there was abundance of house cattle and sheep, which produced excellent wool, of corn and wine. The coast of the shore beyond the pillars was covered with shell-fish and large purple-fish, and the sea was rich in fish (the tunnies and the Tartessian murena so much sought after in antiquity),[178] which the ebb and flow of the tide brought up to the beach. Corn, wine, the best oil, wax, honey, pitch and cinnabar were exported from this fortunate land.[179] If the Phenicians were able in the thirteenth century to settle upon Cyprus and Rhodes, the islands of the Ægean and the coasts of Hellas, their population must have been numerous, their industry active, their trade lucrative. That subsequently in the twelfth century they also took into possession the coasts of Sicily, Sardinia and North Africa by means of their colonies is a proof that the request for the raw products and metals of the West was very lively and increasing in Syria and in Egypt, in Assyria and Babylonia. The market of these lands must have been very remunerative to the Phenicians in order to induce them to make their discoveries, their distant voyages and remote settlements. If the Phenicians about the year 1100 B.C. were in a position to discover the straits of Gibraltar, the fact shows us that they must have practised navigation for a long time. The horizon of the Greek mariner ended even in the ninth century in the waters of Sicily, and in the fifth century B.C. the voyage of a Greek ship from the Syrian coast to the pillars of Heracles occupied 80 days.[180] After the founding of Gades the Phenicians ruled over the whole length of the Mediterranean by their harbour fortresses and factories. Their ships crossed the long basin in every direction, and everywhere they found harbours of safety. They showed themselves no less apt and inventive in the arts of navigation than the Babylonians had shown themselves in technical inventions and astronomy; they were bolder and more enterprising than the Assyrians in the campaigns which the latter attempted at the time when the Phenicians were building Gades; they were more venturesome and enduring on the water than their tribesmen the Arabians on the sandy sea of the desert. In the possession of the ancient civilisation of the East their mariners and merchants presented the same contrast to the Thracians and Hellenes, the Sicels, the Libyans and Iberians which the Portuguese and the Spaniards presented 2500 years later to the tribes of America. FOOTNOTES: [63] Robinson, "Palestine," 3, 710. [64] Tac. "Hist." 5, 6. [65] Rénan, "Mission de Phénicie," p. 836. [66] Vol. i. pp. 344, 345. [67] Vol. i. p. 151. [68] Vol. i. p. 153. [69] Vol. i. p. 344. [70] The legend runs, "From the Sidonians, Mother of Kamb, Ippo, Kith(?), Sor," Movers, "Phoeniz." 2, 134. [71] Isaiah xxiii. 1, 19; Jeremiah ii. 10; Ezekiel xxvii. 6; Joseph. "Antiq." 1, 6, 1. [72] Virgil, "Æn." 1, 619, 620. [73] Brandis, "Monatsberichte Berl. Akad." 1873, s. 645 ff.