Phoenician art is intermediate between Egyptian and Assyrian. The color most prized in the art of Phoenicia was the rare and beautiful purple (properly crimson) dye used exclusively for the garments of royalty. For centuries the process of making this dye was lost, and even at the time of its highest fame it was familiar only to the maritime Canaanites, who procured the color from an animal juice of the murex, a shellfish. The shellfish and the dye were known to the ancients as _conchylium_. When Cleopatra, the famous Queen of Egypt, went to meet Cæsar for the first time, she knew that he would not allow her to enter his presence if recognized, and therefore she cleverly had herself carried into his palace wrapped in a rug of the finest texture. It may well be imagined that the unexpected disclosure of the charms of this subtle Egyptian shared largely in bringing the great Roman general into her toils. Besides Biblical writers, Homer, Æschylus, Plautus, Metellus Scipio, Horace, Pliny, Lucan, Josephus, Arrian, and Athenæus all speak of rugs. To persons interested in rugs the search for these allusions is a most fascinating occupation. The Egyptians bestowed the greatest care and patience upon the rugs they wove, as upon all else of their handiwork. They spread them before the images of their gods, and also on the ground for their sacred cattle to lie upon. They loved Nature intensely; like true lovers, they seemed to have reached her very heart, and they symbolized her works in their artistic designs. Even to this day many Oriental rugs have symbolic signs borrowed from the works of Nature. In design and color the rugs woven to-day in the Orient are similar to the Assyrian and Babylonian textile fabrics of 1000-607 B.C. (Fall of Nineveh) and 538 (Fall of Babylon). At that early period these were used for awnings and floor-coverings in the palaces of the Assyrian kings Sargon, Sennacherib, Esarhaddon, and Sardanapalus. The designs on the stone slab from the palace of Koyunjik, Nineveh, and on the door-sill from the palace at Khorsabad, are probably copied from rugs.