with no
little confidence, that this ancient American civilization came
originally from the Phoenicians. Among those who use reason in their
inquiries sufficiently to be incapable of accepting the absurdities of
monkish fancy, this hypothesis has found more favor than any other.
Wherever inquiry begins by assuming that the original civilizers came
from some other part of the world, it seems more reasonable than any
other, for more can be said to give it the appearance of probability.

The people known to us as Phoenicians were pre-eminent as the colonizing
navigators of antiquity. They were an enlightened and enterprising
maritime people, whose commerce traversed every known sea, and extended
its operations beyond the "Pillars of Hercules" into the "great exterior
ocean." The early Greeks called them Ethiopians (not meaning either
black men or Africans), and said they went every where, establishing
their colonies and their commerce in all the coast regions, "from the
extreme east to the extreme west." But the great ages of this people are
in the distant past, far beyond the beginning of what we call history.
History has knowledge only of a few of their later communities, the
Sabeans of Southern Arabia, the Phoenicians (meaning chiefly the
Tyrians), and the Carthaginians. What a change there would be in the
prevalent conceptions of the past if we could have a complete record of
this race from the beginning of its development!

It is not difficult to believe that communities of the Phoenician or
Ethiopian race were established all around the Mediterranean, and even
beyond the Strait of Gibraltar, in ages quite as old as Egypt or
Chaldea, and that they had communication with America before Tyre or
Sidon was built. Why did the ancients say so much of a "great Saturnian
continent" beyond the Atlantic if nobody in the pre-historic ages had
ever seen that continent? It was there, as they said and as we know; but
whence came their knowledge of it, and such knowledge as led them to
describe it as "larger than Asia (meaning Asia Minor), Europe, and Libya
together?" This ancient belief must have been due to Phoenician or
Ethiopian communication with America in earlier times, which was
imperfectly recollected, or perhaps never completely revealed to other
nations; and this must have taken place at a very remote period, for
imperfect recollection of the great continent across the Atlantic,
including what Solon heard in Egypt of At