the land of Palestine. Iron was excavated
from its hills and wrought into armour, into chariots, and into weapons
of war; while beautifully shaped vessels of variegated glass were
manufactured on the coast. The amber beads found at Lachish point to a
trade with the distant Baltic, and it is possible that there may be
truth after all in the old belief, that the Phoenicians obtained their
tin from the isles of Britain. The mines of Cyprus, indeed, yielded
abundance of copper, but, so far as we know, there were only two parts
of the world from which the nations of Western Asia and the Eastern
Mediterranean could have procured the vast amount of tin needed in the
Bronze Age--the Malayan Peninsula and Cornwall. The Malayan Peninsula is
out of the question--there are no traces of any commercial intercourse
so far to the East; and it would seem, therefore, that we must look to
Cornwall for the source of the tin. If so the trade would probably have
been overland, like the amber trade from the Baltic.

Canaan was marked out by Nature to be a land of merchants. Its long line
of coast fronted the semi-barbarous populations of Asia Minor, of the
AEgean, and of the northern shores of Africa, while the sea furnished it
with the purple dye of the murex. The country itself formed the
high-road and link between the great kingdoms of the Euphrates and the
Nile. It was here that the two civilizations of Babylonia and Egypt met
and coalesced, and it was inevitable that the Canaanites, who possessed
all the energy and adaptive quickness of a commercial race, should
absorb and combine the elements of both. There was little except this
combination that was original in Canaanitish art, but when once the
materials were given, the people of Palestine knew how to work them up
into new and graceful forms, and adapt them practically to the needs of
the foreign world.

If we would realize the change brought about by this contact of Canaan
with the culture of the stranger, we must turn to the rude figures
carved upon the rocks in some of the valleys of Phoenicia. Near Tyre,
for example, in the Wadi el-Qana we may still see some of these
primitive sculptures, in which it is difficult even to recognize the
human form. Equally barbarous in style are the early seals and cylinders
made in imitation of those of Babylonia. It seems at first sight
impossible to believe that such grotesque and child-like beginnings
should have ended in the exquisite art of