Oil the Phceidcian Tin Trade in Cornwall, hy R.Edmonds. 35 
the Irish, stan ; the Welsh, ystaen ; the Cornish, stean ; the 
Armoric, stean, and also staen : the initial letter or sound s in 
each of the last nine names being I consider a mere prefix, as in 
the modern word sneeze, for neeze (Job. xli., 18). With this 
exception, and except the ordinary terminations of the Latin, 
Italian, Spanish and Portuguese names, these thirteen different 
spellings are merely the different ways in which different nations 
of Europe pronounce the Phoenician word tin. Iktin therefore 
signifies *' tin-port." Why this derivation of the ancient name 
of the Mount should have remained so long undiscovered, I have 
now to explain. 
Diodorus calls the Mount Iktin, and by no other name. All 
his translators, however — French and English, as well as Latin 
— finding the word in the accusative case, and imagining it 
declinable, concluded that its nominative was Iktis, although 
another Greek noun which is really Iktis in its nominative case 
has Iktida for its accusative, and not Iktin ; and the Greek word 
which in the nominative is Tis, is Tina in the accusative, and 
not Tin. It is strange that the translators should thus have 
converted the very descriptive name Iktin, by which Diodorus 
calls the chief tin-port in the world, into Iktis, a name bearing 
no reference whatever to the commodity for which it was famed. 
And it is still more strange that all writers on the subject, after 
having known that I had, in the Arch. Camb., exposed this 
blunder, should have continued to miscall the Mount Iktis. 
But we must not suppose, because the Mount was anciently 
called Iktin, that Iktin was its only ancient name. If names 
were anciently descriptive of the places and things to which they 
were given, — and if the name Iktin described the Mount only as 
a ** tin-port," — another name would have been required for dis- 
tinguishing it also as a mount and fortress for the safe custody 
of tin, and that name would have been Bretin (" tin-mount ") — 
