Syria through cities such as Tyre and Sidon, old seafaring ports that hugged the rocky Phoenician (Lebanese) coast. In part the Greeks and Romans simply took advantage of the role that these cities had already played in the Mediterranean world, for by establishing trading colonies throughout the Mediterranean as early as the eighth century B.C., Tyre and Sidon had forged close economic and political ties with the west long before the rise of Rome. Cyprus. Cyprus, an island rich in natural resources,