And the evidence entirely fails to show that the Phoenicians, from the time of their removal to the Mediterranean, ever launched a vessel in the Persian Gulf, or had any connection with the nations inhabiting its shores, beyond that maintained by the caravans which trafficked by land between the Phoenician cities and the men of Dedan and Babylon.[9114] It was otherwise with the more western gulf.

There, certainly, from time to time, the Phoenicians launched their fleets, and carried on a commerce which was scarcely less lucrative because they had to allow the nations whose ports they used a participation in its profits.

It is not impossible that, occasionally, the Egyptians allowed them to build ships in some one or more of their Red Sea ports, and to make such port or ports the head-quarters of a trade which may have proceeded beyond the Straits of Babelmandeb and possibly have reached Zanzibar and Ceylon.
At any rate, we know that, in the time of Solomon, two harbours upon the Red Sea were open to them--viz.

Eloth and Ezion-Geber--both places situated in the inner recess of the Elanitic Gulf, or Gulf of Akaba, the more eastern of the two arms into which the Red Sea divides.
David's conquest of Edom had put these ports into the possession of the Israelites, and the friendship between Hiram and Solomon had given the Phoenicians free access to them.

It was the ambition of Solomon to make the Israelites a nautical people, and to participate in the advantages which he perceived to have accrued to Phoenicia from her commercial enterprise.