introduction of the Alphabet and Writing to the Phœnicians under King Cadmus of Tyre, a people who have latterly been regarded by modern writers, but not by the Greeks, as Semites — though wrongly so, as we have seen by the new evidence; and partly because the earliest hitherto published specimens of systematic alphabetic writing which can be read and approximately dated have been in the retrograde form of the Phœnician alphabet and in a Semitic dialect, which was often used in Semitic communities by the later Phœnician kings and merchants, who are thus assumed to have been Semites themselves. And this assumed Semitic racial character of the Phœnicians is persisted in notwithstanding the fact that the Phœnicians were called by the Hebrews "Sons of Ham," and not "Sons of Shem" or Semites, and thus were regarded by the Hebrews or Semites themselves as Non-Semites.[1]
The Aryan racial nature of the Phœnicians has been dealt with in my former works, and is further confirmed in the following pages.
- ↑ See my article "Sumerians as Phœnicians and Canaanites" in Asiatic Review, April 1926, 300f.
