From Spain and Sardinia they brought the silver which the inhabitants took from the mines. Tin was necessary to make bronze, an alloy of copper and tin, but the Orient did not furnish this, and so they sought it even on the coasts of England, in the Isles of Tin (the Cassiterides). In every country they procured slaves. Sometimes they bought them, as lately the slavers bought negroes on the coast of Africa, for all the peoples of this time made commerce in slaves; sometimes they swooped down on a coast, threw themselves on the women and children and carried them off to be retained in their own cities or to be sold abroad; for on occasion they were pirates and did not scruple to plunder strangers.
The Secrets Kept by the Phœnicians.—The Phœnicians did not care to have mariners of other peoples come into competition with them. On the return from these far countries they concealed the road which they had travelled. No one in antiquity knew where were the famous Isles of the Cassiterides from which they got their tin. It was by chance that a Greek ship discovered Spain, with which the Phœnicians had traded for centuries. Carthage drowned the foreign merchants whom they found in Sardinia or on the shore of Gibraltar. Once a Carthaginian merchantman, seeing a strange ship following it, was run aground by the pilot that the foreigner might not see where he was going.
Colonies.—In the countries where they traded, the Phœnicians founded factories, or branch-houses. They were fortified posts on a natural harbor. There they landed their merchandise, ordinarily cloths, pottery, ornaments, and idols.[40] The natives brought down their commodities and an exchange was made, just as now European merchants do with the negroes of Africa. There were Phœnician markets in Cyprus, in Egypt, and in all the then barbarous countries of the Mediterranean—in Crete, Greece, Sicily, Africa, Malta, Sardinia, on the coasts of Spain at Malaga and Cadiz, and perhaps in Gaul at Monaco. Often around these Phœnician buildings the natives set up their cabins and the mart became a city. The inhabitants adopted the Phœnician gods, and even after the city had become Greek, the cult of the dove-goddess was found there (as in Cythera), that of the god Melkhart (as at Corinth), or of the god with the bull-face that devours human victims (as in Crete).
Influence of the Phœnicians.—It is certain that the Phœnicians in founding their trading stations cared only for their own interest. But it came to pass that their colonies contributed to civilization. The barbarians of the West received the cloths, the jewels, the utensils of the peoples of the East who were more civilized, and, receiving them, learned to imitate them. For a long time the Greeks had only vases, jewels, and idols brought by the Phœnicians, and these served them as models. The Phœnicians brought simultaneously from Egypt and from Assyria industry and commodities.
The Alphabet.—At the same time they exported their alphabet. The Phœnicians did not invent writing. The Egyptians knew how to write many centuries before them, they even made use of letters each of which expressed its own sound, as in our alphabet. But their alphabet was still encumbered with ancient signs which represented, some a syllable, others an entire word. Doubtless the Phœnicians had need of a simpler system for their books of commerce. They rejected all the syllabic signs and ideographs, preserving only twenty-two letters, each of which marks a sound (or rather an articulation of the language). The other peoples imitated this alphabet of twenty-two letters. Some, like the Jews, wrote from right to left just as the Phœnicians themselves did; others, like the Greeks, from left to right. All have slightly changed the form of the letters, but the Phœnician alphabet is found at the basis of all the alphabets—Hebrew, Lycian, Greek, Italian, Etruscan, Iberian, perhaps even in the runes of the Norse. It is the Phœnicians that taught the world how to write.