[4] True, in the Arabic tongue the meaning of the words, of which the name Saracens may be compounded, will bear out the signification of an Oriental situation. But the western position of the Saracen tribe mentioned by Ptolemy, negatives the assumption of the Arabic origin of the word as applied in this sense. As Gibbon sagaciously remarks, the appellation being imposed by strangers, its meaning must be sought, not in the Arabic, but in a foreign language.
[5] It would even appear that the confusion consequent upon the death of the great Macedonian, and upon the feuds and struggles for empire among his generals, was taken advantage of by the princes in the north of Arabia, to extend their dominion beyond the frontier of the peninsula. From the earliest times the wandering tribes had been in the habit, more particularly during the scarcity of winter, to extort the dangerous license of encamping on the skirts of Mesopotamia, Syria, and Egypt, and had often extended their incursions to the very heart of Chaldæa, or Babylonia (Irak). They now took formal possession of a part of the latter country (hence called to the present day Irak-Arabi), and established in it a new Arabian state, the kingdom of Hira. Tribes from Yemen emigrated to the territory of Syria, and established the state of Gassan, in the country north of Damascus. We must not omit to mention, however, that some historians place the establishment of the states of Hira and Gassan at a much later period.
[6] So named from Makkabi, i.e., the hammer; the appellation bestowed upon Judas, the liberator of the Jews from the Syrian yoke.
[7] Dunaan, prince of the Homerites, had been gained over to the Mosaic faith by the Jewish exiles who had found an asylum in Yemen. The new proselyte carried on a most vigorous persecution of the Christians in his dominions, and more particularly in the city of Negra, or Nag’ran, (situated between Saana and Mecca). The Christian king of Abyssinia, who preferred an hereditary claim to the crown of Yemen, as a descendant of Balkis, Queen of Sheba, came to the rescue of his oppressed fellow-believers, and speedily deprived the Jewish proselyte of crown and life. He allied himself also with the Emperor Justinian for the overthrow of the Persian power; but he failed in his subsequent enterprise, and found himself incapable even of defending his Arabian conquests, which were wrested from him by the revolt and usurpation of Abrahah, once the slave of a Roman merchant of Adulis. The payment of a slight tribute alone acknowledged the supremacy of the Ethiopian prince. After a long and prosperous reign, the power of Abrahah was overthrown before the gates of Mecca, by Abdul Motalleb, the grandfather of Mohammed; and his children were finally despoiled by Chosroes Nushirvan, of Persia.
[8] The Axumites, or Abyssinians, were, most probably, originally a colony of Arabs who had settled in Africa.
[9] The same independence from the yoke of a foreign ruler is still preserved to the present day by the Arabians. The Sultan of Turkey exercises but a nominal sovereignty over Hedjaz and Neged; and the rise and exploits of that formidable sect of religious reformers, the Wahabys, during the latter half of the last and in the present century, indicate sufficiently that it may only require the appearance of a great man among the Arabs, or the occurrence of some great event, to unite the wild sons of the desert once more into a mighty nation that may make its influence felt in the destinies of the world. Had not Egypt’s great ruler, Mehemet Ali, and his warlike son Ibrahim, stemmed for a time the progress, and crippled the power of the Wahabys, who knows but that the champion of Greek orthodoxy might have found his present ambitious projects opposed by a fiercer and more formidable antagonist than the effete race of Osman?
[10] Called Medjid-el-Haram, i.e., the holy Mosch.
[11] A visible point of the horizon.
[12] Gibbon.
[13] The constant repetition of this act of pious devotion by so many myriads of pilgrims has had the effect of rendering the surface of the stone quite uneven.