use in this island before the rise of the alphabetic writing. Further, since the Phenicians, as we shall see, set foot on the coast of Hellas from about the year 1200 B.C. onwards, we must place the foundation of the colonies on the coasts nearest them, the settlement in Cyprus, before this date, about the middle of the thirteenth century B.C. What population the Phenicians found on Cyprus it is not possible to discover. Herodotus tells us that the first inhabitants of the island were Ethiopians, according to the statements of the Cyprians. It is beyond a doubt that not Citium only, but the greater part of the cities of the island were founded by the Phenicians, and that the Phenician element became the ruling element of the whole island.[74] It is Belus who is said to have conquered Cyprus, and to whom the city of Citium is said to belong; _i.e._ Citium worshipped the god Baal. At Amathus, to the west of Citium, on the south coast of the island, which was called the oldest city on Cyprus, and which nevertheless bears a distinctly Semitic name (Hamath), Adonis and Ashera-Astarte were worshipped,[75] and these deities had also one of their oldest and most honoured seats of worship at Paphos (Pappa in the inscriptions), on the west coast. The Homeric poems represent Aphrodite as hastening to her altar at Paphos in Cyprus. Pausanias observes that the Aphrodite of Cyprus was a warlike Aphrodite,[76] and as the daughters of the Cyprians surrendered themselves to the foreign seamen in honour of this goddess,[77] it was the Astarte-Ashera of the Phenicians who was worshipped at Amathus and Paphos. The Zeus of the Cyprian city Salamis (Sillumi in the inscriptions of the Assyrians), to whom, according to the evidence of western writers, human sacrifices were offered, can only be Baal Moloch, the evil sun-god of the Phenicians. In the beginning of the tenth century B.C. the cities of Cyprus stood under the supremacy of the king of Tyre.[78] The island was of extraordinary fertility. The forests furnished wood for ship-building; the mountains concealed rich veins of the metal which has obtained the name of copper from this island.[79] Hence it was a very valuable acquisition, an essential strengthening of the power of Sidon in the older, and Tyre in the later, period.