Page:General History of Europe 1921.djvu/101

The Coming of the Greeks 57 III. BEGINNINGS OF HIGHER CULTURE AMONG THE GREEKS 82. Original Barbarism of the Greeks. The Greeks had originally invaded the ^Egean world as barbarian shepherds and warriors, and it required a long time for them to get over their old rude and ignorant mode of life. For a long time they learned little about building or manufacture or art and were not even able to write. Since the Greeks could make scarcely anything for them- selves, they were tempted to buy the various articles which the Phoenician merchants brought to their shores. There was much to attract the Greeks in these cargoes, which were made up of gor- geous clothing ; finely decorated tableware of porcelain, bronze, and silver; toilet articles, ivory combs, and glass and alabaster perfume flasks, along with all sorts of jewelry. 83. The Phoenicians. The Phoenicians had succeeded the Egyp- tians and ^Egeans as the chief merchants of the Mediterranean about the year 1000 B.C. and held their supremacy for several centuries. They pushed westward beyond the JEgean and were the discoverers of the western Mediterranean. Their colony of Carthage in north Africa (see map, p. 122) became the most im- portant commercial state in the western Mediterranean, and they even planted settlements as far away as the Atlantic coast of Spain. Thus the Phoenicians did much to spread the art and industries of the East throughout the Mediterranean. 84. Phoenicians carry the First Alphabet to Europe. But the Phoenicians brought to the Greeks a crowning gift of far more value than manufactured goods. Long before 1000 B. c. the Phoe- nician merchants had given up the inconvenient clay tablet of Babylonia, used all along the Fertile Crescent, and were writing on imported Egyptian papyrus. They or their Semitic neighbors likewise invented a system of twenty-two signs for writing their own language. These signs were alphabetic letters, the first system containing no word-signs or syllable-signs. The Greeks soon became familiar with the Phoenician tradesman's sheets of pale-yellow paper, bearing his bills and receipts, and at last they began to write Greek words by using the Phoenician letters. Thus