The rough material required by Babylonian industry was supplied in the first place by the Arabs, who exchanged their animals, skins, and wool for corn and weapons. Wine, and more especially wood, of which there was none in Babylonia, were brought by the Armenians from their valleys in the north down the Euphrates to Babylon.[424] Before 1500 B.C. the commerce of the Arabs brought the products of South Arabia, the spices of Yemen, and even the products and manufactures of India, especially their silks, which reached the coasts of Southern Arabia (see below), to Babylon. The Babylonians required the perfumes of Arabia and India to prepare their ointments. In order to prepare the best or royal ointment, twenty-five of the most precious perfumes were mixed together.[425] When the cities of Phenicia became great centres of trade which carried the wares of Babylonia by sea to the West in order to obtain copper in exchange, the trade between Babylonia and Syria must have become more lively still. It was the ships of the Phenicians which brought the cubic measure, and the weights, and the cubit of Babylonia to the shores of Greece, and caused them to be adopted there. In the ninth or eighth century B.C. the Greeks completely dropped their old measures of length and superficies, and fixed their stadium at 360 Babylonian cubits, their plethrum at the length and the square of sixty Babylonian cubits, and regulated the Greek foot by the Babylonian at a measure from 308 to 315 millimeters, and made their cubit equal to one and a half of these feet.[426] The light Babylonian talent became known in Greece under the name of the Euboeic talent, while the Greek city Phocæa, on the shores of Asia Minor, struck the oldest Greek coin, the Phocæan stater, at the value of a fiftieth of the heavy gold mina of Babylon (1-3/5 pounds). Chios, Clazomenæ, and Lampsacus followed the heavy Syrian silver talent in their coinage; and lastly, Croesus made his gold stater equal to the fiftieth part of the mina of the light Babylonian gold talent (50-1/2 pounds), and his silver stater equal to the fiftieth part of the mina of the Babylonian silver talent of 67-1/3 pounds.[427] FOOTNOTES: [401] H. Rawlinson, "Journ. Asiat. Soc." 1861, 18, 2 ff.