Ingenious Germans have connected with the destruction of Sodom and its sister cities a passage in the Latin writer Justin (xviii. 3. 2, 3), in which it is said that the Phœnicians were driven to the Canaanitish coast by an earthquake which took place in their original home near ‘the Assyrian lake.’ Instead of ‘Assyrian,’ some manuscripts read ‘Syrian,’ and the lake has accordingly been imagined to be the Dead Sea, and the earthquake to be the rain of fire which destroyed the cities of the plain.[41] But there is no other instance in which the Dead Sea is called ‘the Syrian lake,’ supposing this to be the true reading, nor is there any trace of an earthquake in the catastrophe described in Genesis. Moreover, the unanimous voice of classical antiquity declared that the Phœnicians had come from the Persian Gulf, not from the valley of the Jordan, and their seafaring propensities were explained by the fact that they once lived in the islands of the Erythræan Sea. Whatever the ‘Assyrian lake’ may have been, it was not the ‘Salt Sea’ of the Old Testament. The Israelites traced back to Abram the rite of circumcision which they practised. The rite, however, was not confined to Israel. So far as Western Asia is concerned, it seems to have been of African origin. It is to be found among most of the races and tribes of Africa, and in Egypt the institution was of immemorial antiquity. According to Herodotos (ii. 36), the Egyptians, the Ethiopians, and the Kolkhians alone observed it ‘from the beginning,’ the Phœnicians and Syrians of Palestine having learned it from the Egyptians, and the Cappadocians from the people of Kolkhis. But the knowledge of the world possessed by Herodotos was limited, and his anthropology is not profound. The practice is met with in various parts of the world; it owes its origin to considerations of chastity, its maintenance to sanitary reasons. It is true that Africa was peculiarly its home, and that it seems to have been common to the aboriginal tribes of that continent, but it is also true that it was known to aboriginal tribes in other parts of the globe among whom—so far as our evidence can tell us—the practice originated independently.[42]