Pasha. To the right, well visible from Cyprus, was the fertile tract of
Cilicia Campestris, which led on to the rich and picturesque regions of
Pamphylia, Lycia, and Caria. From Caria stretched out, like a string
of stepping-stones between Asia and Europe, the hundred islets of
the Ægean, Cyclades, and Sporades, and others, inviting settlers, and
conducting to the large islands of Crete and Euboea, and the shores of
Attica and the Peloponnese. It is impossible to trace with any exactness
the order in which the Phoenician colonies were founded. A thousand
incidental circumstances--a thousand caprices--may have deranged what
may be called the natural or geographical order, and have caused
the historical order to diverge from it; but, on the whole, probably
something like the geographical order was observed; and, at any rate, it
will be most convenient, in default of sufficient data for an historical
arrangement, to adopt in the present place a geographic one, and,
beginning with those nearest to Phoenicia itself in the Eastern
Mediterranean, to proceed westward to the Straits of Gibraltar,
reserving for the last those outside the Straits on the shores of the
Atlantic Ocean.

The nearest, and probably the first, region to attract Phoenician
colonies was the island of Cyprus. Cyprus lies in the corner of the
Eastern Mediterranean formed by the projection of Asia Minor from the
Syrian shore. Its mountain chains run parallel with Taurus, and it is
to Asia Minor that it presents its longer flank, while to Phoenicia it
presents merely one of its extremities. Its length from east to west is
145 miles, its greatest width about sixty miles.[53] Two strongly marked
mountain ranges form its most salient features, the one running close
along the north coast from Cape Kormaciti to Cape S. Andreas; the other
nearly central, but nearer the south, beginning at Cape Renaouti in the
west and terminating at Cape Greco. The mountain ranges are connected