There was one further direction in which the Phoenicians pushed their maritime trade, not perhaps continuously, but at intervals, when their political relations were such as to give them access to the sea which washed Asia on the south and on the southeast. The nearest points at which they could embark for the purpose of exploring or utilising the great tract of ocean in this quarter were the inner recesses of the two deep gulfs known as the Persian and the Arabian. It has been thought by some[9113] that there were times in their history when the Phoenicians had the free use of both these gulfs, and could make the starting-point of their eastern explorations and trading voyages either a port on one of the two arms into which the Red Sea divides towards the north, or a harbour on the Persian Gulf near its north-western extremity. But the latter supposition rests upon grounds which are exceedingly unsafe and uncertain. That the Phoenicians migrated at some remote period from the shores of the Persian Gulf to the Mediterranean may be allowed to be highly probable; but that, after quitting their primitive abodes and moving off nearly a thousand miles to the westward, they still maintained a connection with their early settlements and made them centres for a trade with the Far East, is as improbable a hypothesis as any that has ever received the sanction of men of learning and repute. The Babylonians, through whose country the connection must have been kept up, were themselves traders, and would naturally keep the Arabian and Indian traffic in their own hands; nor can we imagine them as brooking the establishment of a rival upon their shores. The Arabians were more friendly; but they, too, would have disliked to share their carrying trade with a foreign nation. And the evidence entirely fails to show that the Phoenicians, from the time of their removal to the Mediterranean, ever launched a vessel in the Persian Gulf, or had any connection with the nations inhabiting its shores, beyond that maintained by the caravans which trafficked by land between the Phoenician cities and the men of Dedan and Babylon.[9114]