Others are referable to the eastern coast. Asia Minor, Egypt, and Phœnicia all contributed to mix the Hellenic blood. In respect to Asia Minor we may relegate the account of the descent of Pelops on Peloponnesus to the region of unsatisfactory traditions, and still have a large amount of facts in favour of the infusion of Eastern blood from this quarter being considerable. These lie in the character of the islanders of the Ægean. Whatever else they may have been, they were partially Carian on one side, and partially Greek on the other.
The claims of Egypt to have contributed to the Greek stock have been closely criticized by Colonel Mure. His broad position, that the introduction of foreign settlers is generally followed by visible and definite influences on the language, is carried to, perhaps, an undue extent, since, to take an example from our own history, the effect of the Danes in England is by no means commensurate with their real importance as invaders. Or, perhaps, his views are limited to the criticism of a nation’s literature; in which case a foreign settlement, which gave nothing new to the speech of the people, to their arts, to their records, or to their mythology, would, to the historian of its literature, be no foreign settlement at all. The ethnologist is, to a certain degree, in the same position; but only to a certain degree. At any rate, however, the fact of an Egyptian element in the early Hellenic population is an important point in the ancient commerce of the Mediterranean, even if it be nothing more.
I admit the likelihood sagaciously suggested by Colonel Mure, of the parts between Syria and Egypt being, in reality, Semitic[11] rather than Egyptian, yet passing for Egyptian in the eyes of a Greek; so that much which is really Phœnician, or Jewish, may have been considered as Coptic. Nevertheless, a few fragmentary facts seem to indicate a true introduction of Egyptian ideas and blood.
a. The name of the city Thebæ, common to both Greece and Egypt, is one of these.
b. The reproach cast in the teeth of Achilles in respect to Penthesilea by Thersites, which can only be alluded to here, but which is explained in Herodotus[12] by a reference to Egyptian manners is another.
c. The word Barbaros, which the evidence of Herodotus, combined with the fact of the native name of the Africans immediately to the south of Egypt being Berber at the present moment, induces me to consider it as an absolute Egyptian word.
d. The word Africa is easily explained by supposing that the Egyptians took it from the Afer nations of Abyssinia, and so gave it the Greeks, but it is not explicable by deducing it from a Semitic source.
e. The names Iolchos and Colchis.—How comes Jason, in sailing from a part of Thessaly named Iolchos, to reach a part of Asia with a name all but identical? or, changing the expression, how comes the Colchos of the Black Sea which Jason visits, to have had a name so like that of the birthplace of the hero who visits it? These things, however little they may be set down to the chapter of accidents, are rarely accidental. Yet they cannot be connected with each other. The evidence, however, of Herodotus to the existence of Egyptian customs in Colchis (evidence which, although it will not prove the identity of the Georgian stock with the Egyptian, suggests the idea of a partial settlement) supplies an explanation. Both Colchos and Iolchos may have been Egyptian.
Farther remarks upon the assumption that the Phœnicians only (and not the Egyptians) were a maritime people, will occur in the ethnology of Crete.
The influences from Syria and Palestine were either Phœnician or Jewish, and by no means exclusively Phœnician. The selling of the sons and daughters of Judah into captivity beyond the sea, is a fact attested by Isaiah. Neither do I think that the eponymus of the Argive Danai was other than that of the Israelite tribe of Dan; only we are so used to confine ourselves to the soil of Palestine in our consideration of the history of the Israelites, that we treat them as if they were adscripti glebœ, and ignore the share they may have taken in the ordinary history of the world. Like priests of great sanctity, they are known in the holy places only—yet the seaports between Tyre and Ascalon, of Dan, Ephraim, and Asher, must have followed the history of seaports in general, and not have stood on the coast for nothing. What a light would be thrown on the origin of the name Pelop-o-nesus, and the history of the Pelop-id family, if a bonâ fide nation of Pelopes, with unequivocal affinities, and cotemporary annals, had existed on the coast of Asia! Who would have hesitated to connect the two? Yet with the Danai and the tribe of Dan this is the case, and no one connects them.