It is generally believed that Phoenician traders smuggled some cats out of Egypt during the first millennium BCE, despite the efforts of the Pharaohs who sent out agents to recover their pilfered felines, and began the trade in these interesting and useful creatures throughout the Mediterranean.

The Phoenicians were regarded disparagingly by other nations of antiquity. They had a reputation for greed, trickery, and questionable business practices and they were also notorious liars. They were experts in the art of bribery and perfidy in general, at least in the opinions of the Greeks and Romans, their trading competition, who depicted them as such. Unfortunately, the Phoenicians, who invented the alphabet, left no literature behind to speak for them.