disseminated over the whole Mediterranean, and the laurel, oleander, iris, ivy, mint and narcissus, which they introduced into Syria from Greece.
The Phoenicians were the first to venture beyond the Pillars of Hercules (the opposite promontories of the Strait of Gibraltar) into the Atlantic Ocean, though how much of this sea they traversed is not easy to ascertain. They may have reached the Scilly Isles and Cornwall to barter pottery, copper utensils and salt for tin. Their crowning nautical achievement was the clockwise circumnavigation of Africa about 600 B.C. at the direction of the Egyptian Pharaoh Necho, a voyage which required more than two years.
Wherever the Phoenicians went, they built trading factories, which developed into settlements and then into colonies. Especially after the thirteenth and twelfth centuries, when they were squeezed out of central Syria by the Aramaeans and out of southern Syria by the Israelites and Philistines, did the Ganaanites turn their energies to overseas expansion. Cyprus and Cilicia, Crete and Samos, Corinth and Thrace, Malta and western Sicily, Sardinia and Corsica, the whole coast of North Africa, eastern and southern Spain—all fell under Phoenician sway. Cadiz in Spain and Utica in Tunisia were founded about 1000 B.C., and the most famous of all, Carthage, about 814. With the decline of Phoenicia, brought on by Greek competition and Assyrian invasion, Carthage took over commercial and political supremacy in the western Mediterranean until its destruction in 146 B.C. by the Romans.
The Phoenicians were the middlemen of the ancient world in intellectual and cultural matters as well as in commerce. The achievements of Egypt and Mesopotamia were carried by Syrians to all the Mediterranean peoples, serving as civilizing influences. The Greeks in particular became their pupils in navigation and colonization and borrowed from them in literature and religion.
