    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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