Note 4 — Chapter XIX

The name of Bĭrāsa will naturally suggest a resemblance between it and Irāsa, the country which is mentioned by Herodotus as that to which the Greeks were conducted by the natives of Libya. We do not mean to infer, that the place first mentioned has any other connexion with the territory upon which Cyrene was erected, than that which we are going to suggest; but if the affinity of the Arabic and Hebrew, or Chaldee, to the old Phœnician, or Samaritan language, (an early dialect of the Hebrew,) be really so great as is generally allowed, the two words in question may bear the same meaning without any forced application. The word rās in Arabic, and in Hebrew, signifies a head; and the term is constantly applied by the Arabs to high and mountainous ground, whether inland or on the coast: land on the summit of a mountain may therefore be said to be—bi-rās—upon the head, or high ground; and bi-rās-a would signify, in Arabic, as it does in the case of the territory in question—a tract of land on the upper part of a range of hills—and might be applied without any impropriety to a similar tract of land of whatever extent. It is not, perhaps, improbable that rās had the same meaning among the Libyan tribes, (whom we may suppose to have spoken some dialect of the old Phœnician,) as it bears in Arabic and Hebrew; and that the particle bi or be, was at the same time used by the Libyans, in the sense which belongs to it in those languages. Irāsa might then be supposed to mean a tract of table land; for the loss of the letter b is of little importance, considering that the word comes through a Greek medium; and as the Greeks in the case alluded to were conducted from the low ground to the high, such an application is far from improbable. It is not, however, necessary for this application to insist upon the omission of the b; for the i in Irāsa might well be a contraction of the article el or il, signifying the, and I-rāsa be pronounced for el-rāsa, which is consistent with the usual pronunciation of Arabic and other Oriental languages. The whole would then be taken for a part; and the country which the Greeks were recommended to inhabit, would be termed—the summit of the mountain—and in the Libyan dialect (let us suppose) Ir’rāsa, or Er’-rāsa.