THE HISTORY OF ARABIA

CHAPTER I. DESCRIPTION OF ARABIA.

GEOGRAPHICAL

Arabia is generally allowed to have derived its name from a Hebrew word, denoting a wilderness or land of deserts and plains. Various other derivations have been assigned; and learned etymologists are divided in opinion, whether the term be expressive of a mixed, a mercantile, or a western people. The Arabs themselves trace it to one of their ancestors, whom they call Yarab, a son of Joktan, who is said to have been one of the earliest settlers in that country; but as Yarab does not occur among the thirteen sons of that patriarch mentioned in Scripture (Gen. x. 26-29), this inference may be considered as purely traditional. The name of Arabah is repeatedly applied to the western wilderness by Moses, who describes it with a minuteness not to be mistaken, as situated over-against the Red Sea, between Paran and Tophel: and by the way of Elath and Ezion-gaber. A small tract in the ancient Idumaea still retains the original appellation, and as these territories belonged to the wandering Ishmaelites, the name would gradually be extended as they spread their conquests over the rest of the country. By this name it is recorded in the writings of the Jewish historians and the later prophets, who speak of the kings of Arabah, of its traffic, and the different tribes by which it was inhabited. (Josh. xv. 52, 61; 1 Kings x. 15; Jer. xxv. 24.)

At this remote period were these western regions distinguished from the more fertile and populous plains towards Chaldea, which went by the name of Kedem or the East,—a distinction as old as the days of Abraham and Job. This simple practice of deriving names from territorial residence is entirely in accordance with the notions that regulated the primitive divisions of the earth, when mankind had no other geography than such as respected their own local situation, or the relative position of the heavens. The ancient Greeks called Italy Hesperia, or the Land of the West; the Italians bestowed the same epithet on Spain; and the name was at length transferred to those fabulous gardens, which gradually retired before the dawn of knowledge into the Elysian solitudes of the Atlantic Ocean. Similar ideas prevail in the East at the present day. Syria is uniformly called Sham,—the country to the left, or the north; while the south is termed Yemen, or the country to the right. The Turks and Persians call the whole peninsula Arabistan; the natives themselves call it Jezirat el Arab (the peninsula of the Arabs); and it is remarkable as one of the few countries among the kingdoms of antiquity which, amid the changes and revolutions of 3000 years, still retains the precise appellation which it bore within a few centuries of the deluge.

This vast tract lies between latitude 12° 45'—34,1/2° north, and longitude 31°-60,1/2 east from Greenwich. Its form is that of an irregular triangle, surrounded on three sides by water. Eastward, its limit is the Persian Gulf and the Euphrates; on the south lies the Indian Ocean; on the west the Red Sea divides it from Egypt, Nubia, and Abyssinia. The northern frontier is not so well defined, and has been subject to considerable variations. The ancients restricted it to an imaginary line, stretching between the extreme points of the Arabian and Persian Gulfs. The rest they attached partly to Egypt and partly to Syria. But the conquests and settlements of the Arabs have long extended their territory beyond this ideal boundary. On the authority of Burckhardt, the northern frontier may be taken as a line running from Suez across the isthmus of that name to the Mediterranean, near El Arish, passing along the borders of Palestine, and the Dead Sea, and thence winding through the Syrian desert by Palmyra until it reaches the Euphrates above Anah, the course of which river it follows till joined by the Tigris; at which point their united streams take the name of Shut el Arab, or boundary of Arabia. Part of the northern frontier lies now within the pashalic of Damascus, which extends as far south as Tor Hesma, a high mountain, one day's journey from Akaba.

The Greek and Roman geographers prescribed a limit somewhat different. Xenophon carries it beyond the Euphrates, including the greater part of Mesopotamia, or the Arabian Irak; Ptolemy bounds it by the Chaldean mountains on this side the river, and northward by the city of Thapsacus, near Racca. The same is adopted with little variation by Diodorus and Strabo. Abulfeda, an Arabian geographer who wrote about the beginning of the fourteenth century, extending the northern boundary somewhat higher than Burckhardt, places it at Beles, nearly in the latitude of Aleppo. The length of this extensive region, from Anah to the Strait of Bab el Mandeb, is reckoned about 1480 miles; and its middle breadth, from Suez to Bussora, above 900. On the south, it present a base of 1200 miles washed by the Indian Ocean.

The Syrian Desert

In its general features Arabia may be described as an elevated table-land, sloping gently towards the Persian Gulf. The whole of the southern coast is a wrall of naked rocks, as dismal and barren as can well be conceived. Here and there they imbosom a low sandy beach, but they are entirely destitute of soil or herbage, offering to the eye of the mariner a striking picture of ruin and desolation. The mountains, brown and bare, rise in several ranges, one behind another, to the height of 1000 or 1500 feet. Such is the impenetrable rampart, dark, waste, and wild, with which nature has guarded the fabled land of "Araby the Blest". On every other side this peninsula is encircled with a belt of flat, dry, sandy ground; that on the north is composed of the Hauran (Auranitis) or Syrian Desert; that on the east, of the level shores of the Persian Gulf. 

The eastern arabian desert

The interior of the country is chiefly burning deserts, lying under a sky almost perpetually without clouds, and stretching into immense and boundless plains, where the eye meets nothing but the uniform horizon of a wild and dreary waste. Over the face of this vast solitude the sand sweeps along in dry billows, or is whirled into hills and columns, having the appearance of waterspouts, and towering to a prodigious height. When the winds leave them at rest, they resemble the ocean; and their level expanse, at a small distance, is sometimes mistaken by the thirsty traveller for a collection of waters. This deception recedes as he journeys on, keeping always in advance; while the intermediate space glows like a furnace, occasioned by the quivering undulating motion of that quick succession of vapours and exhalations which are extracted by the solar rays.

Example of mirage

Every object is magnified to the eye, insomuch that a shrub has the appearanpe of a tree, and a flock of birds might be mistaken for a caravan of camels. The most singular quality of this vapour (Sirab), or mirage as it is termed, is its power of reflection,—objects are seen as from the surface of a lake, and their figure is sometimes changed into the most fantastic shapes.

These naked deserts are encircled, or sometimes intersected, by barren mountains, which run in almost continuous ridges, and in different directions, from the borders of Palestine to the shores of the Indian Ocean. Their summits tower up into rugged and insulated peaks, but their flinty bosoms supply no humidity to nourish the soil; they concentrate no clouds to screen the parched earth from the withering influence of a tropical sky. The refreshment of cooling breezes, periodically enjoyed in other sultry climates, is here unknown. The air is dry and suffocating. Hot and pestilential winds frequently diffuse their noxious breath, alike fatal to animal and vegetable life. The steppes of Russia and the wilds of Tartary are decked by the hand of nature with lofty trees and luxuriant herbage; but in the Arabian deserts vegetation is nearly extinct. The sandy plains give birth to a straggling and hardy brushwood; while the tamarisk and the acacia strike their roots into the clefts of the rocks, and draw a precarious nourishment from the nightly dews. An inspired pen has truly described this steril country as "a land of deserts, and of pits; a land of drought, and of the shadow of death; a land that no man passed through."—(Jer. II. 6.)

This general aspect of desolation is occasionally relieved by verdant spots, or valleys with little streamlets, lying among the hills, and formed by the alluvial depositions of the winter showers. These wadys (the oases of the Greeks), which appear like islands in the trackless ocean, are both fertile and pleasant. Their rich verdure and groves of date-trees supply food and pasture for the roving colonies of the wilderness. There are, besides, various wells or watering stations, partly natural, partly artificial, on the routes which traverse the deserts in several directions; serving as points of intercourse between distant parts of the country. Without these reservoirs the greater portion of Arabia must have remained unpeopled, and for ever impervious to man. Their brackish waters afford refreshment for the weary pilgrims, and enable small hordes of settlers to cultivate patches of ground, on which scanty crops or a few common vegetables are reared. These tanks or reservoirs are often built of stone, and form the usual resting-places of travelers and caravans: the water is raised in leathern buckets by means of an iron chain passed over a pulley, and drawn by cows or oxen. It is sold to strangers on their journey, and is often transported to a considerable distance on the backs of camels. Among the Arabs, water constitutes a great part of their wealth. It is the most valuable property in districts of fifty or a hundred miles round. The possession of a spring has occasioned hot disputes, and even been the cause of civil wars. We read of Abraham rebuking Abimelech because his servants had violently taken possession of a well; and of the strife between the herdsmen of Gerar and those of Isaac. It is also mentioned as an instance of intolerable tyranny in one of the ancient Arab kings, that he would suffer no camels but his own to be watered at the same place. There are entire districts, however, where this luxury, as it may well be called, is unknown. The great southern desert, which extends from six to seven hundred miles in length, and as much in breadth, does not possess a single fountain of water.

From the singular local situation of Arabia, the inequalities in the nature of its soil and climate may readily be inferred. Though the central portion consists of arid and burning wastes, the aspect of the country in other parts is materially different. In the south, more especially where the land is broken into hills and valleys, there are tracts of remarkable fertility, which enjoy a succession of almost perpetual verdure. So short is the interval between the decay and reproduction of vegetable life, that the change is scarcely perceptible. Though nature perhaps nowhere realizes those splendid landscapes which borrowed their colouring from fancy rather than truth, and converted this happy region, in the minds of foreigners at least, into an earthly paradise, still the picture offers an agreeable contrast to the contemplation of dreary sands and desolate rocks. The air is more temperate, while the rains and dews descend more copiously. The hills are wooded to the tops, or covered with a rich alpine turf. From their sides fall perennial streams, sometimes in beautiful cascades, which run a course of considerable extent among cultivated fields or luxuriant gardens. Fruits of all kinds are delicious and abundant. The fertility of the earth at once invites and rewards the industry of the husbandman; and nature, by lavishing her choicest favors here, seems to have compensated for her want of hospitality everywhere else. What Waller says in his Summer Island is true of these delightful regions:

" The gentle spring, that but salutes us here,

Inhabits there, and courts them all the year"

Such is a general outline of what may be termed the physiology of this celebrated peninsula.

POLITICAL.