period, as we are told, of twenty centuries andmore. In them we have a glimpse of the maritime enterprise, in which the oar must have taken a principal part, of the races which inhabited the seaboard of the Mediterranean in which piracy had its home from very early times. Teucrians, Dardanians, Pelesta (? Pelasgians), Daunians, Tyrrhenians, Oscans, all seem to have been sea-going peoples, and at intervals to have provoked by their marauding the wrath of Pharaoh and to have felt his avenging hand.
But of all the seafaring races that made their homes and highways upon the waters of the great inland sea, the most famous of early times were the Phœnicians. According to some accounts connected with Capthor (Copts), and according to others emigrants from the coast of the Persian Gulf, their genius for Maritime enterprise asserted itself very early, so that already before Homer's time they were masters of the commerce of the Mediterranean, and had rowed their dark keels beyond the mystic pillars that guarded the opening of the ocean stream.
And yet, though the facts are certain, we know but little of these famous mariners, of their vessels and their gear. The only representation of their vessels is from the walls of the palaces of their Assyrian conquerors, an inland people, not likely to detect or appreciate any technical want of fidelity in the likeness presented, And, accordingly, the pictures are conventional, telling us but little of that which we should like to know about their build, and oars, and oar ports, &c. The date, moreover, is not in all probability earlier than 900 b.c.
Such being the case, we are driven for information to the more ample store of Greek literature, and to Greek vases for the earliest representations of the Greek vessel.
Homer abounds in sea pictures. He has a wealth of descriptive words, touches of light and colour which bring the sea and its waves and the vessel and its details with vivid and picturesque effect before us. His ships are black and have their bows painted with vermilion, or red of some other tone; they are sharp and swift, and bows and stern curve upwards
