Page:The Periplus of the Erythræan Sea.djvu/87

 olive, requiring continued cultivation from year to year, almost distinguish settled civilizatoin from nomadic conditions, and the product of both industries appears in commerce from the earliest times.

The wine of the Damascus valley was an important export in the time of Ezekiel (XXVII, 18); of the Greek wines the best were the Aegean islands and the Asiatic coast near Ephesus (Strabo, XIV, I, 15). The Phoenicians carried the vine to Spain, and the Greeks to southern Gaul. It was unknown in early Italy, but was fostered by the Roman republic, which restricted imports of foreign growths, and stimulated exports by restricting viniculture in the provinces. In the valleys of the Seine and Moselle wine was not produced until the later days of the Roman Empire.

At the time of the Periplus, the popular taste demanded a wine highly flavored with extraneous substances, such as myrrh and other gums, cinnamon and salt.

The Periplus tells us that Italian and Laodicean wines were imported into Abyssinia, the Somali Coast, East Africa, South Arabia, and India. Arabian wine was also carried to India; this may have included grape-wine from Yemen (§24) but was principally date-wine from the Persian Gulf (§36). Italian wine was preferred to all others (§49). This was from the plain of Campania, in the vicinity of modern Naples, whence Strabo tells us (V, VI, 13), "the Romans procured their finest wines, the Falernian, the Statanian, and the Calenian. That of Surrentum is now esteemed equal to these, it having been lately discovered that it can be kept to ripen." Petronius (Cena Trimalchionis) mentions a Falernian wine which had been ripened 100 years.

The Laodicean wine was from Laodicea on the Syrian coast, some 60 miles south of Antioch, the modern Latakia. Strabo (XVI, II, 9) says: "it is a very well-built city, with a good harbor; the territory, besides its fertility in other respects, abounds with wine, of which the greater part is exported to Alexandria. The whole mountain overhanging the city is planted almost to its summit with vines."

7. Tin.—Hebrew, bedil; Greek, kassiteros; Sanscrit, kasthira; Latin, stannum. This metal, the product of Galicia and Cornwall, was utilized industrially at a comparatively late period, having been introduced after gold, silver, copper, iron, lead, and mercury. It made its appearance in the Mediterranean world soon after the migration of the Phoenicians to Syria. The Phoenician traders may have found it first on the Black Sea coast, coming overland from tribe to tribe; very soon they discovered the Spanish tin and traced it to its source, and finally that of Cornwall. The value of tin in hardening