While the Khita were inlanders, the parallel shore-land of the
Mediterranean—Syria and Palestine—was occupied by a host of Semitic
and congener tribes. The former is a noble word and by no means the
‘invention of a Greek geographer’; Suríyyah denotes the rocky region
from Sur or Tsur (זור = rock), a tower (_turris_), Tyre, the Zurai of
Tiglath-pileser II., and the Tapau of the hieroglyphs. Thus ‘Syria’
and ‘Tyria’ would be synonyms. Herodotus (vii. 63) fathered a sad
confusion when he wrote, ‘The people whom the Greeks call Syrians are
called Assyrians by the barbarians.’ Assyria is from another root, אשר
(Ashur), supposed to signify ‘happiness,’ and applied, as will be seen,
to one of the gods. Syria is the hieroglyphic Khar, Kharu, or Khálu,
the ‘hinder-land,’ that is, behind or north of Osiris (Egypt), and
the Akarru or Akharu of the cuneiforms, both from the ‘Semitic’ root
Akhr. ‘Palestine’ (Syria) is simply the ‘land of the Philistines,’ the
Zahi of the hieroglyphs and mediæval Filistín; this powerful family,
probably connected with the Hyksos, extended eastward from the confines
of Egypt, and built Pelusium—‘Philistine-town,’ not town of πηλὸς or
mud.
Beyond the Philistines began the Phœnicians—merchants and traders,
travellers, explorers, and colonisers—the ‘Englishmen of antiquity.’
When Herodotus brings the Phœnicians from the ‘Erythrean Sea’ he is
generally understood to mean the Persian Gulf, where the islands of
Tyrus (or Tylos) and Aradus are supposed to be the mother-sites of
the homonymous Mediterranean settlements. The popular derivation of
‘Phœnicia’ is from φοῖνιξ, which again may have been, _more Græco_,
a mere translation of the Egyptian Kefeth, Kefthu, Keft, and Kefa, a
palm-tree. But the question would be solved if it can be proved that
the Phœnicians are the ‘Fenekh’[564] of the monuments and the Moslem
El-Fenish. Mariette Pasha derived the term Punoi, Pœni, from Pun or
Punt, by which he understood Somali-land; he is easily reconciled with
Herodotus by assuming Punt to mean, as most understand it, the opposite
Arabian coast.[565] Thus the ‘Port of Punt’ is the mythical Red Sea
(primordial matter?), where red Typhon and the red dragon App or Apáp
(Apophis) fought against the white god Horus—the prototype of Baldur
the Beautiful.[566]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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