ARABIA.
In remote antiquity, star-worship prevailed throughout Arabia and one of its great centres was the flourishing land of Saba or Sheba, whose queen visited Solomon at Jerusalem. The star-cult of the Sabæans is acknowledged to have resembled that of the ancient inhabitants of Syria, Mesopotamia, Persia and India. We are told that a certain sect amongst them “believed in a great cycle of time in which certain epochs of the world's history recurred”—an idea akin to ancient Mexican speculative philosophy. It is also stated that one of the chief centres of Sabæism was the town of Harran in Mesopotamia and that, although surrounded by Christianity, this ancient form of star-worship maintained itself here until the Middle Ages. The possibility that the Mandaïtes of to-day may be the descendants of the ancient inhabitants of Harran is naturally suggested by this historical fact. [pg 323] A curious detail concerning monarchical succession in Sheba has been preserved to us. The king was kept in an enforced seclusion in his palace and incurred the penalty of death if he left it. His office was not hereditary but fell to the first son who was born amongst the nobility, after a king's accession to the throne. In this custom, a curious parallel of which is furnished by the Thibetan mode of electing the “living Buddha,” some readers may be inclined to find an explanation for the massacre of the babes ordered by Herod when he learned that the wise men of the East, guided by a star, had designated “a young child” as the future “King of the Jews.” It is an interesting reflection that, to many of his contemporaries, the establishment of the “Kingdom of Heaven,” announced by the Messiah, may have appeared as a movement to revive the most ancient form of government and to reinstate Jerusalem as the central metropolis of an empire, the organization of which would have resembled the Chinese and ancient American forms of “Middle Kingdoms,” or “Celestial Empires.”
The ideal of many of these descendants of ancient pole-star worshippers may well have been the reversion to the primitive, pure type of single central, celestial and terrestrial rule which had been superseded in western Asia by the pernicious growth of the utterly abasing and demoralizing separate cults of the dual principles of nature.
A curious remnant of the worship of the Earth-mother and of the stable centre of the world, recalling ancient American symbolism, exists in Arabia and merits a passing notice. “The great holy place of Jiddah, the principal landing place of the pilgrims to Mecca, on the eastern coast of the Red sea, is the singular tomb of ‘our mother Eve’ surrounded by the principal cemetery. The tomb is a walled enclosure said to represent the dimensions of the body about 200 paces long and 15 feet wide. At the head is a small erection where gifts are deposited and rather more than half way down a whitewashed dome encloses a small, dark chapel, within which is the black stone known as el-surrah=the navel. The grave of Eve is mentioned by Edrisi but, except the black stone, nothing bears any aspect of antiquity” (Encycl. Brit., article Jiddah).
The fact that the Arabian appellation for Mecca is om-el-kora=“the mother of cities” deserves special attention. Exactly in the centre of the city is the mosque enclosing the kaaba, a structure [pg 324] the only door of which opens to the north. It contains the celebrated black sacred stone and a trough, reputed to be of pure gold, which conducts freshly fallen rain water to the interior of the building and pours it upon its floor of dark earth. The following details are given in a recently published account by an anonymous visitor:
“The Moslems believe that the original Kaaba was built in heaven two thousand years before the creation of the world and that, at the command of the Almighty, angels walked around it in adoration. Furthermore, they said that Adam built the first Kaaba on earth on its present site, directly under the one in heaven.... Long before the time of Mahomet, the Kaaba was a place of worship for the idolatrous Arabs and in it they had no less than 360 idols, one for each day of the Arabian year. These were destroyed by Mahomet....” Beside the pilgrimages to the Kaaba pious Mussulmans also visit the sacred granite mountains the “Arafat where Adam is supposed to have met Eve after a long separation.”
Summarized, the preceding facts clearly show that, from a remote antiquity, the Arabians have preserved the conception of (1) a divine, celestial, stable sanctuary around which “angels” walked in a circle. (2) A terrestrial sanctuary built by man directly beneath the heavenly one and associated with the period of a year, i. e. 360 days. (3) In the sacred terrestrial kaaba the mystic union of rain and earth is made to take place, while (4) Mount Arafat is connected with the traditional reunion of Adam and Eve.
It is unnecessary to point out the significant association of an annual count of days with the stable centre and its importance as an indication that the ancient Arabian star-gazers originally associated the year period with circumpolar rotation. The analogy between the Arabian ideas concerning the dual principles of nature and those of other nations is also too marked to be easily overlooked.
Nor need I emphasize how strikingly the imagery of the celestial kaaba suits Polaris and the circumpolar constellations. But I shall now proceed to point out that the word kaaba itself curiously resembles star-names which are given by Mr. Robert Brown in his recent valuable publication to which I shall revert, namely, the Akkadian name for constellation in general=kakkab and the Babylonian and Assyrian name for the pole-star=Kakkabu. In this connection and upon Professor Sayce's authority I cite the significant [pg 325] fact that the word for north and for the empire and capital of northern Babylonia was Akkad, and that we thus find in North Babylonia a great centre of government the name of which contains the syllables ak-ka which recur in the appellations for north and for Polaris.
The following star-names, given by Mr. Robert Brown, are of utmost interest considering that a star in Draconis was the pole-star of 2170 B.C. and that in general the serpent was indissolubly connected with the pole-star. “The constellation Drakon is Phœnician=Kanaanite in origin and represented primarily the nâkkâsch qodmun (old serpent)=the guardian of the stars (golden apples) which hang from the pole tree. It is called the crooked serpent=nakkasch in Job xxvi:13 ...” (op. cit., p. 29). I further cite Mr. Brown's authority for the fact that in Phœnicia A.D., 1200, the name for Ursa Major was Dubkabir and for Ursa Minor, Dub.