]46 



MAETIN L. EOUSE, ESQ., ON 



Assyrian Kings held sway over Media and Upper Asia as 

 Herodotus tells for 520 years ;* and they therefore were in 

 frequent political and commercial intercourse with the shores of 

 the Caspian Sea, and through them much of its trade and its 

 fame must have passed to other countries. 



Did they not bestow on it this name of Caspian because of its 

 silvery appearance, even as the first Spanish colonists of Buenos 

 Ayres bestowed the name of Eio de la Plata, or Silver Eiver, 

 upon the broad expanse of water that flowed past their new 

 home ? 



We have spoken of Togarmah and the spread and present 

 position of his family ; we have done the same by Kiphath ; and 

 we have dealt somewhat but not sufficiently with the position 

 and early movements of Ashkenaz. Far from sufficiently ; 

 for Ashkenaz is the progenitor of some of the mightiest of our 

 modern nations, as I shall briefly show. 



It is remarkable that the Pontos Euxinos, or Black Sea, bore 

 still more anciently the name of Pontos Axenos.f The Greeks, 

 as trading navigator sand colonists, deeming the appellation to 

 be of ill- omen because oxenos< was the Greek for inhospitable, 

 changed it to eiixenos, or according to the Ionic dialect cnxeinos, 

 hospitable. But it seems little likely that, as has l)een suggested, 

 they gave it the first name because of barbarous tribes that 

 dwelt upon its shores. The Greeks, who sailed about and colon- 

 ized every island in the ^gean Sea in prehistoric times and were 

 in friendly intercourse with the Troad close to the Sea of Marmora 

 by the time of Solomon at least J could hardly at any historic 

 period have called the Black Sea the Inhospitable. Surely the 

 voyage of Jason in the Heroic Age long before the siege of Troy, 

 as far as Colchis at the remote end of the sea, would lead us to 

 conclude this. Bather do I prefer the suggestion to be presently 

 borne out l)y a good array of facts, that the name is that of 

 Ashkenaz slightly inverted, as ask was by our Anglo-Saxon fore- 

 fatliers, and still is by some of our ordinary fellow-Englislnnen 

 sliglitly inverted into ax ; and I hope to show a similar change 

 presently in the name of descendants of Ashkenaz. 



Again, Strabo speaks of a time long anterior to the one fixed by 

 Herodotus when raids by the Kimmerioi were frequent. He 

 says that Homer miglit well have sung of rhis people, seeing 

 that in the poet's own time and earlier they had ravaged Lower 



* Book I, 95. 



+ See .Sn)itl)'s Class. Diet., and Liddcll and Scott's Lexicon, svh voce. 

 \ i.e., at the time of tlie ti'ansactions that led up to the Trojan War. 



