Note 85 — Chapter IX

So, too, the Red Sea, or Phoenician Sea, as to the meaning of which there have been so many conjectures. The name Bahr el Ahmar was formerly applied both to the Red Sea and to the Persian Gulf, both of them originally the homes of the Phoenicians, whose Arabic tribe name, Beni Himyar, Children of the Red, was turned by the Greeks into Phoenicians from the Greek word phoenix, red. I offer this solution of the name puzzle to philologists, having no pretension to be one myself.