c) It seems to be a source of treasures--Jeremiah mentions it as being a place silver comes from (gold is apparently from "Uphaz," another mystery locale.) Ezekiel mentions silver, but also lead, iron and tin. King Solomon's "ships of Tarsis" carry quite a lot: silver, but also gold, ivory, apes, and peacocks.
d) It's probably an island, because it's often mentioned in the same breath, e.g. "Tarsis and the islands."
e) It might be connected to Tyre; Isaiah has the ships of Tarshish wailing when Tyre is laid waste, and tells the "inhabitants of the coast" to "cross over to Tarshish."
Ideas have floated around a long time. There's a town called Tarshish in Lebanon--but Lebanon is not a far-away island, so that's not it. There's Tarsus, in Asia Minor (as in Saul Of), but, again, not an island. Some nineteenth century Brits were apparently convinced that a place full of silver and tin could only be England (???).
Carthage/Tunis/Tyre is a possibility--certainly it was an important trading partner--although it's not on an island. But some references seem to suggest that it is a place separate from Tyre, a place the people of Tyre could go to.
One of the likeliest options is apparently Sardinia, which is a large island. Apparently it used to be well known for the metals trade, and it was an outpost of the Phoenicians (hence the Tyre connection.) There turns out to be some archeological support for this, too; there are silver hoards from the ancient Near East that seem to match isotopes from Spain and Sardinia.
But...what about the other things on the ships of Tarsis? Sardinia doesn't have ivory, for example. My first thought on reading the list of Solomon's treasures was "somewhere in southern Africa" because there are both metals deposits and elephants--but that doesn't really jive with it being an island. Moreover, although there are apparently African peacocks, they're sort of funny-looking birds, not the kind displayed by royalty. (Of course, the peacock has been cultivated as quasi-pet for a long time, so there's no need for the peacocks in question to be native to Tarsis rather than simply bred there. But this did lead to my learning there are three species of peacock! In addition to the African one and the blue kind seen in zoos, there's also a green kind with an interestingly scaly-patterned neck, in which both the male and the female are iridescently coloured birds.) What about India--or maybe Sri Lanka, if we need an island? Conceivably ships coming from India could bear everything described. And indeed, Ophir and/or Uphaz, which are named as sources of gold, are sometimes identified with southern India, in Tamil Nadu (which did a lot of gold trade.) And apparently the Hebrew words for things like parrots, ivory, cotton, and apes are seemingly related to Tamil words for these things!
But how does a ship even get from Jerusalem to India? It doesn't seem like that far a journey, except that, prior to the Suez canal, one would have to go all the way around Africa, or portage across a substantial piece of desert (in which case the goods would surely come to Israel by caravan for their last leg of the journey, not be loaded off a ship.) But wait! Solomon's ships of Tarsis seem to actually be docked at Ezion-Geber (near modern Eliat), which means they were probably headed to the Indian ocean!
So, is Tarsis east or west? Sardinia or Sri Lanka? I figure both. That is, it started off as (maybe) Sardinia, but eventually got used to refer to a variety of different far away places, whether they were called that or no, and maybe used to describe big ships. My analogy here is Guinea: there are three Guineas in Africa (two adjacent, one not), plus a New Guinea. Nobody exactly knows the etymology of "Guinea" either--the Portuguese used it to refer to all southern Africans, possibly getting it from the Berbers, who thought of these darker peoples as "burned" ("ghinawen"). But maybe it comes from Djenné, a trading city on the Niger River. However it came into the language, it also then lent its name to the guinea coin (because it is gold, and gold is from Guinea), and the guinea fowl (pheasant-y birds, some of which do live in the Guinea region), but also the guinea pig, which is decidedly from South American. Maybe the guinea pig is so named because it came via Guyana, which sounds a bit like Guinea; or maybe they were just exotic things that came from a far away place, and so got named after a different far away exotic place. (Aside: its other name, cavia, is derived from what the people of French Guyana called it, but seemingly they were calling it what the Portuguese called it, who got it from the Tupi in Brazil.) Or maybe it's a corruption of "coney." In any case, "guinea pigs" have nothing to do with the country of Guinea, and it's possible that many of the ships of Tarsis had nothing to do with a geographical Tarsis. But there you go.
No comments:
Post a Comment