from an old article in a 1935 school textbook "Foreign Lands And Peoples" by J. Russell Smith (California State Series):
"A block of tin tells a tale. A few years ago some men were digging a foundation for a building in a city on the south coast of England. The earth was very soft, so they dug down and down to find a firm foundation. After going down for many feet, they came to something that seemed like a floor of strong oak planks. It was the deck of an old ship. The place where the city stood had once been a harbor. The ship had sunk in the harbor, and the harbor had been filled by mud brought by streams. The men cut through the deck of the sunken ship and found that the ship was still loaded with blocks of tin.
The writing on the blocks of tin in the old ship buried beneath the English city showed that it was a Phoenician ship......Ships sailed from Phoenicia to trade with many countries along the shores of the Mediterranean. They even went out into the Atlantic and up to England to get tin; this trade in tin from Britain was one of the early trades of the world."
also, from the 1967 World Book Encyclopedia: "Phoenician traders carried their goods far and wide in ancient Europe. They traded cloth and costly goods for tin and other goods from southwestern England......Some scholars believe that the Phoenicians may have sailed as far as Cornwall, in southwestern Britain, and worked the tin mines there."
and I've often come across references to Phoenicians reaching Britian around 1100 B.C., what is the basis for this, and my Encarta Encyclopedia refers to them reaching and settling Spain at this time as well.
-Michael
Michael asked
> Hey John, I'm wondering, could this "Semitic substrate" in northern
Europe be the result of Phoenician loan-words from Phoenician
traders?
I have wondered the same thing, but the evidence seems to point to
something deeper. Word order is not something that comes from
culture contact, but may come from a substrate contact. Certainly
there supposedly were contacts with Phoenicians and the Scilly Isles,
for tin trading, but the evidence for it is pretty thin.
Regards
John
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