ELISHAH (Heb. elee-shaw', God is salvation).
A son of Javan (Gen. x :4). who seems to have given name to 'the isles of Elishah,' which are de scribed as exporting fabrics of purple and scarlet to the markets of Tyre (Ezek. xxvii:7). If the descendants of Javan peopled Greece, we may ex pect to find Elishah in some province of that coun try, but it is difficult to find any name on either the Italian or the African coast which can be com pared with that of Elishah.
The Tel-el-Amarna tablets have thrown a new light on the question. Several of them are letters to the pharaoh from 'the king of Alasia,' a coun try which a hieratic docket attached to one of them identifies with the Egyptian Alsa. Alsa, sometimes read Arosa, was overrun by Thothmes III, and is mentioned in the list of his Syrian con quests engraved on the walls of Karnak (Nos. 213 and 236). Maspero (Recueil de Travaux, x. p. 210) makes Alsa or Alasia the northern part
of Cede-Syria. An unpublished hieratic •papyrus, however, now in the Hermitage of St. Petersburg, which describes an embassy sent by sea to the king of Gebal in the time of the high priest Hir Hor, states that the Egyptian envoys were wrecked on the coast of Alsa, where they were afterwards hospitably entertained by the queen of the country. Alsa or Alasia therefore must have adjoined the Mediterranean, and Winckler and W. Max Muller accordingly propose to sec in it the island of Cyprus. Condor had already sug gested that Alasia and Elishah are one and the same. The two chief objections to the identifica tion with Cyprus are that the ordinary Egyptian name of that island was Asi, and that Thothmes III includes the country among his Syrian con quests. (A. II. Saycc, Hastings' Bib. Dior.)