uently even the more sober
histories contain a mass of fables about early days. Many of these,
taken in part from Jewish and Christian sources, find a place in the
Koran. Of all these stories current at the time of Mahomet, the only
ones of any value are the accounts of the "days of the Arabs," i.e.
accounts of some famous inter-tribal battles in Arabia.

_Authorities._--Until recently the Arab traditions were practically the
only source for the pre-Islamic history of Arabia. The Old Testament
references to Arabs were obscure. The classical accounts of the invasion
of Aelius Callus in 26 B.C. threw little light on the state of Arabia at
the time, still less on its past history. The Greek writers from
Theophrastus in the 4th century B.C. to Ptolemy in the 2nd century A.D.
mention many names of Arabian peoples and describe the situation of
their cities, but contribute little to their history, and that little
could not be controlled. The same applies to the information of Pliny in
his _Natural History_. In the 19th century the discovery and
decipherment of the Assyrian inscriptions gave a slight glance into the
relations between Arabs and Assyrians from the 8th century B.C. But the
great contribution of the century to the early history of Arabia was the
collecting and translating of numerous early Arabian inscriptions (cf.
section _Antiquities_ above), which have done service both by their own
indication of a great civilization in Arabia for nearly (or more than) a
thousand years before the Christian era, and by the new stimulus which
they gave to the study and appreciation of the materials in the Assyrian
inscriptions, the Old Testament, and the Greek and Roman writers. At the
same time the facts that the inscriptions are undated until a late
period, that few are historical in their contents, and for the most part
yield only names of gods and rulers and domestic and religious details,
and that our collection is still very incomplete, have led to much
serious disagreement among scholars as to the reconstruction of the
history of Arabia in the pre-Christian centuries.

All scholars, however, are agreed that the inscriptions reach as far
back as the 9th century B.C. (some say to the 16th) and prove the
existence of at least four civilized kingdoms during these centuries.
These are the kingdoms of Ma'in (Minaean), of Saba (Sabaean), of
Hadramaut (Hadramut) and of Katabania (Katabanu). Of the two latter
little is known. That