384 DIVISION I. VERTEBRAL ANIMALS.—CLASS I. MAMMALIA. 
ness; but the Pheenician colonies in Africa surpassed in magnificence and 
power the parent country. 
According to an ancient inscription in the Phoenician language, which 
says, “We have fled from the robber Joshua, the son of Nim,” and which 
was discovered in Numidia A. D. 540, the first Phcenician colonies in North- 
ern Africa must have been founded as early as the year 1490 B. C.,—a 
circumstance which is by no means improbable when we consider that in the 
book of Joshua, Sidon is already mentioned among the mighty princes, and 
that the Phenician colonies of Utica, Hadrumetum, Hippo, Leptis, and 
others, aré known to have existed on the northern coast of Africa centuries 
before Dido there founded the city whose fame was soon to eclipse that of 
all the older daughters of Sidon and Tyre. 
On the northern coast of Africa, near where the city of Tunis now stands, 
about the year 875 B. C., and one hundred and twenty-five years before the 
foundation of Rome, she founded the city of Carthage, which soon gave 
promise of its future greatness. A tribute for the soil was paid the na- 
tives. The people of the neighboring territories were induced, by the offer 
of great commercial advantages and of the rights of citizenship, to join the 
new comers; and every means for promoting the prosperity of the new set- 
tlement so effectually taken, that even during the lifetime of Dido the city 
had acquired so much importance in the eyes of the neighboring nations, 
that the hand of the princess was sought in marriage by a powerful Numid- 
ian prince, who threatened to have recourse to violent measures in case his 
suit were not accepted. To secure the independence of her new-founded 
city, and to keep her faith to her deceased husband, Dido, acting in accord- 
ance with the received opinions of her country, and the principles of her 
religion, threw herself into the flames of a funereal pyre, which she had. 
ordered to be lighted for her, and was ever afterwards worshipped as a deity 
by her people. 
The first periods of Phenician greatness are veiled in the mysterious dark- 
ness of an unknown past; yet so much is certain, that their date must have 
been very remote; as, according to the accounts which Herodotus received 
from the priests, the foundation of Tyre took place thirty centuries before 
the Christian era. 
Long before the expedition of the Argonauts, the Phoenicians had already 
founded colonies on the Bithynian coast of the Black Sea (Pronectus Bi- 
thynian) ; and that at a very early time they must have steered through the 
Straits of Gades into the Atlantic is proved by the fact, that as far back as 
the eleventh century before Christ they founded the towns of Gades and 
Tartessus on the western coast of Southern Spain. Penetrating farther and 
farther to the north, they discovered Britain, where they established their 
