John Masters (4 page)

Their language was of Hebraic origin. The word
iber
itself derives from
eber,
meaning "ultimate, beyond" in Hebrew;
Iberia
is thus "the last land." The Iberian tribe which lived on the mainland opposite Gibraltar was called the Turdetani; and some Spanish scholars claim that this is from an old Hebrew word meaning "region, country." Southern Spain was known to the ancients as Tarshish; and in it there may or may not have been a great capital called Tartessos and a great king called Argantonio. If it did exist, no one has yet found a trace: if it did not, the "city" was probably a symbol used by Greek and Phoenician poets to personify all the wonders and marvels of the far west.

Tarshish is mentioned several times in the Bible. Jonah met his misadventure with the great fish while on his way there:

But Jonah rose up to flee unto Tarshish from the presence of the LORD, and went down to Joppa; and he found a ship going to Tarshish; so he paid the fare thereof, and went down into it, to go with them unto Tarshish from the presence of the LORD.—Jonah 1:3

And, as we know, there were whales in the strait Solomon had commercial dealings with it:

For the king had at sea a navy of Tharshish with the navy of Hiram: once in three years came the navy of Tharshish, bringing gold, and silver, ivory, and apes, and peacocks.—I Kings 10:22

The kings of Tarshish and of the isles shall bring presents....
—Psalms 72:10

The reference to peacocks and ivory shows that there was a trading link between Tarshish and Africa, and this is not strange, for the Egyptians later sailed right around Africa (it took them three years). The truly revealing reference is the mention of gold and silver, and again, "Silver spread into plates is brought from Tarshish" (Jeremiah 10:9), for these coasts had long before Solomon felt the first thrust of the civilizations beginning to flower in the Near and Middle East. The Egyptians began to use gold, silver, and copper very early, and soon after 3000 B.C. they were getting some of it from Tarshish—specifically, from near Almeria and from the Rio Tinto region, which is west of Gibraltar. An Iberian on the Rock, then, tending goats perhaps, must have seen vessels of the most ancient design creeping past, westbound with oil and cotton and blue beads for the natives, eastbound with sheets of copper and silver.

The Greeks came to share in the trade; and about 2800 B.C. the Minoans, who brought with them and left in Spain a deep-rooted belief of their religion: bull worship. The trade went beyond Spain to England and beyond copper to tin, and soon copper and tin were being melted together to make a new harder and tougher metal—bronze. The Age of Bronze was born close to the Rock, and the Iron Age followed from the same womb, for Tarshish contributed large iron ore deposits, too.

Several peoples traded past the Rock, but it was the Phoenicians who dominated these western waters for over five centuries and, through the colonies they planted, for another three after their own decline. They were the Canaanites of the Bible, who occupied the coastal strip of Palestine north of Carmel—the land allotted to the tribes of Asher and Zebulon at the Exodus, though the Jews were unable to turn the Canaanites out. They were a Semitic people as old as the Jews and closely linked with them by many ties. The Hiram of the quote from I Kings was king of Phoenicia and a close friend of David and Solomon. When, after the death of Solomon, the ten northern Jewish tribes broke off to form the Kingdom of Israel in 975 B.C., Phoenician friendship with the southern kingdom of Judah cooled but with Israel increased; for the people of the north, largely renouncing the Jewish God, took to sharing the worship of the Phoenician gods—Baal, Adon, Moloch, and the chief ones, Melkart and Astarte; and in many other ways began to blend with the Phoenicians.

The ancient world held the Phoenicians in awe for their industry and intelligence—they invented the alphabet—and at the same time in aversion for their custom of burning small children as sacrifices to Moloch. Their temples enjoyed the services of religious prostitutes of both sexes, but this was not uncommon in other religions.

They are remembered now not for their vices or virtues but for their skill as sailors and merchants. Their own capitals were Tyre and Sidon, but in 1100 B.C. they founded Gadir (Cadiz) and in 814 B.C. Carthage (near modern Tunis on the North African coast). They had already founded a town on Gibraltar Bay....

Or had they? There are doubts.

North and west from the Rock around the head of the bay, a river empties itself into the sea. Often, and appropriately called First River, its true name is Guadarranque. On the left bank there are the ruins of an ancient town. Everyone agrees that the town was called Carteia; the doubt is, when was it founded? Some modern scholars tend to believe there was no town here before Roman times or perhaps only an Iberian village; but the Greeks had a word for it—Heraclea; and if the river and beach were properly shaped for a port, as everyone agrees they were, it is a perfect site, with better natural shelter than any other in southern Spain (except Gadir). On balance it seems probable that Carteia
was
founded by the Phoenicians in 940 B.C. to exploit the tunny fishing and the beds of murex. The murex is a shellfish from which was extracted the famous "Tyrian purple," the color which later became the fiercely guarded prerogative of Roman nobles and emperors. It was never in fact a true purple but something between rose and dark violet. The dye was made by extracting the shellfish and dropping them into large vats or tanks, often of stone. When they rotted they secreted a yellow liquid, which was the dye. The vats were always placed downwind for obvious reasons.

The colony's full name was Melkarteia, after the god, but that soon became abbreviated. A thousand years before Christ, therefore, the Rock looked down upon, and was surely regarded as the sacred mountain of, its first real town.

These are all facts, as best they can be traced through the deceptive and ever-shifting curtains of the years. The ancients, with ancestral memories sharpened by tens of thousands of years when all knowledge, experience, and wisdom had to be passed on by word of mouth, recorded them differently. They did not have modern tools of discovery and analysis and, having been actors rather than spectators, were more interested in transmitting emotion than fact. History was recorded and handed down in myth and fable. One such is the story of the opening of the Strait of Gibraltar. Although it is inconceivable that thinking man could have been present on Earth when it actually happened (at least 30,000,000 years ago), yet the most ancient voices of the past seemed to find it necessary to explain that it
had
happened within human ken. The act is attributed to a god or demigod, in the Greek version called Herakles and in the Latin Hercules; and this figure was probably the same as Tubal. Hercules tore the mountains apart and set up pillars inscribed
Non Plus Ultra
(Nothing Beyond) to mark the end of the earth. From the very beginning all men knew that the Pillars of Hercules were the mountains called Abyla on the African shore and, on the European side, the limestone block which the Phoenicians called Alube and the Greeks Calpe, meaning "urn, hollowed out." This was the Rock, Gibraltar, and it was called "hollowed out" because of its innumerable caves, especially one very large one high on the west face, the Great Cave.

About 1100 B.C. one or several Greek poets called Homer began to compose the
Iliad
and the
Odyssey,
which are, in fact, history and geography books, respectively. In them the bards set out in metrical form (so that it could more easily be memorized) all that was known of their own past and of the outside world.

In the
Odyssey
Homer's archetypal wanderer, Ulysses or Odysseus, passes through a narrow strait. Here is the relevant passage in the lucid translation of S. O. Andrew:

Of the two other rocks, the one reaches up to the sky

With sharp-pointed peak, and a cloud encompasses it

That never disperses, nor clear air ever reveals

Even in summer or autumn its heav'n-soaring crest.

No mortal that perilous summit could scale or descend

Though with twenty hands and with twenty feet he were born,

For its surface is smooth, like polished marble, and sheer
.

Midmost the rock is a cavern, misty and dim,

Turn'd toward the region of darkness where

Erebus lies, And beneath it,

O noble Odysseus, your bark ye must steer.

Not even an archer of power with a shaft from his bow

Could shoot from a hollow ship to the depth of that cave;

Therein has yelping Scylla her secret abode,

Her voice like a newborn whelp's, no greater, yet she

Is an evil monster indeed, nor would any that pass'd

Rejoice to behold her, not though an Immortal he were.

She has twelve feet, which she dangles down in the air,

And above, six necks, very long, and on each of the six

A hideous head which is arm'd with a triple array

Of teeth set thickly teeming with black-venom'd death.

And nine lines later:

But mark thou, Odysseus, that other rock which is low,

Quite nectr to the first (thou coulds't shoot with an arrow across).

And on it, in full leafage a fig tree there is,

Where under the mighty Charybdis sucks down the tide.

Thrice in the day she disgorges and thrice in the day

She sucks it again; mayest thou never be near when she sucks...
.

These passages have sometimes been taken to refer to the Strait of Messina between Sicily and the Italian mainland, but the description fits the Strait of Gibraltar much more closely. Gibraltar was also very far off, and its links with the fabulous Hercules and the hardly less mysterious Tarshish would make it a more attractive location for marvels. The cloud hiding the Rock's head is the most telling evidence, for the levanter cloud is unique in the Mediterranean; and in this poetic version of returned seamen's tall tales one can easily trace the Great Cave, the sheer eastern and northern cliffs, the giant squid with its black ink "venom," and the dangerous race which forms off the point of Septa on the African shore. The only factors against this identification are that the African pillar (Charybdis) is in fact not lower than Gibraltar but considerably higher, and the distance between the two is a good deal more than a bowshot; but the dramatic isolation of the Rock so dominates the strait that several later travelers fell into the first error, and the bowshot distance is a liberty required by Homer's plot.

To return to the harsher yet still breathtaking light of history. This is Gibraltar about 600 B.C.... The trees grow thick on the lesser slopes, and sailors often go ashore but do not tarry unless they mean to worship at a shrine of Hercules, for the demigod inhabits the place and is not mocked. Above all, none but the very devout, or the very blasphemous, enter the Great Cave, though it is known to the whole civilized world—it goes into the womb of earth; it holds armies and is not filled; it is dark, but a torch held high shows pillars and walls and steps wrought and decorated and colored beyond the power of mortals to describe....

The small town by the First River flourishes. The colonists have increasingly close relations with the hinterland, where the Iberians are being diluted by successive waves of another people from the Syrio-Turanian region—the Celts—to form the Celtiberians (this particular influx goes on, in dribs and drabs, for about 800 years, for Julius Caesar records some 6,000 Celts, with women and children, entering Spain in 49 B.C.).

In the basin of the Mediterranean the peoples, having developed and spread, begin to fight for empire. Phoenicia is attacked by the Assyrian Shalmaneser V in 721 B.C. and much weakened:

The burden of Tyre. Howl, ye ships of Tarshish; for it is

laid waste, so that there is no house, no entering in.

...
—Isaiah 23:1

Carthage breaks free of the mother country, as colonies will, and from now on it is Carthage, not Tyre, which controls the Phoenician settlements in the west.

The Babylonian Nebuchadnezzar besieges Tyre in 587 B.C. The following year he destroys Jerusalem, sacks the First Temple, and takes some of its people captive. From both the Assyrian and Babylonian invasions many inhabitants of Phoenicia and neighboring countries, including Judea, escape for refuge to Gadir, Carthage, Sexi (modem Almunecar), Carteia, and a dozen other settlements at the far end of the Mediterranean.

It is nearly 3,000 years since Mediterranean man first deliberately sailed past the Rock to trade with the wider world his restless explorations kept uncovering. These explorations have kept to the coasts, north and south.

The kings ... of the isles shall bring presents....
Britain, the Tin Islands, he has known for a thousand years. But in the evenings, faces lit by the flaring lamps, the bards tell of other islands, other continents ... the Isles of the Blest, the Hesperides, Atlantis. Is the Rock, then, a pillar to mark the limit of this world? Or the hinge of the gate which will open to another?