“It seems surprising that the nearest neighbors of the Phoenicians—­the Greeks, the Egyptians, the Etruscans, and the Romans—­should have manufactured plumbiferous bronzes, while the Phoenicians carried to the people of the North only pure bronzes without the alloy of lead.  If the civilized people of the Mediterranean added lead to their bronzes, it can scarcely be doubted that the calculating Phoenicians would have done as much, and, at least, with distant and half-civilized tribes, have replaced the more costly tin by the cheaper metal. . . .  On the whole, then, I consider that the first knowledge of bronze may have been conveyed to the populations of the period tinder review not only by the Phoenicians, but by other civilized people dwelling more to the south-east.”

Professor E. Desor, in his work on the “Lacustrian Constructions of the Lake of Neuchatel,” says,

“The Phoenicians certainly knew the use of iron, and it can scarcely be conceived why they should have excluded it from their commerce on the Scandinavian coasts. . . .  The Etruscans, moreover, were acquainted with the use of iron as well as the Phoenicians, and it has already been seen that the composition of their bronzes is different, since it contains lead, which is entirely a stranger to our bronze epoch. . . .  We must look, then, beyond both the Etruscans and Phoenicians in attempting to identify the commerce of the Bronze Age of our palafittes.  It will be the province of the historian to inquire whether, exclusive of Phoenicians and Carthaginians, there may not have been some maritime and commercial people who carried on a traffic through the ports of Liguria with the populations of the age of bronze of the lakes of Italy before the discovery of iron.  We may remark, in passing, that there is nothing to prove that the Phoenicians were the first navigators.  History, on the Contrary, positively mentions prisoners, under the name of Tokhari, who were vanquished in a naval battle fought by Rhamses iii. in the thirteenth century before our era, and whose physiognomy, according to Morton, would indicate the Celtic type.  Now there is room to suppose that if these Tokhari were energetic enough to measure their strength on the sea with one of the powerful kings of Egypt, they must, with stronger reason, have been in a condition to carry on a commerce along the coasts of the Mediterranean, and perhaps of the Atlantic.  If such a commerce really existed before the time of the Phoenicians, it would not be limited to the southern slope of the Alps; it would have extended also to the people of the age of bronze in Switzerland.  The introduction of bronze would thus ascend to a very high antiquity, doubtless beyond the limits of the most ancient European races.”

For the merchants of the Bronze Age we must look beyond even the Tokhari, who were contemporaries of the Phoenicians.