About the beginning of the seventh century before Christ the Phoenicians had reached the summit of their power on the seas. Their extraordinary wealth tempted the king of Assyria, in 725 B.C., to cross the mountain barrier with a great army. He had no difficulty in overrunning the country, but the inhabitants fled to their colonies. The great city of Tyre, being on an island, defied the invader, and finally the Assyrian king gave up and withdrew to his own country. Having realized at great cost that he could not subdue the Phoenicians without a navy, he set about finding one. By means of bribes and threats he managed to seduce three Phoenician cities to his side. These furnished him sixty ships officered by Phoenicians, but manned by Assyrian crews. With this fleet an attack was made on Tyre, but such was the contempt felt by the Tyrians for their enemy that they held only twelve ships for defense. These twelve went out against the sixty, utterly routed them, and took 500 prisoners. For five years longer the Assyrian king maintained a siege of Tyre from the mainland, attempting to keep the city from its source of fresh water, but as the Tyrians had free command of the sea, they had no difficulty in getting supplies of all kinds from their colonies. At the end of five years the Assyrians again returned home, defeated by the Phoenician control of the sea. When, twenty years later, Phoenicia was subjugated by Assyria, it was due to the lack of union among the scattered cities and colonies of the great sea empire. Widely separated, governed by their own princes, the individual colonies had too little sense of loyalty for the mother country. Each had its own fleets and its own interests; in consequence an Assyrian fleet was able to destroy the Phoenician fleets in detail. From this point till the rise of Athens as a sea power, the fleets of Phoenicia still controlled the sea, but they served the plans of conquest of alien rulers. As a dependency of Persia, Phoenicia enabled Cambyses to conquer Egypt. However, when the Phoenician fleet was ordered to subjugate Carthage, already a strong power in the west, the Phoenicians refused on the ground of the kinship between Carthage and Phoenicia. And the help of Phoenicia was so essential to the Persian monarch that he countermanded the order. Indeed the relation of Phoenicia to Persia amounted to something more nearly like that of an ally than a conquered province, for it was to the interests of Persia to keep the Phoenicians happy and loyal. When, in 498 B.C., the Greeks of Asia and the neighboring islands revolted, it was due chiefly to the loyalty of the Phoenicians that the Persian empire was saved. Thereafter, the Persian yoke was fastened on the Asiatic Greeks, and any prospect of a Greek civilization developing on the eastern shore of the AEgean was destroyed. [Illustration: GREEK WAR GALLEY From Torr, _Ancient Ships_.]