the Phoenicians free
access to them. It was the ambition of Solomon to make the Israelites
a nautical people, and to participate in the advantages which he perceived
to have accrued to Phoenicia from her commercial enterprise. Besides sharing
with the Phoenicians in the trade of the Mediterranean, he constructed
with their help a fleet at Ezion-Geber upon the Red Sea, and the two allies
conjointly made voyages to the region, or country, called Ophir, for the
purpose of procuring precious stones, gold, and almug-wood. Ophir is,
properly speaking, a portion of Arabia, and Arabia was famous for its
production of gold, and also for its precious stones.Whether it likewise
produced almug-trees is doubtful; and it is quite possible that the joint
fleet went further than Ophir proper, and obtained the "almug-wood"
from the east coast of Africa, or from India. The Somauli country might
have been as easily reached as South-eastern Arabia, and if India is considerably
more remote, yet there was nothing to prevent the Phoenicians from finding
their way to it.We have, however, no direct evidence that their commerce
in the Indian Ocean ever took them further than the Arabian coast. |
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