The Phœnicians left their mark upon the world. For many generations the Mediterranean was a ‘Phœnician lake,’ and they could boast of a general θαλασσοκρατία. This enabled their merchants and navigators to diffuse civilisation from Egypt and Assyria to the farthest West. They were the carriers of the world. Their ‘round ships’ or merchantmen (γαυλοί) and their long war-ships pushed far into the Northern and Southern Atlantic. The topographical lists of Thut-mes III. show a thickly inhabited country (Brugsch, i. 350–51), and, as Mariette Pasha says, a map of Canaan, composed of some hundred and fifteen hieroglyphic names, ‘is a synoptical table of the “Promised Land,” made two hundred and seventy years before the exodus of Moses.’ Among the settlements are Debekhu, now Baalbak, the Baal-city;[567] Tum-sakhu, the gate or shrine of Tum, the setting sun, now Damascus; Biarut (_hod._ Bayrut); Keriman or Mount Carmel and Iopoo, Joppa, or Jaffa. We find the Jordan in the Egyptian Iarutana, and Shabatuan is the Sabbaticus River of Pliny and Josephus.[568] The chief cities of Phœnicia, Tyre and Sidon, were of unexampled splendour, depôts of the wealth of the East, as early as B.C. 1500. The arch-Homerid, who curiously enough never mentions Tyre, attributes all the finest works of art either to the Sidonians or to the gods. The eastern coast of the ‘Inner Sea’ was a centre of civilisation, a school of high culture which added beauty to necessary and useful technical products; and its arts and handicrafts became patterns to the world, even to Egypt, the mother. We have only a few inscriptions to remind us of its literature; but nothing can be more touching or more poetical than the epitaph of Eshmunazar, King of the Sidonians:[569]—‘Deprived of my fruit of life, my wise and valiant sons; widowed, the child of solitude, I lie in this tomb, in this grave, in the place which I built,’ &c. Phœnicia, too, gave not only her letters but her gods to Greece and Rome. Mulciber, for instance, was evidently Malik Kabir, the ‘Great King,’ father of the Cabiri, the patron-saints of Palm-land and the Pelasgi; this deity corresponded with the Egyptian Ptah, the Demiurgus-god denoted by the Scarabæus, a symbol as common in Phœnicia as in Nile-land. Melkarth,[570] again, whom Nonnius makes the Babylonian Sun, was the city-god; farther west he became Herakles, the Etruscan Erkle: the latter was an important commercial personage in Phœnicia, for his dog (according to the Greeks) discovered the murex. Melkarth is the Ourshol of Selden (‘De Diis Syriis’), who derives the word from ‘Ur,’ light.[571]