When this sea was discovered to be a Way, the people of the junction land, the jumping-off place, the Phoeni cians, the inhabitants of the city states of Tyre and Sidon and the rest, took their place as an important factor in that little world of olden time. It is obviously to be expected that the form of civilization based on the sea should develop later than those we have hitherto spoken of. It is natural that these states should develop only after the Way was, recognized, and thereafter long time must have elapsed before the minds of men were stimulated to action by the ideas involved. By 1600 B.c., however, the Phoenicians were recognized as sea traders, so that long before this they must have begun their venturesome career. It is possible that originally they came, along the Way, from Babylonia, where they were familiar with boats and trade, where clear skies tempted to a study of astronomy, which was of incalculable service in guiding their ships by night. If this is so, their fresh surround ings stimulated them to advance in new directions. First Sidon and then Tyre took the lead among the cities scattered along the coast from which ships went out to barbarian lands ever more and more remote. It may have been that they went at first in search of the shellfish which were required in always increasing quantity to dye royal robes with Tyrian purple.
However that may be, search for the dye was not their only aim. Trade or commerce of any kind, so long as it repaid their trouble, was welcome, and that their trade might be conducted with greater security, colonies were established from end to end of the Mediterranean, so that by 1000 B.C. the Phoenician confederacy, though
loosely knit, formed a whole which had to be reckoned with. They ruled over very little land, it is true, for they were essentially traders, and traders do not require large areas of fertile land on which to grow their food; they can buy it with the profits of their business. Tyre, Sidon and Carthage dominated only small districts round them, and their territory was not, as was that of Egypt or Babylonia, a compact whole ; it was scattered over the coasts of the Mediterranean, which united those isolated lands into a power of a different order from any that had been before.
Not only was the rule of the Phoenicians a new thing, but they individually possessed moral qualities of a new kind., likewise bred into them by their surroundings. That barbarian markets continued open to them so long implies that their behaviour must have com manded respect. Trade is essentially peaceful; so much the Egyptians and Babylonians had learned. But the Phoenicians learned more : they learned to be brave, and they were no mere fighters like the Assyrians. Constant voyaging over wild seas in fragile vessels not only bred a bravery of a high type, but a love of free dom which enabled them again and again to withstand successfully even the might of Assyrian arms.
Though Assyria failed to absorb Phoenician trade she crippled the trade she could not take, so that from the sixth century s.c. onward the Phoenicians of Phoenicia were of less account. They were not finally destroyed, however, till they were brought face to face with a sea-power whose story we have now to consider.