![]() ![]() (I’d love to suggest it was the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel, but they’re more myth than reality.) Or maybe a Semitic language made its way across Europe without actual Semites, as sometimes happens too. Maybe some Semitic group made its way over land to northern Europe. Trade could’ve brought it there without actual Phoenicians.) I find the linguistic evidence pretty compelling, but a Phoenician settlement seems just the most likely explanation, not the only one. ![]() (A single Phoenician pot found off the shore of northern Germany doesn’t provide much additional evidence. That said, it’s fair to feel skeptical of the theory, because we have little more than linguistic evidence. Plus, the Vikings made the reverse trip (1300 years later), from Scandinavia to the eastern Mediterranean, in ships less sophisticated than the Phoenicians’. (The only place where you’d move faster by crossing open water is the Bay of Biscay.) The Mediterranean presented several challenges greater than the trip to the North Sea, and the Phoenicians mastered them. Not only can you hug the coast, which is all ancient sailing vessels could manage, that’s actually the most direct route for almost the whole trip. But the trip from the Mediterranean to the North Sea actually doesn’t require any time on the open ocean. And Proto-Germanic’s odd, Semitic-sounding vocabulary includes just about all its words for the sea, fish, and ships. Plus, the Phoenicians worshiped Baal Addir (to the horror of their Hebrew cousins, who moaned about Baal in the Old Testament). They could have sailed on from there to northern Germany and southern Scandinavia, where Proto-Germanic formed. What ancient Semites could have lived in northern Europe that far back? The Phoenicians came from cities in Lebanon and Syria, and they were the Mediterranean’s great sailors. Proto-Germanic branched off from the Indo-European family tree around 500 B.C.E. Plus, Germanic languages have a lot of breathy consonants, as well as an unusual verb-shift for the past tense - in both cases unlike other Indo-European languages but like Semitic languages. Just as interesting, the ancient Germans worshiped a god named Balder, while many ancient Semites worshiped Baal Addir, which they shortened to Baldir. ![]() The Proto-Germanic word for maiden, for instance, is something like maga th. But it does often resemble Semitic vocabulary. Could legendary heroes of the Germanic people have been Phoenicians?įully one-third of Proto-Germanic vocabulary has no relation to other Indo-European words. ![]()
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