It may, perhaps, be allowable to hazard an opinion which after all is only an opinion, viz. that the Ligurians who dwelt along the transcontinental amber route were sun worshippers, but that until the days of Julius Cæsar we know very little, if indeed anything for certain, of the religion of the Celts who inhabited western Gaul and Britain. Whether Stonehenge was the temple referred to is very doubtful; whether it was orientated with respect to the sun is a matter which, as Professor Oman justly observes, need not be taken seriously.[19]
But what of the Phœnicians, and where do they come in? It is a cruel thing to say to a generation which can ill afford to part with any fragment of its diminished archæological patrimony, but it must be said without reserve or qualification: the Phœnicians do not come in at all.
It would be comparatively easy, as some have already found, to provide Celtic Britain with all the elaborate machinery of sun worship if it could be shown that there were direct and close relations between Britain and Phœnicia either before or after the Celtic invasion. No one, of course, doubts or denies the glory of the Phœnician thalassocracy. The Bible is only one of many witnesses. Hiram King of Tyre supplied Solomon both with craftsmen for the brass work of the Temple at Jerusalem and with sailors for his trading expeditions to India. Gades (Cadiz) the port of Tartessus, or Tarshish, was founded by the Phœnicians before 1100 B.C. The ships of Tarshish are rooted in the memory like the bulls of Bashan and the cedars of Libanus. Ezekiel’s lamentation for Tyre[20] is not only one of the most profoundly pathetic but also one of the most illuminating passages in the Old Testament.
Speaking of Tyre, he says, “Tarshish was thy merchant by reason of the multitude of all kind of riches, with silver, iron, tin, and lead they traded in thy fairs:” “the ships of Tarshish did sing of thee in thy market: and thou wast replenished and made very glorious in the midst of the seas.”
Nevertheless, great, extensive and varied as was the commercial enterprise of the Phœnicians, scholars are now generally agreed that they never got beyond Gades in their Atlantic voyages.
Moreover, the Cassiterides or Tin Islands, mentioned by Diodorus, which a former generation strove to identify with the Scilly Isles, lay undoubtedly to the north of Spain.[21] At the same time it must be noted that the same author Diodorus, who probably had his information from Poseidonius (born circa 135 B.C.), does expressly state in the same passage that tin was conveyed from Britain to Gaul and overland to Marseilles. By that time, however, the doom of Carthage, the daughter city of Tyre, situated on the Bay of Tunis, had also been sealed.