CHAP. ii. 27. INTRODUCTION. 51 the Atlantic Ocean is confluent, more especially towards the south. Besides, all of these navigators called the final country which they reached, Ethiopia, and described it under that name. Is it therefore at all incredible, that Homer, misled by such reports, separated them into two divisions, one towards the east and the other west, not knowing whether there were any intermediate countries or not? But there is another ancient tradition related by Ephorus, which Homer had probably fallen in with. He tells us it is reported by the Tartessians, 1 that some of the Ethiopians, on their arrival in Libya, 2 penetrated into the extreme west, and settled down there, while the rest occupied the greater part of the sea-coast ; and in support of this state- ment he quotes the passage of Homer, The Ethiopians, the farthest removed of men, separated into two divisions. 27. These and other more stringent arguments may be urged against Aristarchus and those of his school, to clear our poet from the charge of such gross ignorance. I assert that the ancient Greeks, in the same way as they classed all the northern nations" with which they were familiar under the one name of Scythians, or, according to Homer, INomades, and 1 The Tartessians were the inhabitants of the island of Tartessus, formed by the two arms of the Baetis, (the present Guadalquiver,) near the mouth of this river. One of these arms being now dried up, the island is re- united to the mainland. It forms part of the present district of Andalusia. The tradition, says Gosselin, reported by Ephorus, seems to me to resem- ble that still preserved at Tingis, a city of Mauritania, so late as the sixth century. Procopius (Vandalicor. ii. 10) relates that there were two columns at Tingis bearing the following inscription in the Phoenician language, " We are they who fled before the brigand Joshua, the son of Naue (Nun)." It does not concern us to inquire whether these columns actually existed in the time of Procopius, but merely to remark two in- dependent facts. The first is the tradition generally received for more than twenty centuries, that the coming of the Israelites into Palestine drove one body of Canaanites, its ancient inhabitants, to the extremities of the Mediterranean, while another party went to establish, among the savage tribes of the Peloponnesus and Attica, the earliest kingdoms known in Europe. The second observation has reference to the name of Ethio- pians given by Ephorus to this fugitive people, as confirming what we have before stated, that the environs of Jaffa, and possibly the entire of Palestine, anciently bore the name of Ethiopia : and it is here we must seek for the Ethiopians of Homer, and not in the interior of Africa. 3 Africa. E 2
