SILVER 269 



wholly different lines. Every department of life was more strenuous, 

 and the results, naturally, were more notable. The increase of popu- 

 lation was perhaps as great, but the destruction of life by wars and 

 slavery was enormous. The arts flourished, especially architecture, but 

 their product in the shape of buildings, highways, canals, libraries and 

 museums was continually being looted by conquerors, yet this very 

 ruthless destruction seems to have incited rather than discouraged 

 advance and improvements. The sciences were developed up to the 

 point where discovery began, literature to the stage, where it became 

 imperishable because of the invention of comparatively simple methods 

 of writing, society to a state where education was highly prized, religion 

 to the conception of monotheism. 



Between these two diverse and different kinds of humanity a trade 

 slowly sprang into existence. It was first, doubtless, by way of the 

 Arabian Sea, which at some time in the distant past was a " mare 

 clausum," a Mediterranean, as the result of a land connection between 

 east Africa and India, by way of Madagascar, the Seychelles and 

 Andaman Islands; and later by caravan routes through the passes 

 of the mountains. The western nations sought the luxurious and 

 decorative products of the eastern, their fabrics of silk and wool, 

 their manufactures of bronze, their gems and jewelry of ivory and 

 jade. What could be given in exchange? It was early discovered 

 that the money of the east was silver, that it was scarce there and its 

 purchasing power great. Consequently when the strenuous west began 

 to produce the metal in quantity, first from the mountains of Persia 

 and Asia Minor, and later in Greece, Italy and Spain, it became pos- 

 sessed of an article with which the products of the east could be 

 obtained. But the west loved war above all things, and had the war- 

 rior's immemorial contempt for trade, and so there gradually grew 

 into existence, at the extreme eastern end of the Mediterranean, a 

 nation of traders, the Phoenicians, who took charge of the commerce 

 between the Occident and the orient, who never gained any celebrity 

 except along commercial lines, and who for centuries were actually 

 protected in turn by all the great powers of antiquity because of their 

 trading ability, and their knowledge of where and how to get those 

 products of Asia that Europe wanted. We know that the ships of 

 Tyre and Sidon ransacked the shores of the Mediterranean for silver, 

 and were the owners and operators of mines of that metal in Greece, 

 Italy and Spain. Their product was sent overland by caravan, or 

 over sea by ships sailing from ports first on the Persian Gulf, and later 

 on the Eed Sea, to India, and exchanged for the manufactures of the 

 east. One of the most valued of these was tin. Malaysia has been 

 from the most remote antiquity, and is to-day, a prolific producer of 

 this metal, and very early in the history of the human race the ex- 



