Page:An Essay on the Age and Antiquity of the Book of Nabathaean Agriculture.djvu/146

130 Commerce and the industrial arts were first carried on on a grand scale by a Shemitic people, or at least by a people speaking a Shemitic tongue,—the Phœnicians. In the middle ages, the Arabs and the Jews were also our masters in point of commerce. All European luxuries, from ancient times to the seventeenth century, came from the East. I speak of luxury, not of Art; there is a vast difference between the two. Greece, which, as regards taste, had an immense superiority over the rest of mankind, was not a land of luxury; there the vain magnificence of the palace of the great king was spoken of with contempt; and if we could be allowed to see the house of Pericles, we should probably scarcely think it habitable. I do not insist on this point; for then we should have to examine whether this Asiatic luxury, that of Babylon, for instance, were really the work of the Shemites? I, for one, doubt it. But one indisputable gift they made us, a gift of the highest order, and which