Page:History of Art in Phœnicia and Its Dependencies Vol 2.djvu/288

 CHAPTER V. THE INDUSTRIAL ARTS. i. Phoenician Ceramics. WHEN the Phoenicians had become accustomed to the sea and its perils, and had undertaken to supply the wants of the tribes who lived on the shores and islands of the Mediterranean most of those tribes were still without the most elementary kinds of industry the export of pottery must at once have become a steady and profitable trade. Strabo mentions earthenware vessels, to- gether with copper vessels and salt, among the things carried to the Scilly islands there to be exchanged for tin and other metals. 1 According to Scylax, pottery held an important place in the trade carried on with the natives of Cerni, perhaps the modern Arguin on the west coast of Africa. 2 The course of trade must have been much the same in the Mediterranean. It was not only in Africa and Britain that these goods covered the shores in the neighbourhood of the native villages ; the merchants of Tyre and Sidon must have carried them also to the Greeks, the Italiots and the Libyans. Some of the tribes with whom the Phoenicians trafficked already knew how to make earthenware vessels, but their productions can hardly have differed from those we find in so-called prehistoric deposits ; they were built up by hand, of a coarse and strong clay, 1 STRABO, III. v. n. 2 SCYLAX, Periphis, 112. Scylax calls this pottery Attic pottery, Ke/aa/xov ATTIKO'V, but it is plain that the trade went on at a date far more remote than that which saw the establishment of the Phoenicians at the Piraeus, and the commencement of their exportation of that Athenian pottery which was at once so cheap and of such excellent quality. In the fourth century, when the Periplus was writen, Athenian pottery may have been the staple of the trade in question, but it must have begun in the first instance with the export of native Phoenician manufactures.