With Hecatæus of Miletus Cadmus passes as the discoverer of letters; according to others he also discovered the making of iron armour and the art of mining.[87] The direction of the Phenician settlements, which proceeds in the Ægean sea from S.E. to N.W., cannot be mistaken in these legends. First Rhodes, then the Cyclades, then the islands on the Thracian coast, Samothrace and Thasos, were colonised; and at length, on the strait of Euboea, the mainland of Hellas was trodden by the Phenicians, who are said to have gained precisely from this point a deep-reaching influence over the Hellenes. The legend of Cadmus goes far back among the Greeks. In the Homeric poems the inhabitants of Thebes are "Cadmeians." The Thebaid praised "the divine wisdom of Cadmus;" in the poems of Hesiod he leads home Harmonia, "the daughter of Ares and Aphrodite," and Pindar describes how the Muses sang for "the divine Cadmus, the wealthiest of mortals, when in seven-gated Thebes he led the ox-eyed Harmonia to the bridal-bed."[88] Agenor, the father of Cadmus, is a name which the Greeks have given to the Baal of the Phenicians.[89] Cadmus himself, the wealthiest of mortals, who leads home the daughter of a god and a goddess,--who celebrates the first marriage at which the gods assemble, bring gifts and sing,--whose wife was worshipped as the protecting goddess of Thebes,[90]--whose daughters, Ino, Leucothea and Semele, are divine creatures, whom Zeus leads to the Elysian fields,[91]--can only be a god. He seeks the lost Europa, and is to follow the cow which bears the sign of the full moon. We know the moon-goddess of the Phenicians, who bears the crescent moon and cow's horns, the horned Astarte, who wears a cow's head, the goddess of battle and sensual desire, and thus the daughter of Ares and Aphrodite. "The great temple of Astarte at Sidon," so we find in the book of the Syrian goddess, "belongs, as the Sidonians say, to Astarte; but a priest told me that it was a temple of Europa, the sister of Cadmus." The meaning of the word Europa has been discussed previously (I. 371). Cadmus, who seeks the lost moon-goddess, who at length finds and overcomes her, and celebrates with her the holy marriage, is the Baal Melkarth of the Phenicians. The death-bringing Istar-Astarte is changed into Bilit-Ashera, into the fruit-giving goddess;[92] the gloomy Europa changes into Harmonia, the goddess of union, birth and increase, yet not without leaving to her descendants deadly gifts. It is the myth of Melkarth and Astarte which the Greeks present to us in the story of Cadmus; with this myth they have connected the foundation of the Phenician settlements in Rhodes, Thera, Samothrace, Thasos and Boeotia; they have changed it into the foundation of these colonies. The name Cadmus means the man of the East; to the Hebrews the Arabs who dwelt to the east of them were known as Beni Kedem, _i.e._ sons of the East.[93] To the Greeks the Phenicians were