 As almost none of the persons, places and stories in the first eleven chapters of Genesis (called the primeval history) are ever mentioned anywhere else in the Bible, leading scholars to surmise that the story of Japheth and his brothers is a late composition, attached to Genesis to serve as an introduction to that book and to the Torah.Japheth (in Hebrew, Yafet or Yefet) may be a transliteration of the Greek Iapetos, the ancestor of the Hellenic peoples.His sons and grandsons associate him with the geographic area of the eastern Mediterranean and Asia — Ionia/Javan, Rhodes/Rodanim, Cyprus/Kittim, and other points in the region of Greece and Asia Minor — approximating to one of the kingdoms (Lysimachus) into which the generals of Alexander the Great divided his empire on his death (the descendants of Shem and Ham respectively correspond to the other two, those of the Ptolemies and Seleucids).