the Phoenicians from other sea-cities also created trading depôts on the Cyrenaic and Tripolitan coast, thus coming into contact with the Egyptians. But from the seventeenth to the twelfth century before Christ the Phoenicians had been under the overlordship of Egypt; and it was only when the Egyptian power began to weaken that the great ships built at Sidon and at Tyre from the timber of Cyprus and the Lebanon dared to found African colonies immediately to the westward of Egypt. Long afterwards, in the days when the strength of the Phoenicians was itself to decline in the grip of the Assyrian kings, these bold navigators hired themselves and their ships to the rulers of Egypt for naval transport and geographical discovery. In about 600 B.C., according to the story of Herodotos, the last but three of the native Egyptian Pharaohs, Niku (Necho) II, summoned a captain of the Phoenicians whose ships were stationed in the Gulf of Suez (perhaps conveyed thither from the Mediterranean through some canal between the Nile and the Bitter Lakes), and despatched him in command of an expedition of two or three vessels, with the order to attempt to sail round the peninsular continent of Africa and through the Straits of Gibraltar back to the Nile Delta. Very likely the ship-masters from South Arabia had already spread the news that the east coast of Africa trended steadily westwards beyond the equator, and had guessed that Africa was circumnavigable from the land of the negroes on the east back to that land of black men on the west of which the Carthaginians were beginning to spread some dim foreknowledge from their journeys southward along the Morocco and Sahara coasts. This Phoenician expedition accordingly set out, and in about three years’ time had circumnavigated Africa and re-entered the Mediterranean through the strait which separates Morocco from Spain. Somewhere off the southern coast of Africa they had landed, sown grain and waited in the southern summer (our winter) till it matured and ripened. Then they reaped their harvest and continued the voyage, not willingly losing sight of the coast, no doubt, yet landing as seldom as possible (we may imagine) in their justifiable terror of savage tribes and fierce wild beasts. The account given in Herodotos is very bare. Only one experience of these Phoenician pioneers is given, other than the corn-growing; they are said during the (northern) summer season to have had the sun on their right hand—that is to say, in the north of the sky at mid-day. This observation shows at any rate that these Phoenicians had sailed far enough south to have reached the south temperate zone wherein the sun would always be in the northern sky at mid-day; while the ship’s general east-to-west course round the southern extremity of Africa would place the sun on the right hand of a spectator facing the west.