It is a singular anomaly that a people who habitually called themselves Hellenes should be known to all the world beside as Greeks. This name was derived from the Graians, a small and obscure group. The Romans, chancing to come first in contact with this tribe, gave the name Greek to the whole people. In the course of time it became so fixed in the usage of other nations that it could never be shaken off. Such a change of a proper name was very unusual in antiquity. The almost invariable custom was, when it became necessary to use a proper name from a foreign language, to transcribe it as literally as might be with only such minor changes as a difference in the genius of the language made necessary. Thus the Greeks in speaking of their Persian enemies pronounced and wrote such words as “Cyrus” and “Darius” in as close imitation as possible of the native pronunciation of those names, and the Egyptians in turn, in accepting the domination of the Macedonian Ptolemies, spelled and no doubt pronounced the names of their conquerors with as little alteration as was possible in a language which made scant use of vowels. It was indeed this fact of transliteration rather than translation of foreign proper names which, as we have seen, furnished the clew to the nineteenth century scholars in their investigations of the hieroglyphics of Egypt and the cuneiform writing of Asia. Had not the engraver of the Rosetta stone spelled the word Ptolemy closely as the Greeks spelled it, Dr. Young, perhaps, never would have found the key to the interpretation of the hieroglyphics. And had not the eighty or ninety proper names of the great inscription at Behistun been interpreted by the same signs in the three different forms of writing that make up that inscription, it may well be doubted whether we should even now have any clear knowledge of the cuneiform character of the Babylonians and Assyrians. Indeed, so universal was this custom of retaining proper names in their original form that the failure of the Romans to apply to the Greeks the name which they themselves employed seems very extraordinary indeed. The custom which they thus inaugurated, however, has not been without imitators in modern times, as witness the translation “Angleterre” by which the French designate England, and the even stranger use by the same nation of the word “Allemagne” to designate the land which its residents term “Deutschland” and which in English is spoken of as Germany.