The other fact to which I allude is the existence of pottery of the same material and pattern on all the prehistoric sites of the Greek world, however widely separated they may be. We find it, for instance, at Mykenae and Tiryns, at Tanagra and Athens, in Rhodes, in Cyprus, and in Thera, while I picked up specimens of it in the neighbourhood of the Treasury of Minyas and on the site of the Acropolis at Orchomenus. The clay of which it is composed is of a drab colour, derived, perhaps in all instances, from the volcanic soil of Thera and Melos, and it is ornamented with geometrical and other patterns in black and maroon-red. After a time the patterns become more complicated and artistic; flowers, animal forms, and eventually human figures, take the place of simple lines, and the pottery gradually passes into that known as Corinthian or Phoeniko-Greek. It needs but little experience to distinguish at a glance this early pottery from the red ware of the later Hellenic period. Phoenicia, Keft as it was called by the Egyptians, had been brought into relation with the monarchy of the Nile at a remote date, and among the Semitic settlers in the Delta or "Isle of Caphtor" must have been natives of Sidon and the neighbouring towns. After the expulsion of the Hyksos, the Pharaohs of the eighteenth and nineteenth dynasties carried their arms as far as Mesopotamia and placed Egyptian garrisons in Palestine. A tomb-painting of Thothmes III. represents the Kefa or Phoenicians, clad in richly-embroidered kilts and buskins, and bringing their tribute of gold and silver vases and earthenware cups, some in the shape of animals like the vases found at Mykenae and elsewhere. Phoenicia, it would seem, was already celebrated for its goldsmiths' and potters' work, and the ivory the Kefa are sometimes made to carry shows that their commerce must have extended far to the east. As early as the sixteenth century B.C., therefore, we may conclude that the Phoenicians were a great commercial people, trading between Assyria and Egypt and possessed of a considerable amount of artistic skill. It is not likely that a people of this sort, who, as we know from other sources, carried on a large trade in slaves and purple, would have been still unacquainted with the seas and coasts of Greece where both slaves and the murex or purple-fish were most easily to be obtained. Though the Phoenician alphabet was unknown in Greece till the ninth century B.C., we have every reason to expect to find traces of Phoenician commerce and Phoenician influence there at least five centuries before. And such seems to be the case. The excavations carried on in Thera by MM. Fouque and Gorceix,[26] in Rhodes by Mr. Newton and Dr. Saltzmann, and in various other places such as Megara, Athens, and Melos, have been followed by the explorations of Dr. Schliemann at Hissarlik, Tiryns, and Mykenae, of General di Cesnola in Cyprus, and of the Archaeological Society of Athens at Tanagra and Spata.