It is primarily on account of their language that the Phoenicians are regarded as Semites.  When there are no historical grounds for believing that a nation has laid aside its own original form of speech, and adopted an alien dialect, language, if not a certain, is at least a very strong, evidence of ethnic character.  Counter-evidence may no doubt rebut the prima facie presumption; but in the case of the Phoenicians no counter-evidence is producible.  They belong to exactly that geographic zone in which Semitism has always had its chief seat; they cannot be shown to have been ever so circumstanced as to have had any inducement to change their speech; and their physical character and mental characteristics would, by themselves, be almost sufficient ground for assigning them to the type whereto their language points.

The place which the Phoenicians occupy within the Semitic group is a question considerably more difficult to determine.  By local position they should belong to the western, or Aramaic branch, rather than to the eastern, or Assyro-Babylonian, or to the southern, or Arab.  But the linguistic evidence scarcely lends itself to such a view, while the historic leads decidedly to an opposite conclusion.  There is a far closer analogy between the Palestinian group of languages—­Phoenician, Hebrew, Moabite, and the Assyro-Babylonian, than between either of these and the Aramaic.  The Aramaic is scanty both in variety of grammatical forms and in vocabulary; the Phoenician and Assyro-Babylonian are comparatively copious.[36] The Aramaic has the character of a degraded language; the Assyro-Babylonian and the Phoenician are modelled on a primitive type.[37] In some respects Phoenician is even closer to Assyro-Babylonian than Hebrew is—­e.g. in preferring at to ah for the feminine singular termination.[38]

The testimony of history to the origin of the Phoenicians is the following.  Herodotus tells us that both the Phoenicians themselves, and the Persians best acquainted with history and antiquities, agreed in stating that the original settlements of the Phoenician people were upon the Erythraean Sea (Persian Gulf), and that they had migrated from that quarter at a remote period, and transferred their abode to the shores of the Mediterranean.[39] Strabo adds that the inhabitants of certain islands in the Persian Gulf had a similar tradition, and showed temples in their cities which were Phoenician in character.[310] Justin, or rather Trogus Pompeius, whom he abbreviated, writes as follows:—­“The Syrian nation was founded by the Phoenicians, who, being disturbed by an earthquake, left their native land, and settled first of all in the neighbourhood of the Assyrian Lake, and subsequently on the shore of the Mediterranean, where they built a city which they called Sidon on account of the abundance of the fish; for the Phoenicians call a fish sidon."[311] The “Assyrian lake” of this passage is probably the Bahr Nedjif, or “Sea of Nedjif,”