490 COSMOS. 



md powerfully developed during the period c f the new cosmi- 

 cal views that succeeded the Macedonian conquest. The 

 opening of the Egyptian ports under Psammitich, is an event 

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

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

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

 In our enumeration of the non- Hellenic civilised nations 

 who dwelt around the basin of the Mediterranean the most 

 ancient seat and the starting point of our mental cultivation, 

 we must rank the Pho3nicians 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 inhabitants of the valley of the Nile, the Phoeni- 

 cians as an adventurous and commercial race, and especially 

 by the establishment of colonies (one of which far sur- 

 passed the parent city in political power), exerted an influ- 

 ence on the course of ideas, and on the diversity and number 

 of cbsmical 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 dominion, employed stamped metallic coinage, as a 

 monetary currency, which strangely enough was not known 

 in the artificially arranged political institutions of the highly 

 cultivated Egyptians. But that by which the Phoenicians 

 contributed most powerfully to the civilisation of the nations 

 with which they came in contact, was the general spread of 

 alphabetical writing, which they had themselves employed for 



* 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 Psammetichus, see the ingenious observations of Lud- 

 wig Ross, in J dlenika, where he expresses himself as follows, bd. i. 

 38-16, s. v. and x. " In the times immediately preceding Psammeti- 

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

 must necessarily have brought about a diminution and partial inter- 

 ruption of intercourse." 



f Bb'ckh, Metrologische Untersuclmngen uber Gewichtc, Mui^zfilsse 

 anil Masse dcs Alterlhums in ihrem Zusammenhang, 1838, a 12, 

 uiul 273. 



