Page:The Periplus of the Erythræan Sea.djvu/144

 for believing that this is also the "Isle of the Blest," the farthest point reached by the wandering hero of that Babylonian Odyssey, the narrative of Gilgamesh; which joins to the story of a search over the known world for the soul of a departed friend, found in the end by prayer offered to Nergal, god of the dead, the material record of an early migration around the shores of Arabia. The theory of this Cushite–Elamite migration, outlined by Glaser (Skizze, vol. II) is thus recounted by Hommel (Ancient Hebrew Tradition, p.39):

"Egyptian records furnish us with an important piece of ethnological evidence. From the XIIth dynasty (2200 B. C.?) onwands a new race makes its appearance on the Egyptian horizon: the Kashi in Nubia. This name was originally applied to Elam (Babyl. kashu: cf. the Kissioi of Herodotus, the modern Khuzistan; cf. also Cutch and Kachh in India), and according to Hebrew translation, was afterwards given to various parts of central and southern Arabia; from this he argues that in very early times—prior to the 2d millennium B. C.—northeast Africa must have been colonized by the Elamites, who had to pass around Arabia on their way thither. This theory is supported by the fact that in the so-called Cushite languages of northeast Africa, such as the Galla, Somali, Beja, and other allied dialects, we find grammatical principles analogous to those of the early Egyptian and Semitic tongues combined with a totally dissimilar syntax presenting no analogy with that of the Semites or with any Negro tongue in Africa, but resembling closely the syntax of the Ural-altaic languages of Asia, to which... the Elamite language belongs. According to this view, the much-discussed Cushites (the Aethiopians of Homer and Herodotus) must originally have been Elamitic Kassites who were scattered over Arabia and found their way to Africa. It is interesting to note that the Bible calls Nimrod a son of Cush, and that the name Gilgamesh has an Elamitic termination. What the Nimrod epic tells us of his wanderings around Arabia must therefore be regarded as a legendary version of the historical migration of the Kassites from Elam into East Africa. Nimrod is merely a personification of the Elamitic race-element of which traces are still to be found both in Arabia and in Nubia." And in the same book, pp.35–6, Hommel thus describes the references in the epic, which in its present form he dates at about 2000 B. C.:

"In the 9th canto we are told how he set out for the land of Mâshu (central Arabia), the gate of which (the rocky pass formed by the cliffs of Aga and Salma), was guarded by legendary scorpion-men. (Hence perhaps the name "land of darkness" applied to Arabia in