Politically, the Hebrew nation on settling in Canaan had power to annihilate a few small tribes which before the occupation had held the middle of the land. But they brought with them a minimum of civilisation and mental endowments, and intellectually had nothing to oppose to the long-established civilisation of the old inhabitants,[607] and especially of the neighbouring Phenicians, who even then were the ancient occupiers of a great historical position. In mercantile and industrial respects, especially, they were very dependent on that nation, which was the chief bearer of the commerce and industry of antiquity.[608] How should the Hebrews have risen above such dependence? for the Phenicians exerted a powerful intellectual influence not only upon the mentally inferior tribes of Canaan, but also upon the western nations with which they held intercourse; as in recent times Ewald has again strongly asserted.[609] Notwithstanding the contradiction of some scholars who depreciate Phenician civilisation,[610] this seems to be tolerably well established. There is a phenomenon which has been repeated countless times in the history of the world. A conquered people intellectually superior to its conquerors may, any political dependence notwithstanding, enforce its intellectual preeminence by assimilating to itself the nation which has succeeded to its dominion. The political victor has no power to incorporate the mind of the subjugated, if the latter possesses a higher civilisation than his own. For example, the Hyksôs, who were strong enough to annihilate the rule of the Egyptians in the Delta, could found no independent civilisation in the conquered land, but made the Egyptian culture entirely their own. And when the Aztecs, or more strictly the second horde of the Chichimecs (Northmen), coming from Aztlan and California, overwhelmed Anahuac in the twelfth century, and subjugated the Toltecs, a people which had already attained a certain degree of civilisation, it was again the conquered that imparted their culture to the conquerors. All the elements of civilisation—arts, manners, rights, usages, writing, etc.—which the Spanish conquerors found existing among the Aztecs, had been received by them from the conquered Toltecs, to whose intellectual influence they were forced to accommodate themselves, not having anything more potent of their own to impart.[611] The same is seen in China, first in the tenth and again in the seventeenth century. The victorious Khitem dynasty, as later the Manchu dynasty, which still holds the sceptre of the Middle Kingdom, could only accept and advance the native civilisation and the peculiarities of the old Chinese nation. And who can help thinking of the often-quoted instance of the Franks as conquerors of Gaul? And the relation of the Normans to the population of France conquered by them is most curious. The conquerors lost their mother-tongue in favour of the French, took to themselves French