Page:Language and the Study of Language.djvu/317

VIII.] parts of the Mediterranean coast, and speaking a dialect so nearly akin with the Hebrew that its scanty remains are read with no great difficulty by the aid of that language, have been wont to be accounted as the first to give the race prominence in general history. The part which they played was of the most honourable and useful character. Their commercial enterprise widely extended the limits of geographical knowledge, and bound together distant peoples by the ties of mutual helpfulness; their colonies opened to civilization the countries bordering the Mediterranean, and prepared the way for the extension of Greek and Roman culture. A significant indication of the far-reaching and beneficent nature of their activity is to be seen in the fact that a large portion of the world's alphabets, including many of those which have the widest range, and have been used by the most cultivated nations, come from the Phenician alphabet as their ultimate source. To great political importance the Phenicians never attained, except in their most flourishing colony, Carthage, which, as we well know, disputed for a time with the Romans the empire of the world.

But it must not fail to be noticed that, even before the rise of the Phenician world-commerce, there were great Semitic empires in Mesopotamia, that country where the idea of universal empire appears to have had its origin and its first realization, and where some of the earliest germs of world-civilization sprang up and were nursed. The mixture of nationalities and of cultures which contended in that arena for the mastery during tens of centuries, until the Indo-European Persians subjected all beneath their sway, is most intricate, and as yet only partially understood; the knowledge of its intricacy, and the hopeful means of its final solution, were given together, but a few years since, in the discovery and decipherment of the monuments of Nineveh and Babylon, of the records known as "cuneiform," from the shape of the characters in which they are written. These records are abundant, and of various content, consisting not in inscriptions alone, but in whole libraries of annals and works of science and literature, stamped upon tablets and cylinders of burnt clay; but their examination is as yet