larly suitable for the manufacture of glass; their bays abounded in species of fish which produced a fine purple dye—the celebrated Tyrian purple of antiquity; and in various parts of the country there were excellent mines of iron and copper. It was, in fact, essential for the general interests of the race that the people inhabiting that portion of the Mediterranean coasts should devote themselves to commerce. In anticipation of this, as it might seem, the mountains of Libanus, which separated the narrow Ph[oe]nician territory from Syria, were stocked with the best timber, which, transported over the short distance which intervened between these mountains and the sea, abundantly supplied the demands of the Ph[oe]nician dockyards. There was something in the Ph[oe]nician character, also, which suited the requirements of their geographical position. Skillful, enterprising, griping in their desire for wealth, and in other respects resembling much their neighbors the Jews, to whom they were allied in race, and whose language was radically identical with their own—theirs was essentially the merchant type of character.
Standing as the Ph[oe]nicians did as the people by whom the exchange between the East and the West was managed, a complete view of their life and manner of activity should embrace first, their relations with the East—that is, their overland trade with Assyria, Arabia, Egypt, Persia, and India; secondly, their relations with the West—that is, their maritime trade with the various nations of the Mediterranean and Atlantic coasts; and thirdly, the peculiar character of mind which either accompanied or resulted from the consciousness of such a position in the great family of mankind.
With regard to the overland trade of the Ph[oe]nicians with the Eastern countries, little requires to be said except that it was one attended with great risks—the journey of a caravan across the deserts, and through the roaming tribes which separated Ph[oe]nicia from interior Asia, being a more serious enterprise than a long sea voyage. It is probable that the Ph[oe]nicians managed this commerce not in their own persons, but as wealthy speculative merchants, dealing in a skillful manner with the native Egyptian, Assyrian, or Arabian caravan-proprietors, with whom they maintained an understood connection. At the same time it is likely that they stimulated and regulated the Eastern commerce, by means of Ph[oe]nician agents or emissaries despatched into the interior with general instructions, just as in later times European agents were often despatched into the interior of Africa to direct the movements of native merchants. It was in their maritime trade with the West, however, that the Ph[oe]nicians chiefly exhibited the resources of their own character. Shipping the Oriental commodities, as well as their native products, at Tyre or Sidon, they carried them to all the coasts of the Mediterranean as far as Spain, selling them there at immense profit, and returning with freights of Western goods. With some of the nations of the Mediterranean their intercourse would be that of one civilized nation with another; with others, and especially with those of the West, it must have been an intercourse similar to that of a British ship with those rude islanders who exchange their valuable products for nails, bits of looking-glass, and other trifles. Whether their customers were civilized or savage, however, the Ph[oe]nicians reaped profits from them. Their aim was to monopolise the commerce of the Mediterranean. 'If at any time,' it is said, 'their ships bound on a voyage observed
