ENCYCLOPAEDIA

OF

CIVIL ENGINEERING.

BOOK I.

HISTORY OR ENGINEERING.

CHAPTER I.

• PHOENICIAN ENGINEERING.

As commerce and the art of war equally require the assistance of the engineer, hisemployment may be dated from the time when history notices the one, or relates thesuccess which attended the other. War, in the early ages of the world, being consideredmore honourable than the arts of peace, traffic and the handicraft trades would be butlittle esteemed ; and so few good workmen were then to be met with, that we read of such ahero as Ulysses being obliged to construct his own boat, as well as to decorate the fur-niture his rude palace contained. As the knowledge of navigation improved, and trafficbecame more general along the shores of the Mediterranean Sea , the inhabitants found thatthe high precipitous cliffs, broken into headlands, and the numerous indented islands, bythe assistance of art might be made to afford better protection to their vessels against thesudden storms to which that sea is subject. To the architect, whose studies compriseda 'l the sciences which had been developed by society, and united in his employment what"’as then known of construction, the lifting of heavy weights, and the arrangement ofmachinery, was confided the adaptation and improvement of nature’s works ; their defencefrom aggression of every kind ; the formation of the city, the roads, the supply of water,mid all that, was deemed necessary or essential for the wants or the pleasures of the inha-bitants.

To the Phoenicians , who so long enjoyed the dominion of the Mediterranean Sea , wemust give the credit of first encouraging the art of civil engineering : they were amongfl'e earliest descendants of Noah that settled on the coasts, and who made navigation sub-servient to commerce. These people, named Canaanites , which, in the Eastern language,s, gnities merchants, first inhabited a city called Sidon , in consequence of its being built by? le eldest son of Canaan , whose name it bore. The country around not being fruitful, theinhabitants were obliged to turn their attention to manufactures and commerce, and usee . ver y means to induce other nations to trade with them, and take off their surplus prodttc-trnns in exchange for the necessaries of life.

In the days of the patriarch Abraham the settlers here had become so powerful a people^mat when Jacob blesses his children, he tells Zebulon “ that he shall dwell at the haven ofme sea, and he shall he for a haven of ships, and his border shall be unto Sidon .”

The Phoenicians lost the greater part of Canaan which they held, in the time of Joshua,"’hen the land as far as Sidon was given to the tribe of Asher. The inhabitants were not,■owever, destroyed, but suffered to extend their commerce, and to send out colonies to thes tores of Africa and Europe . Cyprus , Rhodes, Greece , Sicily , Sardinia , Gaul, and Spain ,mceived settlers from the Sidonians , who taught the native inhabitants the first rudiments

of science.

Twelve hundred and fifty years before Christ we find these enterprising merchantsPassing through the Straits of Gibraltar , and founding the port of Cadiz, where theyai d Up i n extensive warehouses the produce they freighted from all parts of the then known* 0rld - Gold, silver, copper, lead, tin, and iron, they supplied in abundance, and thesemetals they obtained either by exchange with the natives, or by working the mines whichthe y discovered.

Sa nchoniatho, who was supposed to have been a contemporary of Joshua, has left us

rtn y traditions of the Phoenicians .

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