* The poet Nonnus has preserved a highly embellished account
of this rivalry, where Adonis is called Dionysos.

** The original name appears to have been Tamur, Tamyr, from
a word signifying "palm" in the Phoenician language. The
myth of the conflict between Poseidon and the god of the
river, a Baal-Demarous, has been explained by Renan, who
accepts the identification of the river-deity with Baal-
Thamar, already mentioned by Movers.

Beyond the southern bank of the river, Sidon sits enthroned as "the
firstborn of Canaan." In spite of this ambitious title it was at first
nothing but a poor fishing village founded by Bel, the Agenor of the
Greeks, on the southern slope of a spit of land which juts out obliquely
towards the south-west.* It grew from year to year, spreading out over
the plain, and became at length one of the most prosperous of the chief
cities of the country--a "mother" in Phoenicia.**

* Sidon is called "the firstborn of Canaan" in Genesis: the
name means a fishing-place, as the classical authors already
knew--"nam piscem Phonices _sidon_ appellant."

** In the coins of classic times it is called "Sidon, the
mother--_Om_--of Kambe, Hippo, Citium, and Tyre."

The port, once so celebrated, is shut in by three chains of half-sunken
reefs, which, running out from the northern end of the peninsula,
continue parallel to the coast for some hundreds of yards: narrow
passages in these reefs afford access to the harbour; one small island,
which is always above water, occupies the centre of this natural dyke
of rocks, and furnishes a site for a maritime quarter opposite to the
continental city.* The necropolis on the mainland extends to the east
and north, and consists of an irregular series of excavations made in a
low line of limestone cliffs which must have been lashed by the waves
of the Mediterranean long prior to the beginning of history. These tombs
are crowded closely together, ramifying into an inextricable maze, and
are separated from each other by such thin walls that one expects every
moment to see them give way, and bury the visitors in the ruin. Many
date back to a very early period, while all of them have been re-worked
and re-appropriated over and over again. The latest occupiers were
contemporaries of the Macedonian kings or the Roman Caesars. Space was
limited and costly in this region of the dead: the Sidonians made the
best use th