Page:Early Man in Britain and His Place in the Tertiary Period.djvu/489

] Stuart Poole, by the prominence of Egypt and the absence of reference to Assyria in the Iliad and Odyssey. In other words, they were on the Atlantic during the legendary time when the use of iron was superseding that of bronze, and when they were supplying the Greeks with both those metals. But they probably did not introduce iron into the west till it became comparatively cheap in later times. Professor Nilsson extends their influence as far as Scandinavia, and believes that they were the introducers of the civilisation of the Bronze age. I am, however, unable to meet with any traces of their presence as far north as Scandinavia.

The Phœnicians were the first of the southern peoples who can be proved to have had direct intercourse with Britain, but that intercourse could not have been very extensive. No tombs or other remains distinctively Phœnician have been discovered in any part of the British Isles. Certain geographical names, however, in Cornwall are considered by Dr. Wiberg to be those given by the Phœnician sailors. The river Tamar, and the town Tamaris (Tamerton), (tamara = an exchange), recalls to mind the river Tamaris in Galicia. Uxella (? Bridgwater) = fort, town, village, is the same word as the Sardinian Usellis, and the Maltese Casale; and the promontory of Herakles (Hartland Point) and the island of Herakleia (Lundy), probably owe their names to the worship of Herakles (Melkarth), which was carried on in most of the Phœnician settlements on the shores of the Mediterranean.