JAVAN

or ION, (for the Hebrew word, differently pointed, forms both names,) was the fourth son of Japheth, and the father of all those nations which were included under the name of Grecians, or Ionians, as they were invariably called in the east. Javan had four sons, by whom the different portions of Greece Proper were peopled: Elisha, Tharsis, Chittim, and Dodanim. Elisha, Eliza, or Ellas, as it is written in the Chaldee, and from whom the Greeks took the name of Hέλληνες, settled in the Peloponnesus; where, in the Elysian fields and the river Ili us, his name is still preserved. Tharsis settled in Achaia; Chittim, in Macedonia; and Dodanim, in The aly and Epirus; where the city of Dodona gives ample proof of the origin of its name. But the Greeks did not remain pure Javanim. It appears from history that, at a very early age, they were invaded and subjugated by the Pelasgi, a Cuthite race from the east, and by colonies of Phenic i ans and Egyptians from the south: so that the Greeks, so famous in history, were a compound of all these people. The aboriginal Greeks were called Jaones, or Jonim; from which similarity of sound, the Jonim and the Javanim, although belonging to two e entially different families, have been confounded together. Javan is the name used in the Old Testament for Greece and the Greeks. See Division of the Earth .