A Pale Glow in the East 37 



developed quickly from such primitive beginnings as the ramas, the 

 seaworthy boats in which they began crossing to Ceylon and to 

 the more distant islands, like the Laccadives and Maldives, that lay 

 off their coasts. UnHke the riverine boatsmen of the Nile, the Eu- 

 phrates, and the Indus, moreover, the southern Indians seem to have 

 struck out fearlessly across the open sea. Evidence of this has re- 

 cently been brought forward by several Indian historians who be- 

 lieve that real seafaring and navigation actually were invented by 

 the prehistoric inhabitants of the Malabar coast. 



Seamanship such as this automatically brought man in contact 

 with whales, and there are, as we have already seen, distinct indi- 

 cations that whaling was proceeding in the Arabian Sea in pre- 

 historic times. However, we have to turn to another race of mari- 

 time people, who were bred on the opposite side of that sea, to 

 get our first clear statements of a whaling industry in the ancient 

 world. 



Among the shipbuilders dwelling on the coasts of the Persian 

 Gulf was a tribe destined to become a great nation, one of the 

 greatest maritime powers of all times, and one of the most amazing 

 cultural catalysts that history has ever seen. They were a Semitic 

 tribe which later became known as the Phoenicians from the Greek 

 name for the land they colonized on the shores of the Mediterra- 

 nean, which they themselves called the " Land of Palms." Unlike 

 the other coast tribes of the Persian Gulf, they seem never to have 

 been piratically inclined but rather to have pursued the paths of 

 peaceful trade and shipbuilding. Where they originally came from 

 is not known, though the whole history of Mesopotamia from the 

 earliest times records a constant drift of Semitic peoples from the 

 deserts of Arabia into those fertile plains, and the Phoenicians may 

 originally have come from the Arabian deserts. 



However, about 2000 B.C. a contrary movement that was to con- 

 tinue for many centuries began in Mesopotamia — Semitic groups 

 moving north and west in the direction of the Mediterranean. The 

 Book of Genesis tells of one such exodus that carried the ancestors 

 of the Jews to the Nile Delta. About the middle of the second 

 millennium some of the Phoenicians appear to have migrated thus 

 westward and to have reached the Mediterranean coast in that coun- 

 try we now call Palestine. There they settled down and built them- 



