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 they could of the tombs, burying in them again and again, as the Egyptians were accustomed to do in their cemeteries at Thebes and Memphis. The surrounding plain is watered by the "pleasant Bostrenos," and is covered with gardens which are reckoned to be the most beautiful in all Syria--at least after those of Damascus: their praises were sung even in ancient days, and they had then earned for the city the epithet of "the flowery Sidon."** * The only description of the port which we possess is that in the romance of Olitophon and Leucippus by Achilles Tatius. ** The Bostrenos, which is perhaps to be recognised under the form Borinos in the Periplus of Scylax, is the modern Nahr el-Awaly.