districts without having to pass the Egyptian customs.  He lent to Solomon shipwrights and sailors, who helped him to fit out a fleet at Ezion-geber, and undertook a voyage of discovery in company with a number of Hebrews, who were no doubt despatched in the same capacity as the royal messengers sent with the galleys of Hatshopsitu.  It was a venture similar to those so frequently undertaken by the Egyptian admirals in the palmy days of the Theban navy, and of which we find so many curious pictures among the bas-reliefs at Deir el-Bahari.  On their return, after a three years’ absence, they reported that they had sailed to a country named Ophir, and produced in support of their statement a freight well calculated to convince the most sceptical, consisting as it did of four hundred and twenty talents of gold.  The success of this first venture encouraged Solomon to persevere in such expeditions:  he sent his fleet on several voyages to Ophir, and procured from thence a rich harvest of gold and silver, wood and ivory, apes and peacocks.*

* 1 Kings ix. 26-28, x. 11, 12; cf. 2 Citron, viii. 17, 18, ix. 10, 11, 21.  A whole library might be stocked with the various treatises which have appeared on the situation of the country of Ophir:  Arabia, Persia, India, Java, and America have all been suggested.  The mention of almug wood and of peacocks, which may be of Indian origin, for a long time inclined the scale in favour of India, but the discoveries of Mauch and Bent on the Zimbabaye have drawn attention to the basin of the Zambesi and the ruins found there.  Dr. Peters, one of the best-known German explorers, is inclined to agree with Mauch and Bent, in their theory as to the position of the Ophir of the Bible.  I am rather inclined to identify it with the Egyptian Puanit, on the Somali or Yemen seaboard.

Was the profit from these distant cruises so very considerable after all?  After they had ceased, memory may have thrown a fanciful glamour over them, and magnified the treasures they had yielded to fabulous proportions:  we are told that Solomon would have no drinking vessels or other utensils save those of pure gold, and that in his days “silver was as stone,” so common had it become.*

* 1 Kings x. 21, 27.  In Chronicles the statement in the Book of Kings is repeated in a still more emphatic manner, since it is there stated that gold itself was “in Jerusalem as stones” (2 Chron. i. 15).

[Illustration:  370.jpg MAP OF TYRE SUBSEQUENT TO HIRAM]

Doubtless Hiram took good care to obtain his fall share of the gains.  The Phoenician king began to find Tyre too restricted for him, the various islets over which it was scattered affording too small a space to support the multitudes which flocked thither.  He therefore filled up the channels which separated them; by means of embankments and fortified quays he managed to reclaim from the sea a certain amount of land on the south; after which he constructed two