and bronze, and of the two-handled cups which were a special manufacture of Phoenicia.  Iron seems to have been worked in Canaan from an early date.  The Israelites were unable to drive out the inhabitants of “the valley” because of their chariots of iron, and when the chariot of the Egyptian Mohar is disabled by the rough roads of the Canaanite mountains the writer of the papyrus already referred to makes him turn aside at once to a worker in iron.  There was no difficulty in finding an ironsmith in Canaan.

The purple dye of Phoenicia had been famous from a remote antiquity.  It was one of the chief objects of the trade which was carried on by the Canaanites with Egypt on the one side and Babylonia on the other.  It was doubtless in exchange for the purple that the “goodly Babylonish garment” of which we are told in the Book of Joshua (vii. 21) made its way to the city of Jericho, for Babylonia was as celebrated for its embroidered robes as Canaan was for its purple dye.

We hear something about the trade of Canaan in one of the cuneiform tablets of Tel el-Amarna.  This is a letter from Kallimma-Sin, king of Babylonia, to the Egyptian Pharaoh urging him to conclude a treaty in accordance with which the merchants of Babylonia might trade with Egypt on condition of their paying the customs at the frontier.  Gold, silver, oil, and clothing are among the objects upon which the duty was to be levied.  The frontier was probably fixed at the borders of the Egyptian province of Canaan rather than at those of Egypt itself.

Babylonia and the civilized lands of the East were not the only countries with which Canaanitish trade was carried on.  Negro slaves were imported from the Soudan, copper and lead from Cyprus, and horses from Asia Minor, while the excavations of Mr. Bliss at Lachish have brought to light beads of Baltic amber mixed with the scarabs of the eighteenth Egyptian dynasty.

A large part of the trade of Phoenicia was carried on in ships.  It was in this way that the logs of cedar were brought from the forests at the head of the Gulf of Antioch, and the purple murex from the coasts of the AEgean.  Tyre, whose wealth is already celebrated in one of the Tel el-Amarna tablets, was built upon an island, and, as an Egyptian papyrus tells us, water had to be conveyed to it in boats.  So, too, was Arvad, whose navy occupies an important place in the Tel el-Amarna correspondence.  The ships of Canaan were, in fact, famous from an early date.  Two classes of vessel known to the Egyptians were called “ships of Gebal” and “ships of Kaft,” or Phoenicia, and Ebed-Tob asserts that “as long as a ship sails upon the sea, the arm (or oracle) of the Mighty King shall conquer the forces of Aram-Naharaim (Nahrima) and Babylonia.”  Balaam’s prophecy—­“Ships shall come from Chittim and shall afflict Asshur and shall afflict Eber,” takes us back to the same age.