The Historians' History of the World 08

The real meaning of the name “Arab” seems to be “desert.” It is first met with, or so it seems, in varying forms in Assyrian inscriptions of the ninth century.[1] In the Old Testament it cannot be identified with certainty before the time of Jeremiah.[2] In the inscriptions of King Darius Hystaspes, Arabaya appears to mean the Mesopotamian, Syrian, and Sinaitic desert. Amongst the Greeks we meet with the terms “Arab, Arabia” first in Æschylus (Persians 316; Prom. 422), but the poet’s ideas of the situation of the country are altogether mythical. Herodotus, on the contrary, is fully conversant with it; he is specially interested in that district, populated by Arabs, that constitutes the connection between Palestine and Egypt which was of such importance to the Persian kingdom, and not to it alone. His contemporary, Nehemiah, is quite familiar with the name of “Arab” (Ch. 2, 19; 4, 7; 6, 16) and so is Xenophon. The latter uses the name “Arabia” of the Mesopotamian desert in particular (Anab. 1, 5, 1); and this very region is called “Arab” pure and simple by the later Syrians. The name has survived from that day to this, especially amongst the people themselves. It has long stood for both the nationality and the language. It is true that even in times tolerably remote Arab was understood to mean more particularly Bedouin; as is the case even in Sabæan inscriptions. The latter are, however, more exactly distinguished from the settled inhabitants of the country by the use of the plural, in its old form A’rab, later more frequently Orban.

Many scholars assume that all civilised Semitic nations actually took their rise from Arabia and are, as Sprenger[3] phrases it “Bedouin deposits” (“abgelagerte Beduinen”). The question of whether, in the last resort, Arabia was the original home of the Semites or whether they migrated thither from Africa in primitive times is not affected by this assumption.[4] In any case the language of the Hebrews and Aramæans still bears traces of the fact that their forefathers were at one time a nomadic race, which (with regard to the former at least) is to some extent confirmed by Old Testament tradition. It is true that wherever we have any historic record the contrast between these civilised peoples and the dwellers in the desert is evident. But we can imagine that the same thing happened with them as we may observe repeatedly in Arab tribes of later days. They press forward, gradually in part and in part rapidly, out of Arabia proper. The Syrian and Mesopotamian deserts, barren as they seem to us, offer the nomads certain advantages over the regions to the south. The rainfall is somewhat more copious. The nomads come into closer contact with settled peoples, and much as the Bedouin (proud of his freedom and happy in his leisure) may look down upon the industrious peasant and even upon the artisan, yet the greater security and the certainty of obtaining daily food prompts him to take to husbandry in the region of verdure when opportunity offers. The process was sometimes accompanied by violence towards the earlier settlers, but it often came about peaceably. Thus one wave of Arabs slowly overtook another. The names which predominate in the older portions of the Old Testament (Ishmaelites, Midianites, etc.) soon fall into the background. The appearance of the name “Arab” may be in itself an indication of the arrival of fresh tribes in these regions.

THE ARABS AND THEIR NEIGHBOURS

In the fourth century B.C. we find the Arab tribe of the Nabatæans to the south of Palestine, and the same tribe soon afterwards formed a settled state which extended eastwards from the ancient territory of Israel as far as to Damascus, rose to a considerable height of civilisation, and maintained a position of lax dependence upon Rome until Trajan destroyed it in the year 106; certainly not to the real advantage of the empire. In the first century of our era we meet with princes and nobles with Arabic names in Edessa, Palmyra, Emesa, and Hatrá. The abundant store of inscriptions at Palmyra shows that the greater part of the population of this Aramaic-speaking trading city, encompassed on all sides by the desert, was of Arab origin. It seems that during the gradual decay of the Seleucid kingdom, Arabs in several cases acquired dominion over these districts, just as at a later period members of various Bedouin tribes rose to eminence in Syria and Mesopotamia, during the decadence of the caliphate dynasty. Thus numerous settled Arab tribes lived in many parts of Syria as Roman subjects. In process of time all these Arabs who dwelt in towns or villages grew to be Aramæans; even before that they had always used the Aramaic language in their inscriptions—where they did not write in Greek—because Arabic was not then regarded as a suitable language for use in writing.