Page:The Periplus of the Erythræan Sea.djvu/125

 tribe of Uzal, son of Joktan (Genesis X, 27) with whom he also connects Ausar (Ausal or Ausan) in the Frankincense Country—which survives in the modern Ras el Sair. This is the district which at one time held the "Ausanitic coast" near Zanzibar, as stated in §15. The ancient city of Uzal is the modern Sanaa.

Ocelis is identified by Glaser with a bay on the northern side of the promontory of Sheikh Sa'id (12° 48′N., 43° 28′E.), a volcanic formation which juts out from the Arabian shore and is separated by a narrow channel from the island of Perim. He notes the probability that Indian ships were permitted to go no further than this place, whence their cargoes went by land to Muza. The text says merely that it was "not a market-town, but the first landing for those sailing into the gulf;" but Pliny (VI, 104) states on the authority of Onesicritus, that Ocelis was the most convenient port for those coming from India. He mentions two other ports, Muza (Masala) and Cana, which were not frequented by Indian travellers, but were only for the merchants dealing in frankincense and Arabian spices.

26. Eudaemon Arabia is the modern Aden (12° 48′N., 45° 0′E.), from very early times an important trade center, where goods from the east were trans-shipped for the Mediterranean markets. It was, probably, the Eden of Ezekiel XXVII, 3, and the chief port of the Minaean and Sabaean dynasties. While temporarily in eclipse under the Homerite kings, it had regained its position by the 4th century A. D. when Constantius negotiated for a church to be built there; and the Arabian geographers and Marco Polo refer to its activities in terms almost as glowing as those of Agatharchides.

The Periplus gives the port the name of the entire district; Eudaemon like Felix, being an attempt at translating Yemen, "the country to the right hand" (as one faces the east); the Arabic, like the Greek and Latin, attaching the idea of good fortune to the right hand. Eden had the same signficance, of good fortune.

26. Charibael destroyed the place.—The text is corrupt, having Caesar. It is quite certain that no Roman emperor attacked this place during the 1st century, and the title is equally suspicious, our author having more correctly referred to his sovereign, in §23, as autokrator. Müller and Fabricius substitute Elisar, retaining the second syllable of the word, and suppose him to have been a king of the Frankincense Country. But Schwanbeck (Rheinischen Museum für Philologie, VII. Jahrgang, 1850) prefers Charibael, and Glaser supports him by proving that Eleazus, and not Elisar, was the name of the king mentioned in §27.

The indications are against a westward movement by the