Two KILOMETERS off the Syrian coast near Ṭarṭūs lies the island of Arwad (classical Arados, now known as Ruwād) , a rocky shelf 800 meters long (north to south) and about 500 meters wide. A site that for millennia has attracted settlement, it enjoys a strategic and easily defended location and, along a coastline otherwise generally devoid of good harbors, two protected anchorages along its eastern side now known as the Marbaṭ Jeanne d'Arc and the Marbaṭ Sidnūs ( Cydnus ). These features endowed it-like Tyre further south-with considerable importance and enabled it to make its mark in the course of ancient history. As continues to be the case today, Arwād seems to have been a place entirely dominated by seamen and maritime power politics and trade. It was an independent state already in the second millennium BC, and in the diplomatic correspondence of the Amarna tablets it figures as a naval power of considerable authority in the eastern Mediterranean. Israelite lore makes the Aradians descendants of Canaan, and by the sixth century BC the island was tributary to Tyre and provided the latter with troops and seamen. It was active in the maneuvering among the great powers of antiquity, and was at various times under Egyptian, Assyrian, Babylonian, and Persian suzerainty. Its fleet fought with the Persians at Salamis (480 Be), and in the era prior to its conquest by Alexander the Great (333 BC) it ranked with Byblos, Sidon, and Tyre as one of the four great coastal cities of Syria. Seleucid times comprised an era of efflorescence for the island: Arwād initiated its own era in 259 BC, enjoyed complete autonomy, issued its own coinage, and in this period developed into a flourishing and powerful city. The great walls surrounding the island on all but the harbor side were at least ten meters high in places and were built of tremendous blocks up to six meters long and two meters high, and the city was the capital for a regime that controlled mainland territories extending from Jabala, 70 km. north of Arwād, to the district of Eleutheros, 40 km. to the south of the island. Under Hasmonean rule, and especially during the reign of Simon Maccabeus (141-135 BC), it continued to be a center of both political and military significance.