206 COSMOS 



universal tiafKc with India and the eastern coasts of Africa. 

 The natural products of these countries were interchanged for 

 those of Hadramaut and Yemen. " All they from Sheba 

 shall come," sings the Prophet Isaiah of the dromedaries of 

 Midian ; "they shall bring gold and incense."* Petra was 

 the emporium for the costly wares destined for Tyre and Sidon, 

 and the principal settlement of the Nabatsei, a people once 

 mighty in commerce, whose primitive seat is supposed by the 

 philologist Quatremere to have been situated among the Ger- 

 rhoean Mountains, on the Lower Euphrates. This northern 

 portion of Arabia maintained an active connection with other 

 civilized states, from its vicinity to Egypt, the diffusion of 

 Arabian tribes over the Syro-Palestinian boundaries and the 

 districts around the Euphrates, as well as by means of the 

 celebrated caravan track from Damascus through Emesa and 

 Tadmor (Palmyra) to Babylon. Mohammed himself, who 

 had sprung from a noble but impoverished family of the Ko- 

 reischite tribe, in his mercantile occupation, visited, before he 

 appeared as an inspired prophet and reformer, the fair at Bosra 

 on the Syrian frontier, that at Hadramaut, the land of incense, 

 and more particularly that held at Okadh, near Mecca, which 

 continued during twenty days, and whither poets, mostly Bed- 

 ouins, assembled annually, to take part in the lyric competi- 

 tions. I mention these individual facts referring to interna^, 

 tional relations of commerce, and the causes from which they 

 emanated, in order to give a more animated picture of the 

 circumstances which conduced to prepare the way for a uni- 

 versal change. 



The spread of Arabian population toward the north reminds 

 us most especially of two events, which, notwithstanding the 

 obscurity in which their more immediate relations are shroud- 

 ed, testify that even thousands of years before Mohammed, 

 the inhabitants of the peninsula had occasionally taken part 

 in the great universal traffic, both toward the West and East, 

 in the direction of Egypt and of the Euphrates. The Semitic 

 or Aramaeic origin of the Hyksos, who put an end to the old 

 kingdom under the twelfth dynasty, tv/o thousand two hund- 

 red years before our era, is now alinost universally admitted 

 by all historians. Even Manetho says, " Some maintain that 

 these herdsmen were Arabians." Other authorities call them 

 PliQBnicians, a term which was extended in antiquity to the 

 inhabitants of the Valley of the Jordan, and to all Arabian 

 races. The acute Ewald. refers especially tc the Amalekites, 



* Tfeai-sj^. c\\. Ix.. V. a. 



