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and other particulars connected with the prophetic habits and institutions, the reader must consult the luminous chapter which we have thus briefly noticed.

Yet although the occupations of the early Israelites were chiefly agricultural, they had advanced to some knowledge of the arts: they had become "acquainted with the properties of metals, the texture of various kinds of cloth, and even the fixing of colours." The skill of the founder, the carver, and the statuary was put into requisition, as we perceive from the Teraphim,* the carved and molten images, which were in the land. In geography they were very imperfect; in astronomy and chemistry they never arose to eminence. Their medical acquirements at

no time deserved the name of a science.

We must now consider the commerce of the Hebrews and of the contiguous nations. The caravans which periodically crossed the Syrian desert, on their journeys between the Mediterranean and the Persian Gulf, rendered Palestine a most favourable situation for commercial transactions; and we find mention made of these caravans as far back as the days of Jacob.t Abraham must have obtained his riches by barter with them; for Palestine produced not the gold and silver of which he was possessed; nor could the wealth found at Jericho, among which was a Babylonian garment, nor that stated to be in possession of the Midianites and others, have been procured by any other

Consequently, the Canaanites must have had a con

This may be a foreign word borrowed from the idolaters. What the Teraphim were we do not exactly know. From Ezekiel xxi. 21; Zech. x. 2; some have derived them from he inquired or consulted, but they do not appear in the more early ages to have been applied to divination. Albert Schultens, believing them to have been household gods, retraced them to he abounded with the good

قرف

things of life, to which a trip-to please, satisfy, or content, may be compared. If we suppose them to have been Penates, तर्पण

tărpănă, which comes from this root, and means satisfaction given or received a religious rite-and the presentation of water to deceased ancestors, may not be undeserving of attention. For though the Penates were domestic deities, the word Patrii is applied to them by Horace and Hyginus; and there may probably be some distant trace of the term in fu pindă, (d and t being interchangeable,) which denotes an oblation to deceased ancestors, as a ball or lump of meat, rice, &c.

Mollivit aversos Penates,

Farre pio et saliente mica.-Hor. Qd. iii. 23, 20. † Gen. xxxvii. 25. ÖnyDw' лmn, a caravan of Ishmaelites.

nexion with foreign countries very long before the invasion of Joshua-possibly, very long before the migration of Abraham from Ur: and it is to be observed that the trading people of Canaan, such as the Tyrians and Sidonians, although idolaters, were "not among those against whom Moses commanded the Hebrews to wage a war of extermination." Hiram was the ally of David and Solomon; and the Jewish arms do not appear to have penetrated into the districts possessed by the maritime cities. David's victories gave Solomon ports on the Red Sea: ships, mariners, and pilots were supplied by his Tyrian allies.

The disputes on the situations of Ophir and Tarshish have never been satisfactorily settled. From the conjunction of Ophir with Havilah and Jobab, in the tenth chapter of Genesis, many have determined in favour of Arabia Felix, and the treasures brought from thence correspond to the productions of the country. Dr. Russell shows that there is no inconsistency in the duration of the voyage; for "the Phoenicians, as we find indicated in one of the poems of Homer, combined the two professions of seamen and merchants, and, moving from one port to another, bought and sold according to the nature of their cargo, and the wants of the people whom they visited. They found it necessary to remain at successive harbours, until they had disposed of their merchandise, and supplied themselves with articles suited to the consumption of the home market. those days, it was not uncommon for a fleet to be absent from their native port five or six years; the leaders devoting their attention all the while to commerce rather than to navigation."

In

But there are traces in the books of Moses of an older commerce than that of the Phoenicians; one, of which Arabia was the centre or medium, the main channel of which was directed towards Egypt. The spices brought into that country, and those mentioned in Exodus, were the produce of India or Arabia; but the cinnamon in this list could not have been procured from a nearer quarter than Ceylon, or the coast of Malabar. "If then these commodities were found at Thebes and Jerusalem, it is evident that they must have been imported from India; and it is equally obvious there were, even in those early times, regular carriers between the most remote nations of Ásia and the kingdom of the west-a stated communication between the cities of the Nile and the farmers of Hindostan." To this assertion Heeren has added positive proofs. For, although the Assyrian empire enjoyed the Indian trade through Persia and the northern provinces, a very large proportion of it found its way to the Arabian ports. Dr. Russell conceives that the communication with India existed before the Exodus of the Israelites from Egypt; that even prior to the patriarchal era the intercourse took place between it and Arabia, and that Thebes itself owed much of its splendour to this traffic.

Evidently the voyages to Ophir were undertaken with a view to this trade. Whether Tychsen's idea, that Ophir means "rich countries," according to the Arabic, be correct; whether it be the same as Uphaz in Dan. x. 5; Jer. x. 9; and Uphaz be compounded of an island of gold, i. e. producing gold; whether the Sanskrit Peru (with the prefix ) the golden mountain, or अविपुर avipura, the City of the Sun, which in

colloquial dialects would answer to the Hebrew sound-or any other etymology be offered-all will be mere conjecture, and incapable of defining its situation. Similar difficulties hang over Tarshish. Critics of excellent learning have identified it with Tartessus in Spain: some have placed it on the southern shores of Africa; and Hensler in Ethiopia, or one of the islands in the Arabian Gulf near that coast; whilst Eichhorn denies the existence of a Tarshish in those parts. Ezekiel mentions silver, iron, tin, and lead, among the things brought by the ships of Tarshish; and as Jonah took a vessel to Tarshish from Joppa in the Mediterranean, the argument becomes in favour of Tartessus; but when we recollect, on the other hand, that the apes, ivory, &c. which Solomon received, must have come from Africa or India-that his ships of Tarshish were in the Red Seaand that even silver, iron, tin, and lead, were also to be found in the east-we shall perceive that we have not advanced in the inquiry; and that if Tarshish be the name of a place, it will be reasonable to suppose that more than one had this appellation.

But, was the Tarshish of Solomon and Jehoshaphat the name of a place? Gosselin, Dr. Vincent, and it would seem Dr. Russell, incline to the supposition, that it denoted the sea in general. Their argument is founded on the ships of Tarshish: and if it be correct, every passage in which the term occurs will receive an easy explanation. In 1 Kings xxii. 48, Jehoshaphat is said to have made ships of Tarshish to go to Ophir; but why, if Tarshish here were a place, he should have made such ships for that purpose, is incomprehensible. Yet, if Tarshish be the sea, the whole is plain. In support of this we remark, that tärsha-तरोष, tārāsha, and तारोष, tārāsha, mean the

ocean in Sanskrit-that tăr – tărănă—tări―tărînă, &c. mean a vessel, &c.; and that if India were the place to which the trade was directed, the introduction of the word may readily be explained; and even if not, that the general commerce of the times would afford a sufficient solution of its occurrence. To this we may, as no inconsequential corroboration, add the epithet of daughter of Tarshish, which is applied to Tyre in the sacred page. The etymology quoted by the author from Parkhurst is quite untenable.

Tarshish, however, as Dr. Russell notices, is one of the jewels in the breastplate of the high priest, which some conjecture to be the aigue marine, which is the colour of sea-water; but we know too little of Hebrew precious stones to be positive concerning any of them. It is ordinarily accepted as the chrysolite. But, whatever it was is unimportant, for it is not connected with the present inquiry; nor does it follow, as Braunius thinks, that it came from a place so called, because it can legitimately be derived from the root w; though, on the other hand, it might have been a jewel furnished by the traders to India.

To this hypothesis (for more it is not professed to be) 2 Chron. ix. 21, (cf. 1 Kings, x. 22,) opposes no difficulty. For the preceding remarks tend to show, that Tarshish may have been the name by which the Hebrews called the Indian Ocean; the word having perhaps been accommodated from some Indian dialect to their language, in which case Ophir must be sought on its shores; accordingly, the ships of Tarshish would be merely those employed in the Indian trade, which amply explains the account of Jehoshaphat having made ships of Tarshish to go to Ophir. In many instances the Vulgate and other versions seem to have regarded the word,* as merely implying the sea. This interpretation might certainly be extended to the history of Jonah, viz. that he intended to go to sea, and that he found at Joppa a ship ready for sea: but if Tarshish in his book were a place, Tartessus in Spain, where the Phoenicians had been in the long habit of trading, will better than any other agree with the port from which he sailed.

This commerce, therefore, even without adverting to Vans Kennedy's theory, will account for the introduction of Indian words into these parts.

Dr. Russell's remarks on the intercourse of ancient nations are everywhere perspicuous. His judgment is clear, his research indefatigable, and his propositions are ably substantiated. He conjectures, "that the stream of knowledge accompanied the progress of commerce along the banks of those great rivers which fall into the Persian Gulf, and thence along the coast of Arabia to the Red Sea,-that those passes which connect that sea with the higher portion of the Egyptian river, witnessed the earliest movements of colonists from Asia, who, in search of more fertile lands, or of mountains enriched with gold, found their way into Abyssinia,—that a similar current in the mean time set eastward across the mouths of the Indus, carrying arts and institutions of a corresponding character into the countries which stretch from that river over the great peninsula of

in Malay, appears to be a corruption of the تا سيك or تا سك *

Sanskrit.

Hindostan." This conjecture he soon advances to proof, by the striking resemblances between the usages, superstitions, arts, and even the mythology of the ancient inhabitants of western India, and those of the first settlers on the Upper Nile-by the similarity of features, both as to the style of architecture and the form of worship, which must have been practised in the temples of Nubia and those in the neighbourhood of Bombay;-by the manifest likeness in the minor instruments of their superstition, such as the lotus, the linga, and the serpentby the remarkable resemblances between the excavated temple of Guerfeh Hassan and the cave of Elephanta, between the monolithic temples of Nubia and those of Mahabalipura, the grottos of Hajar Silsili and the caverns of Ellora. May we also add, that the sound BEK, uttered by the children shut up by Psammetichus, according to Herodotus and Diodorus Siculus, for the purpose of discovering the original tongue, which was pronounced to signify apròç in Phrygian, is not indistinctly traced in the Sanscrit b'haksh, to eat, and bhakta,

food? that the Nile may be discerned in, Nila, which largely enters into the names of Siva? and that its Coptic name &po (Heb. ") appears to be recognisable in

swift, from which answers to péw?

;, ără,

The institution of castes the author likewise thinks an evidence of the early intercourse between India and Egypt,* and we cannot imagine it to be one which will be doubted. The temples too, above the cataracts, exhibit closer similarity to those of India, than those below Syene; and the more minutely we investigate the ancient history of Egypt and Canaan, the clearer will be our proofs of a very early communication between "the shores of India, the upper regions of the Nile, and the borders of the Holy Land." That the arts of Asia came to Egypt by the Red Sea and the mercantile stations of Adule, Axum, and Meroë, is confirmed by the celebrity of the Ethiopians in the earliest ages,-by the veneration in which they were regarded by Homer and the ancient poets,-by the nations on the Tigris and Euphrates mingling Ethiopian legends with their own songs. Lucian describes Astronomy coming from Ethiopia and travelling to Babylon-Philosophy

* Tabri declares, that Jamshid instituted four similar castes in Persia, and ordained in like manner

تا هر کسی کار خود کنند و بکار ديكري مشغول نشوند

that each should follow its own employment, and not interfere with that of the others.

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