28 On the Affinity of the Phenician and Celtic Languages. 
seas, where they established, chiefly wpon islands, at convenient points, fortified depots 
or entrepots for their goods and merchandize, which answered, as in modern times» 
the double purpose of protecting warehouses and supply to their vessels in long voy- 
ages. 
Herodotus, as before stated, tells us that the Homerite, who inhabited the southern 
coast of Arabia, were also called by the Greeks, Phenicians, and that the name meant 
in Arabic, the same thing as Phenician. By Arabic, must be meant the ancient lan- 
guage of Arabia Felix—that of the Homerite, not what is now spoken by the de- 
scendants of Ishmael. 
Herodotus in this, as in all other cases, is faithfully correct—Phenicia is the coun- 
try of the ploughers of the sea—Homerite, that of mariners—fein, a ploughman— 
ojee, of the sea—I)a, country ;—ua, the country—mapajoe, of mariners. The old 
Arabian and the Phenician were the same language. 
The Arabian Gulph was called the Red Sea, by the Romans and Greeks, from 
Erythorus, the son of Perseus and Andromeda. ‘This is one of those ingenious 
fictions, by which, as Sammes observes, ‘‘ the Greeks endeavoured to bring down the 
origin of every thing to their own pitiful era,’’ and was invented to disguise and ob- 
scure its real origin, or ignorantly for want of a better. The name of the Erythrean 
ocean, probably arose from its position—o1p, east—icyoy, headland. ‘The Phenicians 
of Tyre and Sidon called the sea which washed the shores of Arabia Felix the coun- 
try of their ancestors ; muyp oy) ttor—the sea beyond the eastern headland, alluding 
to what is now called Cape Gardefan, the north-eastern point of Africa. The Greeks 
copying the sound, made the sea, Hrythrean, and the people, Hrythreans. 
Erythrus was but a personification of the Hrythreans, Homerite, or Phenicians, 
the same people, and first mariners and ship-builders of the human race, who first 
brought ship-building and navigation, for commercial purposes, to any perfection, in 
the same manner as the Tyrians were personified by Hercules. 
From their ports of Cana, Aden, Saba, Sanaa, and Corana, they visited, for the first 
time, the coasts of the whole Indian ocean, as far as the Straits of Malacca ; and as 
they discovered new countries, islands, rivers, promontories, estuaries, coasts, or peo- 
ple, they gave them appropriate names, expressive of their respective products, rela- 
tive positions, appearance, qualities, or other palpable and obviously striking cireum- 
stances. 
This conclusion is so natural, that it would be insulting to the understanding, to 
use arguments to establish so evident a proposition. ‘Thus we find in Ptolemy and 
other other ancient geographers, as among modern discoveries, places distinguished 
by names, which, in the Celtic, indicate—the round hil, the good market, the swampy 
marshy inlet, the happy tribe, the welcome, the island of gentle showers, the fruitful 
hill, the pleasant town on the sea, the promontory of turtles, the brilliant principality 
on the sea, the farthest torrent or great river, the eastern island fruitful in corn, the 
