54 ([return])
[ Vol. II. p. 187.]
55 ([return])
[ "The Gold-Mines of Midian," p. 213.]
56 ([return])
[ As regards these and similar graffiti see (Athenaeum, March 16, 1878) an excerpt from the last Comptes Rendues of the Acad. des Inscript. et B. Lettres, Paris. The celebrated M. Joseph Halévy attacked in their entirety (about 680) the rock-writings in the Safá desert, south-east of Damascus. The German savants, mostly attributing them to the Sabá tribes, who immigrated from Yemen about our first century, tried the Himyaritic syllabaries and failed. M. Halévy traces them to the Beni Tamúd (Thamudites), who served as mercenaries in the Roman army, and whose head-quarters we are now approaching. They contain, according to him, mostly proper names, with devotional formulae, similar to those of the Sinaitic inscriptions and the Kufic and later epigraphs which we discovered. For instance, "By A., son of B., in memory of his mother; he has accomplished his vow, may he be pardoned." The language is held to be intermediate between Arabic and the northern Semitic branches. Names of the Deity (El and Loo or La'?) are found only in composition, as in Abd-El ("Abdallah, slave of El"); and the significant absence of the cross and religious symbols remarked in the Syrian inscriptions, denotes the era of heathenism, which lasted till the establishment of Christianity, about the end of the third century. "At that time," M. Halévy says, "Christianity became the official religion of the Empire; doubt and scepticism penetrated amongst those Arabic tribes which were the allies of Rome, and amongst whom, for a certain time, a kind of vague Deism was prevalent until the day when they disappeared, having been absorbed by the great migrations which had taken place in those countries.">[
57 ([return])
[ Some call it so; others Umm Karáyát: I have preferred the former—"Mother of the Villages," not "of Villages"—as being perhaps the more common.]
58 ([return])
[ See Chap. XIX.]