128 COSMOS. 



and powerfully developed during the penod of the new cos- 

 mical views that succeeded the Macedonian conquest. The 

 opening of the Egyptian ports under Psammitich is an event 

 of very great importance, as the country up to that period, at 

 least at its northern extremity, had for a long time been com- 

 pletely closed to strangers, as Japan is at the present day.* 



In our enumeration of the non-Hellenic civilized nations 

 ■v^'ho dwelt around the basin of the Mediterranean — the most 

 ancient seat and the starting point of our mental cultivation — 

 we must rank the PhcEnicians next to the Egyptians. This 

 race is to be regarded as the most active in maintaining inter- 

 course between the nations from the Indian Ocean to the west 

 and north of the Old Continent. Although circumscribed in 

 many spheres of mental cultivation, and less familiar with the 

 fine arts than with mechanics, and not endowed with the grand 

 form of creative genius common to the more highly-gifted in 

 habitants of the Valley of the Nile, the Phoenicians, as an ad- 

 venturous and commercial race, and especially by the estab- 

 lishment of colonies (one of which far surpassed the parent 

 city in political power), exerted an influence on the course of 

 ideas, and on the diversity and number of cosraical views, 

 earlier than all the other nations inhabiting the coasts of the 

 Mediterranean. The Phoenicians made use of Babylonian 

 weights and measures,! and, at least since the Persian domin- 

 ion, employed stamped metallic coinage as a monetary curren- 

 cy, which, strangely enough, was not known in the artificial- 

 ly-arranged political institutions of the highly-cultivated Egyp- 

 tians, But that by which the Phoenicians contributed most 

 powerfully to the civilization of the nations v/ith which they 

 came in contact was the general spread of alphabetical writ- 

 ing, v/hich they had themselves employed for a long period. 

 Although the whole mythical relation of the colony of Cadmus 

 in Boeotia remains buried in obscurity, it is not the less certain 

 that the Hellenes obtained the alphabetical characters long 

 known as Phoenician symbols by means of the commercial in- 



^ Diod., lib. i., cap. 67, 10; Herod., ii., 154, 178, and 182. On the 

 probability of the existence of intercourse between Egypt and Greece, 

 before the time of Psammeticbus, see the ingenious observations of 

 Ludwig Ross, in Hellenika, where he expresses himself as follows, bd. 

 i., 1846, s. V. and x. "In the times immediately preceding Psammeti- 

 chus, there was in both countries a period of internal disturbance, which 

 must necessarily have brought about a diminution and partial interrup 

 tion of intercourse." 



t Bbckh, Meterologische Untersuchungen uber Gewichte, Munzfusse 

 und Masse des Aliei'thums in ihrem Zusammenhang, 1838, s. 12 und273 



