The condition of A., as represented by the authors of the inscriptions, is very dilTerent from
134
AEABIA
ARABIA
the nomad and patriarchal condition which we ordinarily associate with the name Arab, and which is certainly associated with it in the Bible. The Sabseans and Minitans are people of fixed habitations ; they b\iild fortresses, and live in walled cities ; they raise massive temples, and con- struct works of irrigation on a grand scale. War forms only an occasional incident in their lives ; the main source of their wealth is commerce ; and besides agriculture, they carry on mining and manufactures. Texts containing ' ordres de police ' give evidence, says M. Hal^vy, 'd'une haute per- fection d'organization civile, et de I'existence d'un code p^nal chez les Sab^ens.' Their inscriptions are, many of them, specimens of the most finished workmanship, and show signs of the cultivation of other fine arts ; nor can their civilisation be sliown to have been derived from any other nation. Their Pantheon, says the same \\Titer, was marvellously rich, and of prodigious variety. The temples of both the chief races were built east of the to^^'ns, which would point to the worship of the sun ; yet this cannot be shown to have existed among the Minasans ; neither do the Min.-ean documents show the worship of Al-Makah, the chief Sabrean deity. Common to both was the worship of Attar (the male Ashtoreth), who in Minsean texts appears in the two forms of \p-iv and pij;, which, in the opinion of D. H. Miiller, mean the rising and setting sun. Two female deities, Wadd and Nikrah, interpreted by the same writer as 'Love' and 'Hate,' also occupy an important place in the Minsean Pantheon.
Yet from the nature of things civilisation of this kind can only have existed in South A. and the cases ; the life of the dwellers in the ' black tents,' as described by Burckhardt and Doughty in this century, must have existed from immemorial time in the desert. Several writers, indeed, suppose the ditl'erence between the nomad Arabs and the stationary Arabs to be one of race ; and, strange as it may seem, the purest Arab blood is supposed to be found in the latter {'aribah) ; while the name of the former contains the idea of Arab by adoption (mutn arnbah). Neither half of the Arab stock can be traced with any probability to any other country ; and ethnologists are now with something like unanimity making A. the home of the whoie Semitic race ; and the emigrations of the Shammar and Anezah clans northwards in search of richer pasturage than the A" deserts afl'ord, emigrations wliich have taken place within the last century, represent the continuation of a series of simihir waves of which the commencement is prehistoric, all brought about by the same causes, though not all following the same direction. The fact that the names by which they call their towns and villages, as well as the natural features of their country, are all Arabic, and bear no trace of the memory of another home, is, as Gen. Tweedie has pointed out, strikingly in favour of the theory which makes the Arabs autocthonous.
This autocthony naturally does not exclude the presence of a certain number of colonists. Four Greek colonies are mentioned by Pliny, Ampeloiie, Arethusa, Chalkis, and Larissa, of which the first only seems cajjalile of identification ; Glaser (Skizze, ii. 1.54) tiies to find it on the coast of Ilijaz. Being a Milesian colony, it must have been planted not later than the 6th cent. B.C. The name Javan, mentioned in Ezk 27" in a context which points to A., is possibly to be interpreted of a Gr. colony in the peninsula ; and the statement of Diodorus (iii. 43), that a tribe on the W. coast of A. culti- vated friendly relations with Greeks of Bocotia and the Peloponnesus, may have been rightly connected with the existence of these colonies by Glaser (I.e. p. 155). Jewish colonies akso existed in A. long before the time of the Prophet Mohammed ; in the
3rd and 4th cent. A.D. they would seem to have been favoured by the Persians in opposition to the Christian communities which had the support of the W. empire (Die Abyssinier in Arabien, p. 175).
The ethnolopcal tables of On would seem to take special not« of the inhabitants of A., who are assigned places in the human family in the following passages : Gn 10' (children of Cush), 1022.23 (children of Shem), 1025-30 (children of Eber), ia^-* (children of Abraham and I\eturah), 2512-13 (Ishmaelites). The eminent explorer Carsten Niebuhr argued from the number of places in Yemen and Haflramaut mentioned by ' Moses ' in these places that the legislator must himself have travelled in the country ; but his attempts at identifying them do little towards confirming this proposition. More elaborate attempts ha^■e been made in more recent times, notably by Glaser in his Skizze, ii. 314-470. without, however, producing many con\*incing results. The tables are not quite consistent, as the same names are assigned different iiedi^ees ; but this Glaser would account for by supposing the tables compiled at different periods between the 11th and the 6th cent. B.C. Some of the names, such as Sheba and Dedan, are known from other parts of Scripture, and are otherwise famous ; a few, e.g. Hadramaut (n^3li;n), can be identified with certainty ; several, esp. Ophir and Ha\-ilah, are frequently mentioned in Scripture, but are difficult to localise. Most of the names, however, occur in these tables only ; and as we are quite ignorant of the sources from which their comjiiler drew, endeavours to localise them would seem to have Httle scientific value. They duubtless signified to the compiler tribes or nations ; but the ordinarj- rule for the interpretation of these patronymic pedigrees, according to which the fathers stand to the sons in the relation of genus to species, cannot be applied to them. Thus the great nation of Sheba is called a son of Ra'mah (probably the Regma of Ptolemy, a town on the Pers. Gulf, Glaser, p. 252), which is co-ortlinated with it in Ezk 2722, and Ra'mah itself a son of Chish. Still stranger is it that the patri- arch of the Arab nations, including Ophir and Hadramaut, Joktan, should have left so iittle trace in A. that Sprenger (Geog. p. 50) is fain to identify the name with Bishat Yakzan, a station on the incense roati. Glaser, perhaps with greater probability, connects it vnth Kat.an, a town of Hadramaut. It IS probable, therefore, that these tables, so far from being exact, are as vague as might be expected in the case of so vast and un- explored a countrj'. Even Saba, which we know to have been a powerful empire, is vaguely spoken of by the prophets as a distant country- (Jer 620, ji 3's)_ in NT as at the ends of the earth (Mt 12-^, Lk ifsi).