These last they commonly purchase [in Athens] at the Feast of Cups.

These Ethiopians are eaters of flesh and drinkers of milk; they make also much wine from the vine; and the Phoenicians, too, supply some wine to them.

They have a considerable city, to which the Phoenicians sail up." The river on which the city stood was probably the Senegal.
It will be observed that Scylax says nothing in this passage of any traffic for gold.

We can scarcely suppose, however, that the Phoenicians, if they penetrated so far south as this, could remain ignorant of the fact that West Africa was a gold-producing country, much less that, being aware of the fact, they would fail to utilise it.
Probably they were the first to establish that "dumb commerce" which was afterwards carried on with so much advantage to themselves by the Carthaginians, and whereof Herodotus gives so graphic an account.
"There is a country," he says,[9108] "in Libya, and a nation, beyond the Pillars of Hercules, which the Carthaginians are wont to visit, where they no sooner arrive than forthwith they unlade their wares, and having disposed them after an orderly fashion along the beach, there leave them, and returning aboard their ships, raise a great smoke.

The natives, when they see the sample, come down to the shore, and laying out to view so much gold as they think the wares are worth, withdraw to a distance.