Page:History of India Vol 6.djvu/38

4 merchandise of Somali-land and the African littoral, found their chief market.

An emporium, perhaps originally a convict settlement from the Nile, sprang up at Rhinoculora, where the coast-line of Palestine adjoins Egypt. It probably received the traffic seawards from Tyre and by more than one land route through Palestine, and passed on the reunited volume of the Eastern trade to the neighbouring Nile valley. The Phoenician mariners of the Levant carried their alphabet, apparently derived from Egypt, to Greece and the countries around the Mediterranean Sea; the Sabæans of the Persian Gulf gave a cognate form of the same alphabet to India and the nations bordering on the Indian Ocean.

As the Phoenicians held the northern outports of the Syrian trade-route toward Europe, so the Edomites commanded its southern outlet toward Egypt. The Hebrews, also a Semitic race, occupied the country between the two, and the earliest traditions, not less than the verified history, of Israel, are intimately connected with Eastern commerce. The geography of Gene- sis is the geography of the Syrian trade-route; one of its most picturesque episodes, the sale of Joseph by his brethren, is an incident of the caravan journey. Abraham starts from the Chaldæan, or Euphrates, end of the route near the Persian Gulf, and in four generations his descendants are settled at its southwestern terminus on the Nile. The intermediate regions thus traversed formed the heritage promised to his seed, "from the river of Egypt unto the great river, the