Morocco and Eastern Atlantis

2. Phoenician Geographical Expansion

What had started as a group of three independent defensible coastal towns, Tyre, Byblos, and Sidon, was by now a string of hundreds settlements and trading posts which had gone beyond the Nile delta and inexorably grew, in some stretches of coast by the pact of "blind bargaining" with the peoples there, and in other areas, devoid of resistance, by settlement along the North African Coast and the Eastern Mediterranean Islands, Cyprus, Rhodes, Crete, Sicily, Malta, reaching the Atlantic Coast as far south as Mogador on the Atlantic coast of what is now Morocco, and including the entire Iberian Coast from Huelva in the West to beyond Valencia in the East. The Eastern Mediterranean is not a windy sea and the Phoenicians' principal means of propulsion was the oar. The settlements were laid out a day's rowing from one to the next, about every 30 to 60 miles. The purpose of this continued expansion was to obtain more raw material for the trade with Egypt and with the tribes to the east.

3. Metallurgy and Military Power

In 2500 B.C. the peoples around the Mediterranean basin were still in the New Stone Age or Neolithic, having Copper as the only available metal. On arrival on the Atlantic coast of France the Phoenicians came for the first time upon tin, and either devised or learned the technology necessary to convert it to Bronze by combining it with Copper, which was freely available in the Middle East. Bronze is a far superior material to Copper for practically all purposes, it is stronger to use for weapons and as armour for men and fixings and cladding for ships, and is less prone to rusting. This would be the equivalent today, if such a parallel is wise or possible, of one country coming secretly on the only source of Uranium for Nuclear weapons. So important was this to them that they named North-western France "Barra Tannica" the land of Tin, from which the names Brittany and consequently Britain come. Some specialists claim the Druids, the Celtic religious hierarchy, controlled the trade in tin at all its sources, from Cornwall in the North through Western France and Galicia, to Huelva in the South, and it was therefore perhaps natural that the Phoenicians should decide to try to prevent any other Mediterranean sea-going people from reaching the source of their security and the military power, which gave them complete control of their world for over 1000 years.

This is my hypothesis on how they set about doing so.