institutions, laws and customs, and actually transplanted subsequently the French language to England.[612] The same phenomenon is also encountered on the domain of Religion.[613] For the Phenicians, to whom we recur, it was the easier to establish their system, as they came as conquerors to places where they found a population intellectually inferior to themselves. When by the foundation of Carthage they gained an establishment in Northern Africa, they exerted an influence on the Libyans which almost suppressed everything native. ‘Phenician civilisation prevailed in Libya just as Greek in Asia Minor and Syria after Alexander’s campaigns, if not with equal force. At the courts of the nomad Sheikhs Phenician was spoken and written, and the civilised native tribes took the Phenician alphabet for their languages; but it was neither the spirit of the Phenicians nor the policy of Carthage to Phenicise them entirely.’[614] But this very Phenician language, which as bearer of a higher civilisation suppressed the language of surrounding tribes and the civilisation connected with them, had in its turn to step into the background. A civilisation of superior force and intensity, the Arabian, assailed it, and put the Arabic language of the conquerors of North Africa in the place of that of the Carthaginian colonies. Renan is wrong in asserting, ‘L’arabe n’absorba que les dialectes qui lui étaient congénères, tels que le syriaque, le chaldéen, le samaritain. Partout ailleurs, il ne put effacer les idiomes établis.’[615] We will not here enter on an enquiry, to what extent Arabic in the middle ages and in modern times has supplanted other idioms. But two considerations must be suggested in answer to Renan’s thesis.