The Sidonian king Tennes considered resistance hopeless, and betrayed the town to the Persian king, assisted by Mentor, who had been sent with Greek troops from Egypt to defend the town.
It was first invented, he believes, before the Trojan war, by a Sidonian thinker named Moschus or Mochus, who is identical with the Moses of the Old Testament.
Under Sennacherib's rule, Yatnana figures (as in Isaiah) as the refuge of a disloyal Sidonian in 702; but in 668 ten kings of Cypriote cities joined Assur-bani-pal's expedition to Egypt; most of them bear recognizable Greek names, e.g.
It was here that the superb Greek sarcophagi, which are now in the Imperial Museum at Constantinople, were found, and the sarcophagi of the two Sidonian kings Eshmunazar (Louvre) and Tabnith (Imperial Museum, Constantinople), both of them with important Phoenician inscriptions.
The present harbour is certainly the Sidonian port, though it is not so large as it once was; the other ancient harbour, the Egyptian port, has disappeared, and is supposed by Renan to have lain on the south side of the island, and to be now absorbed in the isthmus.