Compared with the Romans, the Carthaginians did little to open up the interior of North Africa, except in what is now called Tunisia. Trade with the outer world was restricted by jealous monopolies; but the Phoenician language was nevertheless much impressed on North Africa, and became the accepted means of intercommunication among the more civilized tribes between Tripoli and Western Morocco. Indeed the Phoenician tongue, closely akin to Hebrew and not very far removed from Arabic, is believed to have lingered all through the subsequent Roman occupation of Africa and only to have disappeared completely under the invasion of Arabic, the immediate consequence of the Arab conquest in the seventh century of our era. Even then it is considered that some Phoenician words remain incorporated in the Arabic dialects of Tripoli and Tunis and especially in Maltese; Malta having also been occupied by the Carthaginians. The Jews, who settled so abundantly in North Africa both before and after the fall of Jerusalem, brought thither the influence of Hebrew and of Aramaic, and contributed to Semiticise North Africa in language and religion. So that Carthaginian rule paved the way for the Judaizing of certain tribes, before and after the Roman empire ousted Syria for a time as a colonizing agency; and the use of the Phoenician tongue down to the seventh century A.C. in the villages and smaller towns of the Tunisian coast-belt undoubtedly prepared the way for the rapid and wide-spread acceptance of Arabic a hundred years later. Amid all their wrangles, throughout all the recorded history of North Africa, Berber and Semite seem unconsciously to have recognized that by descent and language they had more kinship with each other than with the Aryan peoples. The Jews, after the first century of the Christian era, settled numerously in North Africa from Cyrenaica to Western Morocco. They are believed to have preceded the Berbers in settling the oasis of Twat in mid-Sahara, and other oases of the desert also; though they probably found these habitable regions still retaining a negroid population.