ding to another account, 1200, (D'Herbelot,
Bibliotheque Orientale, p. 75: ) the two historians who wrote of the
Ayam al Arab, the battles of the Arabs, lived in the 9th and 10th
century. The famous war of Dahes and Gabrah was occasioned by two
horses, lasted forty years, and ended in a proverb, (Pocock, Specimen,
p. 48.)]

[Footnote 37: The modern theory and practice of the Arabs in the revenge
of murder are described by Niebuhr, (Description, p. 26-31.) The harsher
features of antiquity may be traced in the Koran, c. 2, p. 20, c. 17, p.
230, with Sale's Observations.]

[Footnote 38: Procopius (de Bell. Persic. l. i. c. 16) places the two
holy months about the summer solstice. The Arabians consecrate four
months of the year--the first, seventh, eleventh, and twelfth; and
pretend, that in a long series of ages the truce was infringed only four
or six times, (Sale's Preliminary Discourse, p. 147-150, and Notes
on the ixth chapter of the Koran, p. 154, &c. Casiri, Bibliot.
Hispano-Arabica, tom. ii. p. 20, 21.)]

But the spirit of rapine and revenge was attempered by the milder
influence of trade and literature. The solitary peninsula is encompassed
by the most civilized nations of the ancient world; the merchant is the
friend of mankind; and the annual caravans imported the first seeds
of knowledge and politeness into the cities, and even the camps of the
desert. Whatever may be the pedigree of the Arabs, their language is
derived from the same original stock with the Hebrew, the Syriac, and
the Chaldaean tongues; the independence of the tribes was marked by
their peculiar dialects; [39] but each, after their own, allowed a just
preference to the pure and perspicuous idiom of Mecca. In Arabia, as
well as in Greece, the perfection of language outstripped the refinement
of manners; and her speech could diversify the fourscore names of honey,
the two hundred of a serpent, the five hundred of a lion, the thousand
of a sword, at a time when this copious dictionary was intrusted to
the memory of an illiterate people. The monuments of the Homerites
were inscribed with an obsolete and mysterious character; but the Cufic
letters, the groundwork of the present alphabet, were invented on the
banks of the Euphrates; and the recent invention was taught at Mecca by
a stranger who settled in that city after the birth of Mahomet. The
arts of grammar, of metre, and of rhetoric, were unknown to the freeborn
eloquence of the Arabians; bu