land, enthroned Hellenism at Alexandria on the sea itself.


SECTION 2. PHOENICIAN CARRIERS

Nor was it only through Greek sea-rovers and settlers in Cilicia, and
through Greek mercenaries, merchants and courtesans in the Nile-Delta,
that the East and the West had been making mutual acquaintance. Other
agencies of communication had been active in bringing Mesopotamian
models to the artists of the Ionian and Dorian cities in Asia Minor, and
Ionian models to Mesopotamia and Syria. The results are plain to see, on
the one hand in the fabric and design of early ivories, jewellery and
other objects found in the archaic Artemisium at Ephesus, and in the
decoration of painted pottery produced at Miletus; on the other hand, in
the carved ivories of the ninth century found at Calah on the Tigris.
But the processes which produced these results are not so clear. If the
agents or carriers of those mutual influences were certainly the
Phoenicians and the Lydians, we cannot yet apportion with confidence to
each of these peoples the responsibility for the results, or be sure
that they were the only agents, or independent of other middlemen more
directly in contact with one party or the other.

The Phoenicians have pushed far afield since we looked at them last. By
founding Carthage more than half-way towards the Pillars of Hercules the
city of Tyre completed her occupation of sufficient African harbours,
beyond the reach of Egypt, and out of the Greek sphere, to appropriate
to herself by the end of the ninth century the trade of the western
Mediterranean basin. By means of secondary settlements in west Sicily,
Sardinia and Spain, she proceeded to convert this sea for a while into
something like a Phoenician lake. No serious rival had forestalled her