The settlements planted by Tyre in the first burst of her colonising energy seem to have been, besides Gades, Thasos, Abdera, and Pronectus towards the north, Malaca, Sexti, Carteia, Belon, and a second Abdera in Spain, together with Caralis in Sardinia,[1443] Tingis and Lixus on the West African coast, and in North Africa Hadrumetum and the lesser Leptis.[1444] Her aim was to throw the meshes of her commerce wider than Sidon had ever done, and so to sweep into her net a more abundant booty.  It was Tyre which especially affected “long voyages,"[1445] and induced her colonists of Gades to explore the shores outside the Pillars of Hercules, northwards as far as Cornwall and the Scilly Isles, southwards to the Fortunate Islands, and north-eastwards into the Baltic.  It is, no doubt, uncertain at what date these explorations were effected, and some of them may belong to the later hegemony of Tyre, ab.  B.C. 600; but the forward movement of the twelfth century seems to have been distinctly Tyrian, and to have been one of the results of the new position in which she was placed by the sudden collapse of her elder sister, Sidon.

According to some,[1446] Tyre, during the early period of her supremacy, was under the government of shophetim, or “judges;” but the general usage of the Phoenician cities makes against this supposition.  Philo in his “Origines of Phoenicia” speaks constantly of kings,[1447] but never of judges.  We hear of a king, Abd-Baal, at Berytus[1448] about B.C. 1300.  Sidonian kings are mentioned in connection with the myth of Europa.[1449] The cities founded by the Phoenicians in Cyprus are always under monarchical rule.[1450] Tyre itself, when its history first presents itself to us in any detail, is governed by a king.[1451] All that can be urged on the other side is, that we know of no Tyrian king by name until about B.C. 1050; and that, if there had been earlier kings, it might have been expected that some record of them would have come down to us.  But to argue thus is to ignore the extreme scantiness and casual character of the notices which have reached us bearing upon the early Phoenician history.  No writer has left us any continuous history of Phoenicia, even in the barest outline.[1452] Native monumental annals are entirely wanting.  We depend for the early times upon the accident of Jewish monarchs having come into contact occasionally with Phoenician ones, and on Jewish writers having noted the occasions in Jewish histories.  Scripture and Josephus alone furnish our materials for the period now under consideration, and the materials are scanty, fragmentary, and sadly wanting in completeness.