By these were the isles of the Gentiles divided in their lands; every one after his tongue, after their families, in their nations. The isles of the Gentiles - a phrase by which the Hebrews described all countries which were accessible by sea (Isaiah 11:11; Isaiah 20:6; Jeremiah 25:22). Such, in relation to them, were the maritime countries of Europe, the peninsula of Lesser Asia, and the region lying on the east of the Euxine. Accordingly, it was in these quarters the early descendants of Japheth, so far as known to the Hebrews, had their settlements. These are the Japhetic types of the large and enterprising family-`audax genus Japeti'-which spread over northern Asia and all Europe, 'after their tongues, after their families, in their nations'-one unity of blood in variety of families and dialects.
The very simplicity of the Mosaic statement appears the principal reason why its truth has been impugned. Moses anticipates in a few words, the grand results of all modern researches into the ethnology of Europe. Eastern descent through Japheth is common to all the nations of Europe, and Italy was the first colonized; because Berosus coincides with Moses in stating that Japheth was the first in establishing new settlements; and there is undoubted evidence that Italy was inhabited by Gomer and the Gomeridae before the Delta and the valley of the Nile were settled at all by the human race. The Gomeridae, or Umbri, were the aborigines of Italy.
Links of the derivation here and there, in some of the European nations, may be missing, but the beginning of the whole chain is riveted to the rocks of the Caucasus. The boast of the Cymry of Britain, that they are the children of Gomer, is true; but the same boast can be made, in respect to one or other of the sons of Japheth, by the natives of Italy, Greece, Spain, Gaul, Russia, and Germany. No substantial good is gained by any one race placing itself above the others of mankind. The difference is, that the primitive Britons have preserved, in their tongue and other monuments, evidences of such descent, which their brethren, more exposed to fusions and conquests, have lost.
Moreover, modern science has found that, both in physical type and language, the Medes belong to this branch of the Japhetic family (Pritchard's 'Physical History.'). Japheth is the representative of what are called the Aryan nations; and in the Mosaic account of the common ancestry of Madai and Gomer is traced the origin of that affinity between the Indo-European languages, the Sanskrit, Persian, Greek, Latin, and German, which is one of the most remarkable philological discoveries of modern times.
It is now incontrovertibly established, also, that most of the inhabitants of Europe, and a great number of the most ancient and civilized tribes of Asia, speak, with greater or smaller modifications, the same language. 'At the first patriarchal settlement of Europe by the Japhetidae, there was one common Japhetic language, and seven dialects of that language. Allowing for fusions and amplification of vocabulary, there is much the same unity, with the same differences, now, arising not from Rome, but from a common origin long prior to the foundation of Rome. That primitive language, whether designated Japhetic, Aryan, Gomeric, or Keltic, is more ancient than that of Egypt or India, the Pharaonic or the Sanskrit. To this conclusion the most distinguished etymologists have, by independent inductions, already arrived.
It is impossible to get a step beyond the Japhetidae and their language; and we must leave it to Bunsen to reconcile this established fact of the comparatively very late appearance of this proto-European "family and their tongue" with his theory, that mankind had existed many thousands of years before in Egypt, using a language one-half of which, and the older half, was borrowed from this very Japhetic' (' Mosaic Ethnology').