The Phœnician settlements in Ceylon corresponded with those in Spain. They had, moreover, been already established there for fifteen hundred years. On all the western coasts of the Indian Ocean, dwelt cognate tribes, with which they trafficked, and from whom they could be sustained or recruited. They were in that Indian island exposed to none of the conquests, invasions, or convulsions which have so often changed the face of the West. If the story of Sopater had never been told, and the work of Cosmas had, like so many others, perished, we might have assumed that Phrygians continued to dwell and traffic in that central yet secluded station of the Indian ocean. Neither Hindoos nor Persians had taken to the sea; China had not engaged in conquest; no Carthage had interfered with them, and no Rome swallowed them up. Isolated not from Europe only, but from Asia also and Africa; surviving the fall of Tyre and Carthage, and, without passing through Christianity, they thus, down to Mussulman times, preserved the augury of Paganism with the enterprise of Phœnicia. Sopater did not describe them as Phœnicians, because, when he wrote, Tyre was deserted; Carthage was a Vandal town, Cadiz and Carthagena were Gothic cities. The Phœnicians had disappeared, and the name was forgotten, and this people, who had never so called themselves even in the West,[160] could not have told him in the East that such was the name which European writers had given them. If these conclusions are correct, we may expect to find remnants of them still. In India proper, the Mussulman dominion, the invasion of Tatar and Patan, and the settlement of Arab tribes would have effaced the trace of such a colony: but Ceylon having remained free from such disturbance, we may not unreasonably look for this further confirmation--and we find it. There _does_ exist such an Arab population[161] of 70,000 souls, where no Arabs ever entered as invaders or mercenaries. The Arabs of the Continent are military bodies--these are given to commerce; their own traditions carry them back nearly to the period of Sopater. They report their forefathers to have come by sea, flying from the persecutions of Andalmaleh. No tribes were driven forth by these persecutions: compromised individuals only escaped.[162] The times and events prior to their conversion are held by the Mussulmans as those of ignominy; and, consequently, this population, having been by those refugees converted, dated from that period and forgot all that preceded it: they were grafted and took no account of the original stock. The same thing precisely has happened in Morocco.