Page:The Periplus of the Erythræan Sea.djvu/170

 160

It is significant that even the Greeks knew Phoenice as Canaan. Hecataeus refers to “Chna, as Phoenice was formerly called,” and the name survived as late as an inscription of Antiochus Epiphanes, being connected with the legendary hero Chna, who can be no other than the Canaan of Genesis X, a brother to Cush, and who “begot Sidon, his firstborn.” This word, according to Movers, means “lowland,” particularly a strip of coast under the hills; and the same meaning is attached to Cush, Cutch, or in its Indian form, Kachh (Holdich, Gates of India, 35), and to the modern Sawahil of East Africa, and Shehr of South Arabia, the Sachalites of the Periplus.

Another derivation of “Phoenician” from phonioi, (bloody, mur- derous), rests on the activities of that people as sea-folk, traders and pirates. So do the habits of the race survive in the puns of the Greeks. The author of the Periplus (§ 33) found the dwellers on Sarapis Island anthropois ponerois, and the Roman shipping out of Egypt had always to go armed or under convoy.

36. Gold. — The Periplus mentions gold coin as an export from Rome to India, but gold itself as an export from Ommana only, and as a product of the Ganges region.

Gold was an important product of Eastern Arabia, the best fields being in the middle courses of the Wadi er Rumma, the Wadi ed Dawasir, and the Wadi Yabrin. Glaser ( Skizze, 347-9) locates alto- gether ten Arabian gold-fields. It was this production that led the Assyrian Tiglath-Pileser III to refer to gold as the “dust of the coun- try” of Merodach-Baladan, king of Bit-Yakin, and to make the Per- sian Gulf ports centers also for the gold produced farther to the east, in Persia, Carmania, and the Himalayas. The watercourses of north- eastern Arabia were probably the producing areas of the “land of Havilah” of Genesis II, 11-12, which could readily supply caravans for Chaldaea or Canaan; while El-Yemama and the southern fields, of richer yield, were probably the “land of Ophir” of Solomon’s voyages (I Kings X) ; and according to the tribal genealogy (Genesis X, 29) Ophir was a son of Joktan and therefore purely Arabian. Into this voluminous controversy it is not necessary to go farther; the evidence is summed up by Glaser ( Skizze, 357-388).

To the Greeks and Romans the “gold of Ophir” was known as apyron, which Diodorus Siculus (II, 50) assumes to be a Greek word, “without fire,” and goes on to explain that it was not reduced by roasting the ores, but was found in the earth in shining lumps the size of chestnuts. Agatharchides and Pliny (XXI, 11) are both acquainted with this apyron gold, and Pliny (VI, 23) mentions also a river Apirus