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through the colonies they planted, for another three after their own decline. They were the Canaanites of the Bible, who occupied the coastal strip of Palestine north of Carmel—the land allotted to the tribes of Asher and Zebulon at the Exodus, though the Jews were unable to turn the Canaanites out. They were a Semitic people as old as the Jews and closely linked with them by many ties. The Hiram of the quote from I Kings was king of Phoenicia and a close friend of David and Solomon. When, after the death of Solomon, the ten northern Jewish tribes broke off to form the Kingdom of Israel in 975 B.C., Phoenician friendship with the southern kingdom of Judah cooled but with Israel increased; for the people of the north, largely renouncing the Jewish God, took to sharing the worship of the Phoenician gods—Baal, Adon, Moloch, and the chief ones, Melkart and Astarte; and in many other ways began to blend with the Phoenicians.
    The ancient world held the Phoenicians in awe for their industry and intelligence—they invented the alphabet—and at the same time in aversion for their custom of burning small children as sacrifices to Moloch. Their temples enjoyed the services of religious prostitutes of both sexes, but this was not uncommon in other religions.
    They are remembered now not for their vices or virtues but for their skill as sailors and merchants. Their own capitals were Tyre and Sidon, but in 1100 B.C. they founded Gadir (Cadiz) and in 814 B.C. Carthage (near modern Tunis on the North African coast). They had already founded a town on Gibraltar Bay....
    Or had they? There are doubts.
    North and west from the Rock around the head of the bay, a river empties itself into the sea. Often, and appropriately called First River, its true name is Guadarranque. On the left bank there are the ruins of an ancient town. Everyone agrees that the town was called Carteia; the doubt is, when was it founded? Some modern scholars tend to believe there was no town here before Roman times or perhaps only an Iberian village; but the Greeks had a word for it—Heraclea; and if the river and beach were properly shaped for a port, as everyone agrees they were, it is a perfect site, with better natural shelter than any other in southern Spain (except Gadir). On balance it seems probable that Carteia was founded by the Phoenicians in 940 B.C. to exploit the tunny fishing and the beds of murex. The murex is a shellfish from which was extracted the famous "Tyrian purple," the color which later became the fiercely guarded prerogative of Roman nobles and emperors. It was never in fact a true purple but something between rose and dark violet. The dye was made by extracting the shellfish and dropping them into large vats or tanks, often of stone. When they rotted they secreted a yellow liquid, which was the dye. The vats were always placed downwind for obvious reasons.
    The colony's full name was Melkarteia, after the god, but that soon became abbreviated. A thousand years before Christ, therefore, the Rock looked down upon, and was surely regarded as the sacred mountain of, its first real town.
    These are all facts, as best they can be traced through the deceptive and ever-shifting curtains of the years. The ancients, with ancestral memories sharpened by tens of thousands of years when all knowledge, experience, and wisdom had to be passed on by word of mouth, recorded them differently. They did not have modern tools of discovery and analysis and, having been actors rather than spectators, were more interested in transmitting emotion than fact. History was recorded and handed down in myth and fable. One such is the story of the opening of the Strait of Gibraltar. Although it is inconceivable that thinking man could have been present on Earth when it actually happened (at least 30,000,000 years ago), yet the most ancient voices of the past seemed to find it necessary to explain that it had happened within human ken. The act is attributed to a god or