4o6 



SCIENCE. 



[Vol. XIV. No. 358 



SCIENCE: 



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Vol. XIV. 



NEW YORK, December 13, iS 



No. 358 



CONTENTS: 



A New Dynamo and Projector... sy7 



Twenty Years 393 



Health Matters. 

 Ozone in the Treatment of Phthisis 400 

 New Jersey Sanitary Association.. 400 

 High Altitude Treatment of Phthi- 



sis 401 



The Acids of the Stomach 40t 



Cholera in Persia 401 



Cremation in Paris 401 



Bicarbonate of Sodium in Milk 401 



Electrical News. 

 The Transmission of Visual Images 

 by Electricity 7 401 



Notes and News 402 



Ancient Arabia A. H. Sayce 406 

 Mr. Mackinder on Geography- 

 Teaching 408 



Speed of Railroad Trains in 



Europr 409 



Among the Publishers 409 



Letters to the Editor. 

 A Belated Dandelion E. B. Knerr 412 

 Is Man Left-Legged ? 



F. A. Lovejoy ; F. H. Allen 412 

 Industrial Notes. 

 The Crvcker-Wheeler Electric Mo- 



tor. 



ANCIENT ARABIA.i 



If there is any country which has seemed to He completely out- 

 side the stream of ancient history, it is Arabia. In spite of its vast 

 extent ; in spite, too, of its position in the very centre of the civi- 

 lized empires of the ancient East, midway between Egypt and 

 Babylon, Palestine and India, — its history has seemed almost a 

 blank. For a brief moment, indeed, it played a conspicuous part 

 in human affairs, inspiring the Koran of Mohammed, and forging 

 the swords of his followers ; then the veil was drawn over it again, 

 which had previously covered it for untold centuries. We think of 

 Arabia only as a country of dreary deserts and uncultured nomads, 

 whose momentary influence on the history of the world was a 

 strange and exceptional phenomenon. 



But the restless spirit of modern research is beginning to dis- 

 cover that such a conception is wide of the truth. The advent of 

 Mohammed had long been prepared for. Arabia had long had a 

 history, though the records of it were lost or forgotten. The ex- 

 plorer and decipherer have been at work during the last few years ; 

 and the results they have obtained, fragmentary though they still 

 may be, are yet sufficiently surprising. Not only has Arabia taken 

 its place among the historical nations of antiquity, its monuments 

 turn out to be among the earliest relics of alphabetic writing which 

 we possess. 



Arab legend told of the mysterious races of 'Ad and Thamud, 

 who, in the plenitude of their pride and power, refused to listen to 



^ From the Contemporary Review for December. 



the warnings of the prophets of God, and were overwhelmed by di- 

 vine vengeance. In the south the magnificent palaces of 'Ad might 

 still be seen in vision by the belated traveller, while the rock-cut 

 dwellings of Thamud were pointed out among the cliffs of the 

 north ; but the first authentic information about the interior of 

 Arabia came to Europe from the ill-fated expedition of /Elius Cal- 

 lus, the Roman governor of Egypt, in B.C. 24. The spice-bearing 

 regions of southern Arabia had long carried on an active trade with 

 East and West, and the wealth their commerce had poured into them 

 for centuries had made them the seats of powerful kingdoms. Their 

 ports commanded the trade with India and the further East. Al- 

 ready in the tenth chapter of Genesis we learn that Ophir, the em- 

 porium of the products of India, was a brother of Hazarmaveth or 

 Hadramaut. Western merchants carried back exaggerated re- 

 ports of the riches of " Araby the Blest," and Augustus coveted 

 the possession of a country which commanded the trade with In- 

 dia as well as being itself a land of gold and spicery. Accordingly, 

 with the help of the Nabatheans of Petra, a Roman army was 

 landed on the western coast of Arabia, and marched inland as far 

 as the kingdom of Sheba or the Sabseans. But disease decimated 

 the invaders, their guides proved treacherous, and yElius Gallus 

 had to retreat under a burning sun and through a waterless land. 

 The wrecks of his army found their way with difficulty to Egypt, 

 and the disaster made such an impression at Rome that the con- 

 quest of Arabia was abandoned forever. From that time forward 

 to the rise of Mohammedanism, the Roman and Byzantine courts 

 contented themselves with supporting the native enemies of the 

 Sabsean kings, or using Christianity as a means for weakening their 

 power. 



As far back as 1810, Seetzen, while travelling in southern Ara- 

 bia, discovered and copied certain inscriptions written in characters 

 previously unknown ; later travellers brought to light other inscrip- 

 tions of the same kind ; and eventually, with the help of an Arabic 

 manuscript, the inscriptions were deciphered, first by Gesenius, 

 and then by Roediger (1841). They received the name of " Him- 

 yaritic " from that of the district in which they were found, — 

 Himyar, the country of the Homerites of classical geography. The 

 language disclosed by them was Semitic, while their alphabet was 

 closely related to the so called Ethiopic or Geez. In certain dia- 

 lects still spoken on the southern Arabian coast, notably that of 

 Mahrah, between Hadramaut and Oman, the peculiarities of the old 

 Himyaritic language are still to be detected. 



In 1 841 Arnaud succeeded, for the first time, in penetrating in-' 

 land to the ancient seat of the Saba;ans, and in bringing back with 

 him a large spoil of important inscriptions. Later, in 1869, an- 

 other adventurous jonrney was made by M. Halevy, on behalf of 

 the French Academy, who was rewarded by the discovery of more 

 than 800 texts. But it is to Dr. Glaser that we owe the better part 

 of our present knowledge of the geography and ancient history of 

 southern Arabia. Three times, at the risk of his life, he has ex- 

 plored a country of which our modern geographers still know so 

 little, and, almost alone among Europeans, has stood among the 

 ruins of Marib, or Mariaba, called by Strabo the Metropolis of the 

 Sabseans. He has collected no less than 1,031 inscriptions, many 

 of them of the highest historical interest. The first-fruits of his 

 discoveries have been published in his " Skizze der Geschichte 

 Arabiens," of which the first part has just appeared at Munich. 



For some time past it has been known that the Himyaritic in- 

 scriptions fall into two groups, distinguished from one another by 

 phonological and grammatical differences. One of the dialects is 

 philologically older than the other, containing fuller and more 

 primitive grammatical forms. The inscriptions in this dialect be- 

 long to a kingdom the capital of which was at Ma'in, and which 

 represents the country of the Minasans of the ancients. The in- 

 scriptions in the other dialect were engraved by the princes and 

 people of Saba, the Sheba of. the Old Testament, the Sabsans of 

 classical geography. The Sabsan kingdom lasted to the time of 

 Mohammed, when it was destroyed by the advancing forces of Is- 

 lam. Its rulers for several generations had been converts to Juda- 

 ism, and had been engaged in almost constant warfare with the 

 Ethiopic kingdom of Axum, which was backed by the influence 

 and subsidies of Rome and Byzantium. Dr. Glaser seeks to show 

 that the founders of this Ethiopic kingdom were the Habasa, or 



