EARLY DISTRIBUTION OF HORSES. 39 



ever owned a horse. It is reasonable to conclude, therefore, not 

 only from what is written, but from what is implied, that the 

 Arabians at about the period of 1600 B.C. had no horses. North- 

 ern Syria, as the source of Egyptian supply, points directly to 

 Armenia, adjoining on the east, as the original source. When 

 Strabo wrote at the beginning of the Christian era that there 

 were no horses in Arabia at that time, he would still have been 

 within the bounds of the truth if ne had said there had been 

 none there for more the sixteen hundred years before his day. 

 All these considerations confirm the history that has come down 

 to us from Philostorgius. 



As early as the dynasties of the Shepherd Kings and while the 

 Israelites were still in Egyptian bondage, the Phoenician mer- 

 chants had accumulated great wealth and great power and were 

 literally the masters of the seas. The Pho3iiicians were a com- 

 mercial and maritime people and the Egyptians were, in fact, de- 

 pendent upon them for all their foreign supplies. These condi- 

 tions leave hardly a doubt that Egypt's first supply of horses came 

 through the Phoenicians. But upon the establishment of the 

 eighteenth dynasty under the old Thebans, the spirit of war and 

 conquest revived, and under Thutmosis I. and Thutmosis III., 

 notably, numerous and successful campaigns were made against 

 Northern Syria and then extending eastward across the Euphrates 

 into the borders of Armenia and Assyria. And from the number 

 of horses and chariots captured in battle and collected as tribute, 

 the careful student cannot avoid the conclusion that this kind of 

 spoil was the chief incentive to the various campaigns. "Besides 

 the usual species," Maspero informs us, "powerful stallions were 

 imported from Northern Syria, which were known by the Semitic 

 name of Abiri, the strong." This is the first mention in history 

 of an improved type of horse noted for his strength. 



Whatever may have been the precise period in which the Patri- 

 arch Job lived, he was the author of the grandest panegyric on 

 the war-horse that ever was written. Yet it seems strange that 

 he owned seven thousand sheep, three thousand camels, five 

 hundred yoke of oxen and five hundred she asses, but did not 

 own a horse. To draw his picture of the war-horse he must have 

 seen him in action, on the field, and it is not improbable in his 

 younger days he witnessed, or possibly participated in, some great 

 battle between the Babylonians and the Persians, north of the 

 latitude and country in which he lived. It is now generally con- 



