Page 258 - Records of Bahrain (2)(ii)_Neat

584 Records oj Bahrain

TIIE ISLANDS OF BAHREIN. 203

detailed in the course of these notes, I judge that they were a
dark race, the ancestors of the (< black-heads ” of the inscrip­
tions, and possibly the samo as the Adamites of Genesis.
They dearly did not belong to what is called the Semitic
family of nations, as there is hardly a name in the original
mythology or geography of the region which can be traced
to a Hebrew or Arabic root.1 They seem to have been of the
same race, judging from their languago, as the later Akkad
of Babylonia; and it may bo conjectured that they owed
their early refinement to their position on the great line of
traffic between the cast and west. Commerce, indeed, lias
always sharpened the intelligence, and pioneered the way to
civilization; and the samo influences, which in a later age
placed tho Phoenicians at the head of European progress,
may thus be supposed, at the first dawn of history, to have
been in operation in tho Persian Gulf. And here I may
observe, that the reasons why, in very early times—and even
as late as tho timo of Alexander—tho emporia of commerce
botween India and the Mediterranean were to be found in
the Persian Gulf, rather than on the southern coast of
Arabia, or in the Bed Sea, were simply these :—1st, that in
the infancy of navigation mariners dared not strike directly
across tho Indian Ocean from the Malabar coast to Aden,
but were obliged to creep along the shore from the mouth of
.the Indus to the entrance to the Persian Gulf; 2nd, that the
Persian Gulf, with its varying winds, was always a far more
convenient sea for navigation than tho funnel-shaped Bed
Sea, where the wind blew for nine months continuously in
one direction, and for three months in the other; and 3rd,
that the valley of tho Euphrates, and the northern skirts of

1 It is difficult of courso in sonio eases to detennino whether the Accadiau or
Assyrian rendering of a proper uamo mav bo the original form. For instaneo,
the evil spirits, companions of Oannes, who uro named by Abydenus (following
Borosus) EtifSuKo? and ’Ev-tvyd/xos, appear in tho Inscriptions ns Vadukku nud
Egimti in Assyrian, but Vaduk and Gij/im in Accadiau, which are mcro variant
forms of tho samo title, nud probably signify “tho strikers” and “tho ravngers;”
and I may add that *Evd~&ov\os is probably Aua-gallii (Arabic “ tho
destroyers”) the Greek labial as usual replacing tho hard guttural, and
may bo Aiia-rabfti, “the crouchcrs,” tho (l and r intorennuging. In this view
Kvhn*VTos will bo tho only one of tho five monsters of Berosus unidentified.