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