The coastland was known to the Greeks and Romans as Phoenicia, "the land of the palm." But its own inhabitants called it Canaan, "the lowlands." It included not only the fringe of cultivated land by the sea-shore, but the western slopes of the Lebanon as well. Phoenician colonies and outposts had been planted inland, far away from the coast, as at Laish, the future Dan, where "the people dwelt careless," though "they were far away from the Sidonians," or at Zemar (the modern Sumra) and Arka (still called by the same name). The territory of the Phoenicians stretched southward as far as Dor (now Tanturah), where it met the advance guard of the Philistines. Such was Palestine, the promised home of Israel. It was a land of rugged and picturesque mountains, interspersed with a few tracts of fertile country, shut in between the sea and the ravine of the Jordan, and falling away into the waterless desert of the south. It was, too, a land of small extent, hardly more than one hundred and sixty miles in length and sixty miles in width. And even this amount of territory was possessed by the Israelites only during the reigns of David and Solomon. The sea-coast with its harbours was in the hands of the Phoenicians and the Philistines, and though the Philistines at one time owned an unwilling allegiance to the Jewish king, the Phoenicians preserved their independence, and even Solomon had to find harbours for his merchantmen, not on the coast of his own native kingdom, but in the distant Edomite ports of Eloth and Ezion-geber, in the Gulf of Aqabah. With the loss of Edom Judah ceased to have a foreign trade. The Negeb, or desert of the south, was then, what it still is, the haunt of robbers and marauders. The Beduin of to-day are the Amalekites of Old Testament history; and then, as now, they infested the southern frontier of Judah, wasting and robbing the fields of the husbandman, and allying themselves with every invader who came from the south, Saul, indeed, punished them, as Romans and Turks have punished them since; but the lesson is remembered only for a short while: when the strong hand is removed, the "sons of the desert" return again like the locusts to their prey.