THE LOST ATLANTIS. 109 
eastern hemisphere was limited and very imperfect. “The Cassiterides, from which tin is 
brought ”—assumed to be the British Isles,—were known to Herodotus only as uncertainly 
located islands of the Atlantic of which he had no direct information. When Assur- 
yuchurabal, the founder of the palace at Nimrud, conquered the people who lived on the 
banks of the Orontes from the confines of Hamath to the sea, the spoils obtained from them 
included one hundred talents of anna, or tin; and the same prized metal is repeatedly 
named in cuneiform inscriptions. The people trading in tin, supposed to be identical 
with the Shirutana, were the merchants of the world before Tyre assumed her place as 
chief among the merchant princes of the sea. Yet already, in the time of Joshua, she was 
known as “the strong city, Tyre.” “Great Zidon ” also is so named, along with her, when 
Joshua defines the bounds of the tribe of Asher, extending to the sea coast; and is celebrated 
by Homer for its works of art. The Seleucia, or Cilicia, of the Greeks, was an attempted 
restoration of the ancient seaport of the Shirutana, which may have been an emporium of 
Khita merchandise; as it was, undoubtedly, an important place of shipment for the 
Pheenicians in their overland trade from the valley of the Euphrates. One favoured 
etymology of Britain, as the name of the islands whence tin was brought, is barat-anna, 
assumed to have been applied to them by that ancient race of merchant princes—the 
Cassiterides being the later Aryan equivalent, Gr. xacoirepos, Sansk. kastira. 
In primitive centuries, when ancient maritime races thus held supremacy in the 
Mediterranean Sea, voyages were undoubtedly made far into the Atlantic Ocean. The 
Pheenicians, who of all the nations settled on its shores, lay among the remotest from 
the outlying ocean, habitually traded with settlements on the Atlantic. They colonised 
the western shores of the Mediterranean at a remote period ; occupied numerous favour- © 
able trading posts on the bays and headlands of the Euxine, and of Sicily and others of 
the largest islands; and passing beyond the straits, effected settlements along the coasts 
of Europe and Africa. According to Strabo (i. 48), they had factories beyond the pillars 
of Hercules in the period immediately succeeding the Trojan war, an era which yearly 
becomes for us less mythical, and to which may be assigned the great development of 
the commercial prosperity of Tyre. The Phœnicians were then widening their trading 
enterprise, and extending explorations so as to command the remotest available sources of 
wealth. The trade of Tarshish was for Pheenicia what that of the Hast has been to 
England in modern centuries. The Tartessus, on which the Arabs of Spain subsequently 
conferred the name of the Guadalquivir, afforded ready access to a rich mining district ; 
and also formed the centre of valuable fisheries of tunny and murena. By means of its 
navigable waters, along with those of the Guadina, Phenician traders were able to 
penetrate far inland; and the colonies established at their mouths furnished fresh starting 
points for adventurous exploration along the Atlantic seaboard. They derived much at 
least of the tin, which was an important object of traffic, from the mines of north-west 
Spain, and from Cornwall; though, doubtless, both the tin of the Cassiterides and amber 
from the Baltic were also transported by overland routes to the Adriatic and the mouth of 
the Rhone. It was a Phœænician expedition which, in the reign of Pharaoh Necho, B.C. 
611-605, after the decline of that great maritime power, accomplished the feat of circumnavi- 
gating Africa, by way of the Red Sea. Hanno, a Carthaginian, not only guided the Punic 
fleet round the parts of Libya which border on the Atlantic, but has been credited with 
reaching the Indian Ocean by the same route as that which Vasco de Gama successfully 
