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 as the source whence was drawn the almost fabulous riches of which history held the record.

In this connection a curious passage may be cited from Josephus's Antiquities of the Jews, which was written during the latter half of the first century, at a period, it will be noted, prior to the date of the works of Marinus of Tyre. Here, in speaking of the pilots furnished to Solomon by Hiram of Tyre, he writes:

"To whom Solomon gave this command that they should go along with his stewards to the land that of old was called Ophir, but now the Aurea Chersonesus, which belongs to India, to fetch gold."

Here, it will be remarked, Josephus speaks of the Chersonese with a certain familiarity, as of a region with the existence of which his readers would be in some sort acquainted, but apart from this he makes two very definite statements—that Ophir and the Chersonesus Aurea are one, and that Ophir belonged to India. The second of these would seem to imply that he recognised that the Chersonese was not an integral portion of India, and since the name had never been borne by any country of the West, he must have intended to convey the meaning that it lay beyond the valley of the Ganges, which in his day was recognised as the eastern boundary of Hindustan.

It is now generally held that Ophir itself was, in all probability, a mere distributing centre situated somewhere in the neighbourhood of the entrance to the Red Sea, and that the pilots of Hiram of Tyre did not guide the Stewards of Solomon to the actual source of the gold