"K. O. Müller, writing in the 1820s, had denied that the Phoenicians had had any influence on Greece, but he was extreme in his Romanticism and ahead of his time in the intensity of his racialism and anti-Semitism. In some ways, therefore, the Phoenicians even profited from the fall of the Egyptians, since legends of Egyptian colonization could now be explained as having referred to them. Consciously or unconsciously, all European thinkers saw the Phoenicians as the Jews of Antiquity—as clever ‘Semitic’ traders. The predominant mid-19th-century view of world history was one of a dialogue between Aryan and Semite. The Semite had created religion and poetry; the Aryan conquest, science, philosophy, freedom and everything else worth having."