RELIGIONS AND CIVILIZATION. 175 



Phoenicians a very mixed people, althougli it has been customary to 

 call them pure Hamites, and to accept the statement of Augustine that 

 they descended from Canaan,"" because the evidence of Semitic, and 

 especially of Indo-European elements, in their persons, language and 

 civilization, is diametrically opposed to any such notion. As well 

 might we conclude, because the inhabitants of England are called 

 Britons, that their physical conformation, character, language, civiliza- 

 tion, etc., are Celtic. The following passage from Lenormant and 

 Chevalier's Manual must be read cum grano sah's, the granum being 

 a wholesome ignoring of all such ethnic terms as Canaanite, Cushite, 

 Semitic, Japetic. It will then simply indicate that a people who once 

 dwelt in the eastern part of Southern Palestine, at a subsequent period 

 migrated to Phoenicia. ''The traditions of the Phoenicians collected 

 at Tyre itself by Herodotus, ever careful and intelligent in the choice 

 of his sources of information, and also accepted by the judicious Trogus 

 Pompeius; those of the inhabitants of Southern Arabia preserved by 

 Strabo; and finally those still current in Babylonia during the first 

 centuries of the Christian era, when the Syro-Chaldee original of the 

 book of Nabathaean Agriculture was revised — all agree in stating that 

 the Canaanites (Phoenicians) at first lived near the Cushites, on the 

 banks of the Erythraean Sea or Persian Gulf, on that portion of the 

 coast of Bahrein designated El Katif on our modern maps of Arabia. 

 Pliny speaks of a land of Canaan, in this neighbourhood, in his time. 

 Strabo speaks of the " Islands of Tyre and Aradus," the Bahrein Isles of 

 our day, containing temples similar to those of the Phoenicians ; " and/' 

 he adds, "if we may believe the inhabitants, the islands and the town 

 of the same name in Phoenicia are their own colonies." According to 

 Trogus Pompeius, the Canaanites (Phoenicians) were driven from their 

 first settlements by earthquakes, and then journeyed (northwards) 

 towards Southern Syria. The traditions preserved in " Nabathajan 

 Agriculture " state, on the contrary, that they were violently expelled, 

 in consequence of a quarrel with the Cushite (?) monarchs of Babylon 

 of the dynasty of Nimrod; and this is also the account given by the 

 Arabian historians, who have recorded very precisely the traditions as 

 to the migration of the Canaanites, whom they term the original 

 Amalekites, descendants of Ham, carefully distinguishing them from 

 the second, the Biblical Amalekites, of Semitic race.^^** One branch of 



109 Leaormant and Chevalier, ii., 144. 



110 Id. 



