The Phoenician trade with Babylonia and Assyria was carried on probably by caravans, which traversed the Syrian desert by way of Tadmor or Palmyra, and struck the Euphrates about Circesium. Here the route divided, passing to Babylon southwards along the course of the great river, and to Nineveh eastwards by way of the Khabour and the Sinjar mountain-range. Both countries seem to have supplied the Phoenicians with fabrics of extraordinary value, rich in a peculiar embroidery, and deemed so precious that they were packed in chests of cedar-wood, which the Phoenician merchants must have brought with them from Lebanon.[977] The wares furnished by Assyria were in some cases exported to Greece,[978] while no doubt in others they were intended for home consumption. They included cylinders in rock crystal, jasper, hematite, steatite, and other materials, which may sometimes have found purchasers in Phoenicia Proper, but appear to have been specially affected by the Phoenician colonists in Cyprus.[979] On her part Phoenicia must have imported into Assyria and Babylonia the tin which was a necessary element in their bronze; and they seem also to have found a market in Assyria for their own most valuable and artistic bronzes, the exquisite embossed pateræ which are among the most precious of the treasures brought by Sir Austen Layard from Nineveh.[980] The nature of the Phoenician trade with Upper Mesopotamia is unknown to us; and it is not impossible that their merchants visited Haran,[981] rather because it lay on the route which they had to follow in order to reach Armenia than because it possessed in itself any special attraction for them. Gall-nuts and manna are almost the only products for which the region is celebrated; and of these Phoenicia herself produced the one, while she probably did not need the other. But the natural route to Armenia was by way of the Coelesyrian valley, Aleppo and Carchemish, to Haran, and thence by Amida or Diarbekr to Van, which was the capital of Armenia in the early times. Armenia supplied the Phoenicians with “horses of common and of noble breeds,”[982] and also with mules.[983] Strabo says that it was a country exceedingly well adapted for the breeding of the horse,[984] and even notes the two qualities of the animal that it produced, one of which he calls “Nisæan,” though the true “Nisæan plain” was in Media. So large was the number of colts bred each year, and so highly were they valued, that, under the Persian monarchy the Great King exacted from the province, as a regular item of its tribute, no fewer than twenty thousand of them annually.[985] Armenian mules seem not to be mentioned by any writer besides Ezekiel; but mules were esteemed throughout the East in antiquity,[986] and no country would have been more likely to breed them than the mountain tract of Armenia, the Switzerland of Western Asia, where such surefooted animals would be especially needed.