eni Lam, the former mostly settled in towns and villages and by
religion Shi'ites, the latter nomads and Sunnites. The staples of food
are dates and fish in the south, elsewhere the produce of the herds and
flocks and rice, wheat and barley. Other products are maize, cotton,
silk and indigo, and the manufactures include carpets without pile,
coarse woollens, cottons and silk nettings. Dyeing is extensively
carried on in Dizful where most of the indigo is grown.

Khuzistan (meaning "the land of the Khuz") was a part of the Biblical
Elam, the classical Susiana, and appears in the great inscription of
Darius as Uvaja.

ARABS, the name given to that branch of the Semitic race which from the
earliest historic times inhabited the south-western portion of the
Arabian peninsula. The name, to-day the collective term for the
overwhelming majority of the surviving Semitic peoples, was originally
restricted to the nomad tribes who ranged the north of the peninsula
east of Palestine and the Syro-Arabian desert. In this narrow sense
"Arab" is used in the Assyrian inscriptions, in the Old Testament and in
the Minaean inscriptions. Before the Christian era it had come to
include all the inhabitants of the peninsula. This, it is suggested, may
have been due to the fact that the "Arabs" were the chief people near
the Greek and Roman colonies in Syria and Mesopotamia. Classical writers
use the term both in its local and general sense. The Arabs to-day
occupy, besides Arabia, a part of Mesopotamia, the western shores of the
Red Sea, the eastern coast of the Persian Gulf and the north of Africa.
The finest type of the race is found in south Arabia among the Ariba
Arabs, among the mountaineers of Hadramut and Yemen and among the
Bedouin tribes roaming over the interior of central and northern Arabia.
The Arabs of the coasts and those of Mesopotamia are hybrids, showing
Turkish, Negroid and Hamitic crossings. The people of Syria and
Palestine are hybrids of Arab, Phoenician and Jewish descent. The theory
that early Arab settlements were made on the east coast of Africa as far
as Sofala south of the Zambezi, is without foundation; the earliest Arab
settlement on the east coast of Africa that can be proved is Magadoxo
(Mukdishu) in the 10th century, and the ruined cities of Mashonaland,
once supposed to be the remains of Arab settlements, are now known to be
of medieval African origin. On the East African coast-lands Arab
influence is st