The story of Spain Author:Edward Everett Hale Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER II. CARTHAGINIANS. But the first acquaintance which Spain made with the rest of the world, after the westward-flowing wave of Celts poured in ... more »on her, was made in her trade with Phoenicia and Carthage. And to-day, as we of other lands read of Spain, our first glimpse of her is in the Bible language, where we read of the ships of Tarshish. Tarshish was but a vague name to the Hebrew writers, as India has been to many an English writer. But as an " Indiaman " stands in English literature for a ship of great burden which comes from a rich land far away,—and this because India is India,—so the ships of Tarshish of the Bible writers, were the Phoenician ships which dealt with Tartessus. Tar- tessus was the district west of our Gibraltar, in the south of Spain. The traveller of to-day finds heavy English steamers there, taking in copper ore at the mouth of the River Tinto, and, if he be an American traveller, he remembers that from that same river, in other " ships of Tarshish," Columbus sailed for the discovery of lands rich with gold. -) The Phoenician trade with Spain naturally gave the Carthaginians a foothold there, for Carthage wassimply a Phoenician colony, which in time far outgrew the strength and empire of the northern cities of Phoenicia. Isaiah, in predicting the fall of Tyre, comes back with a steady refrain to the people of Tarshish as finding no city, no port, no welcome when they came back to Syria. In his day—that is to say, in the eighth century B.C.—the trade with Tar- tessus was so important for Tyre, that he brings it in in the very front of his description. Meanwhile Carthage was steadily gaining in power, and Carthaginian merchants and miners were extending the foothold which Syrian tradesmen had begun. In what we call the first Punic wa...« less