for its plantations of cotton, and for its excellent timber; productions which were sure to be in great demand in Babylonia, where the staple manufacture was weaving, and where the country was bare of all trees but the palm. But Nearchus has preserved to us the highly interesting information, that Cape Makae, on the Arabian side of the entrance of the gulf, was a mart for cinnamon and similar merchandise, which was conveyed to the Assyrians. It appears, therefore, that a commerce with India and Ceylon, and possibly with the Indian Spice Islands, was carried on from the coast of Oman by the Arabians and by the Phoenicians who had settled among them; and that this commerce was extended to Babylon, along the western coast of the Persian Gulf. This communication, which probably was regulated by the monsoons, reached to remoter regions, and yet must have been safer and more expeditious, than that which Alexander endeavoured to establish by the coasting voyage of Nearchus, from the mouths of the Indus, and along the eastern side of the gulf. But under the Persian empire, the maritime commerce of Babylon and the adjacent regions had received a very serious check; and Alexander might be ignorant how great it once had been. The Persians were so fearful lest some maritime power should surprise the great cities of their empire, which were situated on navigable rivers, Susa, and Opis, and Babylon, that they blocked the channels of the rivers by dams, and caused artificial falls. The removal of these obstacles was one of the great objects upon which Alexander was employed at the time of his death.

One section of Heeren's work is devoted to the Scythians, under which name he includes not only the proper Scythians of Europe, between the Danube and the Don, but the Sarmatians between the Don and the Caspian Sea, and the more eastern tribes, the Argippæi and the Issedones, whom he believes to have belonged to the great Mongolian race, as well as the Massagetæ, who dwelt more to the south, along the river Jaxartes. In order to avoid the confusion which would necessarily arise from taking accounts of nomad nations from authors of different ages, he has restricted himself solely to the authority of Herodotus. The student ought to check his geography of the Scythian tribes, by comparing it with the profound disquisition of B. G. Niebuhr on the Scythians; which has been translated and published at Oxford, together with his essay on the geography of Herodotus. It is singular that Heeren, even in this last edition, has made no use of Niebuhr's treatise. In his Manual of Ancient History,' likewise, he has shown a disposition to undervalue his investigations ;-a disposition which detracts from nothing but the value of his own

work. In the present investigation, he shows satisfactorily, on the authority of Herodotus, that the Greeks of Olbia, and the other Milesian colonies on the north of the Euxine, not only maintained a trade with Greece in corn and slaves, but that, by the help of their Scythian neighbours, they carried on an inland commerce, travelling probably in caravans, and passing through seven different nations, and using seven different interpreters, till they ended their journey in the territory of the Argippæi. This people he supposes to be the same as the Calmucks, and to have inhabited the region between Orenburg, near the river Ural, and the lake Aral, which is now the steppe of the Kirghees, a tribe which has emigrated southward from Siberia. He considers it likewise as proved by the researches of Lehrberg into ancient Russian history, that this district, with the regions to the north of it towards Perm and Tobolsk, was the country called Jugria, which was the great centre of the fur-trade in the middle ages. He considers it probable that the Pontine Greeks and the Scythians brought hither their furs, to barter them for the precious commodities of the East, with caravans from Bactra and Maracanda (Balkh and Samarcand). The Russians at this day prosecute a similar trade by caravans from Orenburg to Bokhara ; and they not only meet at Bokhara caravans from the East, but many Banyans or Hindoo merchants reside there.

The volume on the Indians is the least satisfactory part of the whole work. The greater part of it is occupied with a laborious and somewhat tedious enquiry,-what is the amount of the knowledge of Ancient India which we have derived from genuine Sanscrit documents? Heeren himself is not a Sanscrit scholar; and this circumstance has made the enquiry more painful both to himself and his readers: although the caution which he shows in ascertaining the amount and the value of his authorities is highly commendable. The fact is, however, that Sanscrit learning is rapidly making way both in this country and in Germany. The rising tide has passed Heeren's water-marks. He has been obliged to add an Appendix on the Latest Additions to Sanscrit "Literature.' New progress has been made since the writing of his Appendix; and if he lives to publish a fifth edition, many points on which he has expended pages of doubts, will be determined in the positive or the negative. His work would be valuable to a Sanscrit scholar, by showing him to what points he might profitably direct his researches. It is obvious, also, that much may be learned from a more accurate examination of the remains of ancient architecture and sculpture. Heeren unfortunately had not seen the drawings of the Temples of Ellora.

The

One point appears to be satisfactorily ascertained. Vedas, the most ancient of the sacred books of the Hindoos, contain the doctrines, and the rites and offices, of a religion consisting of the worship of the elements and other natural objects; or, at the utmost, of deities which are the personifications of them. As the mythology of Greece received its form from the Homeric poems, so the poetic and popular mythology of India is to be traced to the great epic poems, the Ramayana' and the 'Mahabharat.' It appears likewise, upon the authority of Professor Ewald, that the language of the Vedas is of a much more antique character than that of the Ramayana; and again, that the language of the epic poems is more ancient than that of 'Sacontala' and other dramatic compositions. Calidasa, the author of Sacontala, lived at the court of the Rajah Vicramaditya; and the age of Vicramaditya is thus far ascertained, that the Hindoos compute their chronology from his death, and make this era to correspond with the fifty-sixth year before the Christian era. This grammatical evidence alone obviously carries back the earliest monuments of Sanscrit literature to an age much anterior to that at which we begin to derive any knowledge of India from the Greek writers. The religious system of the Vedas has an affinity to the ancient religion of Persia, as it is described by Herodotus.

In the second chapter of this volume, Heeren treats of the ancient history of the Hindoos-of their social system, and especially of the distinction of castes of their laws and government -and, lastly, of their commerce. By comparing the statements of their native writings with the information contained in the 'Periplus of the Erythrean Sea,' ascribed to Arrian of Alexandria, he throws considerable light upon their manufactures and foreign trade. He shows that an intercourse with China was carried on by land, and that it followed more than one route. In discussing this subject, he returns, of course, to the regions on the north of India, which seem to possess a peculiar charm for him. One route from Thina led to the banks of the Ganges. The other was much more circuitous; for the silken fabrics, which were the staple of this trade, were carried across Central Asia to Bactra, and thence returned eastward across the Indus to Barygaza. Ptolemy mentions a place called the Stone Tower, which was a rendezvous of the caravans of Central Asia, in the same latitude with Byzantium and the capital of Serica (Pekin), and distant from the latter seven months' journey. This monument still exists, and stands near the bottom of a defile at the junction of the two ranges of mountains which skirt the Desert of Cobi. It is a rock

terminating a small line of hills, which juts from the mountains, and ends abruptly in the middle of a plain. It has been cut into a regular shape with two rows of columns, one above the other. It is called Chihel-Sutun, or the Forty Columns; and there is a place of rendezvous for merchants in its neighbourhood at this day only now the station is at the head of the defile, instead of being at the tower, which is at the beginning of the

ascent.

One very valuable portion of this volume is the article in the Appendix on the Commerce of Ceylon,' in which Heeren begins at the age of Cosmas Indicopleustes, and traces the commerce backward to the fifth century before Christ, and forwards to the discovery of the passage round the Cape of Good Hope. We should observe, that the translator of this volume appears to possess an intimate knowledge of his subject, and has illustrated the text of Heeren by many valuable notes.

We have devoted so much space to the volumes on the Asiatic nations, that we cannot even attempt to do justice to the two remaining volumes, on the African nations. Yet we think we do not err in pronouncing these to be the more valuable portion of the work. The volume on Egypt, especially, embodies with great skill all the information which the latest researches have afforded with regard to that singular country. It comprehends, in a perspicuous order, a great multitude of details; and all are brought to bear, with much force of argument, on the theories which the author wishes to establish with regard to the origin and progress of its civilisation. There is more exactness in the reasoning, and more compression in the style, than in the other volumes. Perhaps this apparent superiority may be owing to the greater interest which the subject excites both in the writer and in the reader. We the less regret the brief notice which we can give to these volumes, because, from their first publication, they appear to have attracted more general attention than the others, -to be more widely known, and better appreciated.

After a brief general sketch of the physical geography of Africa, Heeren begins his investigations with Carthage. This division of his work ought to be read in connexion with his Researches on the Phoenicians. Much that is imperfect in our knowledge of the polity and character of the mother state, may be supplied by probable conjecture from our more ample information respecting the colony. Yet even with respect to Carthage, our information is exceedingly deficient. It must be drawn almost entirely from foreign sources. The only native monument of Carthage which has survived, is the short account of the voy

age of Hanno. The main part of our knowledge is derived from the Roman historians, or comes ultimately from the Sicilian Greeks; and the statements of both are coloured by their national enmity to their Punic rivals. And these statements relate only to the latter period of Carthage, when its decline had already commenced. Of its earlier history-of the growth of its commerce and empire-we know nothing but what we can gather from the meagre compendium of Justin, and from the incidental allusions of other writers.

Heeren, after relating what is known of the foundation of Carthage, first gives an account of its dominion in Africa. Its subjects were divided into three very different classes. The first were the cities on the coast, such as Utica and others, which, like itself, were colonies from Phoenicia. These were not so much its subjects as its allies; although a supremacy was conceded to it, which passed into sovereignty. The next class consisted of its own colonies; the maritime colonies on the coast, and the agricultural settlements in the interior of the country. The third class were the native Libyans, who had submitted to its authority; and these were partly a fixed agricultural people, who were kept in subjection by the agricultural colonies planted among them,-partly nomad tribes, whose subjection was partial and precarious. The foreign possessions of the Carthaginians were, in the first place, the islands in the western part of the Mediterranean. They occupied first those immediately adjacent to their own coast. They possessed the Balearic Islands, and were for some time masters of Sardinia. Sicily was the great object of their ambition; and at different times they held a larger or a smaller portion of it; but they were never able to accomplish the entire conquest of it. This was the rock upon which the fortunes of Carthage foundered. Here the Asiatic man was weighed in the balance with the European,-first with the Greek, then with the Roman,—and was found wanting. They do not seem to have sought the possession of Corsica, although they would not suffer the Phocæans to settle in it; and the islands more nearly adjacent to Italy they did not approach. In Spain they succeeded to the supremacy of the Phoenicians over the Phoenician colonies, and founded colonies of their own along the coast beyond the Pillars of Hercules; and when they were expelled by the Romans from Sicily and Sardinia, they sought to compensate themselves, and restore the power of the republic, by achieving the conquest of the whole of the Peninsula. This was the peculiar policy of the Barcine family and party. In Africa, likewise, along the coasts of the Atlantic, the Carthaginians planted colonies for the sake of trade.