ANCIENT KINGS OF ARABIA. 107 



some of which contained fish ; but their course was 

 speedily absorbed in the sands. The Danish trav- 

 eller remarks, it would be a profitable and not a 

 very difficult task for the government to rebuild the 

 structure ; but the local avithorities are too poor to 

 attempt the undertaking'. Reservoirs similar to 

 that of Mareb, on a smaller scale, are not uncom- 

 mon in Yemen and other parts of the East. Those 

 that supply Constantinople are constructed after the 

 same manner. Abulfeda mentions one near Emesa 

 (Homs) in Syria, which the natives attribute to 

 Alexander the Great'; and another at Tostar, in 

 Persia, which raised the water of a neighbouring 

 river to the level of that city. Tavernier and Char- 

 din have described one very much resembling that 

 of Saba, built at the extremity of a pleasant valley 

 near Ispahan, for the purpose of collecting the rills 

 and melted snows from the surrounding mountains. 



Whatever truth there may be in the allegorical 

 details of this catastrophe, there is no reason to 

 doubt the event itself. That political causes, aris- 

 ing from civil war or foreign invasion, as much as 

 the decayed state of the embankment, may have con- 

 tributed to the revolution which then took place, is 

 more than probable ; but we can hardly suppose, as 

 some have thought, that this deluge was a fiction of 

 the Arabs to save their national reputation; since 

 the occurrence of such a calamity is uniformly at- 

 tested, both by their sacred and historical records. 



No point in Arabian chronology has been dis- 

 puted with more learning than the date of this inun- 

 dation. Most of the native historians have fixed it 

 about the time of Alexander the Great ; but little 

 credit is due to their loose calculations. They all 

 .agree, however, that it happened in the reign of 

 Akran, or his son Duhabshan. Reiske places it 30 

 or -iO years, and De Sacy 140, after the Christian 

 era. The former, notwithstanding the high author- 

 ity against us, we are inclined to regard as the more 



