n or a
tree to the forest. Such other localized civilizations as those of
Phoenicia, Carthage, Greece, Rome, Byzantium, the Sassanids, in due
course waxed and waned, leaving a tremendous imprint on national
history, but creating only minor and transitory ripples in the great
ocean of civilization. Progress in the elaboration of the details of
earlier methods and inventions took place as a matter of course. Some
nation, probably the Phoenicians, gave a new impetus to the art of
writing by developing a phonetic alphabet; but this achievement,
remarkable as it was in itself, added nothing fundamental to human
capacity. Literatures had previously flourished through the use of
hieroglyphic and syllabic symbols; and the Babylonian syllabics
continued in vogue throughout western Asia for a long time after the
Phoenician alphabet had demonstrated its intrinsic superiority.

Similarly the art of Egyptian and Assyrian and Greek was but the
elaboration and perfection of methods that barbaric man had practised
away back in the days when he was a cave-dweller. The weapons of warfare
of Greek and Roman were the spear and the bow and arrow that their
ancestors had used in the period of savagery, aided by sword and helmet
dating from the upper period of barbarism. Greek and Roman government at
their best were founded upon the system of _gentes_ that barbaric man
had profoundly studied,--as witness, for example, the federal system of
the barbaric Iroquois Indians existing in America before the coming of
Columbus. And if the Greeks had better literature, the Romans better
roads and larger cities, than their predecessors, these are but matters
of detailed development, the like of which had marked the progress of
the more important arts and the introduction of less important ancillary
ones in each antecedent period. The axe of steel is no new implement,
but a mere perfecting of the axe of chipped flint. The _Iliad_
represents the perfecting of an art that unnumbered generations of
barbarians practised before their camp-fires.

Great inventions of the middle ages.

Thus for six or seven thousand years after man achieved civilization
there was rhythmic progress in many lines, but there came no great
epochal invention to usher in a new ethnic period. Then, towards the
close of what historians of to-day are accustomed to call the middle
ages, there appeared in rapid sequence three or four inventions and a
great scientific discovery that