Page:History of merchant shipping and ancient commerce (Volume 1).djvu/79

 indeed, recent researches strongly lead to the belief that the Egyptians, like the Phœnicians, were immigrants from the same neighbourhood, and connected, therefore, with the chief cities of Chaldæa, such as "Ur of the Chaldees," the primitive Babel, and other sites, the great mounds of which have been partially explored by Loftus and Taylor, though it is not as yet possible in all cases to assign to them their true ancient names. Babylon, the great city of Nebuchadnezzar, did not then exist, nor could Nineveh have been of importance, at least commercially. All the evidence available, and especially that obtainable through the latest interpretation of the Cuneiform Inscriptions, tends to show that the greatest people in the earliest period were the Chaldæans—a race probably older than the Egyptians, and like them of Hamite origin—the true inventors of alphabetic writing, astronomy, agriculture, navigation, and of other sciences, which the Semites, in after days, claimed as their own exclusive discoveries.

It was in connexion with this trade that the ports at the head of the Ælanitic gulf came first into existence. As the caravans of Edom or Idumæa passed to and fro between Egypt and the borders of Arabia, the foundation of Elath and Ezion-geber would be but the satisfying of a necessary want; becoming, when seized by King David, places of much greater importance than they could have been in the hands of Hadad, or of any other petty Idumæan prince.

David would seem to have been the first, in connection with caravans from Petra and from the west, to open up, by means of a line of ships, that trade with "Ophir" which his son Solomon afterwards made so