with any foreign products or manufactures that they desired and that the countries within the range of her influence could furnish.  Phoenicia must have imported into Cyprus, to suit a peculiar Cyprian taste, the Egyptian statuettes, scarabs, and rings,[997] and the Assyrian and Babylonian cylinders, which have been found there.  The tin which she brought from the Cassiterides she distributed generally, for she did not discourage her colonists from manufacturing for themselves to some extent.  There was probably no colony which did not make its own bronze vessels of the commoner sort and its own coarser pottery.

In her trade with the nations who peopled the coasts of the Mediterranean, the Propontis, and the Black Sea, Phoenicia aimed primarily at disposing to advantage of her own commodities, secondarily at making a profit in commodities which she had obtained from other countries, and thirdly on obtaining commodities which she might dispose of to advantage elsewhere.  Where the nations were uncivilised, or in a low condition of civilisation, she looked to making a large profit by furnishing them at a cheap rate with all the simplest conveniences of life, with their pottery, their implements and utensils, their clothes, their arms, the ornaments of their persons and of their houses.  Underselling the native producers, she soon obtained a monopoly of this kind of trade, drove the native products out of the market, and imposed her own instead, much as the manufacturers of Manchester, Birmingham, and the Potteries impose their calicoes, their cutlery, and their earthenware on the savages of Africa and Polynesia.  Where culture was more advanced, as in Greece and parts of Italy,[998] she looked to introduce, and no doubt succeeded in introducing, the best of her own productions, fabrics of crimson, violet, and purple, painted vases, embossed paterae, necklaces, bracelets, rings—­“cunning work” of all manner of kinds[999]—­mirrors, glass vessels, and smelling-bottles.  At the same time she also disposed at a profit of many of the wares that she had imported from foreign countries, which were advanced in certain branches of art, as Egypt, Babylonia, Assyria, possibly India.  The muslins and ivory of Hindustan, the shawls of Kashmir, the carpets of Babylon, the spices of Araby the Blest, the pearls of the Persian Gulf, the faience and the papyrus of Egypt, would be readily taken by the more civilised of the Western nations, who would be prepared to pay a high price for them.  They would pay for them partly, no doubt, in silver and gold, but to some extent also in their own manufactured commodities, Attica in her ceramic products, Corinth in her “brass,” Etruria in her candelabra and engraved mirrors,[9100] Argos in her highly elaborated ornaments.[9101] Or, in some cases, they might make return out of the store wherewith nature had provided them, Euboea rendering her copper, the Peloponnese her “purple,” Crete her timber, the Cyrenaica its silphium.