The imported objects from Greece have left numerous traces. In the earliest period the trade seems to have been exclusively from Cyprus, which seems to have held a monopoly of trade. Cyprus in turn gave way io Rhodes, from which imports of pottery in the sixth and seventh centuries were numerous. At the close of the sixth century &c. the market was captured by Athens, which retained its hold on the trade down to the end. Athenian imports were represented by numerous vases and fragments of vases of the finest Attic workmanship from the black-figure period to the fourth century. The high standard of the artistic imports was illustrated by the discovery of examples of the work of the best-known vase-painters of the fifth century, In some rooms of warehouses many hundreds of the less-valuable Greek vases were found as they had been stored. A hoard of the coins of Athens, silver tetra-drachms, was also found. The as-Itonishing thing about this site is that the trade with Athens which began about 520 me. continued without check right through the period of disturbance of the Persian Wars. This phenomenon wil! come as a surprise to Greek historians.
The excavators ere of opinion that the site of Mina has an earlier history before Greek times, and that it goes beck probably to the Mycenman period also. Stray finds of this period suggest this. But the site has io a large extent been washed away by the Orontes floods, and it is thought that the bulk of the earlier levels have thus vanished.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.