37
Superior Chickens Make Friends
There is one more advantage to moving up the superorganismic
pecking order: friends.  A group high on the ladder of nations has
them.  A group at the bottom doesn't.  That simple fact is vital to the
spread of memes.
In 814 B.C., Phoenician merchants from the coast of what is today
Lebanon sailed half way across the Mediterranean and set up a trading
colony on the northern shores of Africa.  They called the new
encampment Kart-Hadasht--"New Town."  Folks in Europe
mispronounced the Semitic name.  In the mouths of these westerners it
came out as "Carthage."69
The sea-going traders of Carthage did very well for themselves.
They built ships to carry rare goods from one country to another,
explored the coasts, and looked for barbarian towns whose craftsmen
made strange objects.  Carthaginian trading vessels showed up as far
afield as the Baltic, the Cameroons, and even an unheard-of island we
know today as Britain.70  After all, you never knew when some
backwoods trinket might fetch a steep price back in the centers of
sophisticated civilization--Babylon, Nineveh, Memphis or Thebes.71
Occasionally the shipboard entrepreneurs' hunt for new commodities
turned up raw materials of considerable value.  For example, in Spain
the Carthaginians discovered they could buy tin that had been trekked
across seas and mountains all the way from Cornwall.72
Business for the Carthaginians was brisk.  Back home, they dug
an extra harbor and enlarged the size of their merchant fleet.  To
protect their seafaring executives from pirates, they constructed a
sizable navy.  Carthaginian warships were miracles of
technology--swift, narrow galleys driven by sail and oar that could
accelerate like a jackrabbit, and ram an enemy vessel hard enough to
snap it in half.
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