[Phoenician Gadir, modem Spanish Cadiz]. City in southwest Spain. In antiquity Gades enjoyed great prosperity for more than a millenium as a commercial port. Tradition dates its foundation (by Phoenicians from Tyre) to 1100 bc, but a date in the 7th or 8th century bc is perhaps more plausible. Prosperity only declines with the rise of nearby Hispalis (Seville) from the 2nd century ad. The town’s twin bases of success, adventurous sea-borne trade and fishing, are well reflected by early coins which show Phoenician Hercules backed by the tuna fish. The trade portrays a dominant association with metals and metallurgy, and by the 1st century bc Gades seems to have cornered a significant market in tin-mining and the tin trade generally. The link with tin may indeed go back much further, since Phoenician sailors from Gades are credited with the discovery (and no doubt the keeping secret) of a direct trade-route with the so-called Cassiterides (‘Tin Islands’ — usually interpreted as the Scilly Isles in this context), and some sources would put this connection back to the 7th century. Defection from the Carthaginian side to Rome in 206 bc clearly gave a new impetus to this East-West melange of cultures at the western end of the Mediterranean, and it is no surprise that Gades (Gades iocosae, ‘merry Gades’) with its puellae Gaditanae (‘dancing girls of Gades’) became proverbial to the Romans for its colourful gaiety and exotic pleasures.
The Macmillan dictionary of archaeology, Ruth D. Whitehouse, 1983Copied