In the celebrated 27th chapter of Ezekiel, which describes the commerce of Tyre when in the height of its glory, tin is only mentioned once as being imported along with silver, iron, and lead from Tarshish, _i.e._ from the emporium of Gades or Cadiz, to which it had doubtless been brought from Cornwall. The only other reference to tin is, that Javan, Tubal, and Meshech, _i.e._ the Ionians, and tribes of Asia Minor in the mountainous districts to the south of the Black Sea, traded with slaves and vessels of brass, and if brass meant bronze, this would imply a knowledge of tin. The only other considerable supply of tin which is certainly known came from the Etruscans, who worked extensive tin mines in Northern Italy. But the evidence of these does not go back farther than from 1000 to 1500 B.C., and it leaves untouched the question how Egypt and Chaldæa had obtained large stocks of bronze, certainly long before 5000 B.C.; and how they kept up these stocks for certainly more than 2000 years before the Phoenicians appeared on the scene to supply tin by maritime commerce. It is in some other direction that we must look, for it is certain that neither Egypt nor Chaldæa had any native sources of this metal. They must have imported, and that from a distance, either the manufactured bronze, or the tin with which to manufacture it themselves by alloying copper. The latter seems most probable, for the Egyptians worked the copper mines of Sinai from a very early date, and drew supplies of copper from Cyprus, which could only have been made useful by alloying it with tin, while if they imported all the immense quantity of bronze which they must have used, in the manufactured state, the pure copper would have been useless to them.