Author Description

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1886 Excerpt:...of Ham the wide regions of the extreme south. Language could not, originally, have been a certain test of origin, for in the remote ages, when mankind diverged from the common center in Asia, the families of speech must have been less clearly defined than they gradually became. Hamitic races may still have spoken a Semitic language, and carried it with them in their wanderings. Moreover, the original home of the Phenicians goes far to corroborate the Bible statement of their descent from Ham; for we first meet with them making their way from Southern Arabia to what are now called the Bahrein Islands in the Persian Gulf. The temples still standing on these islands in Roman times, were evidently Phenician, and the inhabitants claimed to be the 1 Kneucker, art. FhOnizien, in Sibel Lex. original stock of the famous race of Palestine. Their next rest ing place, still pressing north, was on the flat shores of the Persian Gulf, at the mouth of the Euphrates, called by them originally Canaan, or, as they pronounced it Chna, the "low-lying;" the name afterwards transferred by them to their home at the foot of Lebanon. The Himyarites, a kindred Arab people, with a language akin to theirs and to the Hebrew, and known like them, from their complexion, as the "red," remained behind in South Arabia. But the "Canaanites" chose to migrate to the coast of Palestine, whence they spread, as we have seen, to Egypt among other places; remaining for centuries at the mouths of the Nile, till Egyptian arts, inventions, modes of thought and religious ideas became common to both races, and reacted on Sidon and Tyre; the morals, the degraded worship, and even the style of art thus introduced to Palestine, becoming only too sad a confirmation in the minds...