ARAB CIVILISATION IN SPAIN 33 of as coming to an end, in power at least, about the year 1000 A.D. ; when, after an interval of misrule, it was succeeded in the latter part of the eleventh century, that is, shortly after the Norman conquest of England, by the purely Berber dynasty of the Almoravides. During the first two centuries of the rule of the Ommeyades the Arab dominion in Spain reached its highest point. The court of Abdurrahman and his successors became the centre of all the art, the learning, the refinement, and the elegance of the known world. Commerce brought to the shores of Spain the best productions of every land. Science was honoured. Arab travellers penetrated to the furthest limits of the Eastern hemisphere. All that India and China had to teach was known to them.

They had a common saying that '* Science came down from heaven and lodged itself in three different parts of man's body : in the brain among the Greeks ; in the hands among the Chinese ; and in the tongue among the Arabs." Unfortunate in the fate that subsequently befell them, the Arabs were fortunate in this, that during the period of their prosperity they had historians and poets capable of preserving for posterity records of the high level of civilisation that was reached. Religious fanaticism, which made a duty at a later period of sweeping the infidel out of Spain, made it no less a matter of conscience to destroy the admirable literature which centuries of enlightenment had amassed in the libraries of his forefathers. Fortunately, however, the writings were so copious that many escaped destruction, and the industry of modern research has brought again to light learning which was indignantly rejected by the religious Europe of the Middle Ages.

To appreciate in any degree the debt which Europe owes to the Arab civilisation of Spain, we have to remember the condition of barbarous ignorance, sloth, and superstition in which the Continent was plunged after the break-up of the Roman Empire. What the Berber was to North Africa, such was the Scythian, in the many divisions of Goths, Gauls, Huns, &c., to Europe. What the cultic