Lebanon · c. 3500 BCE
Sidon
Ṣīdūn
Mother of glass
Fishermen who became kings. The fire that trapped light in sand. Homer knew the Sidonians as cunning makers. The sea still hits the same stones.
Sidon on the sea
Phoenician harbor · later fortress on the same rock · Mediterranean
Sidon — mother of glass
Wikimedia Commons · Sidon harbor
Gad Yaton: Fishermen who became kings. The fire that trapped light in sand.
Sarcophagus of Eshmunazar II
Amphibolite · Magharat Tablun, Sidon · 6th–5th c. BCE
Louvre · AO 4806
Wikimedia Commons · Musée du Louvre
Gad Yaton: A Sidonian king in Egyptian dress, speaking Phoenician on the lid.
Mother of glass
Sidon blew glass, embroidered linen, and sent daughters to thrones. Mochus of Sidon — older than Troy in the old lists — is named among the first who thought the world as nature. The west puts the beads in a case. The fire was here.
The harbor is still a harbor. Later fortresses sit on the same rock. The fishermen did not leave.
Eshmun and the kings
Eshmunazar II lies in the Louvre, a Sidonian king in Egyptian dress, speaking Phoenician on the lid. The anthropoid sarcophagi of Sidon learned a foreign shape and kept our language. Eshmun, the healer, had his house in the valley behind the town.
Homer’s Sidonians are not a myth of skill. They are a memory of a workshop that outlasted the palaces that bought from it.
Gad Yaton: they kept the beads. They forgot the fire. The fire is Sidonian.