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SCIENCE 



[Vol. XVI. No. 4^0 



which had been supposed to be little more than a waste of 

 sand and rock, inhabited by wandering nomads, and first 

 appearing on the page of history in the time of Mohammed, 

 had really been a centre of light and culture in remote ages, 

 — a land of active trade and commerce, which once exercised 

 an important influence on the civilized world of the ancient 

 East, and possessed an alphabetic system of writing earlier, 

 it would seem, than that which we know as the Phoenician 

 alphabet. 



I was able to give only a brief outline of the results that 

 had been announced by scholars in the new field of research. 

 A large portion of the inscriptions on which they were based 

 had not been published, and the work promised by Dr. Gla- 

 ser, on the ancient geography of Arabia, had not appeared.' 

 Moreover, there had not yet been time for the special stu- 

 dents of Arabian history and epigraphy to criticise the con- 

 clusions at which scholars like Professor D. H. Muller or Dr. 

 Glaser had arrived.' 



A year has passed, and we have now had time to take a 

 sober review of the new discoveries, and examine their weak 

 points. In one respect the history of ancient Arabia which 

 I laid before the readers of the Contempoy-ary Review must 

 be modified. Professor D. H. Muller was too hasty in as- 

 cribing an early date to the inscriptions of Lihhyan in 

 northern Arabia. Instead of belonging to the tenth, or even 

 the seventh, century before our era, it is now evident that 

 they are not earlier than the fall of the Roman Empire. 

 They are strongly infiuenced by the religious ideas and 

 technical terms of .Judaism, and belong to the period when 

 Jewish colonies and Jewish proselytism were rapidly ex- 

 tending through Arabia. The kingdom of Lihhyan rose 

 and decayed at no long interval of time before the birth of 

 Mohammed. 



On the other hand, further study has gone to confirm Dr. 

 G-laser's view of the great antiquity of the Minsean kingdom, 

 and of the spread of its power from the south of Arabia to 

 the frontiers of Egypt and Palestine. There can be no 

 doubt that it preceded the rise of the kingdom of Saba, the 

 Sheba of the Old Testament. There was no room for the 

 contemporaneous existence of the two monarchies. Geo- 

 graphically they covered the same area; and the cities of 

 Saba were embedded, as it were, within the territory of Ma'in. 

 But the Sabfean cities flourished at the expense of those of 

 Ma'iu, and later tradition forgot even the names of the old 

 Minsean towns. 



The kingdom of Saba was already flourishing when Tig- 

 lath-Pileser and Sargou ruled over Assyria, in the eighth 

 century B.C. And not only was it flourishing: its power 

 had extended far to the north, where the Assyrian monarchs 

 came into contact with its king. The visit of the Queen of 

 Sheba to Solomon carries back the foundation of theSabffian 

 monarchy to a still eai'lier date. Unless we are to suppose 

 that the visit is the invention of a later writer, we must con- 

 clude that nearly ten centuries before the Christian era Saba 

 had already superseded Ma'in; and that the old kingdom, 

 with its trade and culture, its fortified cities and inscribed 

 walls, had already passed away. The fact would explain 

 why it is that classical writers know only of a Minaean peo- 

 ple, not of a Minsean kingdom; and that even in the pages 

 of the Old Testament, while references occur to Sheba, only 

 a careful search can detect the name of Ma'in. 



' Dr. Glaser's large and learned volume ou the ancient geography of Arabia 

 has now been published (Skizze der Gesohichte und Geographie Arablens, 

 vol. 11., Berlin, Weidmana), and contains a wealth of information on subjects 

 Jlke the site of Ophir, or the geographical knowledge of Ptolemy. 



2 SWzze der Gesohiohte Arablens, Part I. (Manich, Straub). 



Dr. Glaser has shown that the "kings " of Saba were pre- 

 ceded by the Makarib, or " high priests " of Saba. Here, as; 

 in other parts of the Semitic world, the priest-king was the 

 predecessor of the merely secular king. The State was 

 originally regarded as a theocracy, and it was some lime 

 before the priest and the king became separated from one 

 another. We are reminded of the history of Israel, as well 

 as of Jethro, the " priest of Midian." As in Assyria, where 

 there were "high priests of Assur " before there were 

 " kings of Assyria,'' the State was represented by a deity 

 whose name it bore, or who derived his name from the State. 

 Saba, like Assur, must once have been a god. 



We are already acquainted with the names of thirty-three 

 Minsean sovereigns. Three of them have been found by 

 Professor Muller in inscriptions from the neighborhood of 

 Teima, the Tema of the Old Testament, in northern Arabia, 

 on the road to Damascus and Sinai. Their authority, there- 

 fore, was not confined to the original seat of Minsean power 

 in the south, but was felt throughout the length of the Ara- 

 bian peninsula. The fact is confirmed by an interesting in- 

 scription copied by Halevy in southern Arabia, which has 

 been deciphered by Professor Homroel and Dr. Glaser. It 

 tells us that it was engraved by its authors in gratitude for 

 their rescue by Athtar and other deities "from the war 

 which took place between the ruler of the land of the south 

 and the ruler of the land of the north," as well as "from 

 the midst of Egypt (Mitsr) in the conflict which took place 

 between Madhi and Egypt," and for their safe restoration to 

 their own city of Qarnu. The authors of the inscription, 

 Ammi-tsadiq and Sa'd, further state that they lived under 

 the Minajan king, Abi-yada' Yathi', and that they were "the 

 two governors of Tsar and Ashur and the farther bank of 

 the river." 



Professor Hommel has pointed out that in Ashur we have 

 an explanation of the Asshurim of the Bible, who are called 

 the sons of Dedan (Gen. xxv. 3, 18) ; while Tsar must be a 

 fortress often mentioned on the Egyptian monuments as 

 guarding the approach to Egypt, on what would now be the 

 Arabian side of the Suez Canal. Madhi Dr. Glaser would 

 identify with Mizzah the grandson of Esan (Gen. xxxvi. 17), 

 but the other references in the inscription are obscure. It 

 proves, however, that the power of the Minsean princes 

 was acknowledged as far as the borders of Egypt, in what 

 Professor Hommel believes to have been the age of the 

 Hyksos. That their authority was recognized in Edom is 

 shown by an inscription in which mention is made of 

 Gaza. 



It would thus appear that Palestine, or at all events the 

 tribes immediately surrounding it, wei'e in close contact with 

 a civilized power which had established trade-routes from the 

 south, and protected them from the attacks of the nomad 

 Bedouin. The part now performed, or supposed to be per- 

 formed, by Turkey, was performed before the days of Solo- 

 • mon by the princes and merchants of Ma'in. A conclusion 

 of unexpected interest follows this discovery. The Minjeans 

 were a literary people: they used an alphabetic system of 

 writing, and set up their inscriptions, not only in their 

 southern homes, but also in their colonies in the north. If 

 their records really mount back to the age now claimed for 

 them, — and it is difiicult to see where counter-arguments are 

 to come from, — they will be far older than the oldest known 

 inscription in Phoenician letters. Instead of deriving the 

 Minsean alphabet from the Phoenician, we must derive the 

 Phoenician alphabet from the Minsean, or from one of the 

 Arabian al phabets of which the Minsean was the mother; in- 



