History of Phoenicia. George Rawlinson
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quarters to which the harbours on the coast are unfortunately open.25 Navigation consequently suffers interruption; but when once the winter is past, a season of tranquillity sets in, and for many months of the year—at any rate from May to October26—the barometer scarcely varies, the sky is unclouded, and rain all but unknown.
As the traveller mounts from the coast tract into the more elevated regions, the climate sensibly changes. An hour’s ride from the plains, when they are most sultry, will bring him into a comparatively cool region, where the dashing spray of the glacier streams is borne on the air, and from time to time a breeze that is actually cold comes down from the mountain-tops.27 Shade is abundant, for the rocks are often perpendicular, and overhand the road in places, while the dense foliage of cedars, or pines, or walnut-trees, forms an equally effectual screen against the sun’s noonday rays. In winter the uplands are, of course, cold. Severe weather prevails in them from November to March;28 snow falls on all the high ground, while it rains on the coast and in the lowlands; the passes are blocked; and Lebanon and Bargylus replenish the icy stories which the summer’s heat has diminished.
The vegetable productions of Phoenicia may be best considered under the several heads of trees, shrubs, herbs, flowers, fruit-trees, and garden vegetables. The chief trees were the palm-tree, the sycamore, the maritime pine, and the plane in the lowlands; in the highlands the cedar, Aleppo pine, oak, walnut, poplar, acacia, shumac, and carob. We have spoken of the former abundance of the palm. At present it is found in comparatively few places, and seldom in any considerable numbers. It grows singly, or in groups of two or three, at various points of the coast from Tripolis to Acre, but is only abundant in a few spots more towards the south, as at Haifa, under Carmel, where “fine date-palms” are numerous in the gardens,29 and at Jaffa, where travellers remark “a broad belt of two or three miles of date-palms and orange-groves laden with fruit."210 The wood was probably not much used as timber except in the earliest times, since Lebanon afforded so many kinds of trees much superior for building purposes. The date-palm was also valued for its fruit, though the produce of the Phoenician groves can never have been of a high quality.
The sycamore, or sycamine-fig, is a dark-foliaged tree, with a gnarled stem when it is old;211 it grows either singly or in clumps, and much more resembles in appearance the English oak than the terebinth does, which has been so often compared to it. The stem is short, and sends forth wide lateral branches forking out in all directions, which renders the tree very easy to climb. It bears a small fig in great abundance, and probably at all seasons, which, however, is “tasteless and woody,"212 though eaten by the inhabitants. The sycamore is common along the Phoenician lowland, but is a very tender tree and will not grow in the mountains.
The plane-tree, common in Asia Minor, is not very frequent either in Phoenicia or Palestine. It occurs, however, on the middle course of the Litany, where it breaks through the roots of Lebanon,213 and also in many of the valleys214 on the western flank of the mountain. The maritime pine (Pinus maritama) extends in forests here and there along the shore,215 and is found of service in checking the advance of the sand dunes, which have a tendency to encroach seriously on the cultivable soil.
Of the upland trees the most common is the oak. There are three species of oak in the country. The most prevalent is an evergreen oak (Quercus pseudococcifera), sometimes mistaken by travellers for a holly, sometimes for an ibex, which covers in a low dense bush many miles of the hilly country everywhere, and occasionally becomes a large tree in the Lebanon valleys,216 and on the flanks of Casius and Bargylus. Another common oak is Quercus Ægilops, a much smaller and deciduous tree, very stout-trunked, which grows in scattered groups on Carmel and elsewhere, “giving a park-like appearance to the landscape."217 The third kind is Quercus infectoria, a gall-oak, also deciduous, and very conspicuous from the large number of bright, chestnut-coloured, viscid galls which it bears, and which are now sometimes gathered for exportation.218
Next to the oak may be mentioned the walnut, which grows to a great size in sheltered positions in the Lebanon range, both upon the eastern and upon the western flank;219 the poplar, which is found both in the mountains220 and in the low country, as especially about Beyrout;221 the Aleppo pine (Pinus halepensis), of which there are large woods in Carmel, Lebanon, and Bargylus,222 while in Casius there is an enormous forest of them;223 and the carob (Ceratonia siliqua), or locust-tree, a dense-foliaged tree of a bright lucid green hue, which never grows in clumps or forms woods, but appears as an isolated tree, rounded or oblong, and affords the best possible shade.224 In the vicinity of Tyre are found also large tamarisks, maples, sumachs, and acacias.225
But the tree which is the glory of Phoenicia, and which was by far the most valuable of all its vegetable productions, is, of course, the cedar. Growing to an immense height, and attaining an enormous girth, it spreads abroad its huge flat branches hither and thither, covering a vast space of ground with its “shadowing shroud,"226 and presenting a most majestic and magnificent appearance. Its timber may not be of first-rate quality, and there is some question whether it was really used for the masts of their ships by the Phoenicians,227 but as building material it was beyond a doubt most highly prized, answering sufficiently for all the purposes required by architectural art, and at the same time delighting the sense of smell by its aromatic odour. Solomon employed it both for the Temple and for his own house;228 the Assyrian kings cut it and carried it to Nineveh;229 Herod the Great used it for the vast additions that he made to Zerubbabel’s temple;230 it was exported to Egypt and Asia Minor; the Ephesian Greeks constructed of cedar, probably of cedar from Lebanon, the roof of their famous temple of Diana.231 At present the wealth of Lebanon in cedars is not great, but the four hundred which form the grove near the source of the Kadisha, and the many scattered cedar woods in other places, are to be viewed as remnants of one great primeval forest, which originally covered all the upper slopes on the western side, and was composed, if not exclusively, at any rate predominantly, of cedars.232 Cultivation, the need of fuel, and the wants of builders, have robbed the mountain of its primitive bright green vest, and left it either bare rock or terraced garden; but in the early times of Phoenicia, the true Lebanon cedar must undoubtedly have been its chief forest tree, and have stood to it as the pine to the Swiss Alps and the chestnut to the mountains of North Italy.
Of shrubs, below the rank of trees, the most important are the lentisk (Pistachia lentiscus), the bay, the arbutus (A. andrachne), the cypress, the oleander, the myrtle, the juniper, the barberry, the styrax (S. officinalis), the rhododendron, the bramble, the caper plant, the small-leaved holly, the prickly pear, the honeysuckle, and the jasmine. Myrtle and rhododendron grow luxuriantly on the flanks of Bargylus, and are more plentiful than any other shrubs in that region.233 Eastern Lebanon has abundant scrub of juniper and barberry;234 while on the western slopes their place is taken by the bramble, the myrtle, and the clematis.235 The lentisk, which rarely exceeds the size of a low bush, is conspicuous by its dark evergreen leaves and numerous small red berries;236 the arbutus—not our species, but a far lighter and more ornamental shrub, the Arbutus andrachne—bears also a bright red fruit, which colours the thickets;237 the styrax, famous for yielding the gum storax of commerce, grows towards the east end of Carmel, and is a very large bush branching from the ground, but never assuming the form of a tree; it has small downy leaves, white flowers like orange blossoms, and round yellow fruit, pendulous from slender stalks, like cherries.238 Travellers in Phoenicia do not often mention the caper plant, but it was seen by Canon Tristram hanging from the fissures of the rock, in the cleft of the Litany,239 amid myrtle and bay and clematis. The small-leaved holly was noticed by Mr. Walpole on the western flank of Bargylus.240 The prickly pear is not a native of Asia, but has been introduced from the New World. It has readily acclimatised itself, and is very generally employed, in Phoenicia, as in the neighbouring countries, for hedges.241
The fruit-trees of Phoenicia are numerous, and grow most luxuriantly, but the majority have no doubt been introduced from other countries, and the time of their introduction is uncertain. Five, however, may be reckoned as either indigenous or as cultivated at any rate from a remote antiquity—the vine, the olive, the date-palm, the walnut, and the fig. The vine is most widely spread. Vineyards cover large tracts in the vicinity of all the towns; they climb up the sides of Carmel, Lebanon, and Bargylus,242 hang upon the edge of precipices, and greet the traveller at every turn in almost every region. The size of individual vines is extraordinary.