Canaan (son of Ham) al Hakam tells that "Canaan is the father of the Sudan (Sub Saharan Africans) and the Abyssinians". The German historian Johannes Aventinus (fl. c. 1525) recorded a legend that Canaan's sons "the "Arkite"" and "the "Hamathite"" first settled in the area of Greece, and gave their names to the regions of Arcadia and Emathia. According to , Noah became drunk then cursed his grandson Canaan, for the transgression of Canaan's father, Ham. This is the "Curse of Canaan", to which the misnomer "Curse of Ham" has been attached since Classical antiquity. <poem> "Ham's transgression:" And Ham, the father of Canaan,
Curse of Ham whether "seeing" someone's nakedness meant to have sex with that person (e.g. Leviticus 20:17). The same idea was raised by 3rd-century rabbis, in the "Babylonian Talmud" (c. 500 AD), who argue that Ham either castrated his father, or sodomised him. The same explanations are found in three Greek translations of the Bible, which replace the word "see" in verse 22 with another word denoting homosexual relations. The castration theory has its modern counterpart in suggested parallels found in the castration of Uranus by Cronus in Greek mythology and a Hittite myth of the supreme god Anu whose genitals were "bitten