There is scarcely any side of civilisation, any forms of technical art, the invention of which was not ascribed by the Greeks to the Phenicians. They were nearly all made known to the Greeks through the Phenicians; more especially the building of walls and fortresses, mining, the alphabet, astronomy, numbers, mathematics, navigation, together with a great variety of applications of technical skill. If the discovery of alphabetic writing belongs to the Phenicians, the Babylonians were the instructors of the Phenicians in astronomy as well as in fixing measures and weights (I. 305). Yet this is no reason for contesting the statement of Strabo that the Sidonians were "eager inquirers into the knowledge of the stars and of numbers, to which they were led by navigation by night and the art of calculation."[518] In the same way the technical discoveries ascribed by the Greeks to the Phenicians were not all made in their cities; they carried on with vigour and skill what grew up independently among them as well as what they learnt from others. The making of glass was undoubtedly older in Egypt than in Phoenicia (I. 224). Egypt also practised work in metals before Phoenicia. Snefru and Chufu made themselves masters of the copper mines of the peninsula of Sinai before the year 3000 B.C. (I. 95), while the Phenicians can hardly have occupied the copper island off their coast (Cyprus) before the middle of the thirteenth century B.C. Artistic weaving and embroidery were certainly practised at a more ancient date in Babylonia than in the cities of the Phenicians. But all these branches of industry were carried on with success by the Phenicians. Sidon furnished excellent works in glass, which were accounted the best even down to a late period of antiquity. The dunes on the coast between Acco and Tyre, where is the mouth of the glass-river (Sihor Libnath),[519] provided the Phenician manufacturers with the earth necessary for the manufacture of glass. It was maintained that the most beautiful glass was cast in Sarepta (Zarpath, _i.e._ melting), a city on the coast between Sidon and Tyre.[520]