Next to her spices, Arabia was famous for the production of a superior quality of wool.  The Phoenicians imported this wool largely.  The flocks of Kedar are especially noted,[969] and are said to have included both sheep and goats.[970] It was perhaps a native woollen manufacture, in which Dedan traded with Tyre, and which Ezekiel notices as a trade in “cloths for chariots."[971] Goat’s hair was largely employed in the production of coverings for tents.[972] Arabia also furnished Phoenicia with gold, with precious stones, with ivory, ebony, and wrought iron.[973] The wrought iron was probably from Yemen, which was celebrated for its manufacture of sword blades.  The gold may have been native, for there is much reason to believe that anciently the Arabian mountain ranges yielded gold as freely as the Ethiopian,[974] with which they form one system; or it may have been imported from Hindustan, with which Arabia had certainly, in ancient times, constant communication.  Ivory and ebony must, beyond a doubt, have been Arabian importations.  There are two countries from which they may have been derived, India and Abyssinia.  It is likely that the commercial Arabs of the south-east coast had dealings with both.[975]

Of Phoenician imports into Arabia we have no account; but we may conjecture that they consisted principally of manufactured goods, cotton and linen fabrics, pottery, implements and utensils in metal, beads, and other ornaments for the person, and the like.  The nomadic Arabs, leading a simple life, required but little beyond what their own country produced; there was, however, a town population[976] in the more southern parts of the peninsula, to which the elegancies and luxuries of life, commonly exported by Phoenicia, would have been welcome.

The Phoenician trade with Babylonia and Assyria was carried on probably by caravans, which traversed the Syrian desert by way of Tadmor or Palmyra, and struck the Euphrates about Circesium.  Here the route divided, passing to Babylon southwards along the course of the great river, and to Nineveh eastwards by way of the Khabour and the Sinjar mountain-range.  Both countries seem to have supplied the Phoenicians with fabrics of extraordinary value, rich in a peculiar embroidery, and deemed so precious that they were packed in chests of cedar-wood, which the Phoenician merchants must have brought with them from Lebanon.[977] The wares furnished by Assyria were in some cases exported to Greece,[978] while no doubt in others they were intended for home consumption.  They included cylinders in rock crystal, jasper, hematite, steatite, and other materials, which may sometimes have found purchasers in Phoenicia Proper, but appear to have been specially affected by the Phoenician colonists in Cyprus.[979] On her part Phoenicia must have imported into Assyria and Babylonia the tin which was a necessary element in their bronze; and they seem also to have found a market in Assyria for their own most valuable and artistic bronzes, the exquisite embossed paterae which are among the most precious of the treasures brought by Sir Austen Layard from Nineveh.[980]