already in full commercial intercourse with one Asiatic people, but not a people who could serve as a bridge between Lydia and Euboea. Everywhere in the Homeric Poems we meet the shipmen of Tyre, who are represented as bringing the products of the skilled artists of Sidon, beautiful cloths, and cunningly wrought vessels of silver, articles of jewellery, necklaces[1] set with amber (perhaps brought from the coasts of the Baltic), and now and then as chance arose, kidnapping women and children to sell as slaves in the marts of the Mediterranean[2].
If the Hellenes had got their standard from an Asiatic source, it must have been the heavy gold shekel of 260 grains, which the Phoenicians employed, and consequently the Homeric Talent would have weighed 260 instead of 130 grains, or on the other hand if it be supposed that the Greeks might borrow and use for their own gold a standard used only for silver in Asia, the Homeric Talent ought to have weighed 225 grains, that is the Phoenician silver standard, which, as we have seen, it certainly did not.
A further difficulty arises in reference to the Euboic standard. No one who reflects for a moment could venture to assert that Phoenician trade and influence were limited to Southern Greece. Yet that virtually is the tacit assumption made by those who derive the standard from Asia. There is evidence to shew that the Phoenicians from a very early period frequented Euboea, doubtless attracted by its copper mines (from which perhaps the famous city of Chalcis derived its name)[3]. Round no spot in Hellas do more legends cluster which connect it with Phoenician colonists than Boeotia. It was here that Cadmus settled, and introduced the Phoenician alphabet, it was here according to Greek tradition that Herakles, who is so strongly identified with the Phoenician Melkarth, had his birth. Why then should the Euboeans have been behind the rest of Hellas in receiving the Phoenician standard, which, according to Mr Head, as we saw above, did, an owl.]
