208 EPOCHS IN THE HISTORY OF THE CONTEMPLATION 



Isaiah, " they (the dromedaries of Midian) shall come from 

 Saba,- they shall bring gold and incense." ( 321 ) Petra was 

 the emporium for the valuable goods designed for Tyre 

 and Sidon, and a principal seat of the once powerful com- 

 mercial nation of the Nabateans, supposed by the learned 

 Quatremere to have had their original dwelling-place in the 

 Gerrha mountains, near the lower Euphrates. This northern 

 part of Arabia, by its proximity to Egypt, by the spreading 

 of Arabian tribes into the mountains bounding Syria and 

 Palestine and into the countries near the Euphrates, as well as 

 by the celebrated caravan road from Damascus through Emesa 

 and Tadinor (Palmyra) to Babylon, had come into influential 

 contact with other civilised states. Mahomet himself, 

 sprung from a noble but impoverished family of the tribe of 

 Koreish, in the course of liis trading occupations, before 

 he came forward as an inspired prophet and reformer, 

 had visited the fair of Bosra on the Syrian border, the fair 

 held in Hadramaut the land of incense, as well as the twenty 

 days' fair of Okadh near Mecca, where poets, chiefly Bedouins, 

 assembled for lyrical contests. I allude to these particulars 

 of the Arabian commerce, and the circumstances thence 

 arising, in order to give a more vivid picture of that which 

 prepared great revolutions in the world. 



The spreading of the Arabian population towards the 

 north reminds us of two events, the circumstances of 

 which are indeed veiled in obscurity, but which afford 

 evidence that ages before Mahomet the inhabitants of 

 the peninsula had mixed in the affairs of the world by 

 outbreaks to the west and east, towards Egypt and the 

 Euphrates. The Semitic or Aramaic descent of the Hyksos, 

 who, under the twelfth dynasty, 2200 years before our era, 



