coasts of England, in the Isles of Tin (the
Cassiterides). In every country they procured slaves. Sometimes they
bought them, as lately the slavers bought negroes on the coast of
Africa, for all the peoples of this time made commerce in slaves;
sometimes they swooped down on a coast, threw themselves on the women
and children and carried them off to be retained in their own cities
or to be sold abroad; for on occasion they were pirates and did not
scruple to plunder strangers.

=The Secrets Kept by the Phoenicians.=--The Phoenicians did not care to
have mariners of other peoples come into competition with them. On the
return from these far countries they concealed the road which they had
travelled. No one in antiquity knew where were the famous Isles of the
Cassiterides from which they got their tin. It was by chance that a
Greek ship discovered Spain, with which the Phoenicians had traded for
centuries. Carthage drowned the foreign merchants whom they found in
Sardinia or on the shore of Gibraltar. Once a Carthaginian
merchantman, seeing a strange ship following it, was run aground by
the pilot that the foreigner might not see where he was going.

=Colonies.=--In the countries where they traded, the Phoenicians
founded factories, or branch-houses. They were fortified posts on a
natural harbor. There they landed their merchandise, ordinarily
cloths, pottery, ornaments, and idols.[40] The natives brought down
their commodities and an exchange was made, just as now European
merchants do with the negroes of Africa. There were Phoenician markets
in Cyprus, in Egypt, and in all the then barbarous countries of the
Mediterranean--in Crete, Greece, Sicily, Africa, Malta, Sardinia, on
the coasts of Spain at Malaga and Cadiz, and perhaps in Gaul at
Monaco. Often around these Phoenician buildings the natives set up
their cabins and the mart became a city. The inhabitants adopted the
Phoenician gods, and even after the city had become Greek, the cult of
the dove-goddess was found there (as in Cythera), that of the god
Melkhart (as at Corinth), or of the god with the bull-face that
devours human victims (as in Crete).

=Influence of the Phoenicians.=--It is certain that the Phoenicians in
founding their trading stations cared only for their own interest. But
it came to pass that their colonies contributed to civilization. The
barbarians of the West received the cloths, the jewels, the utensils
of the peoples of the East who were