" ("Outlines of Philosophy of History,"
vol. i., p. 475.)
There was an ancient tradition among the Persians that the Phoenicians
migrated from the shores of the Erythraean Sea, and this has been
supposed to mean the Persian Gulf; but there was a very old city of
Erythia, in utter ruin in the time of Strabo, which was built in some
ancient age, long before the founding of Gades, near the site of that
town, on the Atlantic coast of Spain. May not this town of Erythia have
given its name to the adjacent sea? And this may have been the
starting-point of the Phoenicians in their European migrations. It would
even appear that there was an island of Erythea. In the Greek mythology
the tenth labor of Hercules consisted in driving away the cattle of
Geryon, who lived in the island of Erythea, "an island somewhere in the
remote west, beyond the Pillars of Hercules." (Murray's "Mythology," p.
257.) Hercules stole the cattle from this remote oceanic island, and,
returning drove them "through Iberia, Gaul, over the Alps, and through
Italy." (Ibid.) It is probable that a people emigrating from the
Erythraean Sea, that is, from the Atlantic, first gave their name to a
town on the coast of Spain, and at a later date to the Persian Gulf--as
we have seen the name of York carried from England to the banks of the
Hudson, and then to the Arctic Circle.
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