mutual safety and comfort, numerous bodies of merchants assembled at stated times, and formed a temporary association, known afterwards by the name of a caravan,* governed by officers of their own choice, and subject to regulations, of which experience had taught them the utility; they performed journeys of such extent and duration, as appear astonishing to nations not accustomed to this mode of carrying on commerce.

But notwithstanding every improvement that could be made in the manner of conveying the productions of one country to another by land, the inconveniences which attended it were obvious and unavoidable. It was often dangerous, always expensive, and tedious and fatiguing. A method of communication more easy and expeditious was sought, and the ingenuity of man gradually discovered that the rivers, the arms of the sea, and even the ocean itself, were destined to open and facilitate intercourse with the various regions of the earth, between which they appear, at first view, to be placed as insuperable barriers. Navigation, however, and shipbuilding, as I have observed in another work, are arts so nice and complicated, that they require the talents, as well as experience, of many successive ages to bring them to any degree of perfection. From the raft, or canoe, which first served to carry a savage over the river that obstructed him in the chase, to the construction of a vessel capable of conveying a numerous crew or a considerable cargo of goods to a distant coast, the progress of improvement is immense. Many efforts would be made, many experiments would be tried, and much labour as well as ingenuity would be employed, before this arduous and important undertaking could be accomplished.— ROBERTSON'S 'Disquisition on Ancient India.'

EVEN after some improvement was made in shipbuilding, the

intercourse of nations with each other by sea was far from being

extensive. From the accounts of the earliest historians, we learn that navigation made its first efforts in the Mediterranean and the Arabian Gulf; and in them the first active operations of commerce were carried on. From an attentive inspection of the position and form of these two great inland seas, these accounts appear to be highly probable. These seas lay' open the continents of Europe, Asia, and Africa, and spreading to a great extent along the coasts of most fertile and most early civilized countries in each, seem to have been destined by nature to facilitate their communication with one another. We find, accordingly, that the first voyages of the Egyptians and Phoenicians, the most ancient navigators mentioned in history, were made in the Mediterranean. Their trade, however, was not long confined to the countries bordering upon it. By acquiring early possession of ports on the Arabian Gulf, they extended the sphere of their commerce, and are represented as the first people of the west who opened a communication by sea with India.

In that account of the progress of navigation and discovery, which I prefixed to the history of America, I considered with attention the maritime operations of the Egyptians and Phonicians; a brief review of them here, as far as they relate to their connection with India, is all that is requisite for illustrating the subject of my present inquiries. With respect to the former of these people, the information which history affords is slender, and of doubtful authority. The fertile soil and mild climate of Egypt produced the necessaries and comforts of life in such profusion as to render its inhabitants so independent of other countries, that it became early an established maxim in their policy to renounce all intercourse with foreigners. In consequence of this, they held all seafaring persons in detestation, as impious and profane, and, fortifying their harbours, they denied strangers admission into them.

The enterprising ambition of Sesostris disdained the restraints imposed upon it by these contracted ideas of his subjects, and prompted him to render the Egyptians a commercial people; and in the course of his reign he so completely accomplished this, that, if we may give credit to some historians, he was able to fit out a fleet of four hundred ships in the Arabian Gulf, which conquered all the countries stretching along the Erythreans sea to India. At the same time his army, led by himself, marched through Asia, and subjected to his dominion every port of it as far as to the banks of the Ganges; and crossing that river, advanced to the Eastern Ocean. But these efforts produced no permanent effect, and appear to have been so contrary to the genius and habits of the Egyptians, that, on the death of

Sesostris, they resumed their ancient maxims, and many ages elapsed before the commercial connection of Egypt with India. came to be of such importance as to merit any notice in this Disquisition.

The history of the early maritime operations of Phoenicia is not involved in the same obscurity with those of Egypt. Every circumstance in the character and situation of the Phoenicians was favourable to the commercial spirit. The territory which they possessed was neither large nor fertile; it was from commerce only that they could derive either opulence or power. Accordingly, the trade carried on by the Phoenicians of Sidon and Tyre was extensive and adventurous; and, both in their manners and policy, they resemble the great commercial states of modern times more than any people in the ancient world.* Among the various branches of their commerce, that with India may be regarded as one of the most considerable and most lucrative. As by their situation on the Mediterranean, and the imperfect state of navigation, they could not attempt to open a direct communication with India by sea; the enterprising spirit of commerce prompted them to wrest from the Idumæans some commodious harbours towards the bottom of the Arabian Gulf.

From these they held a regular intercourse with India, on the one hand, and with the eastern and southern coasts of Africa on the other. The distance, however, from the Arabian Gulf to Tyre was considerable, and rendered the conveyance of goods to it by land carriage so tedious and expensive that it became necessary for them to take possession of Rhinocolura, the nearest port in the Mediterranean to the Arabian Gulf. Thither all the commodities brought from India were conveyed over land, by a route much shorter and more practicable than that by which the productions of the east were carried, at a subsequent period, from the opposite shore of the Arabian Gulf to the Nile. At Rhinocolura they were reshipped and transported, by an easy navigation, to Tyre, and distributed through the world. This, as it is the earliest route of communication with India of which we have any authentic description, had so many advantages over any ever known before the modern discovery of a new course of navigation to the east, that the Phoenicians could supply other nations with the productions of India in greater abundance, and at a cheaper rate, than any people of antiquity. To this circumstance, which, for a considerable time, secured to them a monopoly of that trade, was owing, not only the extraordinary wealth of individuals, which rendered the "merchants of Tyre princes, and her traffickers the honourable of the earth;" but the extensive power of the state itself, which first taught man

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kind to conceive what vast resources a commercial people possess, and what great exertions they are capable of making.-ROBERTSON'S Disquisition on Ancient India.'

FROM the beginning, the people of Egypt have had everything to hope from the river, nothing from the desert; much to fear from the desert, and little from the river. What their fear may reasonably be, any one may know who looks upon a hillocky expanse of sand, where the little jerboa' burrows, and the hyæna prowls at night. Under these hillocks lie temples and palaces, and under the level sands a whole city. The enemy has come in from behind, and stifled and buried it. What is the hope of the people from the river, any one may witness who, at the regular season, sees the people grouped on the eminences, watching the advancing waters, and listening for the voice of the crier, or the boom of the cannon, which is to tell the prospect or event of the inundation of the year. Who can estimate the effect on a nation's mind and character, of a perpetual vigilance against the desert (see what it is in Holland of a similar vigilance against the sea) and of an annual mood of hope in regard to the Nile? Who cannot see what a stimulating and enlivening influence this periodical anxiety and relief must exercise on the character of a nation? And then, there is the effect on their ideas. The Nile was naturally deified by the old inhabitants. It was a god to the mass, and, at least, one of the manifestations of deity to the priestly class. As it was the immediate cause of all they had, and all they hoped for-the creative power regularly at work before their eyes, usually conquering, though occasionally checked, it was to them the good power, and the desert was the

evil one. Hence came a main part of their faith embodied in the allegory of the burial of Osiris in the sacred stream, whence he rose, once a year, to scatter blessings over the earth. Then the structure of their country originated or modified their idea of death and life. As to the disposal of their dead, they could not dream of consigning their dead to the waters which were too sacred to receive any meaner body than the incorruptible one of Osiris; nor must any other be placed within reach of its waters, or in the way of the pure production of the valley. There were the boundary rocks, with the limits afforded by their caves. These became sacred to the dead. After the accumulations of a few generations of corpses, it became clear how much more extensive was the world of the dead than of the living; and as the proportion of the living to the dead became, before men's eyes, smaller and smaller, the state of the dead became a subject of proportionate importance to them, till their faith and practice grew into what we see them in the records of the temples and tombs, engrossed with the idea of death, and in preparation for it. The unseen world became all in all to them; and the visible world and present life of little more importance than as the necessary introduction to the higher and greater.

The imagery before their eyes perpetually sustained these modes of thought. Everywhere they had in presence symbols of the worlds of death and life, the limited scene of production, activity, and change, the valley with its verdure, its floods, and its busy multitudes, who were all incessantly passing away to be succeeded by their like; while, as a boundary to this scene of life, lay the region of death, to their view unlimited, and everlastingly silent to the human ear. Their imagery of death was wholly suggested by the scenery of their abode. Our reception of this is much injured by our having been familiarised with it, first, through the ignorant and vulgarised Greek adoption of it, in their imagery of Charon, Styx, Cerberus, and Rhadamanthus; but if we can forget these, and look upon the older records with fresh eyes, it is inexpressibly interesting to contemplate the symbolical representations of death by the oldest of the Egyptians, before Greek or Persian was heard of in the world: the passage of the dead across the river or lake of the valley, attended by the conductor of souls, the god Anubis, the formidable dog, the guardian of the mansion of Osiris (or the divine abode); the balance in which the heart or deeds of the deceased are weighed against the symbol of integrity; the infant Harpocrates, the emblem of new life, seated before the throne of the judge; the range of assessors who are to pronounce on the life of the being come up to the judgment; and, finally, the judge himself, whose suspended