ANCIENT KINGS OF ARABIA. 119 



Seiph was made viceroy in name of the Persian 

 king, and commanded to pay an annual tribute. His 

 cruelties to the Abyssinian^ occasioned a conspiracy, 

 and after a reign of four years he was waylaid and 

 stabbed by a slave while hunting in the neighbour- 

 hood of his own capital. Wehraz inflicted a cruel 

 retaliation, by putting to death every man with the 

 dark skin and crisp hair of Ethiopia, to the number 

 of about three thousand. From this time until it 

 was subdued by the lieutenants of Mohammed, Ye- 

 men was governed by Persian satraps, under the 

 title of emirs ; the last of whom, Badsan, submitted 

 to the faith of the Prophet. Thus, in less than a 

 century, the arms of Khoosroo supplanted the Abys- 

 sinian power in Arabia. Had Abraha succeeded in 

 demolishing the Kaaba, and establishing the Chris- 

 tian worship on its ruins, Arabia might have acknow- 

 ledged the apostleship of St. Peter instead of the 

 impostor of Mecca, and quietly submitted to the 

 doctrines of the Cross, without undergoing the 

 shock of a revolution, which has changed the civil 

 and religious state of half the world.* 



II. The kingdom of Hira, in Irak, was founded by 

 a part of the dispersed clans which the flood of El 

 Arem had compelled to abandou Yemen. These 

 emigrants first settled on the borders of Hejaz, where 

 they all remained till the death of Amru Mazikia. 

 The scanty produce of that country being inadequate 

 to the maintenance of so great an influx of strangers, 

 another dispersion became necessary. The tribe of 

 Tai took up their residence in Nejed, in the district 

 of Mount Salma ; that of Khozaa continued at Mecca, 

 where they succeeded for a time in wresting from 

 the Ishmaelites the superintendence of the temple 

 and the principality of the city. Malec, with the 

 tribe of Azd and Khodai, a powerful colony, settled 

 in Bahrein and Yemama. The throne of the Arsa- 



* Schnlten's Hist. Joctanidarum. Abulfed. Hist. Gen. 



