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They are laid without cement, like those of Aradus and Sidon, and recall the style of the Aradian builders, but are at once less massive and arranged with more skill. The breadth of the wall is about seven feet. At intervals it is flanked by square towers projecting from it, which are of even greater strength than the curtain between them, and which were carried up to a greater height.
The period which succeeds that of Egyptian preponderance in Western Asia may be distinguished as that of Sidonian ascendancy, or of such ascendancy slightly modified by an Aradian hegemony in the north over the settlements intervening between Mount Casius and the northern roots of Lebanon. During this period Sidon came to the front, alike in arts, in arms, and in navigation.
Hence they called the tract Phoenicia, or "the Land of Palms;" and the people who inhabited it the Phoenicians, or "the Palm-tree people." The term was from the first applied with a good deal of vagueness. The palm is the numismatic emblem of Aradus, and though not now very frequent in the region which Strabo calls "the Aradian coast-tract," must anciently have been among its chief ornaments.
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