=11. Relative insignificance of the commerce of the ancient empires. The Jews. The Phœnicians.=—In the Oriental states which we have hitherto considered, commerce never grew to a position of decisive importance in the national life, however great it may seem when we compare it with its meager beginnings. It served mainly the needs of luxury, and left untouched the economic position of the mass of the people. If we seek in the ancient Orient a people whose very existence depended on trade we must look further. We do not find the Jews to have been such a people, though we are accustomed nowadays to think of them as devoted largely to the pursuit of trade. The descriptions of the Bible show that they lived mainly a pastoral and agricultural life; and down to the time of the Roman Empire they counted for little in the world of commerce. A truly commercial people we do find, however, in near neighbors of the Jews, the Phœnicians, who inhabited a strip of land on the coast of Syria and Palestine, scarcely ten miles wide in most places and little over a hundred miles long. They could gain a scanty food supply from the level ground, and had timber in abundance on the mountains that separated them from the interior, but had to look to trade with other peoples for the means of growth which their home denied them. =12. Commerce of the Phœnicians. Beginnings of sea-trade.=—From raw materials which were in many cases procured from other countries they manufactured products which found a market throughout the ancient world. Their cloths and glass were celebrated; they exported large amounts of metal ware; and they had a monopoly of the purple dye extracted from a species of shell-fish, which was highly prized throughout this period. These wares were but a few of those in which they regularly traded; the reader who would have a more detailed account of the wares of Phœnician commerce, especially the imports, is advised to study the description in the Bible. They maintained an active exchange with peoples to the South, East, and North of them by caravan routes, while they were the first people of antiquity to secure such mastery over the sea that it could be made the medium of regular and extensive transportation. The beginning of these sea voyages is lost in the obscurity of the past. We know that they were highly developed by 1500 B.C., when Sidon was the leading Phœnician city, and that they did not cease to extend when the primacy of the Phœnician cities passed to Tyre. The Phœnicians taught the art of navigation to the ancient world. Their ships were long the accepted models of construction, and the Greeks learned from them to direct their course at night by the North, or, as the Greeks called it, the Phœnician star.