The nature of the Phoenician trade with Upper Mesopotamia is unknown to us; and it is not impossible that their merchants visited Haran,[981] rather because it lay on the route which they had to follow in order to reach Armenia than because it possessed in itself any special attraction for them.  Gall-nuts and manna are almost the only products for which the region is celebrated; and of these Phoenicia herself produced the one, while she probably did not need the other.  But the natural route to Armenia was by way of the Coelesyrian valley, Aleppo and Carchemish, to Haran, and thence by Amida or Diarbekr to Van, which was the capital of Armenia in the early times.

Armenia supplied the Phoenicians with “horses of common and of noble breeds,"[982] and also with mules.[983] Strabo says that it was a country exceedingly well adapted for the breeding of the horse,[984] and even notes the two qualities of the animal that it produced, one of which he calls “Nisaean,” though the true “Nisaean plain” was in Media.  So large was the number of colts bred each year, and so highly were they valued, that, under the Persian monarchy the Great King exacted from the province, as a regular item of its tribute, no fewer than twenty thousand of them annually.[985] Armenian mules seem not to be mentioned by any writer besides Ezekiel; but mules were esteemed throughout the East in antiquity,[986] and no country would have been more likely to breed them than the mountain tract of Armenia, the Switzerland of Western Asia, where such surefooted animals would be especially needed.

Armenia adjoined the country of the Moschi and Tibareni—­the Meshech and Tubal of the Bible.  These tribes, between the ninth and the seventh centuries B.C., inhabited the central regions of Asia Minor and the country known later as Cappadocia.  They traded with Tyre in the “persons of men” and in “vessels of brass” or copper.[987] Copper is found abundantly in the mountain ranges of these parts, and Xenophon remarks on the prevalence of metal vessels in the portion of the region which he passed through—­the country of the Carduchians.[988] The traffic in slaves was one in which the Phoenicians engaged from very early times.  They were not above kidnapping men, women, and children in one country and selling them into another;[989] besides which they seem to have frequented regularly the principal slave marts of the time.  They bought such Jews as were taken captive and sold into slavery by the neighbouring nations,[990] and they looked to the Moschi and Tibareni for a constant supply of the commodity from the Black Sea region.[991] The Caucasian tribes have always been in the habit of furnishing slave-girls to the harems of the East, and the Thracians, who were not confined to Europe, but occupied a great part of Asia Minor, regularly trafficked in their children.[992]