Moreover, it is incredible that the Homeric Greeks, although acquainted with iron, had no share in the bronze-culture flourishing, then and previously, along the eastern shores of the Mediterranean. The persistence, anywhere in that region, of so late, and so extraordinarily developed a copper age, would indeed be a glaring anomaly. Already,[336] in the third millennium B.C., bronze tools were used in Egypt; and under the name _zabar_, whence the Arabic _zifr_, bronze was fabricated by Sumero-Accadian metallurgists at the very outset of Mesopotamian civilisation.[337] It was, in fact, probably from Mesopotamia that knowledge of the art and its attendant advantages was carried westward by Sidonian traffickers. Customers, then, who, like the Achæans, procured from them plentiful supplies of copper, and a smaller quantity of tin, could not long have remained ignorant of the vast superiority of their alloyed over their separate condition. The conclusion is inevitable that _chalkos_, like the corresponding Hebrew term _nechosheth_, and the Egyptian _chomt_, was a word of some elasticity of meaning, designating ordinarily bronze, but occasionally copper. The translation, it need hardly be said, of any of the three by the English _brass_ involves a gross error. Copper was not systematically alloyed with zinc until about the second century B.C.[338] Footnote 336: Perrot et Chipiez, _Histoire de l’Art_, t. i. p. 829; Beck (_Gesch. des Eisens_, p. 79) considers, however, that no Egyptian bronzes yet analysed go back beyond the eighteenth dynasty, about 1700 B.C. Footnote 337: Lenormant, _Trans. Soc. Bibl, Archæology_, vol. vi. p. 344. Footnote 338: Blümner, _Technologie_, Bd. iv. p. 199. But the bronze industry of old must have been seriously hampered in its growth and spread by the scarcity of tin. This metal is of most restricted distribution. The reservoirs of it held by the earth are few and far apart. The two principal, in Cornwall and the Malaccan peninsula respectively, are ‘wide as the poles asunder.’ Yet its discovery goes back to a hoar antiquity, and its prehistoric use was extensive and continuous. This wide dispersion of so scarce an article gives cogent proof of unexpectedly early intercourse between remote populations, and strikingly illustrates the effectiveness of those gradual processes of primitive trade by which desirable commodities permeated continents, and reached the least accessible markets.