Note 12 — Chapter III · Ancient Mariners and Explorers

There are those who believe that the early Egyptian mariners, who were accustomed to visit British East Africa and sail round the Arabian coast, founded the earliest colony in Sumeria (ancient Babylonia) at the head of the Persian Gulf. The cradle of Sumerian culture was Eridu, “the sea port”. The god of Eridu was Ea, who had a ship with pilot and crew. According to Babylonian traditions, he instructed the people, as did Osiris in Egypt, how to irrigate the land, grow corn, build houses and temples, make laws, engage in trade, and so on. He was remembered as a monster—a goat-fish god, or half fish, half man. Apparently he was identical with the Oannes of Berosus. It may be that Ea-Oannes symbolized the seafarers who visited the coast and founded a colony at Eridu, introducing the agricultural mode of life and the working of copper. Early inland peoples must have regarded the mariners with whom they first came into contact as semi-divine beings, just as the Cubans regarded Columbus and his followers as visitors from the sky. The Mongols of Tartary entertained quaint ideas about the British “foreign devils” after they had fought in one of the early wars against China. M. Huc, the French missionary priest of the congregation of St. Lazarus, who travelled through Tartary, Tibet, and China during 1844–6, had once an interesting conversation with a Mongol, who “had been told by the Chinese what kind of people, or monsters rather, these English were”. The story ran that the Englishmen “lived in the water like fish, and when you least expected it, they would rise to the surface and cast at you fiery gourds. Then as soon as you bend your bow to send an arrow at them, they plunge again into the water like frogs.”12