CHAPTER I--THE LAND.
Phoenicia--Origin of the name--Spread of the name southwards--Real length of Phoenicia along the coast-- Breadth and area--General character of the region--The Plains--Plain of Sharon--Plain of Acre--Plain of Tyre--Plain of Sidon--Plain of Berytus--Plain of Marathus--Hilly regions--Mountain ranges--Carmel--Casius--Bargylus--Lebanon-- Beauty of Lebanon--Rivers--The Litany--The Nahr-el-Berid-- The Kadisha--The Adonis--The Lycus--The Tamyras--The Bostrenus--The Zaherany--The Headlands--Main characteristics, inaccessibility, picturesqueness, productiveness.
Phoenice, or Phoenicia, was the name originally given by the Greeks--and afterwards adopted from them by the Romans--to the coast region of the Mediterranean, where it faces the west between the thirty-second and the thirty-sixth parallels.

Here, it would seem, in their early voyagings, the Pre-Homeric Greeks first came upon a land where the palm-tree was not only indigenous, but formed a leading and striking characteristic, everywhere along the low sandy shore lifting its tuft of feathery leaves into the bright blue sky, high above the undergrowth of fig, and pomegranate, and alive.

Hence they called the tract Phoenicia, or "the Land of Palms;" and the people who inhabited it the Phoenicians, or "the Palm-tree people." The term was from the first applied with a good deal of vagueness.

It was probably originally given to the region opposite Cyprus, from Gabala in the north--now Jebili--to Antaradus (Tortosa) and Marathus (Amrith) towards the south, where the palm-tree was first seen growing in rich abundance.

The palm is the numismatic emblem of Aradus,[11] and though not now very frequent in the region which Strabo calls "the Aradian coast-tract,"[12] must anciently have been among its chief ornaments.