The commerce of the Phenician cities comprised Egypt, Babylonia, and Assyria, it touched Mesopotamia and Armenia, the lands of the Moschi and Tibarenes, the silver and copper mines of the Chalybes on the Black Sea.[540] When on the opening of the communication by the Red Sea with South Arabia and the countries beyond, it gained the widest extent to the south and east, it had for a whole century past traversed the entire length of the Mediterranean to the Straits of Gibraltar. We saw above how the Phenicians steered to Cyprus, Rhodes, Crete, to the Ægean Sea, to the coasts of Hellas, in order to barter or dig up minerals, to collect purple-fish for their coloured stuffs, and how after the middle of the thirteenth century they began to plant settlements on these coasts. The request for minerals must have been so strongly felt in their own cities, in Egypt and the lands of the Euphrates, in the course of the twelfth century, that the ships of the Phenicians went farther and farther to the west in search of them, that Sicily, Sardinia, and Corsica were reached and then colonised by them. At the same time Ityke and Old Hippo were built on the coast of Africa. These supplied saltpetre, alum, and salt, skins of lions and panthers, horns of buffalos, ostrich eggs and feathers, slaves and ivory to the mother-cities. After this, about the year 1100 B.C., Gades was built on the shore of the Atlantic Ocean. The trade of the Phenicians now brought not only the products of Syria and the manufactures of their cities to Egypt and Babylonia; it was not merely a middle trade between those two lands, nor merely an independent trade and middle trade between South Arabia and the civilised countries; it mediated now between the East and the West, the products and manufactures of the near and distant East, and the natural products of the near and distant West, between the ancient civilisation of the East and the young life of the nations of the West. It was above all the metals of the West, the gold of the Thracian, the copper of the Italian islands, the silver of Tartessus, which the ships of the Phenicians carried into the harbours of the mother-cities: the nations of the West received in return weapons, and metal vases, ornaments, variegated cloths, and purple garments. The works of Babylonian and Egyptian style, the works which are found in the tombs of Caere, Clusium, Alsium, at Corneto and Praeneste, adorned in types at once Egyptian and Babylonian-Assyrian, like the implements and ornaments found in the tombs of Spata and Mycenæ, can only have come into the possession of the Etruscans, Latins, and Lucanians from intercourse with the Phenicians, the Phenician colonies of Sicily, or from the trade with Carthage.[541]