"Justin represents Tyre as having been founded a year before the Capture of Troy, thus apparently reducing by about 1,500 years the date assigned to it by the priests of the temple of Hercules. … Josephus places the settlement of Tyre 240 years before the building of Solomon's Temple. He refers no doubt to the same event as Justin, the occupation of the island by the Sidonians, as he cannot have been ignorant of the mention of Tyre in the Old Testament more than 240 years before Solomon. The date of the building of Solomon's Temple is itself disputed, estimates varying from 1012 B. C. to 969 B. C. … Tyre consisted of two parts, an island about three-quarters of a mile in length, separated from the mainland by a strait four stadia, about half a mile, in width at its northern end, and a town on the shore. The latter was distinguished as Palæ-Tyrus, or Ancient Tyre, and was the chief seat of the population, till the wars of the Assyrian monarchs against Phœnicia. It extended along the shore from the river Leontes in the north to the fountain of Rusel-Ain in the south, a distance of seven miles, great part of which would be suburb rather than city. Pliny, who wrote when its boundaries could still be traced, computes the circuit of Palæ-Tyrus and the island together at nineteen Roman miles, that of the island town being 22 stadia. … Though called Old Tyre, because it lay in ruins, when the younger city on the island was in the height of its prosperity, it was from the first connected with it; and the name of Tyre (Tsour), 'a rock,' would hardly be appropriate, except to the island. … It is probable that, from the first, the island, from the excellence of its natural harbour, was a naval station to the city on the mainland, and, as a place of security, the seat of the worship of the national deities, Astarte, Belus, Hercules. … The situation of Palæ-Tyrus was one of the most fertile spots on the coast of Phœnicia. The plain is here about five miles wide, the soil is dark, and the variety of its productions excited the wonder of the Crusaders. Near the southern extremity of the city was a fountain, which, communicating with some natural receptacle in the mountains above, poured forth copious and perennial streams of pure and cool water. An aqueduct distributed them through the town. … Whatever may have been the relative importance of Palæ-Tyrus and the island, previous to the great migration from Sidon, occasioned by the victory of the Ascalonites, there can be no doubt that from this time the population of the island greatly increased. The colonization of Gades took place about a century later. But we have no connected history of Tyre till near the age of Solomon." _J. Kenrick, Phœnicia: History, chapter 1._ See, also, PHŒNICIANS. TYRE: The founding of the colony of Carthage.