What is the equivalent of the consortiums of traders in modern days? So traffickers could be legitimate, but morally questionable in contemporary view, and yet honourable? Phoenician trade was likely, then, carried out by state officials working on commission but also by consortiums of traders closely associated with royal households. These latter would have been high-ranking nobles, as described in Isaiah 23:8, "Tyre, the crowning city, whose merchants are princes, whose traffickers are the honourable of the earth."