Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 76.djvu/167

Rh In connection with their maritime trade they also established great overland routes, their caravans bringing gold from Ophir in southeastern Arabia, and passing through Palmyra, Baalbec and Babylon, whence they penetrated all the east.

Although the Phœnicians were thus brought into intimate contact with all the great nations of antiquity, their culture was essentially different. Forced to rely upon the sea for their livelihood, they developed an industrious and hardy manhood in marked contrast to the dependent attitude characteristic of nations relying upon agriculture for their subsistence. In religion the same contrast was apparent, the religion of the Egyptians and Assyrians being a crude and sensuous idolatry, whereas the Phœnicians worshipped Hercules, a divinity whom the Greeks said raised himself to Olympus by virtue of his own courage and daring. In mathematics the Phœnicians developed commercial arithmetic, necessitated by their enormous commerce. According to Strabo, the Syrians applied themselves especially to the science of numbers, navigation and astronomy. They were, in fact, the first to notice the connection of the moon with the tides, and make a practical application of astronomy to navigation. It is also said that the Phœnicians regularly supplied the weights and measures used by their neighbors, the Chaldeans. In all respects, therefore, their culture was a natural consequence of the commercial spirit engendered by the sea.

With the rise of Grecian culture, a new topographical principle entered to alter the trend of development. Numerous mountain walls fence off the Grecian peninsula into a large number of isolated districts, each of which became the seat of a separate community or state, which never coalesced into a single nation. Moreover the coast is indented with numerous deep inlets, forming excellent harbors and giving every inducement to commerce. So numerous and deep are these inlets that the country is practically an archipelago, no place in Greece being forty miles from the sea. To this combination of mountain and coastal elements was largely due the versatility of the Greeks, while the exhilarating atmosphere and brilliant skies of Attica were also intimately related to their intellectual vigor and attainments.

The same principle of diversity is also met in the origin of the Greeks. There was here no such inbreeding of native stock as characterized Egypt and China, but at the outset a mixture of races, partly autochthonous and partly foreign, from which there evolved a higher type of intellect than had yet appeared. The diverse sources of their civilization was acknowledged by the Greeks in their mythology. Thus the introduction of agriculture was ascribed to Triptolemus; fire was introduced by Prometheus from the Caucasus; Æschylus speaks of iron as "Scythian"; while Poseidon introduced the olive, the horse and the arts of spinning and weaving. The foundation of the various states was also ascribed to foreigners. Thus Athens was said to owe