OF THE ANCIENT ARABS. 153 



the Dwellers in Houses made of clay. Through all 

 antiquity this characteristic distinction has remained 

 inviolate ; and it continues in force at the present 

 day, as strongly marked as it was three or four 

 thousand years ago. 



The Scenite or Nomadic tribes held in contempt 

 the peaceful and mechanical arts ; and had any of 

 their number abandoned their erratic habits for the 

 occupations of agriculture, they would have been 

 considered as degraded, and fallen from the primitive 

 nobiUty of their birth. Their grand employment was 

 the tending of their flocks, which constituted their 

 principal wealth, and suppUed all their domestic 

 necessities. They held little intercourse and had 

 few connexions with the world around them ; but 

 their habits of sobriety raised them above the arti- 

 ficial wants of more refined and civilized nations. It 

 was their constant boast, that little was required to 

 maintain a man who lived after the Bedouin fashion. 

 Their chief nourishment was dates and milk. The 

 camel, the most common and the most valuable of 

 their possessions, was of itself a storehouse of useful 

 commodities. The flesh of the young was tender, 

 though reckoned conducive to a "hot and vindictive 

 temperament ; the dung was consumed as fuel ; the 

 long hair, which fell off" amiually, was manufactured 

 into curtains for their tents, and various articles of 

 dress and furniture. 



While food and raiment were thus supplied by the 

 spontaneous gift of nature, they envied not the 

 tenants of the more fertile and industrious provinces. 

 Their love of liberty was stronger than the desire 

 of wealth; and the passion for foreign luxuries, 

 which has proved so fatal to other countries, has not 

 yet changed the patriarchal manners of the roving 

 shepherds of Arabia. As all travellers have re- 

 marked, the modern Bedouin diff'ers but little from 

 his ancestors, who, in the age of Moses and Mo- 

 hammed, dwelt under similar tents, and conducted 



