The Arabic language had become dominant everywhere. Its vocabulary had leavened the whole lump of languages in the Near East. Every race with which the Arabs came in contact was more or less Arabized. “The extent of this influence,” says Chenery,[3] “may be perceived by comparing the Persian of Firdausi with that of Saʾdi. The language of the former, who flourished in the early part of our eleventh century, is tolerably pure, while the Gulistan, which was produced some two hundred and fifty years later, is in some places little more than a piecing together of Arabic words with a cement of the original tongue. It is to be noticed, also, that the latter author introduces continually Arabic verses, as the highest ornaments of his work, and assumes that his readers are acquainted with this classic and sacred tongue.” Trade routes extended everywhere. There was intercourse with India and China on the east, as well as with the Spice Islands, so called, of Malaysia. Caravans carried trade across the whole of Central Asia and Northern Arabia to the emporiums of the West. Spain had intercourse with Persia. Al-Hariri praises Busrah “as the spot where the ship and the camel meet, the sea fish and the lizard, the camel-leader and the sailor, the fisher and the tiller.” In other words it was the port and emporium for all the lands watered by the Euphrates and Tigris. The same was true of Alexandria for the West. We have evidences that an extensive trade was carried on between Arabia and China in walrus and ivory. An extensive work exists written in Chinese in the twelfth century on trade with the Arabs of which a recent translation has been published at Petrograd. More remarkable still is the fact that in Scandinavia thousands of Kufic coins have been found, nearly all of which date from the eleventh century. This would indicate that even this remote part of Europe was in touch with the Near East.[4]