Though the invincible industry and enterprise of the Phenicians maintained them as a people of importance down to the period of the Roman empire, yet the period of their widest range and greatest efficiency is to be sought much earlier,—anterior to 700 B. C. In these remote times they and their colonists were the exclusive navigators of the Mediterranean: the rise of the Greek maritime settlements banished their commerce to a great degree from the Ægean sea, and embarrassed it even in the more westerly waters. Their colonial establishments were formed in Africa, Sicily, Sardinia, the Balearic Isles, and Spain: the greatness as well as the antiquity of Carthage, Utica, and Gadês, attest the long-sighted plans of Phenician traders, even in days anterior to the 1st Olympiad. We trace the wealth and industry of Tyre, and the distant navigation of her vessels through the Red sea and along the coast of Arabia, back to the days of David and Solomon. And as neither Egyptians, Assyrians, Persians, nor Indians, addressed themselves to a seafaring life, so it seems that both the importation and the distribution of the products of India and Arabia into Western Asia and Europe, was performed by the Idumæan Arabs, between Petra and the Red sea,—by the Arabs of Gerrha on the Persian gulf, joined as they were in later times by a body of Chaldæan exiles from Babylonia,—and by the more enterprising Phenicians of Tyre and Sidon in these two seas as well as in the Mediterranean.[514] [514] See Ritter, Erdkunde von Asien, West-Asien, Buch iii, Abtheilung iii, Abschnitt i, s. 29, p. 50.