also called On, and the question arises whether
the name and worship of the On of Syria were not derived from the On of
Egypt. For nearly two centuries Syria was an Egyptian province, and the
priests of On in Egypt may well have established themselves in the
"cleft" valley of Coele-Syria.

From Baalbek, the city of "Baal of the Bek'a," the traveller makes his
way across Lebanon, and under the snows of Jebel Sannin--nearly 9000
feet in height--to the old Phoenician city of Beyrout. Beyrout is
already mentioned in the cuneiform tablets of Tel el-Amarna under the
name of Beruta or Beruna, "the cisterns." It was already a seaport of
Phoenicia, and a halting-place on the high road that ran along the
coast.

The coastland was known to the Greeks and Romans as Phoenicia, "the land
of the palm." But its own inhabitants called it Canaan, "the lowlands."
It included not only the fringe of cultivated land by the sea-shore, but
the western slopes of the Lebanon as well. Phoenician colonies and
outposts had been planted inland, far away from the coast, as at Laish,
the future Dan, where "the people dwelt careless," though "they were far
away from the Sidonians," or at Zemar (the modern Sumra) and Arka (still
called by the same name). The territory of the Phoenicians stretched
southward as far as Dor (now Tanturah), where it met the advance guard
of the Philistines.

Such was Palestine, the promised home of Israel. It was a land of rugged
and picturesque mountains, interspersed with a few tracts of fertile
country, shut in between the sea and the ravine of the Jordan, and
falling away into the waterless desert of the south. It was, too, a land
of small extent, hardly more than one hundred and sixty miles in length
and sixty miles in width. And even this amount of territory was
possessed by the Israelites only during the reigns of David and Solomon.
The sea-coast with its harbours was in the hands of the Phoenicians and
the Philistines, and though the Philistines at one time owned an
unwilling allegiance to the Jewish king, the Phoenicians preserved their
independence, and even Solomon had to find harbours for his merchantmen,
not on the coast of his own native kingdom, but in the distant Edomite
ports of Eloth and Ezion-geber, in the Gulf of Aqabah. With the loss of
Edom Judah ceased to have a foreign trade.

The Negeb, or desert of the south, was then, what it still is, the haunt
of robbers and marauders. The Beduin of to-day ar