494 MAN : PAST AND PRESENT. [CHAP. 



But Saba itself was preceded by the much older empire of 

 in, i.e. of the Minceans, whose very name had 



almost died out till rescued from oblivion by the 

 recently discovered inscriptions 1 . These have already yielded a 

 long list of 33 Minaean kings, whose sway extended over the 

 whole of Arabia as far as Syria and Egypt, as shown by the 

 references to Gaza and to Teima (the Tema of Scripture) on the 

 route between Sinai and Damascus. 



Other inscriptions copied by Seetzen in 1810, and all grouped 

 together as Himyaritic 2 , proved to be in an old Semitic tongue, 

 and in a script which is often disposed in vertical lines, and is the 

 parent of the system introduced in remote times into Abyssinia, 

 where it is still current. These Himyaritic documents are now 

 found to comprise two distinct groups, an early Minaean with 

 fuller and more archaic Semitic forms, and a later Sabsean, though 

 even this language is more primitive than that of the oldest 

 Assyrian and Hebrew records. Now the later Sabaean empire 

 goes back with certainty to the time of Solomon, so that the 33 

 kings, of the preceding Minaean dynasty, Sayce argues, may point 

 to a past probably coeval with that of the earliest Egyptian and 

 Akkadian records. When we remember that the Phoenicians 

 looked to the Persian Gulf as their cradle, that they must have 

 been settled in the Bahrein islands for long ages before their 

 migration to the Mediterranean, and that Cannes, from whom the 

 Akkado-Sumerians received the germs of their culture, had also 

 traditionally come up from the sea, further research may yet show 

 that South Arabia was the source whence the Chaldaeans derived 

 their first knowledge of the arts and letters. In any case this region 

 may well have been the first home of the Semites, for " in Arabia 

 alone we find Semites, and Semites only, from the very beginning, 



1 See Fritz Rommel's Siid-Arabische Chrestomathie, Munich, 1893. 



2 From Himyar, land of the Homcrites, i.e. the "Red People," a term at 

 one time applied to the South Arabian populations, and extended from them 

 to the neighbouring Erythrean ("Red") Sea. It is interesting to note that the 

 Egyptian artists also depicted the Retu men in red, but the women in yellow, 

 in contradistinction to the black Ethiopians ; while the Pun, i.e. the people of 

 Punt ("Red Land") on both sides of the Strait of Bab-el- Mandeb, are now 

 believed to be the ancestors of the Puni, or Phoenicians. 



