82 PRIMITIVE INHABITANTS OF ARABIA. 



in their records, — that of their national descent. 

 History and tradition agree in deducing their ori- 

 gin from Kahtan or Joktan, the son of Heber, and 

 of the posterity of Noah by Shem. Among them- 

 selves this account has always passed as authentic. 

 Elmacin calls Joktan the father of the Arabs ; and 

 Abulfeda adds, that his descendants inhabited Ye- 

 men, or the Happy Arabia. The parts of that coun- 

 try bordering on Palestine and Egypt were origin- 

 ally peopled by Cush, the son of Ham, whose de- 

 scendants formed several petty monarchies and in- 

 dependent governments. Hence the name has been 

 applied both by saci-ed and profane writers to Arabia 

 as well as Ethiopia. Strabo, Diodorus, and Ptolemy 

 speak of the Chusi and tlie island of Chutis as bemg 

 in the former. The wife of Moses is called an 

 Ethiopian, or native of Cush ; but we know that she 

 was an Arabian, and fed her father's flocks in the 

 deserts of Horeb. In the prophecies of Habakkuk 

 (iii. 7), Cushan and Midian are conjoined as the 

 same territory. Sheba, Dedan, Teman, and other 

 districts attest beyond dispute the names of the 

 ancient settlers in these provinces. Various tribes 

 have been already mentioned as occupying the bor- 

 ders of the desert from the Red Sea to the Chaldean 

 Mountains, who were displaced by the posterity of 

 Edom, to whom that region was a sort of promised 

 land. But the Arabs pass them in total silence, as 

 not sprung from either of the two acknowledged 

 patriarchs of their nation. We shall therefore ad- 

 here to the following classification, which has been 

 uniformly adopted by their own authors : — The old 

 extinct Arabs ; the genuine or pure Arabs ; and the 

 mixed or naturalized Arabs. 



finished his General History in 914. By the ad\'ice of his 

 friends, he reduced it from 30,000 sheets to a more reasonable 

 size. Price, in his Essay towards a History of Arabia, has 

 • given translations from it.' Elmacin, whose Historia Saracenica 

 was published in 1635 by Erpenius, is said to be abridged 

 from Tabiri. 



