The Phenician settlers on the coast of Spain became gradually more and more numerous, and appear to have been distributed, either in separate townships or intermingled with the native population, between the mouth of the Anas (Guadiana) and the town of Malaka (Malaga) on the Mediterranean. Unfortunately, we are very little informed about their precise localities and details, but we find no information of Phenician settlements on the Mediterranean coast of Spain northward of Malaka; for Carthagena, or New Carthage, was a Carthaginian settlement, founded only in the third century B. C., after the first Punic war.[523] The Greek word Phenicians being used to signify as well the inhabitants of Carthage as those of Tyre and Sidon, it is not easy to distinguish what belongs to each of them; nevertheless, we can discern a great and important difference in the character of their establishments, especially in Iberia. The Carthaginians combined with their commercial projects large schemes of conquest and empire: it is thus that the independent Phenician establishments in and near the gulf of Tunis, in Africa, were reduced to dependence upon them,—while many new small townships, direct from Carthage itself, were planted on the Mediterranean coast of Africa, and the whole of that coast from the great Syrtis westward to the Pillars of Hêraklês (strait of Gibraltar) is described as their territory in the Periplus of Skylax (B. C. 360). In Iberia, during the third century B. C., they maintained large armies,[524] constrained the inland tribes to subjection, and acquired a dominion which nothing but the superior force of Rome prevented from being durable: in Sicily, also, the resistance of the Greeks prevented a similar consummation. But the foreign settlements of Tyre and Sidon were formed with views purely commercial. In the region of Tartêssus as well as in the western coast of Africa outside of the strait of Gibraltar, we hear only of pacific interchange and metallurgy; and the number of Phenicians who acquired gradually settlements in the interior was so great, that Strabo describes these towns—not less than two hundred in number—as altogether Phenicized.[525] In his time, the circumstances favorable to new Phenician emigrations had been long past and gone, and there can be little hesitation in ascribing the preponderance, which this foreign element had then acquired, to a period several centuries earlier, beginning at a time when Tyre and Sidon enjoyed both undisputed autonomy at home, and the entire monopoly of Iberian commerce, without interference from the Greeks. [523] Strabo, iii, pp. 156, 158, 161; Polybius, iii, 10, 3-10. [524] Polyb. i, 10; ii, 1. [525] Strabo, iii, pp. 141-150. Οὗτοι γὰρ Φοίνιξιν οὕτως ἐγένοντο ὑποχείριοι, ὥστε τὰς πλείους τῶν ἐν τῇ Τουρδιτανίᾳ πολέων καὶ τῶν πλήσιον τόπων ὑπ᾽ ἐκείνων ~νῦν~ οἰκεῖσθαι.