Phoenica Author:George Rawlinson General Books publication date: 2009 Original publication date: 1889 Original Publisher: T.F. Unwin Subjects: Phoenicia Notes: This is a black and white OCR reprint of the original. It has no illustrations and there may be typos or missing text. When you buy the General Books edition of this book you get free trial access to Million-Books.c... more »om where you can select from more than a million books for free. Excerpt: III. THE CITIES -- THEIR POSITION, PRINCIPAL FEATURES, AND MUTUAL RELATIONS. Among the Phoenician cities the one which first challenges attention, and which requires to be described at the greatest length, is the city of Tyre. In a certain qualified sense Tyre may be regarded as the capital of Phoenicia. If not the most ancient, it was, at any rate during the historical period, by far the most important of the towns. Known to the Hebrews from the time of Joshua as " the strong city " (Josh. xix. 29), often mentioned as Tsor on the early Egyptian monuments, attracting so much the regards of the Greeks as to extend its name in their geographical nomenclature to the entire tract of sea- coast on which it stood (for " Syria " is most properly explained as a softened form of " Tsyria "), from the age of David to that of Alexander politically first and foremost among the states, Tyre is to Phoenicia what Miletus was to Ionia, almost what Rome was to Italy -- the natural leader and head, the directress and monitress, the national impersonation and embodiment. It is among the most remarkable peculiarities ofDESCRIPTION OF OLD TYKE. 41 Tyre, that it was a double city -- a city made up of two wholly distinct parts -- one, a littoral island about three-quarters of a mile in length, separated from the mainland by a strait about half a mile wide, and the other a town upon the opposite shore. The town upon the shore was known to the Greeks and Romans as Palaetyrus, or " Old Tyre " -- its twin sister was " the island Tyre," or "New Tyre,"or "Tyre" emphatically. N...« less