reasons why the Phoenicians could not have been the authors of the
Bronze Age: First, the ornamentation is different. In the Bronze Age
"this always consists of geometrical figures, and we rarely, if ever,
find upon them representations of animals and plants, while on the
ornamented shields, etc., described by Homer, as well as in the
decoration of Solomon's Temple, animals and plants were abundantly
represented." The cuts on p. 242 will show the character of the
ornamentation of the Bronze Age. In the next place, the form of burial
is different in the Bronze Age from that of the Phoenicians. "In the
third place, the Phoenicians, so far as we know them, were well
acquainted with the use of iron; in Homer we find the warriors already
armed with iron weapons, and the tools used in preparing the materials
for Solomon's Temple were of this metal."

This view is also held by M. de Fallenberg, in the "Bulletin de la
Societe des Sciences" of Berne. (See "Smithsonian Rep.," 1865-66, p.
383.) He says,

ORNAMENTS OF THE BRONZE AGE

"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