Rome from earlies times to 44 B C Author:Theodor Mommsen Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: Chapter XI CARTHAGE. 500-264 B.C. WE now turn our eyes to a race of people widely differing from any in Italy in nature and origin, viz., the Carthaginians... more ». Belonging to the great Semitic race, which has ever, as though from some instinctive sense of its wide diversity, kept itself severed from the European nations, Carthage was one of the numerous settlements of the enterprising Phoenicians. This particular branch of the Semitic stock issued forth from its native land of Canaan or " the plain," and spread further west than any other people of the same race. Utilizing to the full the excellent harbors, and the bountiful supply of timber and metals of their own country, the Phoenicians early attained an unrivaled position in the ancient world as the pioneers of commerce, navigation, manufacture, and colonization. In the most remote times we find them in Cyprus and Egypt, Greece and Sicily, Africa and Spain, and even on the Atlantic Ocean and the North Sea. The field of their commerce reached from Sierra Leone and Cornwall in the west, eastward to the coast of Malabar. But the one-sided character that marks the development of the great nations of antiquity is especially visible in the case of the Phoenicians. We cannot ascribe to them the credit of having originated any of the intellectual or scientific discoveries which have been the glory of other members of the Semitic family. Their religious conceptions were gross and barbarous; their art was not comparable to that of Italy, still less to that of Greece; their knowledge of astronomy and chronology, of the alphabet, of weights and measures, was derived from Babylon. No doubt, in their commercial dealings, the Phoenicians spread valuable germs of civilization, but rather as a bird dropping grain than a husbandman sowing s...« less