The Cadiz peninsula has for centuries been legitimately renowned, for,
turn by turn, Phenicians, properly so called, Carthaginians, Romans,
Goths, Arabs and Spaniards have made of it the preferred seat of their
business and pleasure. In his so often unsparing verses, Martial,
even, celebrates with an erotic rapture the undulating suppleness of
the ballet dancers of _Gades_, who are continued in our day by the
_majas_ and _chulas_.

[Illustration: PHENICIAN TOMBS DISCOVERED AT CADIZ.]

For an epoch anterior to that of the Latin poet, we have the
testimony, among others, of Strabo, who describes the splendors,
formerly and for a long time famous, of the temple of Hercules, and
who gives many details, whose accuracy can still be verified,
concerning various questions of topography or ethnography. Thus the
superb tree called _Dracæna draco_ is mentioned as growing in the
vicinity of _Gadeira_, the Greek name of the city. Now, some of these
trees still exist in certain public and private gardens, and attract
so much the more attention in that they are not met with in any other
European country. However, although historically Cadiz finds her title
to nobility on every page of the Greek and Latin authors, and although
her Phenician origin is averred, nowhere has such origin, in a
monumental and epigraphic sense, left fewer traces than in the
Andalusian peninsula. A few short legends, imperfectly read upon
either silver or bronze coins, and that was all, at least up to recent
times. Such penury as this distressed savants and even put them into
pretty bad humor with the Cadiz archæologists.

To-day, it seems that the ancient Semitic civilization, which has