'Gazetteer of Arabia Vol. I' [‎420] (439/1050)

420
BEDOUIN
and camel breeding. Not infrequently they have been split up and the different sections
separated by intruding confederations. Thus the Qeys and the Mawali, early-comers
into Mesopotamia, are now dwellers in villages on its furthest con e nes. The Adwan
charged in the Days of Ignorance with the duty of conducting pilgrims to Mina on the
day of sacrifice, are present in the Hejez only in very small numbers ; they have been
pushed up to the northern edges of the Belqa and the northern reaches of Mesopotamia.
The Tai, whose fame was so great in further Asia that their name stood for the whole
Arabian people, share the extreme north-eastern pasturages with Kurdish tribes. On
the other hand, many of the great tribes of Arabian legend and history, Rabi'a, Taghlib,
Bekr, Kinda, Ghassan and Lakhm have vanished, and the most powe ful nomadic con
federations of to-day, Shammar, Anazeh, Beni Sakhr, Huweytat, Harb and Ateyba,
though derived from ancient stocks, are not of ancient renown.
The earliest references to the peninsula in Babylonian inscriptions of the 3rd mille-
nium make mention of a power in Eastern Arabia which has been conjecutred to be the
Minaean kingdom. It occupied the whole of southern Arabia, with its centre in the
fertile Yemen, where Minaean inscriptions have been found which can be dated certainly
before 800 B.C. and probably several hundred years earlier. From about 700 B.C. to
115 b.c. another southern kingdom, that of the Sabaeans, ruled the Yemen, and in-
borited the trading colony of Minaeans, the land of Midian in north-westrn Arabia,
where the Nabataeans, descendants of the Amaliq (Amalakites), began to develop an
important commercial kingdom in the beginning of the 6th century before Christ. The
Himyarites succeeded to the Sabaeans and dominated Southern Arabia till about 525
A.D. at which date their power was broken by the Abyssinian invasion. The slender data
afforded by history concerning the Southern Arabian kingdom were magnified by tradi*
tion and fable into a south Arabian Saga, leading up to the breach of the dam of Marib
in the earlv centuries of our era, with the subsequent impoverishing of the land and
migration of the Ahl Qibli northwards. In the immense uncertainty of tribal o igins,
the genealogists of the 8th and 9th centuries constructed a system which accounted^
for the distinction oi the people of the south and the people of th3 north. Both were
descended from Abraham, the former through Qahtan, the latter through Ishmael,
Adnan, Maadd and Nizar. That the genealogical scheme was older than Islam is proved
by the fact that Procopius mentions the Maadd tribes as a race of Saracens living north
of the Himyar, and by the still older evidence of an inscription found at Nemara, east of
the Safa, the language of which is Arabic, but the script Nabataen. In it Imrulqais,
who corresponds without question to the second ruler of the Lakhmfd kingdom of Hira
mentioned in Arab tradition, asserts that he was lord of the two Asads (i.e., the north
Arab tribes of Asad and Tai) and of Nizar in the year 328 A. D.
The traditional settlement of the Ishmaelite tribes at Mecca among the Jurham and
Amaliq may have some historic basis in so far as it relates to an agreement arrived at
between the older non-Arab inhabitant? and the Ahl A1 Shimal in the Hejaz. Long
before the birth of the Prophet, the Tai were in occupation of Nejd, but until the middle
of the 6th century of our era, the descendants of Maadd paid tribute to Yemen and the
paramount rulers of Arabia were all of the Ahl Qibli. Towards the end of the 3rd century
after Christ, the kingdom of Hira on the borders of Iraq began to make itself felt under
a reigning house of the southern tribe of Lakhm. It played an essential part in the
development of Arab civilization as the intermdiary between the settled lands and the
desert and the transmitter of culture. At Hira, according to tradition, the Arabic script
was first employed currently, and it is certain that it was in use there in the second
ha 1 f of the 6th century though the literary language of Hira was Aramaic, and the two
earliest Arabic inscriptions in existence, dated 512 A.D. and 568 A.D., were both found
on the western side of the desert. It was the king of Hira Imrul Qais who laid claim in
328 A.D. to overlordship over Asad and Nizar. The Lakhmids of Hira were charged
with the protection of the frontiers of the desert for the Sasanians ; their constant harry-
inf of Byzantine territories suggested to Justinian the creation of an Arab phylarch on
his Syrian Marches. Another tribe of the Ahl Qibli, the Bani Ghassan, settled on the
borders of Syria since the 3rd century, was chosen to represent Rome and garrison the
fortresses of its Limes. In Central Arabia the Kinda, rulers in their native Hadra-
mout, extended their authority over all the Maadd tribes of Najd, but towards the
middle of the 6th century the power of Kinda was broken by the Lakhmids, and about
the same time the Himyarite kingdom was overthrown by the Abyssinians who were in-