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The men who fall on their faces before the envoys of Assar may not say to me, 'Sign and Thou wilt get! Stupid Phoenician rats, who steal into the pharaoh's palace and look on it as their own den a moment later!" The longer he thought over it the more precisely he recalled the bearing of Hiram and Dagon, the greater the auger that seized him,

It is on this account that the language lends itself so well to poetical declamation, of which these remarkable people are very fond. The Zu-Vendi alphabet seems, Sir henry says, to be derived, like every other known system of letters, from a Phoenician source, and therefore more remotely still from the ancient Egyptian hieratic writing.

That the Phoenician stock did not even in Carthage renounce its policy of passiveness, there is no lack of evidence to prove.

Cleopatra's ships are said to have been derived from the Cilician forests, which Antony made over to her for the purpose. Other Phoenician settlements upon the Cilician coast were, it is probable, Soli, Celenderis, and Nagidus. Pursuing their way westward, in search of new abodes, the emigrants would pass along the coast, first of Pamphylia and then of Lycia.

Arka, called Irqat in the Tel el-Amarna tablets, and now known as Tel 'Arqa, was one of the inland cities of Phoenicia, in the mountains between the Orontes and the sea. It was at the time an important Phoenician fortress, "perched like a bird upon the rock," and was under the control of the governor of Gebal.

Of the numerous small country towns some every year fell away from the Romans, and had to be laboriously wrested afresh from the Phoenician grasp; while in the coast fortresses the Carthaginians maintained themselves without challenge, particularly in their headquarters of Panormus and in their new stronghold of Drepana, to which, on account of its easier defence by sea, Hamilcar had transferred the inhabitants of Eryx.

There is also at the Piraeus an altar, which a Phoenician must have erected and dedicated to a Phoenician god, whom he worshipped on Attic soil apparently without let or hindrance. The god's name is given as "Askum-Adar," a form which does not elsewhere recur, but which is thought to designate the god elsewhere called Sakon, who corresponded to the Grecian Hermes.

They felt a far keener regret when they not merely had to abandon the hope of monopolizing all the sea-routes between the eastern and the western Mediterranean just as that hope seemed on the eve of fulfilment but also saw their whole system of commercial policy broken up, the south-western basin of the Mediterranean, which they had hitherto exclusively commanded, converted since the loss of Sicily into an open thoroughfare for all nations, and the commerce of Italy rendered completely independent of the Phoenician.

CARTHAGINIAN HISTORY. The most prominent of all the Phoenician settlements was Carthage. It had remarkable advantages of situation. Its harbor was sufficient for the anchorage of the largest vessels, and it had a fertile territory around it. These circumstances, in conjunction with the energy of its inhabitants, placed it at the head of the Phoenician colonies.

Those fairy gifts, people said, were given to the maidens by the Wine God, Dionysus, and by the Goddess of Corn, Demeter. Now corn, and wine, and oil were sorely needed by the Greeks, who were tired of paying much gold and bronze to the Phoenician merchants for their supplies.