EARLY DISTRIBUTION OF HORSES. 43 



outing his work successfully. It might also be quoted to show 

 that the people of the cities of Yemen (Arabia Felix) were, at 

 that day, well advanced in civilization and refinement, and that 

 wealth and luxury abounded on all sides. Their lands, from the 

 sea to the desert, were wonderfully productive, and their people 

 lived in the cities and on their farms, but few leading a nomadic 

 life. In later generations this part of the country, which is in 

 Arabia Felix, has been called Yemen, and I believe it is univer- 

 sally conceded among the Arab tribes and by writers who have 

 studied the subject that the best horses come from Yemen. 



Taking the administration of Joseph as indicating the time 

 when the first horses were introduced into Egypt, about B.C. 

 1720, and the actual date when Constantius sent the first into 

 Arabia, A.D. 356, we find that Egypt led Arabia by two thousand 

 and seventy-six years. And yet numbers of men have written 

 great pretentious books on the horse, in which they tell us that 

 the Egyptians got their horses from the Arabians; while others 

 equally pretentious and voluminous tell us the Arabians got their 

 horses from the Egyptians; and neither class probably ever gave 

 the labor of an honest hour to settle this question. The one is 

 over two thousand years out of the way, and still they know just 

 as much about it as the other knows. They are both equally 

 ignorant and equally dishonest, for they simply copied, as their 

 own, what somebody had said before them. 



It is conceded on all hands and by all men who have gone beneath 

 the mere surface, that the literature of the ages furnishes no 

 evidence that there were horses in Arabia before the fourth or 

 fifth century of our era. General Tweedie, by far the ablest 

 writer on the Arabian horse that we have examined, concedes 

 the pertinency and force of the absence of all literary evidence, 

 until the fifth century is reached, and as a reply he says: "The sev- 

 eral Roman invasions of Arabia, in the reigns of Augustus, Trajan, 

 and Severus, must have left foreign horses behind them." This 

 is, in fact, conceding the accuracy of Strabo's representations and 

 that there were no horses in Arabia at the beginning of the 

 Christian era. The truth of the historical allusion is that the 

 Romans never overran nor conquered Arabia. They could skir- 

 mish around the border and capture a few towns or cities, but 

 the death -dealing desert was too much for them. Trajan at last 

 made it a Roman province by his proclamation, and not by his 

 sword, and for the excellent reason that "the game was not worth 



