aromatic reed), and, beyond all doubt, frankincense,[933] and perhaps cinnamon and ladanum.[934] She also supplies wool and goat’s hair, and cloths for chariots, and gold, and wrought iron, and precious stones, and ivory, and ebony, of which the last two cannot have been productions of her own, but must have been imported from India or Abyssinia.[935] Babylonia and Assyria furnish “wrappings of blue, embroidered work, and chests of rich apparel."[936] Upper Mesopotamia partakes in this traffic.[937] Armenia gives horses and mules.  Central Asia Minor (Tubal and Meshech) supplies slaves and vessels of brass, and the Greeks of Ionia do the like.  Cyprus furnishes ivory, which she must first have imported from abroad.[938] Greece Proper sends her shell-fish, to enable the Phoenician cities to increase their manufacture of the purple dye.[939] Finally, Spain yields silver, iron, tin, and lead—­the most useful of the metals—­all of which she is known to have produced in abundance.[940]

With the exception of Egypt, Ionia, Cyprus, Hellas, and Spain, the Phoenician intercourse with these places must have been carried on wholly by land.  Even with Egypt, wherewith the communication by sea was so facile, there seems to have been also from a very early date a land commerce.  The land commerce was in every case carried on by caravans.  Western Asia has never yet been in so peaceful and orderly condition as to dispense prudent traders from the necessity of joining together in large bodies, well provisioned and well armed, when they are about to move valuable goods any considerable distance.  There have always been robber-tribes in the mountain tracts, and thievish Arabs upon the plains, ready to pounce on the insufficiently protected traveller, and to despoil him of all his belongings.  Hence the necessity of the caravan traffic.  As early as the time of Joseph—­probably about B.C. 1600—­we find a company of the Midianites on their way from Gilead, with their camels bearing spicery, and balm, and myrrh, going to carry it down to Egypt.[941] Elsewhere we hear of the “travelling companies of the Dedanim,"[942] of the men of Sheba bringing their gold and frankincense;[943] of a multitude of camels coming up to Palestine with wood from Kedar and Nebaioth.[944] Heeren is entirely justified in his conclusion that the land trade of the Phoenicians was conducted by “large companies or caravans, since it could only have been carried on in this way."[945]

The nearest neighbours of the Phoenicians on the land side were the Jews and Israelites, the Syrians of Damascus, and the people of Northern Syria, or the Orontes valley and the tract east of it.  From the Jews and Israelites the Phoenicians seem to have derived at all times almost the whole of the grain which they were forced to import for their sustenance.  In the time of David and Solomon it was chiefly for wheat and barley that they exchanged the commodities which they exported,[946] in that of Ezekiel it was