466 
MOCHA. 
which appears to me of considerable importance to general his- 
tory, as connected with the Roman, Persian, and Arabian trans- 
actions of this period.* 
The points to which I allude are the arrival of some holy 
men from Egypt, who came to settle the faith, and the expe- 
dition of one of the Abyssinian monarchs against Dunowas^ a 
Jewish king who had persecuted the Christian traders in Arabia/' 
The former event has always hitherto, without any satisfactory 
reason, been supposed to have occurred within the years 426-80,t 
and the latter has been attributed to the Emperor Caleb, f who 
must have reigned as late as 570 — whereas it now appears that 
the two events were intimately connected together, and that the 
conquest of Arabia took place prior to the arrival of the holy men 
from Egypt. 
For the purpose of illustrating these facts, I shall lay before 
the reader the separate accounts of these transactions given in the 
native Chronicles, in the Historia Chronica of John of Antioch, 
as well as other Greek writers. In the first work it is related that 
during the reign of El Ameda or Amda, arrived nine saints or 
holy men from Room§ and Egypt, and settled the faith, one of 
* Gibbon himself remarks, after giving an account of these affairs in his history, 
' this narrative of obscure and remote events is not foreign to the decline and fall of the 
Roman empire. If a Christian power had been maintained in Arabia, Mahomet must 
have been crushed in his cradle, and Abyssinia would have prevented a revolution which 
has changed the civil and religious state of the world." 
t Vide Tellez, p. 91. Geddes' Church History of Ethiopia p. 14, and Ludolfi Com- 
ment, p. 283. 
X Vide the same author, Ludolf fixes the date of Caleb's reign at 522.— Lib II. c. 4. 
Geddes at about 530, p. 15.— and Murray at 511, p. 438, vol. VII. of Bruce. 
§ By Room is meant Constantinople. 
